Lewis attempted to focus on the feeling of the carpet against his bare feet and not on the fact that every time he closed his eyes he saw the giant frog. He got out of bed and walked to the window. He looked down at the street. He moved back to the bed, lay down, turned onto his stomach, then his side, and then watched the clock on the bedside table turn to 6:01 a.m.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the frogwoman. It wasn’t just that he’d talked to her, or that he’d seen her twice, in two different cities. These facts were minor compared to the key chain he’d held since she handed it to him. Lewis looked at the family portrait. Lisa stood to the left of her mother, who was seated. Rebecca was on the other side of the chair, and their significantly taller father stood behind it, benevolently hovering over them all. Lewis continued to stare at the key chain and reached a conclusion he felt was undeniable: its presence was a message, simply and undeniably stated, that the unbelievable must be believed.
Lewis kept the key chain firmly gripped in his right hand as he dressed, left his suite and began looking for the woman who claimed to be God. Realizing that each time she’d appeared he’d been waiting, Lewis began to wait. He waited all morning in the emergency room of Grace General Hospital. At 1:30 he moved to Gus’s Barbershop, then to a chair outside the manager’s office at the Toronto Dominion Bank on Portage. He waited in a bus shelter in front of the CBC Building, in a dentist’s office on the sixth floor of a building he couldn’t name and on a bench outside the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Just after 4:00 p.m., Lewis was in the waiting room of the law offices of Aikins, MacAulay & Thorvaldson, on the thirtieth floor of the Commodity Exchange Tower, when he saw her for the fourth time.
The woman who claimed to be God passed so close to where Lewis was sitting that he could have touched her. Her hair was in pigtails that stuck out from the sides of her head. She wore bicycle shorts that revealed too much. Her shoes had metal clasps on the bottom that made her steps click as she walked across the floor. Tucked under her arm was a large manila envelope. Lewis watched as Lisa handed it to the receptionist, waited for the receipt to be signed and walked back through the waiting room, passing as close to Lewis as she had the first time.
Lewis watched her stand in the foyer, waiting for an elevator. She pressed the down button and crossed her arms. Her posture was horrible. When the doors opened, Lewis stood up and ran as hard as he could. Turning his body sideways, he slipped between the doors just as they were closing. There were eight people in the tiny elevator, and everyone was standing very close. Lewis stood beside Lisa, but a floor passed before she recognized him.
“Hey! It’s you.”
“You’re a bike courier?”
“Very observant, Lewis.”
Their conversation stopped when the elevator did. The doors opened. Two more men got in. Lisa and Lewis moved to the back. He felt her breath on his face. He reached out his index finger. He softly stroked her cheek and then took hold of her wrist with his right hand. He squeezed. His grip tightened. All colour drained from his face, and it was suddenly significantly easier for him to accept that this woman was God than it was to believe that a giant green frog had asked him for directions. Or that the ghost of his wife had given him advice in his hotel room. Although crude and vulgar, she was undeniably real, and stepping into her delusion, if it was one, seemed profoundly easier than remaining inside his.
“Is this the best you can do?” he asked.
“Lewis, you’re hurting me.”
“Is this really the best you can do?”
“What are you talking about?”
The shoulders of everyone in the elevator had stiffened. When the doors opened, they exited like a school of fish. Although there were people waiting outside, not one of them entered. The doors closed, and Lewis and Lisa were alone in the elevator.
“Are you talking about being a bike courier? ’Cause it’s a pretty good job.”
“I’m talking about everything.”
Lisa’s eyes became very wide, then very narrow. She shook Lewis’s grip from her wrist, extended her index finger and executed a single, precise jab to the doors-open button. The doors opened. Taking firm hold of his hand, she led him out of the elevator and pulled him through the lobby and out the large glass doors. Lewis began to lose feeling in his hand. He rushed to keep up with her. Just outside the building, at the top of a flight of concrete steps, she stopped. “Let me tell you a little something about Christianity,” she said.
“I’m not Christian.”
“The only thing your book got right, and here it is, pay attention,” Lisa said, unexpectedly cuffing Lewis on the back of the head. “Is that man was created in my image. Understand?”
“No. No, I don’t,” Lewis said, although it came out as “Wo. Wo, I thon’t,” as he’d bitten the tip of his tongue when she hit him on the back of the head.
“Look at me,” Lisa said. “I am frail and weak and fragile. And therefore so are you. Therefore so is the world.”
Lewis didn’t say a word. He stood on the front steps of the Commodity Exchange Tower, watching the street. On the sidewalk immediately in front of him were an inconsolable toddler and a mother running out of patience. Lewis felt for the toddler. He felt for the mother. He wanted to cover his ears before either of their screams got louder, but then he discovered he didn’t need to. A city bus stopped at the corner and Lewis heard the brakes squeal but not the doors opening or the people getting off. The conversation of two office workers walking past him disappeared. He looked at Lisa and saw her mouth moving, but she made no sound. He heard no sounds at all.