Chapter 12
L
ucas knocks on the apartment door of the woman in the green shirt. They go downstairs together and knock on the door of the woman in the purple dress. From there they connect to Lucas’s Wi-Fi and get on Facebook.
Purple Dress is extremely enthusiastic and wants to know what his “plan” is, because she hasn’t been part of a gang with a plan since she was young and was part of a gang that was planning a bank robbery, she tells them.
“Wow! How did that go?” Green Shirt asks.
“Oh, it didn’t happen. The bus was late, so when we got there the bank was closed.” Purple Dress shrugs.
“You took the bus to a bank robbery?” Green Shirt wonders.
Purple Dress looks a little offended.
“Well, if we could afford a getaway car
we wouldn’t have had to rob a bank
, now would we?”
“Oh.” Green Shirt nods as though that makes perfect sense.
Lucas, meanwhile, sits at the computer and looks deeply pensive, before confessing:
“I don’t really have a plan. I guess I’m just going to trust human nature.”
Then he enters the Facebook group There ARE Angels!, takes a deep breath, and writes: I, the angel, hereby ask you to stop following me. You should follow yourselves instead.
He is just about to erase the whole thing because he thinks it sounds so terribly silly, but Purple Dress stops him.
“Oh! That’s good! Deep!” She whistles, impressed.
Lucas stares at her with a combination of great pride and huge annoyance.
“You think so? Do people listen to this kind of nonsense?”
Purple Dress nods eagerly.
“Oh yes! This is awesome! Write something about happiness too! People on the internet love happiness!”
Lucas thinks this over for quite a while. Then he writes:
I, the angel, ask you to choose one thing each from the pile. For what is now everyone’s trash was once someone’s possession. Carry this thing with you through life as a reminder of the pile within yourselves. Do not collect junk in your hearts. You can make yourself happy if you don’t let others make you unhappy.
“Wow. You should write one of those self-help books,” whispers Green Shirt.
“Yeah, you know, people really need to hear these things,” agrees Purple Dress.
“People should really just play more video games.” Lucas sighs.
“Oh! Write something about how they should stick together, too, all the people in the There ARE Angels! group. They should keep hanging out after this. Maybe start a little club?” suggests Purple Dress.
“Should they really . . . hang out? Won’t that be a . . . cult, then?” Green Shirt interjects cautiously.
Purple Dress immediately changes her mind.
“Oh! Smart thinking! Definitely don’t write that!”
So Lucas writes:
Don’t look on the internet for someone who is exactly like you. Look for someone who isn’t. Love is not to never fight. Love is always making up.
Then the woman in the green shirt sobs over Lucas’s shoulder, her tears falling on the keyboard. A little while later the three of them are standing on the balcony again, watching the cult members each picking up an item from the pile and walking away, hesitantly at first, but soon with confident steps.
They will be happy, all of them. The three humans on the balcony will learn this in the years to come, the way you always learn these things: via Facebook. The happiest of all will actually be the cult member who chooses the ice skate as her thing from the pile. She will meet a police officer, he will think she’s out of her damn mind, they will drive each other crazy every day for the rest of their lives. Such is love.
“Now what?” the woman in the purple dress asks after a while.
“The pile is still pretty big,” Lucas admits, somewhat defeated.
“Maybe love is not enough,” the woman in the green shirt says softly.
They stand there in silence for a long, long time before Lucas whispers:
“No, that’s right. Love is not powerful enough.”
And so he rushes back to his computer, opens the Facebook group Angels Are Fake instead, and writes:
I, the angel, hereby announce that I have created the pile of junk outside my home as proof of my angelic superpowers! You will never be able to make the pile disappear, because that would be proof that I am not a real angel!
He turns out to be right, of course. Love isn’t powerful enough. But spite? Spite can change the world. Soon the whole street is full of people who for hours and hours voluntarily carry away junk, just to prove that angels don’t exist. No one dares to tell them that this actually sounds very much like something that angels would do.
And so, piece by piece, the pile disappears. And surely this would have been enough, but the woman in the purple dress also takes the opportunity to locate a third Facebook group, named We Who Are Ninjas!
“I’m writing that this is the ultimate test for a ninja, if they can manage to take something from the pile without getting caught!” she says excitedly.
“Are these people . . . real ninjas?” Green Shirt asks with some hesitation.
Purple Dress shakes her head.
“No, no, of course not. This group is full of ordinary people: janitors and librarians and middle management at IT consultant firms. They’ve just read too many inspirational books that made them think that maybe deep down they’re something . . . special. So, you know, maybe this is a way for them to get to feel, just for one night, that they . . . are?”
That evening Lucas and the two women stand on the balcony and watch the last of the pile disappear. And that night, all over the city, the streets are full of special people. When the sun rises, no junk remains. The only thing left on the ground is a small black fur hat. Lucas and the woman in the green shirt have fallen asleep in separate chairs on the balcony by then, and the board animal is asleep on the couch in Lucas’s apartment, its heads on each other’s shoulders. So
no one sees the woman in the purple dress walk carefully down the stairs to throw away the fur hat. This might seem unnecessary, of course, because what difference could a single fur hat on the ground make in the world? It’s not like it could be the beginning of a pile or anything, right?
It’s only when the woman in the purple dress is standing down on the sidewalk, panting after walking down all those stairs, that she realizes it’s not a black furry hat. It’s a black kitten. The woman’s apartment is never silent again.