What in God's Name: A Novel Read online

  Eliza put her bag down on her new desk, then stood on top of her chair to have a look around. She grabbed Craig’s arm for support, and his body shyly stiffened.

  “What are they working on next door?” she asked.

  Craig peered over the cubicle wall. Three exhausted Angels were huddled over a single computer, frantically typing in codes.

  “Oh, they’re on Lynyrd Skynyrd duty,” Craig said. “Special orders from the man upstairs.”

  On the monitor two original members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were having a “coincidental” encounter at a gas station.

  “What are the odds both our trucks would break down on the same road?”

  “Pretty crazy.”

  “Hey…maybe we should jam again sometime?”

  The three Angels sighed with relief. One of them opened a filing cabinet, took out a bottle of bourbon, and started drinking from it.

  Eliza climbed back down.

  “Are all the miracles assigned?” she asked, her voice tinged with disappointment.

  “Actually,” Craig said, “for the most part, we can do whatever we want! That’s the great thing about working in this department. We’re so low on the totem pole, nobody’s really watching us.”

  A beeping noise sounded on Eliza’s computer and she gave a startled hop.

  “Don’t worry,” Craig said, “it’s just a Potential Miracle.”

  She peered at her screen; a hungry Chinese teenager was kicking a vending machine in frustration, trying to dislodge the candy bar he’d just purchased.

  “Why did this one come up?” Eliza asked.

  “Oh, it’s random. Our algorithms anticipate millions of PMs a second. That’s way too much for us to handle, so the computer feeds them to us one at a time.”

  Eliza watched as the Chinese teenager hopped on his bicycle and glumly pedaled away from the vending machine.

  “Oh no,” she said. “I blew it.”

  Craig laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of chances. Click refresh.”

  She tapped her mouse, and the earth popped onto her screen, a glowing blue ball, as shiny as a Christmas ornament.

  “Good luck,” he said. “It’s all yours.”

  Eliza swiveled around in her desk chair, marveling at the size of her new cubicle. When she was in Prayer Intake she’d had to beg her supervisors for a desk, and the one they finally gave her was in the hallway next to the bathrooms. It was a terrible place to work: noisy and smelly and lonely. Luckily, she was usually too busy to notice.

  When Eliza first arrived in Prayer Intake, the department was in shambles. The prayers came in by fax—usually about 500 million a day—and they were all heaped into the same gigantic storage room. Each night someone would fill a sack with random prayers and send it upstairs to God. The rest would end up in the incinerator. Eliza was appalled. Even though she was just a Sub-Angel, she immediately took it upon herself to change things.

  After innumerable meetings, she was eventually able to implement a commonsense accounting system. Her first improvement was to staple identical prayers together, to save God time. The less God had to read, she reasoned, the more prayers he could answer. Next, she instituted a field-goal filter. A full 4 percent of prayers were related to field-goal attempts—and since an equal number of humans usually rooted for success or failure, she figured that none were worth answering.

  But Eliza’s crowning achievement was the Urgency Scale. For as long as anyone could remember, prayers had been sent upstairs at random. It didn’t matter whether you asked for a new bike or a new kidney; they all had the same chance of reaching God’s desk. On Eliza’s watch, prayers were finally sorted by importance, on an easy-to-follow 1-to-7 ranking system.

  About 30 percent of prayers were classified as 1s—meaning their urgency was low. Traffic prayers usually went into this category, along with lotto prayers, in-flight turbulence prayers, and prayers for wireless Internet access. Most prayers were classified as 3s or 4s: parents wishing for the general health of their children, lovers hoping to see each other soon, abstract pleas for peace. Only matters of life and death were 7s. Under Eliza’s watch, these were reprinted on special red stationery so they would stand out in God’s inbox.

  Her supervisor had fought her system because of all the extra work it would entail. And in order to get it approved, she’d had to promise to do all of the prayer sorting herself. It was tedious, even with the help of computers. She worked so many weekends, the word “Friday” lost all meaning. Every day was the same, a grueling endurance test that ended only when she reached her physical breaking point. But Eliza had persevered, driven by the knowledge that she was making a concrete difference in people’s lives.

  Of course, her motives weren’t entirely selfless: she also wanted a promotion. Ever since she’d joined Heaven Inc., Eliza had dreamt of making it to the Miracles Department. When she was a Page, she used to volunteer to stock the vending machines on the seventeenth floor, just so she could catch a glimpse of the Angels in action. It was the most exciting, creative unit in the entire company. Sorting prayers was one thing—but planning miracles! What could possibly be cooler than that?

  When she applied for a spot in the Miracles Department, her supervisor made fun of her for a solid hour. No Sub-Angel had ever jumped from Prayer Intake to Miracles before—not in the department’s entire history. He agreed to forward her résumé to Angel Resources, but only after reading the whole thing out loud, in a mock British accent, to a pack of laughing secretaries.

  When Eliza received her congratulatory e-mail, she thought at first that her supervisor had sent it as a cruel practical joke. But the shock on his face when she told him the news convinced her the promotion was for real. He demanded to read the e-mail himself, and when she forwarded him the message he stared at it for a solid ten minutes. Eventually, he stiffly shook her hand and sent out a secretary to buy a bad bottle of champagne. Eliza forced down a glass, packed her stapler in a cardboard box, and wobbled trancelike to the elevators.

  And now here she was, on the seventeenth floor, just a few strides away from the vending machine she had once begged permission to stock.

  She knew it was irrational, but she kept expecting a second e-mail to arrive in her inbox—a short, apologetic note from Angel Resources—telling her there’d been a mistake. Any second now, she thought, someone—an embarrassed-looking man in a gray flannel suit, maybe—was going to knock on her cubicle and inform her as politely as he could that she would have to go back downstairs.

  “There’s no easy way to say this,” he would begin. “But…”

  She pictured herself returning to the fourth floor, tearfully unpacking her stapler while the secretaries stifled their giggles.

  Eliza opened her new filing cabinet and spotted a small white envelope. She assumed it had been left there by the cubicle’s previous occupant. But when she flipped it over, she saw with surprise that it had her name on it. She carefully opened the envelope and plucked out a shiny, wing-shaped pin. As she brought it toward her face, its silver coating glinted in the light.

  She’d seen Angels wearing these pins around the commissary, and they’d always struck her as a bit silly. Why did they have to make them so garish? Wouldn’t identification cards be more cost-effective? Still, she supposed she’d better put hers on. She’d noticed earlier that Craig was wearing one, so it was probably company policy.

  She fastened the wings to her lapel and straightened them in the reflection of her computer monitor. “Eliza Hunter,” the pin read in gold letters. “Angel: Miracles Dept.”

  She poked her head through the cubicle doorway to make sure no one was coming. Then she leaned back inside, closed her eyes, and thrust both arms into the air.

  Craig shuffled down the hall, struggling to balance two large plates of cake. It was someone’s birthday—he wasn’t sure whose—and he had snatched the last two slices in the break room. He was just a few paces from his cubicle when he lost his footing and spille
d one of the slices onto the floor. He cursed under his breath, scraped the mess off the carpet, and tossed it into a garbage can.

  Craig looked at the remaining slice. It was a corner piece, thickly frosted on three sides. He hesitated for a moment, then knocked on Eliza’s cubicle and handed it to her.

  “Hey!” he said. “There was one slice left!”

  “Wow, thanks. Sure you don’t want it?”

  “Nah,” Craig said, unconvincingly. “Nah.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Craig said, holding his hands up in protest. “I’m actually, uh…allergic to chocolate.”

  Eliza blushed. In the past three days she’d seen Craig eat two Almond Joys and a twelve-pack of Oreos.

  “Well, thanks, Craig.”

  “Sure! I mean…it’s nothing.”

  He trudged back to his cubicle and slumped wearily into his chair. Allergic to chocolate? What the hell kind of lie was that? He shook his head, shocked by his stupidity. He could have just said he wasn’t hungry. Or that he wanted her to have it.

  He turned on his computer, determined to push the incident out of his mind. He’d already more or less clinched his second straight Angel of the Month award (his closest competition was twenty-two miracles behind). But if he allowed himself to get distracted, someone else could leap ahead of him. And that would be unacceptable, especially after all the sacrifices he’d made. He’d been coming to work on weekends and eating every meal at his desk. He’d even made a policy of avoiding dates and parties because they interfered with his late-night work schedule. Craig didn’t have much of a social life, so this policy had never technically been tested. Still, it was a policy, and he was proud of it.

  He scanned the globe for Potential Miracles, but he was having trouble concentrating. A nagging thought kept running through his mind, ruining his focus. Finally he stood up and poked his head over into Eliza’s cubicle.

  “There’s milk,” he said.

  Eliza jumped. “What?”

  “For your cake,” Craig said. “In the fridge in the break room…there’s milk there.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

  He spotted her plate in the trash can; she’d finished her slice a while ago. How much time had passed?

  “Well, thanks,” she said. “Now I know where the milk is.”

  “No problemo!” he said, using that phrase for the first time in his life.

  He wasn’t sure how to end the conversation, so he made a baffling hand gesture—a kind of half-wave, half-salute with vague hip-hop undertones. Then he sighed audibly and slowly slunk out of her view.

  He stared at his reflection in his computer monitor; his cheeks were flushed and his forehead was damp with sweat. He felt ashamed and depressed—but also a little relieved. Now that he had ruined things, there was nothing to distract him; now he could finally get back to work.

  “Hey, can you explain dreams again?”

  “Sure. Milk or sugar?”

  “Both.”

  Craig handed Eliza her coffee. The break room was empty and the department completely silent, except for the whir of a janitor’s vacuum cleaner.

  “Dreams were invented by Angels to test out their beta programs.”

  Eliza paused, embarrassed to be asking another question so quickly into the explanation.

  “I’m sorry…what are beta programs again?”

  “Oh, they’re awesome. They’re unreleased pieces of software. In dreams you can try out anything you want. You can break all the rules, consequence free.”

  “Which rules?”

  “Well a lot of Angels really hate the gravity thing, so you see a bunch of flying programs. What else…a lot of teleporting and body morphing and resurrecting the dead.”

  Eliza added some more sugar to her coffee.

  “Don’t those dreams screw humans up?”

  Craig shook his head. “They’re self-erasing. As soon as you wake up, you forget almost everything that happened.”

  “Is that sort of like…?”

  Craig nodded. “It’s sort of like what happens when you die. You remember a couple things—a face or two, maybe, or a place. Then it fades.”

  She stirred her coffee and took a sip.

  “Sometimes I think I remember something,” she said. “Someone calling my name. I think it was Susan, maybe? Or Sarah? I don’t know.”

  “The only thing I can remember,” Craig said, “is working right here.”

  Eliza nodded. She could recall orientation so vividly: the endless PowerPoint presentations, the idiotic trust falls, the ’80s-themed mixer. But everything before that was a blur.

  “What’s your favorite beta program?” she asked.

  Craig bit into his Hostess cupcake.

  “It’d have to be Vision Stuffer,” he said. “That’s the one that allows you to visit them. You know, to try to reason with them.”

  “Does that ever work?”

  Craig laughed. “Nah. They usually forget what you told them by morning. And if anything sticks—like an image or a word—they fill in the blanks themselves and write a crazy book about you.”

  “So all of those religions…”

  Craig nodded. “They’re our fault.”

  He broke his second cupcake in half and slid a piece over to Eliza. She shook her head politely, but within a few seconds she was eating it.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I forgot to eat dinner.”

  “Me too. That’s why I picked strawberry—it seemed like the healthiest cupcake flavor.”

  Eliza raised her eyebrows teasingly. “Plus you’re allergic to chocolate.”

  Craig averted his eyes. “What were we talking about?”

  Eliza smiled. “Heaven stuff.”

  “Right!” Craig said, relieved to be back on the subject of work. “Do you have any other questions?”

  “Just one. How does he decide? You know, on who gets in?”

  “I don’t know,” Craig admitted. “I’ve always wanted to ask him. But I’ve never had the guts.”

  “I’d love to know.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  She yawned suddenly, clasping her hands high above her head. Craig tried not to stare as her shirt climbed slowly up her midriff, revealing a sliver of her stomach. She almost definitely had a boyfriend. Some executive probably, with tailored suits and monogrammed ties. His name was probably James or Charles or…

  “Craig?”

  “What?”

  “You were staring off into space.”

  “Oh—sorry. Just tired.”

  She leaned in slightly. “Thanks for showing me the ropes. I really appreciate it.”

  “Sure!” Craig said. “I mean, it’s my job.”

  She finished her coffee in a single swallow and left him alone in the break room.

  Craig’s breath was shallow, and his heart was racing—but when he returned to his cubicle and turned on his computer, a sense of calm enveloped him. A thirty-four-year-old in Amsterdam needed to bike through traffic in time to feed his daughter’s gerbil. This he understood—this he could handle.

  In the last three years Craig had gone on exactly one date. He didn’t have much of a frame of reference, but he could tell the encounter had gone poorly. His first mistake, he realized in hindsight, was to insist that the girl meet him in the office cafeteria. He was just a Sub-Angel back then, in Snowflake Design, and he’d been too anxious to leave his cubicle for more than thirty minutes at a time.

  He couldn’t decide whether or not the girl was pretty, in part because he was too shy to look directly at her. But she seemed like a nice person, and the following week he worked up the courage to call her again.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said. “You’re just too work-obsessed for me.”

  “What?” Craig asked. He was designing a snowflake at the time and wasn’t fully listening to her.

  “You’re too work-obsessed,” she repeated.

  “Oh,” he said.


  Craig knew his obsession with work was unusual, but he couldn’t control it. His job was his entire identity. Craig, like all his coworkers, lived on the Heaven Campus, a sprawling enclave of dormitories, office buildings, and snack bars. His home was only five minutes away from his office—less if he scootered to work. It was convenient but also vaguely depressing. Heaven was so vast, yet his entire life took place within a single square acre of it.

  Craig didn’t have to be an Angel. Most people in heaven were content to work as Pages or secretaries, sleepwalking through their term of service until it was time to retire. God required forty years of work, but it didn’t matter which job you picked. Most Heaven Inc. employees spent less than five hours a day in the office. The campus had everything: tennis courts, bocce, a koi pond. It was crazy to spend all your time indoors.

  But whenever Craig signed up for a golf lesson or rented a rowboat, he felt ridiculous. There were a lot of fun things to do in heaven. But none were as thrilling as what you could do on Earth.

  There were so many things in Craig’s life that he couldn’t control: his carpal tunnel symptoms, his mounting insomnia, his nonexistent social life. But he could control the humans. He could grant them small victories, divert their little tragedies, deliver them some tiny measures of happiness. He knew it was madness to spend so much time obsessing over them. They had no idea he even existed. His miracles were invisible by design—and always would be. Still, on some level, he felt like the species was counting on him. And he didn’t want to let them down.

  Sometimes, when he needed cheering up, he watched clips of children celebrating all the snow days he had caused. One girl, an eighth-grade outcast from Sweden, was so thrilled when she heard that school was canceled that she immediately started break-dancing. Her moves were so infectious that Craig stood up in his cubicle and danced along with her, shaking his hips and pumping his fists in the air. It was the happiest moment of his career.

  He knew his miracles were small and often ridiculous. But he loved every single one of them. It was only when he turned off his computer and took the lonely elevator ride down that he sometimes wondered: Did the humans really need him? Or was it the other way around?