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The New Millennium is not so far away, a nice round number, and my God, wouldn’t that make sense?
    “Look!” Josiah yells, he can’t help himself, a voice speaks through him: “For the Lord and His army come knocking!”
    Excited, he lets his sermon notes slip and fall to the floor.
    He looks down, pauses for what feels like minutes—and then he looks away to the back of the hall. He puts his hand to his brow as if saluting a brother in the way back row, as if guarding his eyes from the sun. “And there in the heavens, a door has opened!” Josiah’s thin voice careens throughout the hall, even his mother is startled by its power. Kizowski stands from his chair backstage, and stumbles over to the curtain. Call him crazy, but he actually looks for a heavenly door. The kid’s got something, all right. Without realizing, Kizowski, now side-stage, is resting his arm on Pullsey’s shoulder. Trading glances, how old is the boy, again?
    But Josiah is well beyond all this now. He sees every heavenly star within reach.
    He sees every dream he will ever have, every way he will become, what he certainly must become: a receptacle, an empty bowl, a deep and lucky cup of God.
    “The first voice!” he shouts out. “See the returning Christ riding on a great white horse, and here even now He comes riding!” He straightens his back, shouting, and believing every word as it comes to him: “The Lord God has said every star will fall, and the sun will turn black in the sky. And His voice speaks out like a trumpet!” Josiah sees the crowd see him, and their vision of him infuses him, informing him with a wholly new spirit. “And look!” He points to the ceiling. “The Lord God said, Come up here. And I will show you what waits for this world!”
    Hundreds of heads, adoring and reverent, bent back now, looking upward.
    Sister Hilda Famosa is swooning in her seat.
    “And know this, while sitting in the house of Heaven.” Arms spread wide, embracing every last hungry spirit in the audience, he says: “The Lord God said two thousand years must pass since the birth of the Son of Man. And then I will come, in the year two thousand, at the dawning of God’s New Millennium! And in that last year the Messiah, our Lord Christ, will return!” His hands now reach, grabbing for invisible rungs. “And there I see myself standing as an elder before you! And then—only then—on that day—in that hour, a divine vindication, a great rain of tribulation and destruction, and the End will finally be here!
    “At once,” he shouts. “I am in the spirit!”
    Overwhelmed, the crowd inhales, each one a child of God.
    Lay focus on this boy, lay focus on me—O, look at me filling up with breath and divine voice, and seeing with the eyes of Heaven, because my Lord God opens a heavenly door, one that no man can ever shut. And He himself will enter. And He will sup with me, and I with Him, and He will set me on His throne until the End of Days. And He will write on me a brand-new name, and every soul, I swear, will hear it.

 
    THE ENDS

 
    EAST
    1
    FRIDAY, QUEENS, NEW YORK, 2005
    The cabbie tore through a dead-red light and we took off for the expressway, away from the airport and heading for Richmond Hill. He was laughing, fast-talking into his ear clip phone. The sky outside was a cool blue David Hockney pool, but inside, the vinyl seat burned through my pants. I lowered the window. I’m guessing the language was Arabic. The ID card on the back of his seat gave his first name as Abdullah, and Abdullah let loose another howling and happy laugh. He saw me in his mirror and threw me a smiling nod. Pointed at his phone and looked at me like, this guy’s really killing me.
    We joined the traffic flow. The whirl of outside, the car horns and sirens, the screech and relentless machine din of city washed over the car like a wave. Everything sounded the same as the car dropped and bounced in jolts, over potholes and swellings all along the Grand