Noah’s Kirkland Signature Ark, by Tom Dinard

“Seriously, how long has it been raining?” Noah wasn’t asking this of anyone in particular, but since his wife, Nami, was in the room, pretending to read the latest Janet Evanovich novel, she felt obligated to answer.

“At least two weeks, right?” she said. “I mean, you don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to know that this type of thing happens here in February, but every day for two weeks is a bit extreme.”

“True,” said Noah, shaking his head and closing the blinds with a sharp pull and a smirk, shutting out reality for at least a few more minutes, “but Stephen Hawking should know about extremes, right? The guy can’t even move. I’d say that’s pretty fucking extreme.”

Nami rolled her eyes and sunk back under the bright purple and silver cover of her thriller. She’d heard her husband’s everyone-ist rants before, from calling his dad’s hometown, Riverhead on Long Island, “Blackhampton,” to referring to the elder players at his country club “spit-ups,” to his affectionate term for their landscaper, Chuy, and his band of merry Mexican leaf-blowers. They were, of course, the “No-Hablas.”

“Seriously,” Nami said, closing her book, rising from bed and walking to the bathroom. “You’re going to burn in hell, so I’ll just freshen up. We’ve got things to do.”

Twenty minutes later, after Noah’s vigorous manipulation of his privates to a SpankWire “cumpilation” ceased as soon as he heard the last of the full-body spray hit the porcelain shower floor, Nami emerged from the steamy lair in a towel and a fog of her own. Her eyes were withdrawn. She stared at the carpeted floor. She sat on the side of the bed and stared off into the white nothingness of her shock.

“What?” Noah said, in one motion bouncing up to awareness and discarding his soiled Kleenex bundle under the box spring. “What is it? You look like somebody died.”

“I don’t know,” she said, still dazed, still not turning to face him. “Maybe somebody did.”

***

Noah Glinsky and Nami Rasner Glinsky were not religious people. Noah had a Bar Mitzvah only because his parents forced him to, and they were rich enough to pull it off to the hilt. Since every Bar Mitzvah had to have a theme and thirteen-year-old Noah was into cars, his folks, Irv and Sandy Glinsky, booked a Saturday reception for four hundred at the club and the real Mario Andretti made a guest toast to the boy who had become a man.

That neon-splashed shindig was followed by a Sunday brunch at the Auto Pub restaurant in the General Motors Building in Manhattan. The proud Glinskys printed souvenir T-shirts that read, “I Went Car-Azy at Noah’s Bar Mitzvah.” Noah cringed all weekend and swore that he’d never have anything to do with God or Judaism for as long as his circumcised schvantz could still stiffen.

Nami’s upbringing was different. When she asked her father, Stan, what the theme of her Bat Mitzvah might be, he replied, “The theme of your Bat Mitzvah … is your Bat Mitzvah.”

Then again, the Rasners weren’t Five Towns social climbers. They were organic turnip farmers. Nami grew up near Woodstock, Stan had a pony tail, and Nami ended up at Bennington College, where she smoked cigars and had a three-semester affair with her fifty-eight-year-old English professor, the poet Joaquin Stevens, because she figured it might be something Anais Nin would do. She met Noah in law school at Columbia. She was readying for a life of public defense. He was intent on “making a fuckload of dough.”

Somehow it worked. He landed a lucrative corporate gig in Seattle and she followed with a smile, learning that being a mother to three boys — Jasper, Shep and Hamish — was a different kind of public defense, and, given her oft-absent husband’s credit-card guilt, even more profitable.

***

They were in Noah’s Audi and had done two laps of Lake Sammamish in two hours without speaking a word. The SUV was running out of gas and the world seemed to be running out of sanity.

She wiped away a tear and explained it to him one more time. While in the shower, someone had spoken to her. And it wasn’t anyone guilty of the phenomenon they called “family timing,” in which annoying members of the Glinsky or Rasner clans would ring away right before showers or dinner or sex or “Mad Men.”

No, this was a clear voice, one that boomed over the constant rush of the cascading water, reverberating off the river-rock-tiled walls like one of Noah’s Fat Tire farts. It was His voice and He had some heavy shit to discuss.

“It might sound cliché,” she said He had told her. “But once again the wickedness of man on this earth has gotten way out of control. That asshole in Norway pretty much clinched it. So it’s time for another reboot, you know, a flood. We’ll do the usual forty and forty. It worked for a while last time, and I tend to stick with what works.

“Bottom line, Nami, is that your husband is going to build me a new Ark. Or at least rent one. And I need you to keep him in line. Make sure it’s a good, sturdy one, and not some turd-bucket that will become so dilapidated after the flood that they’ll find pieces of it on Mount Hood and think it was Bigfoot’s smack-shack.

“And don’t worry about the two-animals-of-every-kind thing. That was kaput a long time ago. Just do what you can. If you can’t find a male and female Malayan sun bear, fuck it. Text some scientists. Get the right bugs. It’ll all eventually lead to what we have now. I’ll give you two weeks before I really start pissing from the sky.

“Now get your food, load up with whatever other supplies you think you’ll need for six week on rough seas, I’ll destroy the world and make it good again, and you two will be heroes forever. I’ll even spare the Audi. And if Noah doesn’t believe any of this, tell him that I know all about the time he touched Jeff Meltzer’s balls at Camp Wahnee.”

***

“It wasn’t a touch,” Noah told Nami that night. “It was a one-finger tap. Maybe not even that. Probably best described as a light graze. And it was Truth or Dare, for fuck’s sake. I wasn’t the only one.”

The following day, Noah took vacation and called every humane society, zoo, museum, and bird sanctuary he could find online. He spent money. He made plans.

He Googled and found a nutjob from Holland who had built a monstrous ark replica just to get on YouTube and paid the Dutchman a lot of Guilders to have it tugged via cruise ship to Seattle on the double.

And with what they estimated to be one day before the end of the world as they would know it, with the rain coming down in black sheets and thunder rampaging in the heavens enough for them to believe in God without hearing stories of teenage homoeroticism gone awry, Noah and Nami took Jasper, Shep and Hamish along to purchase the remainder of what they’d need at the only place they figured they’d need to visit before taking their new furry and feathered family with them onto their 2011 Ark.

Costco.

***

The lines outside for the hot dogs and pizza and brand-new Asada Bakes were short enough for Noah to think that it might be a good time to take advantage of the smokin’ deals on those tasty treats, but alas, he had a job to do.

They gathered their carts, Noah flashed his black executive membership card to Norm, the mustachioed greeter, and they were off, Nami cursing a bit to herself behind the traffic of older folks to the right of the flat screens while the boys ran to pluck their lunches, steaming microwaved morsel by morsel, from the frilly paper sample doilies in the back by the meat cases.

As they turned their wheeled containers up the main drag, with video cameras to their left and potted Japanese maples and a rack of oversized movie theater and restaurant gift certificates to their right, Noah and Nami saw it: a line of people snaking around three aisles and leading to a table where a man was busy signing copies of his book. Yes, this Sunday was a special one at the South Seattle branch. Today was the day for the signing of the latest memoir by Bear Grylls, celebrity super-survivor and star of TV’s “Man Vs. Wild.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Noah said. “Do you?”

“I don’t even know who he is,” Nami said. “And I just realized that we need just about everything in this damn store except for his stupid book.”

As the weight of that thought, the sheer, cataclysmic, all-encompassing, vertebrae-crushing weight of that thought toppled down upon Noah and barricaded him into a corner of Costco and his own mind that he couldn’t imagine escaping from, something even more incredible happened before him and his brood.

Screaming rang out in the warehouse, from the back room where they take busted up bins of basmati rice, through the walk-in fridge with the bell peppers and out to the aisle with the big, poofy brown sectional sofas.

Jasper, Shep and Hamish ran to their parents in stunned silence, grabbing them, turning them around and pointing toward the open corrugated metal doors as mustachioed Norm scrambled to shut them. The horizon beyond them was moving with a familiar twisting, blue violence.

It was water. It was waves of water, bouncing up and down. It was the ocean, and the South Seattle Costco was floating away in it at the pleasure of one pissed-off Lord.

***

Noah crumpled into an uncomfortable Herman Miller-knockoff office chair and pondered the situation while patrons gathered in the middle of the store and managers moved with frantic purpose to push the clothing bins out of the way, availing some sort of simple, decent human gathering place.

As the only guy in the joint named Noah and the only one summoned by God to build an ark in the last two weeks, it had become apparent to him early in the sailing trip that the three hundred or so people inside the South Seattle Costco were being spared by some higher power in the midst of the Biblical event going on outside.

Plans had changed, and even Bear Grylls understood why. As the line for Grylls’ autograph had dissipated, the rugged multi-millionaire Brit didn’t blink. He wasn’t thrilled about having a New York Times best-seller blown off for Scripture, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He had made a heck of a living off of being a survivalist, but that didn’t mean upper Mongolian turtle scat while yachting off to oblivion.

Noah knew something had to be done.

He lapped the aisles with his family, taking stock. The electricity still worked. That meant the pounds upon pounds of New York strips and pork shoulder country ribs (yes, he ate pork) and Atlantic salmon fillets and New Zealand lamb chops and frozen jumbo prawns were fine. The rotisseries firing up those six-dollar grease-pit chickens were still spinning like roulette wheels that landed on whatever glorious number you picked. Not a shard of broken glass or spilled liquid could be seen in the beer-and-wine section. God is good, indeed.

Noah clapped his hands. He raised his fists to the weird, insulated, sky-lit ceiling. He jumped up on top of Grylls’ author’s table, grabbed the microphone, and maybe for the first time in his life, spoke from the heart.

“My name is Noah,” he said. “Seriously. And I’ve been called by God to help the world through this great flood. Seriously.”

He didn’t get any strange looks. Rather the people of the South Seattle Costco flocked to their designated gathering place in the center of the store and listened, enraptured by his words.

“I was supposed to build or buy or lease an ark and procure the two animals of every kind, but this happened first, so I’m assuming God has some sort of better plan for the animals. Or maybe he didn’t think I could pull it off after those liberals in Siberia wouldn’t give me their last female polar bear.

“But I’m here to tell you that we’ve got everything we need right here. I mean … Jesus … just take a look around you! We’ve got all the meat and cheese and frozen vegetables and soda and paper towels and toilet paper and laundry detergent and plastic cups and silverware that we could ever need.

“We’ve got three different kinds of barbecue sauce! In fifty-six ounce plastic-squeezy jars! We’ve got the best baby wipes known to man and diapers of every size. Enough fish oil, colon cleanser, multi-vitamin and Tinactin to keep the entire city healthy for a year!

People stood in attention. Bear Grylls got out of his chair.

“Look, people. Just look. Bacon, eggs, Jimmy Dean sausage sandwiches, organic milk, orange juice, prune juice, grape juice. Dockers pants, Lucky Brand jeans, Sonicare electronic toothbrush heads by the dozen. Pillows, shelving units, basketballs, guitars, golf clubs, computers, TVs, paper shredders, fire extinguishers, coffee makers, coffee, coffee grinders, bathrooms, lockers, an optometrist, for fuck’s sake.

“Hey, is the optometrist still here?”

The optometrist, Ed, stood and raised his hand with meek pride. He was wearing glasses.

“Nice,” Noah said. “I think I need new contacts.”

With that, the two hundred and ninety-three shipmates of the South Seattle Costco exploded in applause, setting off for the journey of their lives.

They knew they would be led. They knew they would be nourished. They knew they would be loved.

And most important, they knew they would finally be one … with bulk discounted products.

***

”No,” Tom says, “I haven’t seen ‘Evan Almighty,’ but …

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