But Miriam sighed and pushed the scrap of paper away. Tonight she seemed to have no relish for the news, particularly political news. She settled her bifocals on the table and rubbed her eyes.
The kitchen table had been much eroded by Miriam’s work. Over the course of a year, her cutter blades—bearing down a little too hard on this clipping or that—had stripped away slivers of Formica. The table had come to look like a butcher block, and Miriam regretted it. The kitchen, otherwise, was quite tidy. She had always believed in a tidy kitchen.
She picked up her eyeglasses and pulled her scrapbook closer.
This was the current volume, Volume Ten. The other nine were stacked on a hutch beside the table. The upper shelf held spice bottles and cookbooks; the lower shelf, her work.
It was not long after she left the school board’s employ—shortly after the Eye of God appeared—that Miriam began to understand that she was quite alone in the world: friendless in Buchanan, considered an eccentric even by the churches. Of her family, only her father had remained alive—and that barely. He had been living in the Mount Bailiwick Care Community, incontinent and incoherent, but Miriam had visited him every day, had talked to him even when his pupils dilated with foggy disinterest. She told him about her project.
“I’ve started clipping the papers,” she said, and watched him carefully for some tic of surprise or discouragement. There was none. Unshaven, he sat in bed and looked at Miriam with the same passive stare he directed at the TV set as soon as Miriam left the room, or before she arrived.
Emboldened, she went on. “I think it’s what I’m supposed to do. I can’t explain how I know that. I don’t suppose anybody told me to do it. But I will take all the newspaper writing about the Eye of God and I’ll put those clippings in a book. And at the end of all this it will remind someone what happened. I don’t know what the end will be, or who will need to be reminded. But that’s what I’ll do.”
In the old days, Daddy would have had some answer. He used to have quite a lot to say about Miriam’s projects, almost always disparaging. Miriam had never quite lived up to Daddy’s expectations.
Since the stroke, however, Daddy had had no expectations whatsoever. Miriam could say and do what she wished—even in this room.
She had wished to quit her job when Principal Clay accused her of fanaticism. She had done so. She had wished to keep a scrapbook. So Miriam had done so.
She pulled down Volume One from the shelf. It was little more than a year old, but the newsprint inside had already begun to turn brittle and yellow.
All these clippings were from the Observer, mostly labeled UPI or Reuters. Miriam could have had more clippings if she’d taken a Portland paper or gone down to Duffy’s for The New York Times. But the point of the exercise wasn’t more. The point was enough.
Her first and fondly remembered. Miriam turned a page.
Miriam turned a whole sheaf of pages.
Such a sweep of history enclosed in these books! She skipped ahead to Volume Three. By Volume Three, the screaming headlines were more sparse. Many of the clippings were from the Features section. So-called opinion pieces. In Miriam’s opinion, worthless. But she had collated them faithfully.
LIFE IN UNIVERSE INEVITABLE: SAGAN
Astronomer and popular writer Carl Sagan argues that the events of the past six months were “inevitable, in one form or another, given overwhelming odds that life has evolved elsewhere in the galaxy. We ought to be grateful that this has happened in our lifetime.”
Sagan does not see the artifact as a threat. “It’s true that no attempt at communication has been made. But recall that any journey between stars must take an immensely long time. The entities responsible must be capable of exercising an enormous patience. We should try to do the same.”
But Miriam recognized that song: it was a lullaby, whistled in the dark. Clipping the Observer, Miriam had grown tired of Sagan and all the other pundits to whom the media had so eagerly flocked. In the end, they were as plainly ignorant as everyone else. And as plainly misguided.
It is an Eye, Miriam thought, and was there any question just Who was peering through it? And an Eye must have a Hand: of Judgment. Volume Six.
April and May of this year. A very fat volume indeed.
But the photographs told the tale best. Here was a telescopic view of the so-called Artifact, starry dots emerging from it like so much confetti or winter snow, a snow of some two hundred flakes dispersed equivalently across the world. Then, in the later pictures, not flakes of snow any longer but faceted obsidian structures hanging above all the world’s proud hives— New York, Los Angeles, London ; and Moscow, and Mexico City, and Amsterdam ; and Johannesburg and Baghdad and Jerusalem and too many others, all marked on a newsprint map of the world dated April 16. Grim octahedral slabs. Inhumanly perfect. They did not fly, veer, dash, dart, or glide; simply fell through the atmosphere like so many precisely aimed bubbles. They landed with the gentility of butterflies in available open spaces, and when they had landed they did not move. No visitors emerged. Having arrived, the octahedrons did nothing more spectacular than cast their own immense shadows.
Miriam supposed Mr. Sagan was continuing to advise patience.
It was not the Eye but these several Fingers of God that seemed to have worked an effect on the people of Buchanan. Miriam knew people had begun to take the Eye for granted, as people will take anything for granted if it stands still long enough. But the Fingers were a message. They said: Yes, I’ve come for a purpose. No, I’m not finished with you. And: I move slowly but inexorably and you may not lift a hand against me. It was a truth that penetrated the idiotic cheerfulness of her neighbors, a truth that bent, the backs of the proud and softened the voices of the mighty. The town of Buchanan seemed to acknowledge at last that this was the Endtime, or something like it—that nothing predictable would happen anymore.
Miriam opened Volume Ten to the first blank page and installed SPEECH PROMISED ON SPACECRAFT with a few dabs of her Glu-Stik, also from Delisle’s.
She hoped this was the only clipping from the Observer tonight. Miriam was tired. She had shopped for the week’s groceries today and felt worn out, maybe even a little feverish. Light-headed. The check-out girl at Delisle’s had sneezed three times into her hankie as Miriam was purchasing her cutter blade today. Miriam had paid with a one-dollar bill and hoped she hadn’t been handed a case of influenza along with her change. What were they calling it? Taiwan Flu? That was all she needed… what with the difficult times ahead of her.
But Miriam was dutiful and didn’t go directly to bed. Instead she turned the pages of the Observer and frowned through her bifocals at every article. There was nothing more for her collation in the first section. She observed with pleasure that Perdy’s, the big department store at the Ferry Park Mall, had stopped running their NEW MOON MADNESS sale ads with that ridiculous drawing of the Eye of God beaming at a Kenmore washing machine. Maybe Perdy’s advertising department had been talked out of this sacrilege. Or maybe they were just nervous—like everybody else.