Azariah

God said to take up serpents and that nothing shall by any means hurt him, so of course, Azariah did so, and this killed him, but that wasn't even the worst of it; he had a baby on the way.

One month before he died, he and his wife were downtown at the Oriental Market buying spices in bulk. They were tight on cash because three and a half months before he died, he fell off a ladder cleaning out the M-Hall gutter. It would have been a clean fall, but there was a rock feature below and his jeans got caught on a step on the way down. He flipped like an acrobat, then he hung like a bat, and lastly, he became a bomb—set to destroy Earth. The carnage amassed a crowd. He twitched a little every now and again until the paramedics came.

A week after the fall Commander Plumb finally woke up (technically for the second time, but the first was so brief he couldn’t remember it). His wife was hysterical when the doctors came in, begging them to fix her husband. She was terrified. Uneven pupils stared back at her and Azariah was nowhere to be found in them. He grabbed his wife’s arm, begging her to listen. Please call me Commander Plumb he said. You are disrespecting Him he said. Then he seized and a nurse anesthetized him.

Much later, he woke up as Azariah and eventually they let him go. There was now an absurd bill under his name that he had no intention of paying off with broom and mop. This is why they were buying spices in bulk at some shop even though neither of them cooked well, and why his car sat empty in front of their apartment, and why his wife was working two jobs now. On top of this, both of them took turns vomiting in the sink each morning because his wife shared his nausea.

And now one month before he died, he seized again in the middle of the Oriental Market, spilling ginger powder all over himself. A little raisiny old lady with an aged voice called 9-1-1, but Commander Plumb woke up and ran away before the paramedics came.

He was saturnic, pale as bone, and babbling incoherently. He stumbled like an infant but never fell the whole way. He was guided by God.

The problem with the Tower of Babel, he was told, was that it wouldn’t have been able to carry mankind past the stratosphere, and that was a far way away from Saturn. Heaven was a wind-worn brick building built on a moving storm a few hundred feet into the gaseous mass. The most convenient part about Heaven was the locally sourced comet ice, though the rings were a bit thin recently and God was thinking about having a comet or two brought into orbit when Azariah woke up.

Hello, God said, and welcome to Heaven.

Have I died? Azariah asked.

No of course not, and please, it’s Commander Plumb.

Yessir, Commander Plumb.

Not me, Commander Plumb.

The sanguine clouds painted the light and then the room. There were papers that Commander Plumb couldn’t read everywhere. The only machine he recognized was a hole punch. God said it was his office. There were multiple armrests placed haphazardly on both chairs and Commander Plumb was shifting the whole time, trying to find a comfortable position. This was because God looked like a bunch of green grapes.

When the Bible said he created man in His image, He meant it. Grew from yeast, He said. Or, pretty much so. I just figured I’d let you screw up. Trial by fire He said. You all were beautiful at first. I’m not disappointed.

The mitochondria and ribosomes sat vaguely like a smile in His cytoplasm.

Commander Plumb was in Saturn for no reason as far as God knew. The whole business had been decentralized millions of years ago because Earth had more people than God had sensory organs. David, a red grape-ish blob, was in charge of Angelic Defense. He monitored Plumb and admired his careful and merciful attitude towards microbes—his gut flora flourished and his immune system was quite kind towards various hepatitis, influenza, rhinovirus, and bacterial strains. He didn’t drink alcohol, eat fresh bread or yogurts. He was, surprisingly, the only person on Earth who was eligible for drafting into the Angelic Army. David got into his giant tin-can-shaped ship, analyzed, and rectified Azariah straight to Saturn, promoting him straight to Commander. He was re-christened in comet-water and named after Saint Plumb, who discovered potassium sulfite—also known colloquially in Saturn as ambrosia. Years of temporal distortion exposure made David’s bulbs shrivel, but he had to crank this one all the way up regardless since Commander Plumb was supposed to be in a coma. Hopefully, the whole training ordeal would take about two and a half seconds Earth time.

A familiar sort of bacterial magnetism originally woke Commander Plumb up, and once he felt an uncomfortable vinyl suit against his naturally moist skin, he couldn’t fall back asleep. The suit whistled as it rubbed against the examination table, which had the same polymer upholstery. David circled around him, admiring the lack of restraint in Plumb’s glands. David was sure he had the one; he racked the brain up and then a tube full of violet gas presented itself for breathing. This put the war-ready human to sleep before he went to see God, who sent him back to David finally with some postscripts for that Bible thing. Then David took back Plumb’s uniform, loaded him back into the giant tin can, and a spiral column filled with bubbles as time unwarped and bent Plumb back to bed. This was all the air in his lungs, which had to stay on Saturn because it was far denser than Earth air, which is why he woke up gasping and drained of color before he took off.

He was looking for God now. A sign said “Second Pilgrim’s Pentecostal Church” and he fell into the congregation. He was sure he was sobbing uncontrollably, but no one else was convinced. They thought he might be an alcoholic or going through meth psychosis—but Commander Plumb was set to bring Earth back together. He was a Saint now. When he woke up, all he could think about was verse and psalm. He knew the entire Bible, cover to cover. He couldn’t remember why he was so distressed, which is why he needed to find God and ask for a reminder.

The congregation realized he might be speaking in tongues. Occasionally, they heard talk of Solomon, or Joseph, or a parable about janitors. They surrounded him with religious curiosity. After the tics and convulsions calmed, he talked about his visit and how everyone there was chosen as they truly, really, seriously understood that Book. Pretty much no one believed him, except Pastor Jim, who quizzed Commander Plumb on scripture. As everyone there knew, lying was a sin—so of course, he was telling the truth, and he told them another parable that moved the crowd so greatly that two older ladies fainted. He threw out the communion, renounced vineyards, gave several angelic descriptions that were uncomfortably sexually charged, and then convinced everyone there to all call up KSFM in unison.

A van was there twenty minutes later, and Commander Plumb delivered two more sermons to the local public broadcast television station.

He had garnered a following of about a hundred people after a week of news interviews and fervorous sermons, and they would talk to God all trying to remember the post-scripts. It made enough money in tithes for Commander Plumb to quit his old job.

The night before he died, he had a horrible fever dream. He was laying in a soup of mechanical parts, rope, and lather. Each move shaped space. He was placing infinitesimal pieces according to a master blueprint that came to him with each surge of his migraine—creating his own sarcophagus. It was pitch black, but everything had a shadow. For the rest of his life, he would be building a machine to bend metal.

He had hot flashes for the rest of the night until service next morning, when everyone laid hands on him so God would let them recover. And following that, they started the cameras, and Tim grabbed his rattlers. Commander Plumb was granted power, sure, but the rattler’s hemotoxin was so much simpler than Plumb and didn’t care much for power.

He was saturnic again, but this time he was turning violet. He started to puff up as air escaped violently. Sputtering, moaning, and hacking the whole way through, he began to speak. Jude chapter one, verse two he said. Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. That’s what yeast does. Earth is our sugar. Then his throat closed up. He couldn’t tell anyone what he learned—the preservative of humanity—as he drowned in a pool of his own drool. Bursting at the seams now, he seized and choked on his own tongue.

The news was big, and his wife got some money from that, and she got some money from the church too, but she spent most of it trying to get Pastor Tim in jail for murder. Then she learned she was expecting.

Worst of all, Azariah’s death was ruled a suicide.