Muscle memory kept Ilya the driver beautiful. He lifted a finger, set the cruise control, answered his cell phone, made the rare use of his turn signal, and his tissue reciprocated magically with new and fabulous striations, rich grains whose alluring strength was uncontained by the suit coat he wore. The eyes of passengers find health and strength like wizards will find water in desert countries where it sits below an inconsequential surface, and the chauffeur was iconic of health and well-being. He held his clientele in the hypnotic sway of either attraction or fearful respect.
for fifteen years, fifteen hours a day he shuttled humans to or back from the airports over the uneven pavement that could hardly be called a proper road, over the seemingly randomly channeled spread of concrete and asphalt divided by temporary concrete rails in new patterns daily, like frost on an airplane window, that crept outward from the unnatural, growing concrete and glass metropolitan crystal garden on the island whose new facets of poured stone and hung glass, that slowest of fluids, he kept framed either in his windshield or in his rear-view mirror. It was a quiet life free of unexpected disappointments he never had to call on his vast strengths to vanquish.
The day he picked up the old nun he was unable to fasten the cuffs on his sleeves. On the third try He gave up on pushing the cuff links through the holes, and when he opened the drawer to replace them on his dresser 3 spiders, each with three stripes on their bellies in the shape of a cross, or a sword, or a crosshairs, made for the corners. He picked up his keychain, holding 3 keys, and left the house.
He arrived three minutes early and, as he was waiting, denied three calls for a pickup in the area. The convent where he picked the nun up was situated on a triangle of land between ill-planned roads, and the front door was on a small porch the old woman had to descend three steps from as she was bade adieu by two other ascetics.
The nun gave him a strange and long look as he lifted her three traveling bags into the trunk of his car, the last of which was unusually heavy. The trunk took three attempts to close. He had three quarters of a tank of gas left.
“That last bag was a heavy one,” he remarked when they had gotten underway.
“It contains the Word.” She replied. Ilya’s mind told him it must just be some devotional fervor that made her response so strange, that it was just religious stuff, but he couldn’t shake the chill that ran down his spine. The rest of the journey was spent in an understandable silence.
She had asked him to take her to an airfield whose name he did not know, but he did not think it was strange until later, until he had been thinking on all the events of the day after the fact.
When he had left her at the funny little airport, alone somewhere far away on Long Island with nothing surrounding it, he stopped for lunch and found that she had left the heaviest bag in his trunk. Somehow he had forgotten to remove it.
He finished his lunch and pointed his car toward the convent to return the bag to his passenger’s cohort, but the windows were dark and, like so many specimens of bungalow architecture, in the building’s eerie vacancy had taken on the mien of eyes seeing for a strange and timeless mind. There was no answer when he arrived.
He brought the car with the bag in it back to his home, where he hefted it with great struggle up the stairs and into his apartment. He set it down beside his computer, which he turned on to check his email and Facebook messages. With dismay at the difficulties he was being forced to surmount, he let the bag fall open, and a large flash drive in the shape of a casket that said “Facebook” on it fell out onto the floor. It was fully large enough to fit a man of his size.
Without thinking, he let his curiousity get the better of him and he lifted the giant vessel to the USB port of his desktop computer. It slid in and mounted and, as it did, the casket opened.
Ilya climbed inside.
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