Forgiving Ararat

7

“You are not prepared for what you would see, so we must limit what you will see, which is only possible, Brek Abigail Cuttler, because you insist upon what you believe is your sight to see.”

Luas spoke these words while placing a felt blindfold over my eyes in the vestibule leading back into Shemaya Station. He was like my father on my wedding day at the rear of the church before giving me away, ironic and wistful, lowering the veil over my face and offering riddles for advice before escorting me into the unknown. He wore the identical gray suit, vest, shirt, and tie Bill Gwynne had been wearing at the office the last day I saw him. The resemblance between Luas and Bill was uncanny, as was his resemblance to my grandfathers, and he sometimes seemed to be all three men at once, shifting physical features like a hologram depending upon my memories and mood. For my part, I looked as fresh and presentable as I did on my wedding day. Nana fussed over me all morning in a mother-of-the-bride sort of way, making certain my hair and makeup looked just so; but instead of a wedding dress, I wore my black silk suit, from which she had managed to remove the baby formula and blood. The suit had become my uniform in Shemaya: the garment that represented my identity, the proof that I had lived a life, and the symbol that I intended to return to that life. Biding time until I was cured of whatever disease had seized control of my mind, I acquiesced in the fantasy that I was in heaven while secretly knowing it was just that-a fantasy.

Nana had explained that I would be spending the day with Luas but gave no hint of where we would be going or what we would be doing. It would be my first day away from her since arriving in Shemaya. While primping my hair in the bedroom mirror before leaving the house-her house in Delaware, my grandparents’ house-I asked her if Luas was my great-grandfather Frank, whom I had never met.

“No, no,” she said in her Italian accent, amused by the suggestion. “Luas isn’t your great-grandfather, dear. He’s already moved on. Luas is the High Jurisconsult of Shemaya.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “High Jurisconsult?”

“It means he’s the chief lawyer here.”

Another contradiction. I pounced. “But I thought we were in heaven,” I said. “Why would there be lawyers in paradise?”

Nana looked surprised. “You don’t think God would allow souls to face the Final Judgment alone, do you? Even murderers on earth have a lawyer to represent them and the outcomes of those trials are only temporary. The stakes are higher here. Eternity.”

I was speechless.

“Luas will explain everything,” Nana assured me. “But let me tell you a little secret. He needs your help. Don’t tell him I told you.”

“He needs my help? I’m the one who needs help.”

“Yes, dear,” she said, “and by helping Luas you’ll be helping yourself.”

“What, exactly, does he need my help with?”

Nana paused for a moment and looked at me in the mirror. “He wants to leave Shemaya, but he can’t find the way out.”

“How long has he been here?” I asked.

Nana thought for a moment. “I think it’s been nearly two thousand years,” she said. “Come along now, it’s time to go.”

Luas continued his instructions to me in the vestibule: “The train station is crowded now with new arrivals,” he said. “You will hear nothing but you will feel them brushing against you; you must make no attempt to reach out to them, and do not, under any circumstances, remove the blindfold. The entrance to the Urartu Chamber is at the opposite end of the station. We’ll be going straight through. Are you ready?”

“Why can’t I see them?” I asked. “And what is the Urartu Chamber?”

“I’ll explain later,” he said, tugging at the blindfold to be certain it was tight. “If we don’t get going, we’ll miss the trial. Can you see?”

“No.”

“Then you’re ready. Follow me.”

He grasped my left elbow and urged me forward, stiffening against the weight of the doors. Entering the station, I immediately sensed a great throng of people milling about in ghostly silence; bodies began brushing against my hips and shoulders, but heeding Luas’ warning, I made no attempt to reach out to them. Even so, halfway through I could no longer resist the temptation to peek beneath the blindfold. What I saw is difficult to describe: the train station was not filled with people but rather their memories: disconnected sensations, emotions, and images arcing through the air like bolts of electricity inside a novelty plasma globe. These were raw memories, not the sanitized recollections we tell each other over cups of coffee or even the more honest accounts we record in our secret diaries, but life itself as experienced and remembered by those who lived it; and because I came into direct contact with these memories without the protective filter of another person’s mind, they became my memories. Suddenly, like a character actor viewing scenes spliced together from a lifetime of films, I found myself reliving the experiences of people whom I had never known but who seemed in a very real sense to be me, remembering events of their lives both minor and momentous, brief and prolonged, moments of numbing boredom and exhilarating excitement, excruciating pain and indescribable pleasure. At one instant, I’m working a sewing machine in a sweat shop in Saipan, the next I’m climbing the catwalk of a grain silo in Kansas City; I’m careening through the streets of Baghdad in the back of a taxi cab, tending the helm of a trawler in stormy seas off Newfoundland, strolling the rows of a vineyard in Australia, driving a front end loader from a mine shaft in Siberia, severing the head of a Tutsi boy with a machete in Rwanda, kissing the neck of a lover in Montreal. I was more than mere spectator. My fingers cramped as the fabric slid beneath the needle, I choked on clouds of dust billowing over the dry wheat, my body leaned as we swerved to avoid a pedestrian crossing the street, I barked orders to my crew on deck and saw the fear in their eyes as the waves crested the bow, I slipped a fleshy red grape into my mouth and savored the tart explosion of juice, I felt the warm spray of blood as I thrust the machete again into the convulsing corpse, I whispered softly while indulging the desires of my lover. Alien memories surfaced in my mind as though I were emerging from a lifetime of amnesia, leaving me confused and lost. Soon Luas strained against another pair of doors and we passed out of the station.

“Are you all right?” he asked as the doors slammed shut behind us.

I was unable to respond, my body trembled.

“Here,” he said, “you may remove the blindfold now, sit.”

We were in a remote, vacant corridor of the train station now and sat down together on a bench. Luas brushed away the hair that had fallen into my eyes and smiled. “I knew you would peek,” he said. “You’re not one to obey rules, even when they benefit you.” He gazed toward the doors through which we had just emerged. “You see them for who they are, Brek Abigail Cuttler. You have the gift.”

I was barely able to understand his words. My memories had merged and deepened into the larger pool of humanity: lives rushed through me in intoxicating bursts of light and sound, joy and horror, the fragments of other lives expanding the life I had remembered in ways both tender and terrifying. It was as though I’d been raised on a desert island without music, books, television, or maps and suddenly been given a glimpse of the world. I wanted to see more; I needed to see more. I got up from the bench and turned toward the doors.

“Not yet,” Luas warned. “It’s too soon. You’re not ready.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “Who am I?” I grasped the door handle.

“No, Brek,” Luas spoke sternly. “You must do exactly as I say or you will lose who you are. Do you understand?”

“Who am I, Luas?” I said, confused and lost. “Or, should I say, who was I?” I pulled on the door.

Luas tugged on the empty right sleeve of my suit jacket, causing me to turn toward him.

“You did it on purpose,” he said, indicating the empty sleeve. “Quite bold, actually. Why, there isn’t a child who hasn’t comforted herself to sleep knowing that if pushed too far she could simply deny her parents what they treasure most of all. Children play the same dangerous game adults play on the tips of ballistic missiles, but unlike adults most children recognize the futility of trying to win by losing. Not you, Brek Cuttler. No, you heard your grandfather’s instruction to stand clear of the conveyor chain as an invitation to trade a pound of your own flesh for the pleasure of the pain on your parents’ faces and the sorrow in their voices.”

It all came back to me, my own darkest secret, never shared. The secret of the princess in Santiago. “How did you know?” I asked.

“I know many things about you, Brek Cuttler,” Luas said.

“Then you know they were getting a divorce,” I said, “and that my mother was an alcoholic and my father hit her and he… You know I thought I’d only get a cut when I reached into the machine and maybe be taken to the hospital for a few stitches, not that I would lose my arm. I just wanted them to listen. I just wanted them to stay together. Is that too much for a child to ask?” I glared at Luas as if he were my own father. “You have no right to judge me,” I said. “I’ve been punished my entire life for the sin of trying to keep my parents together. I’ve more than paid for my crime-if you can call wanting a family a crime. You know many things about me? Do you know about the phantom pains, when you think your arm is hurting even though you don’t have an arm? Do you know what it’s like not to be able to hug another human being because you’re missing an arm to hug them back? Do you know about bathing, dressing, eating, and sleeping with only one hand, and about the jeers of children and the cruelty of adults? Do you know about the awkwardness of every new meeting, about the shattered hopes and dreams? Do you know about clothes with useless right sleeves?”

“All that was forgiven long ago,” Luas replied.

“Forgiven? Really? I don’t remember forgiving anybody.”

“Please, Brek,” he said, “sit down.”

I released the door and sat back down with him on the bench. Two sculptures had been chiseled into the stone wall opposite the bench: one of a Buddhist temple in the foothills of Tibet and the other of a synagogue in the foothills of Mt. Sinai. Luas noticed me looking at them. They seemed out of place in a train station.

“Have you heard of the Book of Life and the Book of Death?” he asked.

I nodded.

“They don’t exist,” he said.

I exhaled in relief, prematurely.

“God doesn’t maintain them. We do. Each one of us. A record of every thought, word, and deed in our lives. The storage is quite perfect, actually; it’s the recall that’s incomplete. Not that this is a defect. Important reasons exist for narrowing the field: forgetting traumatic events helps one cope, and there’s the exquisitely practical need to discard portions of an ever-growing body of experiences to avoid being consumed by them. Memory isn’t the defective tape recording you’ve been led to believe it is; memory is the tape player itself, playing back the tracks of music we select-and sometimes those we don’t. Replayed on the right machine-a high quality machine-the music can be reproduced with great fidelity and precision, nearly as perfect as when it was first produced.”

Although hewn from solid rock, the stone reliefs on the wall metamorphosed as Luas spoke, reworking themselves into brooding animations of viscous stone. Two elevated thrones surrounded by great mounds of crumpled scrolls replaced the temple and the synagogue, in front of which queued long lines of people, naked, their faces erased from their egg shaped bald heads. Thin, fat, young, old, male, female, tall, small, each person carried a scroll, some bulging and heavy and others compact and light. Upon the throne sat an orb like the sun with rays emanating in all directions, and at the foot of the throne stood a robed soul who received the scroll from the next person in line and appeared to read aloud as the parchment unspooled. When the end was reached, the scroll was cast by the reader onto the pile and the bearer disappeared without direction or trace, replaced by the next in line for whom the process was repeated. Luas paused to watch the somber procession.

“You’ve been given the privilege, and the responsibility, of replaying the tape for others,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“That is what we do here, Brek,” Luas explained. “It’s why we’ve been brought to Shemaya, to read and dissect the record of life and plead to the Creator the imperfect case of the created, as oil and canvas would, if they could, explain to the artist flaws of texture and color, or as string and bow would, if they could, explain to the composer disturbances of pitch and tone. We’ve been appointed to tell the other side of the story, Brek-to explain their fears and regrets, their complicity and victimization, their greed and sacrifice. We’re here to make sure justice is served at the Final Judgment.”

As I said earlier, I had not accepted my death at this point; to the contrary, I had been playing along, biding my time, waiting and watching for an opening to rejoin the life I had once led. My earlier thoughts of fever and illness had turned into the possibility that I’d been in a terrible accident and suffered a serious brain injury. Maybe I had been in a car crash, or fallen off a cliff during the hike up Tussey Mountain? Maybe this is what a coma is like? When Nana dressed me for my big day, I even imagined she was my nurse preparing me for surgery and Luas was my neurosurgeon, speaking about things I couldn’t understand but telling me to trust him and everything would be fine. The blindfold he lowered over my eyes became an oxygen mask to keep me alive. I clung with all my might to these hopes now as Luas explained things, terrifying things, I could neither comprehend nor accept-things that could not be unless I was, in fact, dead.

“Oh, I think I get it now,” I said, skeptically playing along. “You’re pretending to be my lawyer and you’re trying to help me avoid being sent to hell for sticking my hand in the manure spreader, right? Can’t you get me a plea bargain or something? Credit for time served?”

“Hardly,” Luas said. “Why did God promise not to flood the earth again?”

A puzzled expression flashed across my face.

“Come now,” he said, removing a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and packing the bowl. “Surely you know the story. Things only got worse after the fiasco in Eden. Cain murdered Abel, and later one of Cain’s children murdered a young child. Humans began mating with animals and engaging in every sort of debauchery. God was furious-and rightly so. He decided to destroy the lot of us, as justice demands, but when the flood waters receded, He felt remorse. Imagine that. God regrets what God’s done. Strange. He makes a promise: ‘I’ll never do it again,’ He says, hanging rainbows from the clouds as a reminder. One day extermination of the human race is the final solution-to borrow an ugly phrase-but as soon as humanity has been driven to the brink, all is forgiven and our survival is guaranteed, even if we return to our wicked ways. Why the change of heart? Why even spare Noah in the first place?”

“I guess because Noah was the only one who obeyed,” I said.

Luas paused to strike a match and light his pipe. “Yes,” he said, “and if Noah had disobeyed?”

“He would have been killed with the others.”

“Correct,” Luas said between puffs. “Divine justice. A good case could be made, could it not, that God is the greatest mass murderer of all time and Adolph Hitler was a petty criminal by comparison? Hitler was once a presenter here, by the way. One of the best.”

“Adolph Hitler was here?”

“Yes, but let’s stick to the point; we’re talking about God now, and there’s still the matter of His last-second change of heart. It’s because of this astounding about-face that beyond those doors at the end of the corridor, inside the Urartu Chamber, there will be argument for many souls today that they have a place in the Light and, for those same souls, the Dark. They’ll learn their fates today and greet their eternities. You see, every birth on earth is a potential crime and a pending trial. It’s the Urartu Chamber, not a pot of gold, that sits at the end of God’s rainbows. God promised us those rainbows would guarantee a place for man in the world of sun and clouds, but He said nothing about the worlds to come.”

Luas rose from the bench and gestured for me to follow.

“Of course,” he continued, puffing on his pipe, “we do not deal here with bodhisattvas or saints, caitiffs or fiends. The conclusions for them are foregone, the judgments obvious and unassailable. Our concern here in the Urartu Chamber is for the rest of humanity-the good people who sometimes cheat, the bad who sometimes do good, the billions who failed to sacrifice everything to become priests or prophets but resisted the temptation to become demons or demigods. We put on no false airs here. We do not ask whether there has been renunciation for the Hindu, awakening for the Buddhist, reckoning for the Muslim, salvation for the Christian, or atonement for the Jew. These are mere obfuscations of Divine Law. There is only one question to be answered during the Final Judgment of every human soul, and it is the same question that concerned God before the Great Flood: What does justice demand?”

We approached the doors at the opposite end of the corridor.

“Accounts rich and grave are reconciled beyond these doors, Brek Cuttler,” Luas said. “Could you speak honestly of yourself there? Could you damn yourself if damning is what you deserved, setting aside fear and hatred for truth? Could you stand before the Creator of energy, space, and time and save yourself? Could you pass through those doors knowing your experience of eternity would be forever shaped by what you said and left unsaid? Could you explain what, during your entire life, defied explanation?”

I began to panic. I couldn’t have made up these words if my brain had been knocked around inside my skull during a car accident or riddled with cancer and fever. And I couldn’t have made up the memories I experienced passing through the train shed either-they were too vivid, exotic, real. The possibility of my own death was becoming more inescapable.

“You’re taking me to be judged, then?” I said, backing away. “I really am going to hell for putting my arm in a manure spreader?”

“Judged? You?” Luas said, genuinely surprised by my question. “Of course not! I told you all that was forgiven long ago. I’m taking you to receive your heavenly reward, Brek, not to send you to hell. You’ve always hoped and prayed you would come here. Shemaya has been the motive behind your every decision, the basis of your every interaction from the first moment of your life to the last; it has been your longing and your dream, just as it has been the longing and dream of almost every human being since the beginning of time. You knew it most vividly after your accident, when you realized you suffered not because you would never again be able to dangle from monkey bars on a playground or swing a softball bat or play a violin, but because it was unjust that millions of other girls could.”

Luas removed his hands from my shoulders and puffed his pipe.

“A member of the bar, not the clergy, offered you justice after the accident, isn’t that right? And so you discovered at an early age that the legal system provides the redemption religion can no longer afford, and that lawyers are the true priests and judges the true prophets. You craved justice more than anything else in your life. Growing older, you felt the same sting when somebody cut you off in traffic or said an unkind word, as when a drunk driver wiped out a family or a tornado flattened a town. Although different by degree and implication, you knew in your heart neither of these was more or less capricious, and neither was more or less unjust.

“On the day your childhood friend, Karen Busfield, told you she was accepted into a seminary to become an Episcopal priest, you were filled with despair, not joy. You were already in law school by then. Do you remember how you mocked her while cross-examining her motives? You said: ‘When a child with bruises all over her body tells you her father did it, Karen, what will you do? Ask her to pray and put it in God’s hands? And when she tells you she’s been praying every night for ten years, but the beatings still continue, what will you say then? God’s hands can’t be bothered with children, Karen! If you really want to save people’s souls from sin-not just the sin of hating others and themselves but the sin of hating the God who breathed life into them and then abandoned them-you won’t pray for them, Karen. You’ll give them one of my business cards and tell them to call me.’”

I stared at Luas, trying to understand how he could possibly know all these things.

“And do you remember Karen’s reply?” Luas continued. “She said you didn’t let her finish; she was planning to join the Air Force, like her father, and become a military chaplain. ‘The Air Force doesn’t call lawyers when somebody misbehaves, Brek,’ she said. ‘They drop bombs on them. Now that’s justice.’ And you said to her: ‘They’ll never take you, Karen. They’ll see right through you.’” Luas puffed his pipe. “You understood the great truth of life, Brek Cuttler. You understood that the pursuit of justice is the purest form of religion and the highest human aspiration. You became a disciple of justice. Now, as I said, the time has come for you to receive your reward. You have been chosen to join the elite lawyers of Shemaya who defend souls at the Final Judgment. I was being facetious when I asked you if you could defend yourself in the Urartu Chamber. That always gets the attention of new arrivals; one’s own jeopardy helps focus the mind. No, the only question now is whether you can walk through those doors if someone else depends upon what you say and leave unsaid? If you speak for humanity, not yourself. But this question was answered about you long ago, was it not? My job is not to assess your fitness but to show you the way.”

Luas emptied his pipe into an ashtray on the wall, then slipped his hand into his vest pocket and removed a golden key from which dangled a sparkling Magen David, the crescent moon of Islam, figures of Shiva and Buddha, the Yin and Yang, and a crucifix. “This is yours,” he said, handing me the key. “It’s the key to the Urartu Chamber.”

I refused to take it.

“This isn’t the time for fear and indecision,” Luas said. “You’ve been waiting for God to smite the evil and reward the righteous since you were eleven years old and you put those boys on trial for murdering crayfish. To you, even crayfish deserved justice! How wonderful! Rejoice, Brek Abigail Cuttler! Your prayers have been answered! There is justice after all! Finally, praise God, justice!”

The memory of the crayfish trials came rushing back to me. Little did I know then how important those trials would become to my life-and my afterlife.

8

Behind my best friend Karen Busfield’s house in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, beyond the ash piles left over from the old coal furnaces and the small abandoned building with the words “Tyrone Casket & Vault Co.” fading from its side, glistened the wide pleasant stream known as the Little Juniata River. The Little Juniata flows north out of the Allegheny Mountains, draining the small creeks and springs that bless the hills and valleys with life, then due south when it reaches Tyrone, where my father’s family, the Cuttlers, who were simple farmers, are from. When the Little Juniata reaches Huntingdon, it spills into the big Juniata River, which is a big river only during twenty year hurricanes and at other times just normal sized, not wide, not deep, and not fast. The big Juniata River continues south until it empties into the Susquehanna River at Clark’s Ferry near Harrisburg, and the Susquehanna River, which is a big river all year round, continues south until it reaches Harve de Grace, Maryland, where it flows into the Chesapeake Bay. There is a marina there, where my mother’s family, the Bellinis, who were more wealthy and better educated than the Cuttlers, docked their sailboat. And so it was that my father’s and mother’s families were connected in this way, by the rivers, long before my parents married or met. I remember being astonished when I discovered this relationship on a map, like suddenly recognizing the shape of a connect-the-dots rabbit. I wondered about its meaning, and, like an astrologer searching for signs in the heavens, I began reading all kinds of maps for signs of what my future might bring. After that, when I waded into the Little Juniata River, or sailed the Chesapeake Bay with my grandparents, I could not resist wondering where the water had come from and where it was going and whose lives it would bring together.

The Little Juniata River is shallow in midsummer and has a limestone bottom of slippery, moss-covered river rocks; Karen and I could walk for miles through its knee-deep, clear waters wearing cutoff shorts and old sneakers, stumbling, sliding, drenching ourselves, and laughing merrily. We carried our lunches with us and ate along its banks, pretending to be early explorers charting the river for the first time. The aboriginal tribes we encountered, which is to say the boys from the different neighborhoods along the river, tracked our movements warily, as if we really were from a faraway land. Girls never played in the river, but Karen and I were different from most girls-not because we were more tomboyish or brave, but because we thought of things differently. For example, we thought the river was interesting and full of possibilities, which most girls did not, and we believed we had equal right with the boys to play in it, which most girls would not. Ours was a difference of curiosity and perspective. And fairness.

One hot July afternoon, while Karen and I were exploring the river, we shocked ourselves and the boys by catching crayfish with our own bare hands-no easy feat for a girl with only one arm, which made catching things like bugs, baseballs, crayfish, and boys, a challenge. Little Juniata River crayfish, in particular, are difficult to catch. Like handicapped girls, they’re timid little creatures, seemingly aware of their vulnerability and embarrassed by their bizarre bodies. You must approach them from behind without casting a shadow, while they’re sunning themselves in shallow waters on the mossy green river rocks they try so hard to imitate. They dart backward when frightened, vanishing in a cloud of silt into the nearest crevice. You must be fast, and you must grab them by the large middle shell to avoid their sharp pincers-like lifting a snarling cat by the scruff of its neck. Held this way, they’re perfectly harmless; but make a mistake, and they’ll give you a painful snip and you’ll drop them back into the water.

Karen and I proudly waved our crayfish high in the air that afternoon, cheering and hollering with the excitement of biologists discovering a new species. We examined them up close, noticing how their tails curled into a ball to shield their soft underbellies and their pincers strained to reach back over their heads to nip at our fingers; we stroked their antennae and clicked our fingernails against their hard shells; and finally we returned them to the river, worried they wouldn’t survive if we kept them out too long. Ethically, there isn’t much more you can do with a crayfish. You might shake it in the face of a boy to make him wince, but you could embarrass him this way only once, and the consequences for the crayfish were dire. When the boys saw we were still alive after handling the nasty things, they bravely attacked the river and a fierce competition set in. Soon buckets were filled with crayfish and records made of who caught the most and the biggest. This is where the minds of girls and boys turn in opposite directions. Karen and I were content to study the crayfish for a minute or two and set them free. The boys, on the other hand, weren’t satisfied until they’d tortured and executed the lot of them. Their buckets became killing grounds. The crayfish snapped ferociously to defend themselves, but in the confined space of the buckets they succeeded only in maiming each other, not their captors. A thick algae of amputated pincers, antennae, and other body parts soon floated upon the water; each new crayfish added to the hoard set off a fury, and when things settled down the boys stirred the buckets to see them go after each other again. When the crayfish became too exhausted to fight, the boys tore their bodies apart with their hands and tossed the fragments back into the river.

Karen and I were horrified. We pleaded with the boys to end the competition and spare the crayfish. We tried to wrestle the buckets away, but the boys were too strong; we threw rocks at them and called them names; we even offered to let them kiss us-and threatened to kiss them if they refused to stop-but it was no use. There must be something genetic in boys that makes the suffering of living creatures an endless source of fascination and amusement.

Even though we couldn’t liberate the crayfish, I was determined to bring the boys to justice for their crimes, so I established a courtroom of rocks and logs along the riverbank and held trials. I had seen my Pop Pop Bellini, valiant and righteous, cross-examining witnesses in court, and I had testified about the accident with my arm, answering the questions Mr. Gwynne asked as carefully as I could, so I knew just how to do it. I appointed myself prosecutor and told Karen she could be the judge and the jury. To my shock and dismay, Karen betrayed both the crayfish and me by refusing to participate, claiming that punishing the boys wouldn’t do any good. I thought she was sweet on one of them, probably Lenny Basilio, who kept running up to show her his crayfish. Even the boys doubted Karen’s motives, but to their credit they knew they’d done wrong, and they’d gotten bored with the killing and thought trials might be fun. Since Karen wouldn’t help, they offered to sit as the jury for each other, promising to listen impartially to the evidence and render a fair verdict. I would hear none of it, but Karen, relishing her role as spoiler, reminded me that a jury is supposed to be composed of the defendant’s peers, leaving me no choice but to agree. I would be both prosecutor and judge, and Karen would sit by and watch.

I put Lenny Basilio on trial first to spite her. Lenny was the fattest boy and the weakest, the one always being pushed around. He was also the nicest. He’d been afraid at first to catch the crayfish and had to be teased by the others into doing it, but once he got started he became very efficient and caught the largest crayfish of the day-a wise old granddaddy of a crustacean the size of a small baby lobster. Although by far the biggest and most powerful crayfish in his collection, it was too heavy and slow to defend itself against the younger ones and became the first casualty in Lenny’s bucket. Lenny looked genuinely remorseful when the big crayfish died. I knew he’d be easy to convict for the murder.

I called him to the witness stand-a flat piece of river rock resting on a platform of sticks-and told him to raise his right hand. We recognized no right against self-incrimination along the banks of the Little Juniata River; all defendants were forced to testify.

“Do you swear to tell the whole truth, Lenny Basilio, so help you God?” I said.

Lenny shrugged his shoulders and sat down.

I placed his bucket before him, fetid and stinking, filled with crayfish parts. “Did you put these crayfish in this bucket?”

Lenny looked into the pail and then over at his buddies.

“Remember, Lenny,” I warned him, “you’re under oath. You’ll be struck dead by a bolt of lightning if you lie.”

Lenny let out a whine. “But the crayfish pinched me first!”

“Yes or no?” I said. “Did you fill this bucket with crayfish?”

“Yes.”

“That’s right, you did. And after you filled it, you stirred it up so the crayfish would snap at each other, didn’t you?”

Before Lenny could answer, I dredged through the water and pulled out the lifeless granddaddy crayfish, already turning white in the heat like a steamed jumbo shrimp. Its right pincer had been amputated, just like my right arm. I showed the crayfish to the jury and made them take a good long look at it; although a few of them snickered and made coarse jokes, the expressions on most of their faces suggested that even they were appalled and saddened by what had happened. Then I showed it defiantly to Karen, who shook her head silently, and turned back to Lenny.

“You did this, didn’t you Lenny Basilio?” I said. “You killed it. You put it in your bucket and killed it. Now it’ll never see its family again. What if somebody reached down here right now and pulled you off that rock and put you in a bucket?”

“But I didn’t mean to,” Lenny pleaded. He looked like he was about to cry.

I dropped the crayfish into the bucket and turned toward the jury in disgust. “The prosecution rests.”

“Guilty! Guilty!” the boys all cheered.

“Wait a minute,” I said sagely. “You’ve got to vote on it to make it official. We have to take a poll. John Gaines, what say you?” I spoke the way the courtroom tipstave spoke while polling the jury during my trial.

John Gaines glared at Lenny. “Guilty,” he said, leaning forward and barring his teeth for effect. “Guilty as sin.”

“Mike Kelly, what say you?”

“Guilty!” he said with enthusiasm.

“Ok,” I said. “Robby…I don’t know your last name.”

“Temin.”

“Robby Temin, what say you?”

Robby looked sympathetically at Lenny. “Guilty,” he whispered.

“Jimmy Reece?”

Jimmy threw a rock at Lenny and laughed. “Guilty…and he’s a crybaby too!”

The boys all laughed.

I slid behind the judge’s bench and banged a stone against the river rock. “Order in the court!” I hollered. “Order in the court!” The boys became silent instantly. I was impressed with my newfound power.

“Wally Nearhoof, what say you?”

Wally glared back at me, full of insolence and venom. He was the biggest and meanest boy, the bully of the bunch. Everybody was afraid of Wally Nearhoof, including me. He had a look of malice about him, and he held it for a long time on me, boring through me like the twist of a drill.

“Not guilty,” he said, keeping his fixed eyes on me.

My jaw dropped. Before I could protest, the other boys chimed in: “What? Not guilty? No way! He’s as guilty as the devil!”

“I said, not guilty,” Wally insisted.

Lenny Basilio’s face brightened. By some miracle, Wally the bully had actually come to his rescue. It was a first. With a warm smile of gratitude and friendship, he virtually danced over to Wally to thank him; but as soon as Lenny got there, Wally cocked his arm and thumped Lenny hard in the chest with the heel of his hand, knocking him to the ground. He leered at the other boys. “Just kidding,” he said. “Guilty. Guilty as hell! Let’s hang him!”

The boys broke into a riot of cheers. “Guilty! Guilty as hell! Hang him! Let’s hang Lenny!”

Lenny scrambled to his feet and backed away. He looked terrified; tears poured from his eyes.

I clapped the river rocks. “Order! Order!” I said. “Order, or I’ll hold you all in contempt and end this trial right now!”

The boys quieted down and I turned to Lenny, staring back at me with miserable, desperate eyes. I felt no sympathy for him. I was still thinking about what he’d done to the crayfish.

“Lenny Basilio,” I said gravely. “You’ve been found guilty of murdering crayfish.”

Lenny hung his head low.

“Murder is the most serious crime there is,” I continued, “but since everybody else did it too, we can’t hang you.”

Lenny perked up but the boys started booing.

I slammed the rocks together again. “Order!”

“We can’t hang you, Lenny, but you’ve got to be punished…” I thought for a moment what his punishment should be, then I picked up his bucket and shoved it in his face. “As the judge of this court, I hereby sentence you, Lenny Basilio, to spend the rest of your life inside a bucket, like the crayfish you killed!” I emptied the crayfish parts on the ground and put the bucket over Lenny’s head like a dunce cap.

“Life in a bucket! Life in a bucket!” the boys all laughed and cheered.

Lenny pulled the bucket off his head. Hatred filled his eyes. “One-armed freak!” he screamed at me. “It should have been you that died in the bucket, not the crayfish!” He punched me as hard as he could in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me, and ran home.

I didn’t cry when I got my wind back. I didn’t care about the punch or the insult. Justice had prevailed. It was the best feeling I’d ever felt in my life. At the age of eleven, I’d won my first trial and the battle of good versus evil. It was a glorious moment. I smiled smugly at Karen, who looked on without saying a word.

But then Wally Nearhoof, the bully, spoke up. “Now it’s my turn,” he said, taking the witness stand. “Bet you can’t convict me.”

I wanted to save Wally for last, but flush with righteousness and invincibility, I accepted his challenge. I couldn’t wait to put the bucket on his dumb, ugly head. I told him to raise his right hand.

“Wally Nearhoof, do you swear to tell the whole truth, so help you God?”

“Yeah,” he said, sneering and patronizing.

I pointed to the rusty, old paint can he used to hold his crayfish. Wally had caught the most crayfish of all, and he’d also been the most cruel, pulling their legs and pincers off and crushing their soft underbellies between his thumbs, breaking their squirming bodies in half and pouring the contents into the water. I hated Wally’s big murderous face and his big murderous hands. I wanted to convict him more than any of the others and went straight for his throat.

“Did you put these crayfish in here?”

“Nope.”

“You’re under oath, Wally,” I warned him, “you have to tell the truth. You put these crayfish in this can, didn’t you?”

“No,” he said. “And you can’t prove I did.”

I guess I wasn’t surprised. Wally was a murderer, after all, why wouldn’t he be a liar too? I stood for a moment thinking how to prove his guilt, then the idea struck me. It was obvious.

“No further questions,” I said, cutting my losses.

Wally started hooting and hollering like he’d won, but he got quiet real fast when I called Jimmy Reece to the stand. Jimmy was Wally’s lackey, the littlest kid of the bunch, who traded his dignity for Wally’s protection. He had held the paint can and laughed while Wally dismembered the crayfish. Jimmy had more bruises on his body from Wally than anybody else, and he knew that after his testimony he would have more. He looked petrified when I asked him to raise his right hand.

“Jimmy, do you swear to tell the whole truth, so help you God?”

Jimmy glanced over at Wally, who was menacingly smacking his big fist into his big hand.

“I…I guess so,” Jimmy said with a tremor in his voice.

“Did you see Wally put crayfish in this can?”

Wally smacked his fist harder.

“Ah…Ah…”

“You’re under oath, Jimmy,” I said. “You were holding the can for Wally. Tell the truth. You saw him put crayfish in it. You saw him tear them apart, didn’t you?”

“No.”

I was stunned. In my naiveté, I didn’t think he would lie. I called the rest of the boys to the witness stand. They’d all seen Wally fill the can with crayfish, they’d all seen Wally disembowel them, but one by one every one of them denied it. Karen had seen him too, but when I called her she refused to testify. I was furious.

“Cowards!” I screamed at them. “Liars! You’re letting him get away with murder!”

Karen was sitting on a rock a near the judge’s seat. She said to me: “You don’t think it’s right for crayfish to spend their lives in a bucket, Brek, but you just sentenced Lenny to life in a bucket and now you want to do the same thing to Wally. They didn’t know any better when they hurt the crayfish, but you do.”

“Not guilty! Not guilty!” the boys cheered.

Wally strutted up to me and smiled. “I told you you couldn’t prove it,” he said. “You one-armed freak.”

I tried not to burst into tears but I couldn’t control myself. “I hate you!” I screamed. “I hate all of you!” Like Lenny, I ran away.

Later that afternoon, I went back to the river. Karen was burying the crayfish in a mass grave she had dug in the moist, dark soil of the riverbank. After covering the grave, she offered a prayer for their little crayfish souls and a prayer for the souls of the boys who persecuted them. Afterward, she wiped her hands on her legs and said to me:

“I guess everybody wants justice. My mom and dad when they’re fighting want justice; teachers when we don’t listen in class want justice; bullies on playgrounds want justice and their victims do too. But every time somebody says they want justice, what they really mean is they want to hurt somebody; it’s ok to do that, they say, because they’re doing justice. But how does that make it any better? We shamed the boys, so the boys got mad and started hunting crayfish; the boys made fun of Lenny, so Lenny got mad and caught the crayfish; the crayfish got mad for being caught and pinched Lenny; Lenny got mad and killed the crayfish; then you got mad at Lenny and convicted him; then Lenny got mad and hit you; then you got mad at me when I wouldn’t testify against Wally; and Wally got mad and called you names. It’s weird, you know? Everybody wants justice, but justice is what makes everybody angry and unhappy in the first place. Why do we want it so bad, if it’s what hurts us?” Karen made a little cross on the grave with some pebbles. “The only way I could figure to stop all the fighting was to just forgive them.”

9

I inserted the golden key Luas had given me into the lock of the massive wooden doors leading into the Urartu Chamber. Suddenly the doors, the walls, and the train shed itself vanished, leaving me standing beside Luas in an immense space bounded only by energy itself. Instead of unlocking the doors, the key seemed to have somehow freed the unknown numbers of subatomic particles that cling together to form stone and wood, leaving behind only the latticework of magnetic and gravitational pulses that had bound them together, like knocking all the bricks from a wall but leaving the mortar-or converting mass to energy at the speed of light squared. The wall of energy surrounding the space was palpable, translucent, and, if it could be said to have had a color, glistened like water in a crystal decanter on a sterling silver tray.

At the opposite end of the Chamber, the energy condensed itself into a triangular monolith several stories tall, seemingly working Einstein’s theorem in reverse. The slab was both dark and luminescent, composed of what appeared to be the finest sapphire, with a triangular aperture near the top through which light entered but did not exit, allowing nothing of the interior to be seen. A semicircle of pale amber light radiated outward from the base of the monolith in a broad arc, and this light formed the floor itself. At the center of the floor stood a simple wooden chair, absurdly out of scale in substance and size. Behind this chair, but beyond the circle of light and exactly opposite the monolith, sat three more chairs. Luas ushered me toward them and insisted I take the one in the middle. He took the left chair and, after seating himself, placed his hands on his knees, closed his eyes, and said to me: “Tobias Bowles will be presenting the case of his father, Gerard.”

A moment later, the presenter arrived, standing in the same spot where we had been standing, a golden key like mine still turning in his fingers. He was only a young boy, perhaps eight or nine years of age; his skin was dark and his features middle eastern, with a prominent wanderer’s nose and soft brown eyes that seemed to have seen and understood too much for his years. He wore his hair long and unkempt; a light colored robe draped from his shoulders to the floor. Luas rose to his feet when he saw him, looking disappointed.

“Oh, it’s only you, Haissem,” he said, frowning. “We were expecting Mr. Bowles… Well, here we are anyway. Haissem, this is Brek Cuttler, the newest lawyer on my staff. Brek, this is Haissem, the most senior presenter in all of Shemaya. I must say, Haissem, she’s arrived not a moment too soon. We just lost Jared Schrieberg and now, it seems from your appearance, Mr. Bowles as well.”

Haissem reached out to greet me with his left hand-a perceptive gesture, as most people reached by instinct for my right hand and were embarrassed to come up with an empty sleeve.

“Welcome to the Urartu Chamber, Brek,” he said, bowing politely, his voice high and prepubescent. “I remember sitting here to witness my first presentation. Abel presented the difficult case of his brother, Cain. That was long before your time though, Luas.”

“Quite,” Luas agreed.

“Not much has changed since then,” Haissem sighed. “Luas keeps the docket moving even though the number of cases increases. We’re fortunate to have you, Brek, and you’re fortunate to have somebody like Luas as your mentor. There’s no better presenter in all of Shemaya.”

“Present company excepted,” Luas said.

“Not at all,” said Haissem. “I only handle the easy cases.”

“Few would consider Socrates and Judas to have been easy cases,” Luas replied. “I’m just a clerk.”

Haissem winked at me. “Don’t let him fool you,” he said. “Without Luas, there would be no Shemaya.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, bewildered. “Cain and Abel? “Socrates and Judas? What are you talking about. What’s the joke?”

Luas turned to me impatiently. “Do you believe theirs were clear cases about which there could be no doubt?” he said.

“I, I guess not…” I said. “I really have no idea, but my point is that you couldn’t possibly have- Well, what happened to them, then? What was the verdict?”

Haissem patted Luas on the back. “I must enter my appearance and prepare myself,” he said. “I trust you’ll explain everything.” Haissem reached again for my left hand and, for an instant, his eyes seemed to focus on something inside me that was much larger than me. “We will meet again, Brek,” he said. “You’ll do well here, I’m certain of it.” He walked toward the chair at the center of the Chamber and Luas motioned for us to take our seats.

“We present only the facts,” he whispered as we sat down. “Our concern here is not with verdicts.”

“But if they were really put on trial, then surely you must know-”

“Nothing,” Luas interrupted. “We know nothing about the outcomes. The Chamber never speaks. One might speculate, of course. There are instances when a presenter feels the result should go one way more than another, but it is strictly forbidden. The consequences for a presenter who attempts to alter eternity last all of eternity. We must not seek to influence the result.”

I stared at him, trying to see through him, behind him, still unwilling to believe, still clinging to life as it used to be, searching for explanations for what was happening. “The surgery isn’t going well, is it doctor?” I said. You’re making me worse. I’m even more delusional.”

“Nonsense,” Luas said. “Look, Haissem has taken his seat. You’ll see things more clearly after he presents his case.”

Haissem sat on the chair at the center of the Chamber, adopting the same position as Luas, hands on knees, eyes closed, waiting. I kept my eyes open, watching. Suddenly, a powerful tremor rocked the triangular monolith, rippling its smooth surface. From the center of the monolith, from its solid core, emerged a being like the one on the animated sculpture in the hallway, human in shape and size but without hair, face, or features, dressed in a charcoal gray cassock. The creature approached Haissem without moving its limbs, buoyed, it seemed, on a cushion of air. Haissem maintained his position and the creature stood before him for a moment, then returned to its dark home without a sound. When the tremor subsided, Haissem rose from the chair and, standing at the exact center of the Chamber, raised his arms up from his sides in a broad arc. The energy of the walls and floor pulsed violently and surged toward him from all directions, seemingly compressing the space around him like an imploding star. The shock wave struck Haissem’s body, instantly vaporizing him, leaving behind in the vacuum only his voice, detonating like a great cosmic explosion: “I PRESENT TOBIAS WILLIAM BOWLES… HE HAS CHOSEN!”

The Chamber went dark. No light. No sound. No motion. Then the Chamber disappeared altogether.

I’m crossing a dirt road now, in another time and another place. My body feels heavy, tired, anxious; my face feels thick and rough, covered with whiskers and grime; my mouth tastes unfamiliar, like a first kiss. My arms, two of them now, feel powerful but detached, as though I am operating a machine. There is an aggressiveness I have never felt before, a heightened wariness of my surroundings and other people. My thoughts and reactions are accelerated and more analytical, my emotions and ability to comprehend subtleties, dull and unused. I reek with body odors that seem both comfortable and unpleasant. My head aches from a hangover.

I’m wearing a filthy green Army uniform and new black boots. This is my second pair of boots this month, which I know for a fact but don’t know why or how I know it. I know too that I can have as many boots as I want, that there are enough boots at my disposal to outfit two armies. They’re nice boots, shiny, black, and warm, but you can’t keep them clean here in Saverne. The dust takes the shine off as soon as you put them on, and there is nothing here but dust, darkening the sun and fading the colors. Everything is dust brown: the clothes, the tents, the once white requisition forms; in Saverne, the food tastes brown, the water washes brown, the stars sparkle brown, the air smells brown, and, when the dead arrive at the morgue here, they bleed brown onto the brown ground, ashes to ashes, brown to brown. I even dream in brown. The only thing not brown in Saverne is greed, which tints the eyes and fingertips a vibrant glossy hue of green.

Crossing the brown dirt road, I’m debating in my own mind whether to low-ball Collins or give him a fair offer and make him think I’m doing him a favor; but when I reach the middle of the dirt road, somebody yells: “Toby, lookout!”

From the corner of my eye, I see an olive green Army truck racing toward me at breakneck speed, plowing a tantrum of brown dust into the air. The dust looks startled for a moment, as if it has just been awakened from a nap. I leap out of the way, spinning a pirouette in my new black boots and giving Davidson a thank you slug in the shoulder for the warning. “You gotta be more careful, Toby,” he says. “You’re gonna get yourself killed.”

“Me, killed? No way,” I tell him. “Not by no goddamned truck anyway. It’ll take a French maid to do me in.”

Davidson guards the entrance to a brown tent that was once olive green. Dirt blown from the road piles into drifts against the canvas, re-creating in miniature the blowing and drifting snow in the mountain passes to the south that make the Alps impenetrable at this time of year. Early winter cuts crisp and cold over the peaks and down into the French valleys, pruning the wounded and the diseased from the battlefield and encampments, the villages and cities. A mountaineer lucky enough to reach the summit of the Alps would see war on the horizon in all directions.

The tent is warmed by a well-stocked wood stove and insulated with boxes of medical supplies stacked from floor to ceiling with dusty red crosses painted on their sides. Each box is worth two hundred dollars on the black market, making the tent into a bank vault. They form an aisle through to a desk at the center and a kerosene lantern producing a thin drizzle of light; behind the desk sits a lean, powerful looking black man. His left chest bears the name Collins, and his shoulder the stripes of a corporal. We are of equal rank. He crushes the cigarette he’s been smoking and lights another without offering me one. The white smoke from his cigarette fears the dust and latches onto his head and neck like a small child among strangers.

“Scuttlebutt says Patton’s crossing the Rhine near Ludwigshafen,” I say. “Two Divisions are moving up from southern Italy to join the party. Price of boots and gloves just tripled.”

Collins’ mouth curls. “Where are they?” he asks.

“Keeping warm in a chateau.”

“Don’t be playin’ no games wit’ me, Bowles,” he says, speaking like he just escaped from a plantation. “I ain’t got no time for it now.”

My stomach churns a sour broth of hash and coffee up into the back of my throat. I’m finally gonna get a piece of the action, I keep telling myself. Just a piece of what everyone else has. I didn’t want to come here. I wanted to stay home and work on cars; that’s all I ever wanted. I got a right to a little comfort, and I’ll be damned if any nigger from Kentucky is gonna get more than me. They assigned me to the quartermaster after I played up an asthma attack during basic. It wasn’t that bad, and I wasn’t that good of an actor, but who was I to argue?

“Somebody’s got to keep guys like you happy and it might as well be me, right Collins?” I tell him. “What do you want, I got it all: uniforms, tents, food, booze, utensils, tools, radios, movies, office supplies, sundries.” It’s all true. In the quartermaster, I’m a walking department store and everybody’s my best friend. As soon as the bees figure out where the clover is, they swarm and rub themselves all over to get it. Officers, GI’s, locals-they’re nicer to me than to the docs who cure their syphilis. They shake my hand and talk to me about me: Where’d I come from? Got a girl? Sure, good lookin’ guy like you’s got a girl. Ten of ‘em, and pretty, too, I bet. They show me pictures of their girls, mothers, fathers, and kid brothers and sisters. I’m just a regular guy like you, they’re all sayin’, and us regular guys gotta stick together if we’re gonna make it. Got any extra whiskey stashed back there? Helps me sleep better at night.

“You ain’t got nothin’ I want, Bowles,” Collins says. “I’m the one who’s got what you want. You’re standing in my personal piggybank, and my man Davidson out there, he’s the guard. Now do you want to sign for a loan or do I have to tell Davidson to throw your ass outta here?”

I stand there for a minute, deciding whether to low-ball him. Collins just came in with the Surgeon General’s command and somehow got put in charge of the medical supplies. He’s got no connections in the area, but he knows he’s sitting on a fortune. I came in behind the invasion force and worked up some relationships with a few French doctors who have backers all the way south to Marseilles. I decide to low-ball him to see how he’ll react.

“Twenty-five a box, unopened, and I’ll throw in a crate of boots and gloves for every two medical.”

“Davidson!” he hollers. “Get this lump of dog shit outta my office!”

“Look Collins,” I counter, backtracking a little. “You couldn’t move this stuff if you set up a booth under the Eiffel Tower. I’ll give you three boots and gloves for every two medical. I can’t go any higher.”

“One-fifty a box, Bowles, and you can keep your damn boots.”

“Fifty.”

“One-twenty-five.”

“Seventy-five.”

“Hundred.”

“I got costs, Collins,” I tell him. “No way you’re comin’ out ahead of me. Seventy-five, take it or leave it.”

“I’ll need a deposit.”

“How much?”

“Thousand.”

“What?”

“You ain’t the only one interested, Bowles. You the third white guy been sniffin’ round here today. One thousand in cash, final.”

“I got five hundred on me,” I say, reaching into my pocket. “I’ll give you the rest tonight.”

Collins thinks it over. “You know,” he says, his thick lips parting into a toothy greed-green smile, “I like you, Bowles. Get the rest here by 18:00.”

I give Collins the money and walk out of the tent doing the math in my head. I can move at least a hundred boxes a month; at two hundred bucks a box, that’s twenty thousand gross, twelve-five net, minus grease money for the motor pool and perimeter patrol, maybe a thousand max. I just made eleven grand! I nearly skip over to the enlisted club to grab a beer and celebrate; but on my way I see two men opening the rear panel of the truck that almost hit me, parked now about fifty yards away. They crawl up inside and begin unloading empty black body bags onto a folding litter, stacked twenty at a time. I stop to watch them. The guys in the morgue detail pretty much keep to themselves and everyone else stays away from them. A guy will deny any belief in superstitions and walk out of his way to avoid getting anywhere near the morgue. I wonder whether the bags are new or whether they just reuse the old ones over and over again. It doesn’t seem right reusing them; violates the privacy of the first guy and insults the second. They gave their lives for chrissake; the least the Army can do is spring for new bags.

Eleven grand…eleven… freakin’… grand!

The body bags slap onto the litter like stacks of crisp, new script hitting a counter.

Surplus, Toby. Just surplus, I tell myself. The stuff’s just sitting there while some French kid dies because his doctor can’t get enough sulfa and penicillin. A fellow ought to get paid when he puts himself on the line.

Turning into the enlisted club I hear boots racing toward me, pounding like hooves. Before I can see what’s going on I’m knocked to the ground. There’s a sharp pain in my back; I try lifting my head, but it won’t move. Oh, my God, they’re shelling us and I’ve been hit!

“Help!” I yell. “Help! Medic! I’ve been hit! I’ve been hit!”

The pain in my back increases, like a great weight is bearing down on me.

“Stop your damn yelling, Bowles,” a voice says, close behind, just above me. “You’re under arrest for theft.”

Two MPs pull me off the ground and cuff my wrists behind my back. Over their shoulders, I see Collins in the door of the tent, shaking hands with another MP and handing him my money.

Haissem is sitting again on the chair at the center of the Chamber. I feel the same sense of confusion and exhaustion that overwhelmed me after passing among all the souls and memories in the train station. I am not just watching Toby Bowles’ life, I am Toby Bowles. The rough cotton of his uniform chafes my skin; the cold, dusty air and cigarette smoke burn my lungs; the fatigue and fear of being near the front weigh heavy. I soar when the deal is struck and feel the MP’s knee in my back when he’s arrested.

“Can you hear me now, Brek?” Luas says.

“Yes,” I say, barely hearing him, as though he was far away. “What do you mean now?”

“I was talking to you during the presentation,” he says. “When you didn’t respond, I asked Haissem to stop.”

“Oh…,” I reply, lost, trying to separate my identity as Toby Bowles from my identity as Brek Cuttler. “I’m sorry. It just seems so…so…real, like I’m remembering my own life.”

“Yes, it is that way, isn’t it?” Luas says. “When Haissem begins again, listen for my voice. At first you’ll hear me speaking through the people in the presentation; what I say will seem out of context. If you fail to respond again, I’ll bring up the circumstances of your disfigurement again to bring you back. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to instruct you on how to separate yourself from the soul being presented; you must learn this by doing, which is one of the reasons for having you watch.”

“What other reason is there?” I ask.

“To prepare you to present souls yourself.”

10

Luas nodded and Haissem stood again at the center of the Urartu Chamber to continue the presentation of the life of Toby Bowles at the trial of his soul.

I’m in the parish hall of my church during coffee hour after the service, and I’m seething with rage. “How dare you tell them that!” I whisper to Claire through clenched teeth so no one else will hear. She gives me her stupid I don’t know what you’re talking about look, and I stomp ahead through the parish hall doors, letting them swing back hard against her as she comes through behind. I hope they knock her flat on her ass.

Alan Bickel smiles at me and sticks out his hand.

“Mornin’,” I grunt, pushing past him without shaking his hand or making eye contact. The guy’s thirty-five year old, got two kids, and he’s still pumping gas at the Sinclair.

I walk out into the parking lot, climb into our car, start the engine, and light a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs and holding it there with my rage until they both can be contained no longer. I still can’t believe she said it. I exhale loudly, talking to myself:

“‘I’m sorry, Marion, but money’s tight right now. We just haven’t any extra for the building fund.’”

How could she? To Paul and Marion Hudson? And there they go now; every year a new Cadillac. From a dry-cleaning store? The guy must be running something on the side or cooking the books. I bend down and pretend not to see them. The rear door of our car opens and Tad and Todd climb in, then Susan and Katie.

“Dibs on the window,” Tad calls. There’s a big commotion and Tad starts crying. “Dad, Todd hit me and Susan won’t move. I called dibs first.”

“Knock it off back there or I’ll take off my belt!” I yell. “For chrissake, Tad, you’re the oldest. What are you, nine now? And still cryin’ all the time like you was a baby. If you don’t like what Todd and Susan are doin’, then give ‘em one across the mouth; that’s what I used to do to your Uncle Mike when he crossed me. It’s time you started actin’ like a man, son, and I’m tellin’ you right now you’re playin’ football come August. Period. I don’t want to hear another word about playin’ in no fairy marching band.” I take another drag on my cigarette. “You’re playin’, right Todd old boy?”

“You bet, dad,” Todd says. “Mr. Detterbeck says he’s startin’ me at linebacker and quarterback.” Even though he’s a full year younger, Todd stands two inches taller than his brother and weighs at least fifteen pounds more.

“Atta boy,” I tell him.

Claire slides into the passenger seat beside me. “I really don’t understand why you got so upset,” she says.

I’m furious. I throw the cigarette out the window, yank the gear selector into drive, and mash the accelerator before she can close the door. We roar out of the parking lot.

“Toby, for heaven’s sake!” Claire screeches, “I haven’t got the door closed and there’s kids in the car!”

“No!” I holler over the engine, “There’s a bunch of cryin’ ingrates in this car and a woman who embarrasses her family in public and don’t even have the sense to know it.” My chest tightens and I feel the veins in my neck swelling. As usual, when I catch Claire she refuses to respond. “You got nothin’ to say? You ain’t got no idea what I’m talkin’ about?”

“The souls come in through the Urartu passage,” she says, “and wait in Shemaya Station, just like you did, until I come to get them. A presenter is assigned to meet with each postulant before the trial, then they wait in the train station until their case is called and a decision is made. Since they’re not permitted to attend the trial, the presenter must acquire a complete understanding of the choices they’ve made during-”

“What the hell did you just say?” I ask.

“Do what you want, Toby!” Claire yells. “Everyday it’s something. I’ve broken one of the invisible rules in your invisible rule book; you’re swearing in front of the kids on Sunday and driving like a maniac; I have nothing more to say.”

I explode. “‘Money’s tight right now, Marion?’ ‘Toby can’t take care of his family, Marion?’ ‘We barely make ends meet with his job on the railroad, Marion?’ Don’t think I haven’t seen the way you look at Paul Hudson. But you know why I don’t worry? Because there’s no way Paul Hudson would give up what he’s got for big, ugly thighs like yours.”

Claire starts crying. “I hate you, Toby!” she screams. “I hate you! I want you out. Just get out and leave us alone.”

“It’s none of their damn business whether money’s tight!” I yell. “It’s nobody’s business. You got that? Nobody’s. Off they go in their big Caddy to their big country club. I’ll bet they’re Red, too; there’s commies all over the place, Claire, and the niggers are helpin’ ‘em. They’re after regular guys like me; that’s why I ain’t got a good job and never will. Marion Hudson’s laughing at us and you don’t even know it. Don’t you get it? She knows we don’t got extra. That’s why she asked, to hear you say it. That’s how they get their kicks. How can you be so stupid?”

“Mrs. Hudson’s not like that, daddy,” Susan speaks up from the back seat. “When I stay over with Penny, they always ask about you and mommy and they’re real nice.”

“I don’t want you kids over there again!” I holler. “Do you hear me? My God, Claire, they even do it to the kids. I can just hear it now: ‘How’s your mother and father, Susan? My, aren’t your shoes old…and that dress. What, they haven’t taken you shopping in Manhattan? Such a shame.’ And that Penny Hudson: I don’t want her comin’ over to our place anymore either. New bikes. New dresses. She’s always got something new. She’s a spoiled brat.”

I can’t control myself. Embarrassment, jealousy, hatred: they pour out of me as if there’s nothing else inside, as if I am nothing else. I want to give my kids and my wife new things. I want to be respected in the community. I want to live where the Hudsons live and eat where the Hudsons eat. I whip down Greenwood Avenue, barely stopping at the lights.

When we get home, I call Bob to see if he’ll pick me up early, then I go upstairs and start throwing things in my duffel bag for the week: work lights, flares, two pairs of work pants, some t-shirts, and two pairs of work gloves. Claire stays downstairs with the kids, fixing them lunch, trying to keep them quiet. I take off my dress slacks, shirt, and tie and fold them neatly into the bottom of my bag along with a bottle of Aqua Velva. Sheila likes it when I dress up and wear cologne for her. She thinks I’m an important businessman; I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth. I can’t wait to see her. She’s the only one who understands me. I zip the bag closed and put my Wolverines on top. Claire calls up from the kitchen.

“Do you want any lunch before you go?” Her voice is cold, emotionless. She’s still upset but prides herself on not showing it in front of the kids. She knows damn well Bob’s on his way over but asks anyway.

“No. Bob and I’ll grab something on the way to Princeton Junction.”

“When will you be back?”

“Not ‘til Friday.”

I carry my things down the stairs. “We’re runnin’ empty dump cars up to Scranton and full ones on to Pittsburgh.”

Katie toddles into the living room with a coloring book and crayon, her most prized possessions. She’s just eighteen months old. “Daddy, what happened to your right arm?” she asks. “Did you do it because you were mad at your mommy and daddy?”

“Sure, I’ll color with you, sweetie,” I say, feeling miserable for having yelled and gotten everybody so upset. “Climb up here on my lap.”

“Brek, do you hear me?”

“Luas?”

“Ah, there you are,” he says. “Finally got through, good.”

My personality splinters in two. Half of me carries on a conversation with Toby Bowles’ daughter; the other half carries on a conversation with Luas. I exist simultaneously in two worlds and two lives.

“This is a circle, Katie. Can you say circle?” She looks up at me with wide brown eyes and rosy cheeks, melting my heart.

“Cirsa.”

“Concentrate on your memories,” Luas says, “Bo, Sarah, your job.”

I think of Sarah and her crayons, not much younger than Katie, and of Bo, who sometimes yells at me the way Toby did, and my mom and dad. The distance between selves grows until two distinct lives emerge: mine, which has depth, substance, and nuance; and Toby Bowles’ life, which I know well but only episodically. I feel his emotions and see through his eyes, but I understand now that he is not me even though he’s someone I have experienced more intimately and completely than I’ve ever experienced another person before.

“So,” Luas says, “what do you think of our Mr. Bowles?”

I can hear Luas but not see him. I see only the Bowles’ living room. It’s as if Luas and I are commenting on a televised sporting event from the press box, eyes focused on the field.

“I don’t much care for-” I catch myself. “I thought we weren’t allowed to make judgments about other souls.”

“Well done,” Luas says. “But a little too far. We’re forbidden from making judgments, if you will, not observations. A lawyer may disapprove of the actions of his client but nonetheless remain an advocate for his client’s rights. Wasn’t that so with Alan Fleming?”

Bob pulls up in front and honks his horn. Toby wraps Katie in his arms and gives her a kiss. He hates saying goodbye, and it’s worse now because of the awful way he’s behaved. Claire, Susan, and Todd approach timidly. Toby wishes he could take it all back, but an apology would be empty and they wouldn’t understand. He kisses Claire tenderly and she responds with a lingering hug, at once absolving him of his crime and, at the same time, wounding him with the generosity of her forgiveness.

“I’ll bring you all back something nice,” he whispers remorsefully, still convinced material possessions are what they want from him. Todd and Susan give him hugs but Tad stays in the kitchen playing walk-the-dog with his yo-yo, unwilling to forgive his father and muttering goodbye only after his mother orders him to say something. Toby doesn’t know how to handle Tad anymore. “I’ll bring him something special too,” he mumbles to himself, “maybe the cap gun and holster set he’s been wanting.” Toby knows he’s been hard on Tad, but it’s been for his own good: Toby’s father was the same way before he abandoned the family when Toby was eleven. At least Toby hasn’t done that. The horn honks again; Bob’s waiting. Toby waves, picks up his things, and walks out the door.

“Haissem is re-creating this?” I ask.

“Yes,” Luas replies. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

Nine years later. Toby Bowles is now staggering under the weight of middle age. The regrets of lost youth, the deterioration of his body, the fear of approaching death, the vain search for meaning and reaffirmation-all these things sour his life, making him restless and depressed. His hair has thinned and his worry lines have deepened.

He walks up to a small garden apartment in Morrisville, New Jersey, letting himself in with the key Bonnie Campbell leaves for him under a loose brick. The apartment is dark. He turns to lock the door as he’s always careful to do, but Bonnie has been waiting and goes quickly for his ears, sending gusts of hot breath into the sensual pockets of his mind. His hand drops from the knob and they move quickly into her darkened bedroom before his eyes can adjust from the glare of the midafternoon sun.

Bonnie’s robe falls to the shabby gold carpet, revealing a middle-aged body of creases and folds desirable to Toby only because the candlelight is forgiving-and because Bonnie’s attraction to him refutes what he sees of himself in the mirror. The sheets are thrown back and their bodies embrace, fingers and lips uniting all that is opposite, other, forbidden. The delights are exquisite, suspending time. But bliss is fleeting, shattered suddenly by the distinct metal-on-metal click of the front door knob cylinder. Toby bolts upright out of the bed and Bonnie rolls beneath the covers, popping her head out the other side like a groundhog peering from its hole. A dark silhouette fills the doorway to the bedroom.

“Claire, honey?” Toby says in a voice trembling with remorse, shaken by the overwhelming surge of guilt that has been consuming him during his six month affair with Bonnie Campbell. Yet he’s almost relieved now that it will all finally be over; he’ll be able to confess his crime and beg her forgiveness. The candles on the dresser flicker low in an unseen draft, then brighter in its wake, illuminating tears streaming down the intruder’s face.

“That’s not Claire!” Bonnie screams, pulling the covers up to her chin. “It’s Tad!”

Bonnie Campbell had known Tad since he was a little boy; in fact, she had been close friends with Toby’s wife, Tad’s mother-Claire-making the humiliation of the encounter for Toby even more complete than if it were Claire herself. Bonnie owned the only pet shop in the small town, and as Tad grew older he purchased at least one of every creature she sold, climbing the evolutionary chain in step with his ability to care for them: an ant farm at first, then a fish, a lizard, some gerbils and hamsters, a rabbit, cat, and, finally, a dog, a German Shepherd. He even worked in her store after school. Tad knew her son, Josh, who was much younger; he knew her ex-husband, Joe; he had eaten many meals at their home.

Bonnie switches on the nightstand light, indignant and remorseless, full of pride for what she has accomplished, daring Tad to speak. But Tad does not see her. He sees only his father: naked, panting, stunned. Tears flood down his face, but he says nothing. He turns and leaves the apartment without saying a word.

Toby’s guilt and remorse vanish as quickly as they arose, replaced by rage and a sense of betrayal. He feels ashamed now, not for his own conduct but for his son’s. He could understand why Claire would track him down, but Tad? His eighteen year old son? And to stand there crying the way Claire would have done? This embarrassment crowns all the other embarrassments and disappointments Tad has caused Toby over the years: his lack of interest in sports, his lack of friends, his weakness and inability to stand up for himself, his defense of his mother against Toby’s abuse. Tad had judged Toby and turned on him at every opportunity, but now he had crossed the line. Toby turns out the light and slides back into bed. He takes Bonnie now with a passion he has never before expressed, but not because he wants her. In fact, he finds her suddenly ugly and repulsive. Instead, he takes her to reestablish who is the father and who is the son, to reclaim his biological position as accuser and Tad’s as accused, to reassert his authority to judge what is right and what is wrong, and who is right and who is wrong. And Toby vows to himself to have Bonnie more often now, and to boast proudly of it and rub Tad’s nose in it-for, Toby believes no conduct can be sinful if it is done in the open and to teach a lesson. He will dare Tad to say otherwise, dare him to tell his mother and risk destroying her life. And if that moment comes, Toby resolves not to deny it because, in the end, it is Claire’s fault that he has turned to another woman, not a weakness of his own.

The light is back on now in the bedroom and Toby is pulling his boxers up to his flabby waist. He’s drenched in sweat. He promises himself that he will never forgive Tad. Ever. And then he vows to destroy him, as only a father is capable of destroying a son.

Suddenly the Urartu Chamber emerges into the foreground, displacing Bonnie Campbell’s seedy apartment. Haissem bows solemnly before the monolith, then walks over to join Luas and me. The glittering walls of the Chamber vanish just as magically as they appeared. The three of us-Luas, Haissem, and I-are left standing in the vacant corridor of the train station in front of the large wooden doors and near the animated stone sculptures on the wall.

Haissem turns to me and says: “The trial is over. A verdict has been reached.”

11

After the trial of Toby Bowles, I knew I no longer existed in the living world to which I had once belonged-your world, there on earth. Something momentous had happened to me, something so altering and absolute that reality itself was replaced by a new archetype of existence that could no longer be postponed or denied. It wasn’t a matter of voluntarily accepting the fact of my death, any more than one voluntarily accepts the fact of one’s life. It was more basic than that: a simple acknowledgment that this is what is now, and the other is no more.

Oddly enough, accepting my death wasn’t terrifying; it was, in a way, liberating. I no longer had to rationalize the bizarre things happening around me and to me; I no longer had to search for a cure to an illness or an injury that did not exist. And I realized I no longer had to carry the many burdens of life: I no longer had to go to work, shower, brush my teeth, eat, sleep, exercise, or take care of my husband and daughter. Death is the ultimate vacation away from everything.

Even so, I found admitting my death to be deeply shameful and embarrassing. In the end, death is the ultimate failure in life, the condition we fear, fight, avoid at all cost, that our every biological instinct and emotion abhors and resists. No one is admired on earth for having accomplished the feat of one’s own death; even the words used to describe it are pejorative: you’ve either “lost” your life, as if you’ve somehow been careless and misplaced it, or your life has been “taken,” “stolen,” “forfeited,” or “given up.” I was one of the losers now. The fact that all of the people in history who had come before me were losers too-and that all the people who would come after me were losers in waiting-didn’t make my being dead any less humiliating. Even though I had a pretty good excuse for not taking care of my husband and daughter anymore, I was still away from them. I had abandoned them. Even worse, I had abandoned myself-Brek Cuttler: human being, mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, friend, lawyer, neighbor, American, all no more.

The more I thought about everything I had lost, the more angry I became. The injustice of dying after only thirty-one years of life galled me like nothing I had ever experienced before; it was a hot anger that burned hotter because I had no way to express the enormity of my loss, particularly to my Nana. She listened patiently, but she could not, I thought, understand my condition because, unlike me, she had died after having lived a full, complete life, raising her children to adulthood and seeing her grandchildren and even her great-grandchildren.

I also discovered that, like life, the afterlife is governed by a law of special relativity. This law holds that, from the perspective of the one who has died, one’s own death feels not like the death of oneself, but rather like the death of the billions of others who remain alive but can no longer be seen. It was as though I was the lone survivor of a nuclear Armageddon. From my perspective, I had not been taken away from my family; my family had been taken away from me. I lost even more than this; I lost my entire world-the earth that had sheltered me, the waters that had nourished me, the sky that had inspired me-all vanished into a lyrical, haunted oblivion.

What finally broke me, though-the thing that drove me into the prolonged silence of grieving that replaces and becomes anger’s surrogate-was not the gnawing despair of having lost everything, but the sarcastic resemblance of the afterlife to life itself. There was no release in my heaven, no salvation, no comfort, no “better place” to which I had gone after my death-there was, instead, only a perverse continuation of the discordant strands of my old life, freed of physical laws and boundaries, as if life and death were merely potential states of the same cynical mind. Where was the reward? Where was the eternal repose promised by the prophets? I had come full circle: the burdens of life had been replaced by the burdens of death. For my thirty-one years of effort, I was being trained for a new job at a new law firm: Luas & Associates, Attorneys-at-Divine Law.

The chilling trial of Toby Bowles had the incongruous effect of both deepening and lessening my own misery by showing me that things could actually be worse. On the way out of the train station after the trial, Haissem told me that only a fraction of Mr. Bowles’ life had been presented, and a misleading portrait of his soul had been created. Yet he seemed perfectly content with this, and Luas shared his indifference, seeming almost amused by my concern. I asked Haissem what he would have offered in Mr. Bowles’ defense if the trial had continued.

“Oh, many things,” he said nonchalantly. “For example, Toby was actually a very kind and caring man. When his train stopped at the Altoona rail yard, he would change into his Sunday clothes and hitchhike into the mountains to visit with his sister, Sheila, who lived in a beautiful private home for mentally retarded women on the shore of a small mountain lake. She lived at this home instead of the wretched public asylum to which she had been confined since a child because every month of every year since the war, Toby Bowles paid the bills that allowed her to live there-even though he would never own a new car or a home as grand as Paul and Marion Hudson’s. Sometimes he and Sheila played together, walking through the rooms of the home on imaginary journeys she created; Toby would be her customer in a store selling only hugs, or the passenger on an airplane flying to the ends of rainbows; they would climb trees and relax in the clouds, or paddle across the lake, which she thought the most exotic place on earth. He was always patient with her, and Sheila would always take Toby up to her room before he left and show him the black and white photograph of their mama and papa with their forced smiles on the day she was born, holding their baby Sheila not too close because of the deformities in her face and limbs that are the clinical signs of Down’s syndrome.

“Toby suffered many injustices during his life as well,” Haissem continued. “He was eleven years old when Sheila was born and that photograph was taken; it was the last photograph they had of their father, Gerard Bowles, who came home from the hospital that day with his face dark with disgrace and loathing; he told Toby his mother had done something very wrong and that God had punished her for it and he must leave and never return. Toby was relieved by his father’s departure at first, because Gerard Bowles had been cruel to Toby and his mother, sometimes beating them with his belt the way Toby sometimes did with his own children-all the while quoting passages from the Bible about sin and the purification of the soul. But Toby soon learned what the loss of a father meant when his mother wouldn’t stop crying and packed up their things to go live with his grandparents. This was when his new sister Sheila was taken away as a ward of the state. Lying in bed late at night, Toby worried for Sheila’s and his father’s safety; he prayed for their return, asking God to please forgive his mother for whatever she had done wrong to cause their family to split apart.

“In his teenage years,” Haissem went on, “Toby’s unrequited longing and love for his father turned into hatred of the man who had never once written a letter to let them know he was still alive-or to ask if they were still alive. At his most violent moments, Toby fantasized about meeting his father on a street, introducing himself as his son, and pulling a revolver from a pocket and shooting him dead between the eyes; at other moments, when the possibilities of the future seemed expansive and bright, Toby imagined becoming a great success and one day being stopped on the street by his father as a beggar and shoving him aside without recognition or pity. There were few times in Toby Bowles’ life when he did not feel the pain of his father’s abandonment; but his sister Sheila became the beneficiary of this broken relationship, receiving the love Toby would have given his father; she desperately needed such a champion because her mother blamed Sheila for all that had gone so terribly wrong. When the time came, Ester Bowles gladly handed Sheila over to the state as though she were handing over a carrier of typhus or a common criminal. Ester Bowles lived in a gloom from which she rarely ascended, replacing her need for a husband by suffocating Toby with jealous affection. Toby became as protective of Sheila as he was of his own daughters; he would have gladly gone to jail or bankrupted himself to win her escape from the asylum, and he nearly did both. All the extra money he raised by stealing and selling supplies in the Army went to Sheila, not for his own use-not even to feed and clothe his own young children.

“The only other photograph in Sheila’s room, next to her bed, was taken by the director of the home on the day Toby brought her a terrier puppy she named Jack that went to heaven a year later when it crossed the road. Arm in arm, Sheila and Toby stand grinning for the photograph with the furry bundle-proud sister and wealthy businessman from the big city (for who else, she thought, could afford such an extravagant gift?).

“Sheila Bowles died in her sleep one year before Toby’s affair with Bonnie Campbell began; Toby buried her on a brutal February morning in a small cemetery near the house by the lake, not far from the tiny wooden cross with the word ‘Jack’ carved into its surface by her hands. In a voice breaking with grief and love across the wind-swept knoll, Toby handed his sister over to her Creator, and he told her Creator, his family, and the few mourners from the house, that the earth would never again be graced by such innocence.”

“But God heard none of this!” I protested to Haissem. “The moment of truth arrives for Toby Bowles, but his life unspools bad to good instead of good to bad and he’s hurled into hell without appeal…without a trace? What kind of God would conduct such a trial?”

“A just God,” Luas said. “The God of the Flood. Haissem presented the case through Mr. Bowles’ own thoughts and actions. Could any of it be denied?”

“No,” I conceded, “but only his sins were presented.”

“Then only his sins were relevant,” Luas answered, irritated by my challenge. “It was the Judge who ended the presentation. Who are we to weigh the gravity of Toby Bowles’ offenses and determine what is just and unjust? I warned you not to speculate.”

“I think it’s good that Brek wants to hear Toby’s story,” Haissem interjected. “Understanding the mistakes and triumphs of his life may help her when she enters the Chamber on behalf of her first client.” He turned to me. “There’s more. Would you like to hear the rest?”

Luas wasn’t willing to let it drop. “My point wasn’t that Toby’s story is irrelevant,” he said. “I only meant to say that justice is God’s, not ours, and that justice will be done.”

“I understand, Luas,” Haissem said curtly. “And my point is that justice has nothing to do with it at all.”

Luas regarded Haissem suspiciously. “Then I respectfully disagree,” he said.

Haissem ignored the comment and turned back to me. “Let me finish the story,” he said. “You haven’t even heard the most important part yet. You see, the truth is that Toby Bowles touched the lives of many people. To avoid a court martial for stealing the medical supplies in Saverne, he volunteered for a combat unit. Out of eight men assigned to that unit, all but Toby were shot dead or drowned in the Elbe River on the final push of the Allies to Berlin. Toby, himself, was hit in the leg while carrying his wounded sergeant up the river bank. He limped away, bleeding and stunned, and collapsed outside a small cabin in the woods near Kamenz. When he awakened, he found himself inside this cabin, feverish from an infection, surrounded by the family who lived there: a father, mother, teenage daughter, and two younger sons. They gave him food and water and he slept another twenty-four hours until he awoke again, this time to the sound of gunfire and screaming as the mother and children fled into a tunnel beneath the floorboards of the cabin and the father ran from the house with a shotgun.

“Toby hobbled along after the man to help, and they came to the edge of a clearing where they could see a very large house through the misty afternoon rain. They kneeled behind some bushes and watched as a platoon of soldiers with red stars on their sleeves drove the inhabitants from the house and out into the driveway: an elderly man, two middle aged women, a teenage girl, two younger boys, and two younger girls, all dressed in party clothes. The leader of the platoon barked an order in Russian and the old man and the young boys were separated from the others and shot on the spot. When the women lunged toward the victims, they too were cut down in cold blood. It all appeared to Toby as in a dream, through the fine mist, distorted by fever from the infection, bodies dropping like shadows into darkness, continuing the savage nightmare begun earlier along the banks of the Elbe River. The man from the cabin, still kneeling beside Toby, jumped up and charged the platoon, firing his shotgun wildly into the air. The platoon returned the fire, killing him instantly.

“Toby started limping back toward the cabin before realizing he had been seen and would be leading the soldiers to the man’s family. To save them, he changed direction and confronted the soldiers, knowing that in all likelihood he would be killed. He put his hands over his head and limped through the clearing, yelling ‘American! American!’ The grass was wet and the water soaked through his pants, stinging his wounds. All the while he was thinking not of himself, but of his sister Sheila and who would care for her now, of his mother and how news of his death would plunge her deeper into despair, of his father and how news of his death might haunt him with regret for the rest of his life.

“Two Russian soldiers came forward with their guns raised, but as they neared Toby and saw his uniform, they lowered their weapons. ‘Amerika! Amerika!’ they cheered, embracing him. Then the soldiers saw the cabin in the distance and advanced toward it. Toby knew the only hope for the family was for him to convince the soldiers that he had already taken them prisoner. He limped along behind the soldiers as fast as he could; when they got to the door, he slid past them, pulled out his sidearm, and motioned for them to stand back. One of the soldiers grabbed the pistol from Toby’s hands, but Toby pushed the door open, yanked up the floorboards and ordered the frightened family out of the tunnel. They were white and shaking with fear; they glared at Toby for having been betrayed after they had saved his life. Toby pointed at them and then himself and said to the soldiers: ‘My prisoners! My prisoners!’ He grabbed the mother and slammed her against the wall, then the daughter and the two boys. He pointed to a medal on one of the Russian’s chests and then his own chest, where a new medal would be placed if he brought them in.

“‘My prisoners! My prisoners!’ he said again.

“The Russians finally understood. They smiled, slapped him on the back, and gave him back his gun. Toby put the gun against the temple of the mother, completing the charade. The soldiers lowered their rifles and laughed.

“‘Amerika! Amerika!’ they said, shaking their heads as they walked away.

“Toby saved their lives that afternoon, but they were no longer safe in the cabin; he convinced them to gather their things and flee into the woods. Late the next day, after Toby first checked to be sure the Russians had left the area, he led the mother back to the clearing to retrieve the body of her dead husband. Unable to speak German, he attempted to comfort the distraught woman as best he could, using his hands and showing her the corpses of the people from the house to attempt to explain that her husband had been brave to confront the soldiers and try and save their lives. The mother began to understand, and only then did she begin to comprehend what Toby himself had done to spare her family the same fate.

“Toby carried the lifeless body of the man back to the cabin and helped the boys dig a grave. The family’s anguish overwhelmed him and at times he cried with them because he too had lost a father, just as they had. But Toby wept also out of a desperate and mournful jealousy of these children, who had at least known their father, could bury him, and would remember him as a father who had loved them enough to sacrifice his life for them and others. Although Toby couldn’t understand their strange prayers, when they placed a yarmulke upon the man’s head and nobody made the sign of the cross, he realized these were Jewish prayers, spoken in Hebrew. He made the sign of the cross anyway, whispering a prayer for the man and for his own father, and the entire world as well. But upon seeing the cross, the daughter, hysterical with grief, began wailing ‘Amina! Amina! Amina!’ She removed a small gold cross of her own from her pocket and made the sign on her chest. Horrified, the mother reached over to slap her, but suddenly a deep and profound understanding flashed across her face; she bowed her head and began to weep even more violently. Toby did not understand what had happened between the mother and daughter but helped them fill the grave.

“The group began walking west toward Leipzig, where Toby hoped to find Allied troops. At Frieberg, they came across an American infantry unit, and Toby was able with his leg wound, and a small bribe, to get them all loaded onto a truck headed further west into Allied territory. They rode together as far as Nuremberg, where they were taken to a field hospital and Toby finally received the medical care that saved his leg from amputation. The mother and the daughter were embarrassed and helpless at the moment of their parting because they had no way to repay his generosity. But then the mother’s eyes brightened and she whispered something to the daughter and made a gesture, asking for a pen and a piece of paper. An orderly gave these to the mother and she carefully copied Toby’s last name from his shirt, B-O-W-L-E-S, on the paper. She said to him: ‘Mein erstes Enkelkind wird nach Ihnen benannt,’ but she could see that he didn’t understand, so she held the paper against her daughter’s womb, raising her index finger in the air as if to say ‘first,’ then she held her arms as if she were cradling a baby and tucked the paper into her daughter’s hand. Toby finally understood what she was trying to say. He hugged them both and said goodbye.”

When Haissem finished, he turned to Luas and said: “But Luas is entirely correct, Brek. We must not be tempted into judging what is and is not just. That is not for us to decide.”

Luas nodded his head appreciatively.

“I must leave you now,” Haissem said. “We’ll meet again, after you’ve handled your first case. Good luck.”

As Haissem walked away, Luas whispered to me:

“He’s the most senior presenter here, but I sometimes wonder whether his time has passed. The things he says sometimes are very dangerous.”

“What about the trial?” I responded. “The Final Judgment is nothing more than a sham where the accused is prohibited from speaking, before a tribunal nobody can see, attended by witnesses the accused can’t confront, represented by a lawyer who is also his prosecutor, and ended by the judge before a defense can even be presented. There’s less justice in heaven than we have on earth.”

Luas glared at me. “Never say that again, Brek,” he warned me. “This is the way of Divine Justice, not man’s justice. We have no right to question it. God and justice are one.”

12

My one solace in Shemaya was visiting the places that had been dear to me while I was alive. They were all there, exact replicas of my house, my town, my world-the only things missing were the people, like walking through an empty movie studio lot. These were lonely visits, but I found this loneliness, at first, to be a great comfort. I needed to get away from Luas, the Urartu Chamber, and my Nana; I needed to get away from other souls’ memories and other souls’ lives. So I went home. I didn’t go there to grieve: I didn’t dare look in Sarah’s room or Bo’s closet because I knew I would break down; I just wanted to be happy again, to pick up where I left off and live.

So, the first thing I did when I got home was go shopping. I decided that if God was going to strand me in this sadistic netherworld where everything reminded me of life’s lost pleasures, I might as well indulge in some of those pleasures and enjoy myself a little. My first stop was the local mall, and, boy, did I shop. It was, without exception, the greatest shopping trip I’ve ever had: no lines, no crowds, no pushy salespeople; the entire mall to myself, and best of all, everything marvelously, magnificently free. It was, in a way, heaven. I disrobed and tried on clothes right in the middle of sales floors rather than going back to the dressing rooms; if I didn’t like something, I just tossed it over my shoulder and moved on. I replaced the black silk suit I’d been wearing since I arrived in Shemaya with a cute, insanely expensive wool miniskirt and top that I robbed from a startled mannequin. I plundered stock rooms, pried open display cases, and hauled my booty around on a merry train of rolling racks weighted down with four seasons’ worth of apparel, shoes, accessories, makeup, and fine jewelry. The only limit to my decadence was my ability to cart it all away. Like a looter after a hurricane, I backed my car up to the doors and crammed it full. After an entire day of this, I dragged myself to the food court and helped myself to a double cheeseburger and milkshake, which spontaneously appeared at the counter, topping it all off with five white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. Yes, heaven indeed.

By the time I returned home from my shopping spree, I was so exhausted that I left everything in the car and collapsed on the couch. To my delight, the television functioned normally and displayed any channel I selected as long as it was showing something prerecorded, like a movie or a sitcom; the live news, weather, and sports channels displayed only white static, which was fine by me. I dozed in and out, happily watching reruns of M*A*S*H and All in the Family; but as evening came on, the weekend infomercials featuring gorgeous models demonstrating exercise equipment began having their guilt-inspiring effect on me (yes, even after death). I got up, dressed in the sleek new racer-back top and shorts I’d picked up at the mall, and went to the YMCA for a workout to show them off.

Of course, the gym was empty and there was nobody to show off to when I arrived, which was rather disappointing because I thought I looked pretty hot for a one-armed girl who usually wore oversized t-shirts and baggy sweatpants during her workouts. Bo had been begging me for years to get new exercise clothes and would have loved the change. On the plus side, the fact that nobody was there meant no waiting for machines and no sweaty, smelly men grunting and ogling; it was like being rich and having my own personal health club. I climbed on a treadmill and tried to set the workout time for thirty minutes, but the digital timer, like all clocks in Shemaya, didn’t work and I had to rely on the odometer. I started off at my normal pace and felt so good when I reached three miles that I continued on to six, then ten (more than I’d ever run), twenty, and so on until the indicator flashed that I’d run ninety-nine miles and was resetting itself back to zero. Ironically, being dead improved my endurance; I barely broke a sweat and my pulse remained in the perfect range the entire time. My muscle strength in death improved as well. With no effort at all I was able to lift the huge stacks of weights heaved around by the body builders and football players.

I noticed I looked better dead than alive too. In the mirrors on the walls around the gym, my muscles were as taut and sculpted as an Olympic athlete’s; my stomach and thighs as tight and smooth as they had been the day I turned eighteen. No evidence whatsoever that I’d delivered a baby only ten months ago. Preening before the mirrors, my body seemed more beautiful and fascinating to me than it had ever been before. What an exquisite and amazing creation, I thought. I stared at it dumbstruck, as if it were another creature, not me, trying to comprehend how it had come to be here, eager to see what it would do next. It bent over and touched the floor, then recoiling against gravity rose up straight and tall, buttocks and breasts striking the perfect counterpoise, fingers fanning outward, a wave in the ocean, creating and re-creating itself, always different but always the same. Its leg tensed, then its arm, and like a cloud pushed by the wind, it reshaped itself and struck a new pose-a fractured Renaissance sculpture no less perfect for the amputation. It was art, music, science, mystery. I wasn’t given two arms in Shemaya-probably because I could only think of myself as an amputee-but my body seemed all the more beautiful for it. When I brushed against the cold steel frame of an exercise bike, a shiver ran up my spine, reconnecting me to the body I saw in the mirror. In that moment, I regretted how foolish I’d been during my life for not having noticed all these amazing things and what a gift I had been given. This body, my body, just the way it was, had always been holy, had always been mine, and it had always been as beautiful and precious as life itself. How could I not have known that? I wondered. How could I have taken it for granted for so long?

I finished my workout perspiration and odor free, no need for a shower. Nightfall had come and I considered going to a restaurant and then a movie by myself but thought that would be just too weird. I decided to spend the evening at home, watching a movie and eating popcorn.

I changed into my new silk pajamas when I got back. Popcorn spontaneously appeared in a bowl on the coffee table, and I put on the television. An Officer and a Gentleman was playing-one of my favorite movies, exactly what I was in the mood to see. Because of this movie, I had willingly and blissfully surrendered my virginity during my sophomore year of college, and seeing it again triggered sweet memories of the night and the guy. As strange and implausible as it had all seemed to be dead and yet still be able to shop, exercise, eat popcorn, and watch TV, it was stranger still to be dead and feel the sudden ache of sexual desire ripple over my body in a way even more powerful and urgent than I had experienced while alive. It was far more than the carnal craving for physical pleasure and release; it was a deeper stirring of that fundamental impulse, present in every corner of the universe-present the night Bo and I conceived Sarah-to defy death by creating life. And it was also, for me-surprised but somehow unashamed to feel aroused within the darkness of my own death-a final opportunity to re-experience and reclaim all I had been and all I had lost. Submitting to the primal necessity that had moved God himself to create, alone and out of nothingness, I released the creative organs of my own body, such as they were, with the hope and prayer that out of nothingness would come life. God might have ordained that humans shall not create in solitude, but for one cathartic moment, I could see the clear resemblance of God in the fragile nobility, in the desperation and the ecstasy, of the entire human race. Then came the nagging question: Why did I die? What happened to me? I could no longer wait for answers.

I ran from the house still dressed in my pajamas and roared off in my car toward the convenience store and the last memories of my life, determined to re-create every detail. The fall air was fresh and cool, exactly as it was in my dreams. I retraced my steps, singing Hot Tea and Bees Honey on the way into the store and grabbing a carton of milk from the refrigerator case before turning down the aisle where Sarah knocked the pastries onto the floor.

I stooped down to pick up the pastries.

This is where all my dreams had ended since arriving in Shemaya-hollow and questioning, like a failed coroner’s inquest. Cause of death: unknown. But this time there was no overpowering smell of manure and mushrooms as there had been before. I waited at the counter with the milk carton, hoping there would be some clue or sign, hoping recollection would be stimulated and there would be an answer. None came. I remembered nothing of life beyond this moment, just arriving in Shemaya Station, my clothes stained with baby formula that turned to blood.

I threw the milk carton across the counter; it exploded white against the shelves stocked with cigarettes.

“What happened to me?” I screamed into the silence. “What happened to me?” I walked back out to my car in tears.

On the drive home, a car appeared in my rearview mirror-my first encounter with another car since the traffic had backed up on the street when I arrived in Huntingdon and I thought I was going insane. When we reached a long, deserted stretch of road with corn and hay fields on both sides, the high-beam headlights of the car behind started flashing and bursts from a red strobe light filled my rearview mirror, hurting my eyes. The red light came from low on the windshield; I could tell it was an unmarked patrol car and decided to pull over even though I knew it would be unoccupied. Sitting there on the side of the road with my car idling, admiring the authenticity of the virtual reality game I seemed to be playing with myself, I remembered Bo warning me he’d seen a speed trap on this stretch of road. Of course, no patrolman appeared at my window, so I decided to get out and go have a look. The engine of the police car was running but there was nobody inside. I opened the driver’s door, turning on the dome lights. It looked like the interior of a normal four door sedan rather than a police car after all; there was no police radio or any of the other equipment you would expect; the only resemblance to a police car was the red strobe light on the dashboard, connected by a coil of black cord to the cigarette lighter. Glancing in back, I saw a videocassette tape on the floor and went around to the rear door to get it. As I slid across the seat, the door slammed shut behind me and locked me inside; then the shifter on the steering column mysteriously moved itself from park to drive and the car pulled back onto the road without a driver. Looking over my shoulder, I could see my own car following behind.

I laughed. It could have been very spooky, terrifying even, but after you’ve accepted your own death, what more is there to be afraid of? Handwritten on the label of the videocassette were the words “What Happened?” How appropriate, I thought. Maybe God speaks to souls on video and I would finally find out what happened to me. I sat back and relaxed, as if I were on an amusement park ride, curious to see where the car would take me.

We headed south on Route 22 for a few miles. There were no other cars on the road, all the homes and businesses were dark. The seasons stopped cycling; it was autumn everywhere now and colored leaves rained down on the windshield like drops of thick, wet paint. We turned off onto a side road at Ardenheim and up an old dirt logging road into the mountains with the headlights of both cars shut off, hitting ruts and splashing through mud puddles. The car I was riding in finally stopped, and my car following behind stopped as well, then turned and backed itself off the log road into a grove of pine trees, crushing branches as it moved until it was covered with pine boughs and could no longer be seen in the moonlight. Its engine shut off and a moment later, the videocassette suddenly vanished from my lap, as if it had been a mirage all along. The car I was riding in backed its way down the logging road in the direction from which we had come and drove out onto the highway, turning its lights back on. Very strange, I thought, very strange. But I had seen far stranger things in Shemaya-and I had nothing better to do-so I decided to play along.

The driverless sedan with me sitting in the backseat continued traveling south through the night to Route 522, then along Route 322 east toward Harrisburg. This was the same route I took when traveling between Delaware and Huntingdon, and I began to suspect that Nana and Luas had somehow contrived all of this as a way of bringing me back home. The radio came on, switching itself between country music stations as the signals faded, proving to me that my mind was not in control of the car-I rarely listened to country music. When we reached Lancaster, the car turned onto Route 30 east, then south onto Route 41 through the rolling farmland of southern Chester County and toward Delaware, as I had suspected. But before crossing the state line, we turned off onto a winding secondary road, following this for a time until we turned again onto a smaller country lane. There were no streetlights or power lines now; the sky was coal black, without the hope of stars or the kind solace of the moon. The last uninhabited home passed from view miles ago, asleep in the cool harvest air pregnant with the scent of decaying leaves and apples. Finally, the pavement ended and we were traveling on a gravel road descending a steep ravine through woods and ending on rutted tracks leading through an open, overgrown field, then back into more woods and down an even steeper slope.

The tracks ended at a crumbling cinderblock building protruding from the ground like an ugly scab. Its windowless walls stood barely one-story tall and were pocked with black streaks of mold and a leprosy of flaking white paint; it resembled the shell of an abandoned industrial building and looked out of place in the country. I had the feeling I had been there before, although I remembered no such place.

The gear selector moved itself to park, the engine shut off, and the doors unlocked. I got out of the car and walked up to the building, lit by the yellow glare of the headlights. The cloying stench of manure and mushrooms-the same odor I had smelled in the convenience store in my dreams-made the air heavy and difficult to breathe. Pulling open the worm-eaten door, I was fearful now even though I knew there could be nothing to harm me. As I stepped inside, bright daylight erupted across the sky, like a thermonuclear explosion, vaporizing the building, the car, the woods, and my own body.

I find myself within the bedchamber of a great Roman palace, a chamber as immense and splendid as the Pantheon itself. White stone columns soar into the bowl of a fantastic marble dome overhead; beneath it sits a glittering golden bed surrounded by divans covered in plush crimson fabric. Standing in front of this bed, bloated and nude, is the Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar. At his feet, groaning and pleading for mercy, lies his wife, Poppaea, fully clothed and several months pregnant with his child. Her white gown is streaked red between her legs.

“You ungrateful whore!” Nero bellows as he drives his foot deep into Poppaea’s abdomen. “I put Octavia’s head on a platter for your amusement and this is how you repay me, by ridiculing me!” He kicks her again, more savagely, and this time her ribs give way, cracking and breaking like twigs. Poppaea gasps for air, blood drools from her mouth.

“Get out of my sight!”

Poppaea does not rise. Nero strikes another blow to her stomach, then turns and walks from the bedchamber with his hands on his hips, soaked with sweat from the exertion, his penis flapping from side to side against his heavy thighs, like a wagging finger. He orders his servants to have her removed and bring him a meal before he takes his afternoon nap.

The Roman palace vanishes just as suddenly as it had appeared. In its place emerges the outline of the Urartu Chamber with Luas standing at its center; the faceless creature from the monolith whispers something in his ear then returns to its home inside the monolith. I am sitting, now, on one of the observer chairs in the back of the Chamber. I have no idea how I’ve gotten from the cinderblock building, to Nero’s palace, to the Urartu Chamber. Luas walks over to speak to me.

“Hello, Brek,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to see that. How was your visit back home?”

“You just presented Nero?” I say, astonished by what I have just seen.

The Urartu Chamber disappears, and now we’re standing in the corridor leading back to the train shed.

“Yes, foul character, isn’t he?”

“But he died two thousand years ago-”

“And I’ve been representing him ever since,” Luas says. “The presentation usually ends here, or just after he has the boy Sporus castrated and takes him for his wife. When I return to the Chamber the next day, I’m informed a final decision on his fate still hasn’t been made and I must present his case again.” Luas sighs. “This is my job, it seems, to try Nero’s soul every day for eternity, even though a decision is never made. Seems God isn’t quite ready to make up his mind about this one.”

“Didn’t you say we only present the close cases,” I ask.

“Yes, well, there are two sides to every story, aren’t there? It may seem strange, but Nero did have some redeeming qualities, not unlike Toby Bowles. I never get to them during the presentation, of course, but he had them. Anyway, ours is not to wonder why. Nero is a postulant here and we treat him like all the rest. Just be happy he isn’t one of your clients.”

We start walking toward the train shed, but Luas leads me around a corner and into another corridor I hadn’t seen before, so unfathomably long that I’m unable to see the end of it stretching beyond the horizon and out into space. It has the appearance of a vast courthouse annex, with thousands of identical offices lining both sides of the corridor, each with tall, slender wooden doors and transoms closed tight; florescent tubes bathe the walls in the uniform and compassionless light of bureaucracy.

We continue walking. “So,” I say, still stunned by the trial, “Nero and Toby Bowles are treated the same way-nothing they did right their entire lives is heard in the Chamber. What’s the point of conducting a trial at all-if you can even call it that? Why not just send them straight to hell?”

“Back to that again, are we?” Luas says. “There is no Bill of Rights in Shemaya. The procedural protections in which you placed such great faith as an attorney on earth are entirely unnecessary here. No lie can go unexposed in the Urartu Chamber, and no truth remains hidden. Justice is guaranteed as long as the presenters remain unbiased and do nothing to tip the scales.”

“But how can there be justice if all sides of the case aren’t presented?”

“Do I need to remind you,” Luas answers in a reprimanding way, “that the Judge himself was once tried, convicted, and punished unjustly? Surely He requires no lessons from us about fairness. Of course, justice has many dimensions, and we’ve been speaking only of fairness to the accused; you lost your arm when you were just a little girl, Nero Claudius turned Christians into tapers, and God once drowned every living creature. To know whether justice has been done, one must consider all of its aspects.”

We somehow reach the end of the limitless corridor. Luas stops us at the last office on the right. A small plaque on the door reads, “High Jurisconsult of Shemaya.”

“Ah, here we are,” Luas announces, opening the door. “The next phase of your training is about to begin.”

13

There was a simple wooden desk in the office, two candles, two chairs behind the desk, and a single guest chair in front of it. No windows, papers, files, phones, pencils, or other office items. Luas closed the door and struck a match to light the candles.

“Please have a seat here beside me,” he said. “We’re going to interview a new postulant together and then watch the presentation. I will be your proctor. After this, you will be assigned your first client and conduct a trial on your own.”

“Am I being forced to represent them?” I asked. “I mean, what if I refuse?”

“Forced?” Luas said. “Certainly not. The choice is yours, but it’s a choice you have already made. That’s why you’re here. You will represent them because, like all lawyers, justice is what you crave most and you won’t rest until you have it.”

“There’s no justice here,” I said flatly. “At least not the kind I crave.”

Luas smiled condescendingly. “Perhaps you will introduce it to us then,” he said.

I thought about this for a moment and, for the first time, considered the possibility that I just might be able to help these poor souls, that this might be the reason why I was brought to Shemaya, to fix a broken judicial system. Lawyers had a long and proud tradition of bringing about reform and restoring justice to the world. I had always dreamed of doing something truly significant and grand, like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther.

“Perhaps I will,” I said. “Perhaps I will.” Then I looked down and realized I was still wearing my silk pajamas, from what I had thought would be a relaxing evening at home, watching a movie and eating popcorn.

“Oh, you needn’t worry about your clothes,” Luas said, noticing my embarrassment. “The postulants can’t see us; but if you’d feel more comfortable, you may change into these.” From a desk drawer he produced the black suit, blouse, and shoes I’d been wearing since I arrived in Shemaya-the ones I’d discarded at the mall during my shopping spree.

“How did you get these?” I asked, confused.

“I didn’t get them,” he said. “You did. Go ahead, put them on, I’ll step outside.”

By telling me I got the clothes, Luas meant to remind me that I was making all of this up-my appearance and his, that is, not Shemaya itself, which existed quite independently of me, and over which I exercised no control. Even so, I took the opportunity to dress, out of respect for my profession if nothing else; pajamas were not appropriate for meeting a client on earth or in heaven, particularly a client facing the Final Judgment.

Luas returned to the office and seated himself beside me behind the desk, surrounded by darkness. The dim candles gave his face a dull orange color.

“Before I invite the postulant in,” he said, “I must warn you that there is a grave danger in this meeting, one for which I have been trying to prepare you. More than Mr. Bowles, more than your parents, your husband, or even your own child, will you come to know the postulant we are about to meet; only slightly better will you know yourself. To avoid losing your identity forever, you must employ the tactics I showed you earlier. No matter how difficult, you must continue to remind yourself of the circumstances of your disfigurement. Try to recall the smallest details: the smell of the air above the manure, the sound of the flies buzzing over the heap; the puzzled look of the cows as they watched you and your grandfather spreading their excrement across the fields; the way the heavy, wet dung, produced by the first alfalfa of the season, clotted in the bin like plaster, jamming the tines.

“Your parents had told you they were taking you to your grandparents’ farm to enjoy some time in the country, but you had heard the viciousness of their argument when your father revealed the arrangements, against your mother’s wishes, to admit her into a treatment center for alcoholics and your mother revealed her knowledge that he had been having an affair. All that had held them together was you, and you were convinced that only a crisis would hold you all together now. You considered running away, but this would only separate you from them; you had already tried modulating your grades, but the good marks only gave them confidence of your adjustment and the bad just another source for blame. Behaving and misbehaving had the same weak effect, and crying worked only temporarily and could not be sustained. You had even contrived illnesses, but doctors confirmed your health and the proper functioning of your organs.”

I could no longer bear the pain of reliving those difficult days. “Enough!” I said. “Please, stop.”

“You did not plan what to do next,” Luas continued, ignoring my discomfort. “Your grandfather had warned you to stand clear as he worked his pitchfork through the pile; he climbed down from the bin and up onto the tractor, but he left the guard off the conveyor chain. You watched the chain hesitate for a moment under the load and then break free with a bang, whirring through the gears and cogs as the tractor engine roared and the manure flew. The thought struck you in that very moment, before he could disengage the power and replace the guard. You ran up and thrust your hand into the gears. You thought you’d only cut your finger or perhaps break it; but feeling no more than the return of a firm handshake at first, you watched in astonishment and disbelief as your forearm ripped from your elbow and hurled along the conveyor like a toy on an assembly line. You stood frozen for a moment, the way one does upon first seeing one’s own reflection, watching yourself watch yourself, but not fully recognizing the image. In the moment before you lost consciousness, your body tingled-not with pain, but with the brief exaltation that you had finally succeeded in reuniting your parents and all would soon be well.”

“No more, Luas,” I begged, sobbing. “Please, stop.”

“But there is more,” Luas said callously. “So much more. This is the only way to separate yourself from the powerful memories of the postulants, and this is what must be done. Two years later, after your parents had divorced and the right sleeves of your clothes had been sewn shut, you took the witness stand in the Huntingdon County Courthouse, where you would one day practice law, and a young attorney named Bill Gwynne asked you to show the jury the mangled stump of your arm and tell them what happened. It was the most critical testimony in the case, to establish the liability of the manufacturer of the manure spreader for producing a defective product and bestow upon you and your family a small fortune in recompense. The courtroom was silent, every moist eye turned to you. You had practiced your testimony so often with Mr. Gwynne that you actually believed what you were about to say. He had promised you justice. You faced the jury and do you remember what you said?”

“Yes, yes,” I cried, traumatized and ashamed. “I remember. There’s no need for you to repeat it.”

“Oh, but I must,” Luas said. “‘I was standing on my toes,’ you told the jury, ‘trying to see what my grandfather was doing. I slipped on the wet grass and fell against the guard. I didn’t hit it very hard, but the guard gave way and my arm got caught in the gears-’ You became too emotional to go on; the memory of what happened next was too painful.”

Luas’ relentless recounting of the story was having the desired effect; so immersed did he have me in my own memories that I couldn’t possibly confuse my life with that of the postulant I was about to meet. I saw myself there on the witness stand, a ten year old girl again: the judge, robed in black, glaring down at me from the bench, old and terrifying like God; the pinch-faced stenographer yawning as she taps her keys; my grandfather, pale with guilt and remorse, nervously fondling his pipe, aching for a smoke; my grandmother waving a roll of Lifesavers at me for encouragement; my mother sitting by herself on the other side of the courtroom with her “I told you so” face, snarling at my father and grandparents; my father sucking on a Lifesaver my grandmother insisted he take, checking his watch; the defense lawyer from Pittsburgh, too slick and condescending for Huntingdon County, whispering to the vice president of the equipment manufacturer, a Texan, who crosses his legs and strokes the brown suede of his cowboy boots. To my right sits the jury who will decide the case: three farmers, a hairdresser, a housewife, and a truck mechanic. The farmers tug uncomfortably at the collars of their white dress shirts; the hairdresser, wearing too much makeup, cracks her gum, drawing the glare of the overfed tipstave with stains on his necktie; the housewife, wearing too little makeup, fusses with her hair; the truck mechanic bites his dirty fingernails, stealing glances at the hairdresser.

“It’s ok, honey,” Mr. Gwynne says. He’s here to protect me, my knight in shining armor, gallant and handsome; I have a secret crush on him. “Take a moment to blow your nose; I know it’s difficult with one hand. I’m sorry we have to do this, but the makers of the manure spreader here want their day in court, and they’re entitled to it. Just a few more questions, ok? We need you to be brave now and tell the truth. Are you certain the guard was in place? I’m talking about the metal shield over the chain.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Gwynne, I’m certain.”

“And you slipped and bumped into it?”

“Yes.”

“And it gave way?”

“Yes.”

“And your arm got caught in the chain.”

“Yes. Gee, I’m sorry, Mr. Gwynne; I’m awfully sorry for all this. I should have been more careful.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Brek,” he reassures me. “We’re the ones who are sorry for what happened to you. You’ve been very brave for us today, and we appreciate it.”

The jury returned a verdict against the manufacturer in less than an hour: four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. An expert hired by Mr. Gwynne testified that if the spreader had been designed properly, there would have been no need to remove the guard to fix the problem in the first place, meaning that my lie might not have made the difference after all. One-third of the money went to Mr. Gwynne; another third put me through an expensive Quaker boarding school, four years at a private liberal arts college, and three years at an Ivy League law school; the rest paid my medical bills with some left over for other expenses, including a semester abroad in Europe. Only my grandfather knew for certain I lied about the guard, but we never spoke about it to each other. He testified that he couldn’t remember whether he left it on or off, which made it seem like only half a lie.

Luas wasn’t finished with me yet: “Nobody in the courtroom that day knew,” he said, “not your parents, not Bill Gwynne, not even your grandfather-that you deliberately put your hand into the machine. You told only one person, Karen Busfield, and that was almost twenty years after the trial. Do you remember?”

It came back to me with the same clarity as the trial, as if it were happening all over again-as if I were seeing my own life being replayed in the Urartu Chamber. Karen called me late one night; Bo and I were asleep.

“Hi, Karen,” I said, yawning into the phone. “What time is it? Are you ok?”

“ 2 a.m. Sorry for calling you so late. I need a lawyer.”

“I told you this day would come,” I quipped. The sounds of a jail echoed in the background; rough voices, the slamming echo of steel doors. “Where are you?”

“ Fort Leavenworth.”

“ Fort Leavenworth? What are you doing there, counseling inmates?”

“I am an inmate.”

I could tell she wasn’t joking.

Bo rolled over. “What’s going on?” he said.

“It’s Karen,” I whispered, covering the phone. “I think she’s been arrested.”

I uncovered the phone. “You’re a chaplain, Karen,” I said. “What could you have possibly done?”

“I can’t talk about that right now,” she said.

“Ok. Can you tell me what they’re charging you with?”

“Assault, destruction of government property and…”

“And what?”

“Treason.”

“Treason? Are you serious?” Bo’s eyes widened.

“Yes.”

“I’m coming, and I’m bringing Bill Gwynne with me.”

“No, just you,” she said.

“Treason is a big deal, Karen; I don’t want to scare you, but it carries the death penalty. I’m bringing Bill with me-and maybe twenty other lawyers. Let me call the airlines. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

“Just you, Brek, okay?” she said, desperately, on the verge of breaking down. “Please?”

“Okay,” I said. “For now. We can talk about it when I get there.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Don’t rush, take care of Sarah first. I’ll be fine. I’m really sorry about this. How’s she doing?”

“She’s fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“I’m really sorry-”

“Don’t worry about it. Let me pack a bag. Do you need anything?”

“Just you,” she said. She was crying and I could hear voices in the background. “They’re saying I’ve got to hang up now,” she sniffled.

“Everything will be all right,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Stay strong. And no matter what you do, don’t answer any questions, okay? Tell them you’re invoking your right to remain silent until you’ve spoken with your attorney.”

“Okay. Thanks, Brek. I’ve got to go. Bye.”

I hung up the phone.

Bo was fully awake and sitting up now. “They’re charging an Air Force chaplain with treason?” he said. “We did some research into treason cases for an espionage story we were doing a few years ago; there have been fewer than like fifty treason prosecutions in the entire history of the United States. This is going to be front page national news.”

“I know,” I said bleakly. “But you know you can’t be the one to break the story, right? Karen called me as her lawyer; my conversation with her was a confidential attorney-client communication.”

“But-”

“Promise me, Bo,” I said. “This is serious. I know you want to be the first on a story like this, but there’s no way you can report it or tip anybody else about it. I can’t be Karen’s lawyer if I have to worry that everything I say in my own home might wind up on the wires the next day.”

“Ok,” he said glumly, “but get ready: you’re going to be facing a lot of other reporters-guys who won’t be as nice as me. You’ll be on television every day-maybe even more than me.”

“Great, I’ll replace the weather girl.”

“Let’s not get carried away.”

“Can you take care of Sarah while I’m gone?”

“We’ll manage. I’ll call in a few favors.”

“Thanks. I’m going to need your help to get through this.”

“You’ve got it, whatever you need.” He kissed me on the forehead. “Go kick some prosecutor’s butt and make me proud.”

I hugged him and headed for the shower.

14

The next morning, I flew to Kansas City, rented a car, and drove to Leavenworth. Two female guards escorted Karen, wearing handcuffs and dressed in orange prison coveralls, into the small room with a table and two chairs reserved for attorney visits. Karen looked terrible-pale and gaunt with dark circles under her puffy, red eyes as though she hadn’t slept or eaten in days. She took the chair across from me and flashed me a weak smile. The guards left the room and closed and locked the door behind them so our conversation would be confidential, but they continued monitoring us through a window.

“Oh, sweetie,” I said, reaching out to touch her hand. One of the guards rapped on the window and gestured toward a sign in the room saying, “No Physical Contact Permitted.” Karen scowled at the guard, but I obeyed, putting my hand in my lap. We looked at each other silently.

“I’m really sorry I dragged you all the way here,” she said. “How was your flight?”

“Fine,” I said, “no problems. How are you holding up? Are they treating you okay?”

She looked down and tugged on her coveralls. “They took my clerical collar.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “we’ll get it back. I’m meeting with the U.S. Attorney later this afternoon to see if I can get this cleared up, or at least negotiate a low bail; you’re a priest with no criminal history and you’re not much of a flight risk.” I glanced at my watch. “We only have forty-five minutes. Tell me what happened.”

Karen yawned and rubbed her eyes. “They’ve been questioning me for two days. I haven’t gotten any sleep.”

“Questioning you for two days?” I said, alarmed. “Didn’t they tell you that you had the right to a lawyer?”

“Yes,” she said, “but I told them I didn’t think I needed one.”

“What?” I said, indignantly, more than a little cranky myself from having been awoken in the middle of the night to travel from Pennsylvania to Kansas. “They’re charging you with treason and you didn’t think you needed a lawyer? Why did you bother calling me then?”

“Please don’t yell at me,” Karen said.

I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that it makes it so much harder to defend you if you’ve been talking to them for two days already. Did you confess to anything?”

“Of course not…at least not that I’m aware of.”

“That’s exactly my point,” I said. “Two days with no sleep, who knows what they had you saying. No more talking, okay?”

“Okay, no more talking.”

“Good, now tell me what happened.”

She looked at me and then, fidgeting with her fingers, looked away. She was broken and ashamed. I had never seen her this way before.

“I can’t help you unless you talk to me, Karen.”

“I know.”

I sat quietly, waiting, but she wouldn’t speak. “Okay,” I said, finally, “I’ll tell you what. Let me tell you something I’ve never told anybody before, something I did wrong.”

“You’ve never done anything wrong,” Karen said.

“Yes, I have,” I said. I tugged on the empty right sleeve of my suit-the same black silk suit I was wearing when I arrived in Shemaya; I wore it that day because I knew I would need all the confidence I could get to meet the U.S. Attorney. “Do you see this?” I said, showing her the empty sleeve; then I proceeded to tell her everything about how I had lost my arm, including my perjured testimony during the trial. When I finished, she smiled gratefully and compassionately-like a priest.

“You were only a child,” she said, softly. “And you’ve already been forgiven. Do you know that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I know. And you’ve already been forgiven for whatever you’ve done too. Do you know that?”

She smiled again and wiped her eyes. “Yes, I guess I do.”

“Then tell me what happened.”

“Okay,” she said. She summoned her strength. “Well, since you’re my lawyer, I guess I can tell you…I’m a chaplain to the missileers.”

“The who?”

“The missileers-the airmen who man the nuclear missile silos; you know, the ones who will launch the ICBMs to end the world when given the command?”

“Wow,” I said, impressed, “I guess I thought you were just an ordinary base chaplain somewhere ministering to fighter pilots and their families or something.”

“I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody what I really do,” she said. “I actually requested this duty after I passed Officer Training School. They stationed me at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, one of the few remaining bases that still has Minuteman nuclear missiles on alert.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Okay, so what happened?”

“I told them launching nuclear missiles was wrong and they should refuse to do it if they’re ever ordered to.”

“You mean ‘wrong’ as in wrong unless we’re attacked first?” I asked.

“No,” Karen said, “even in retaliation.”

I was surprised. “So if the Russians or some rouge nation fires nuclear missiles at the United States, we’re not supposed to respond?”

“We’re supposed to forgive. We’re not supposed to resist violence with violence.”

“But that’s what the military does, Karen,” I said. “They resist violence with violence; that’s their line of work, it’s their entire reason for being. Why did you become a military chaplain if you don’t agree with what they do?”

Karen looked annoyed. “Would you ask why somebody became a doctor if they didn’t agree with human sickness and disease? We go where we’re needed most and can do the most good. Doctors work in hospitals because that’s where the sick people are. Nobody needs to learn about non-violence and forgiveness more than the military-and nobody in the military needs to learn about it more than the people who launch weapons that can destroy the world.”

I was stunned-it was the crayfish trials all over again. “That’s all very nice,” I said, “but the best way of deterring a nuclear attack is to make sure our enemies understand they’ll suffer the same fate if they ever try it.”

“But if we’re attacked,” Karen argued, “then, by definition, nuclear deterrence will have failed, so why bother to retaliate?”

“I don’t think I follow you,” I said.

“Let’s say we’re attacked by nuclear weapons this afternoon,” Karen said. “If that happens, it would be despite our threat of retaliation and mutually assured destruction. In other words, our threat of retaliation didn’t work-it didn’t deter the attack.”

“I guess so…”

“So if it didn’t deter the attack, then retaliating would be risking the destruction of the world to carry out an already failed strategy. It would be both illogical and immoral.”

“Look,” I said, now annoyed myself, “you’ve obviously given this more thought than I have. I’m not here to debate nuclear strategy; I’m here to defend you against a charge of treason. There’s a right to free speech in this country, a right we protect, by the way, with nuclear missiles-and it says you can say anything you want regardless of whether others agree, so I still don’t understand what you did wrong and why you’re here. Telling missileers not to launch their missiles might be a breach of your duties as an Air Force officer, but it’s not treason. You’re not in the chain of command as a chaplain; the most they can do about it is give you a dishonorable discharge.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Karen said. “I went down into one of the missile silos.”

“Did you break in?”

“No, one of the guys I’m friends with, Sam-I mean Captain Huggler, one of the missileers-let me go with him and Brian, Captain Kurtz, during their shift in the MAF.”

“What does that mean, MAF?”

“Missile Alert Facility, that’s what they call the underground launch control capsules inside the missile silos. Each MAF controls ten Minuteman missiles.”

“Was he allowed to bring you along?”

“He got special permission. They’re normally two person crews and they stay underground for twenty-four hours, but they’d been studying whether three person crews spelling each other over longer shifts would work better, so having me along wasn’t that unusual. I have the necessary clearance because I talk to them. They’re under a lot of stress, you know, sitting for days on end with their fingers on the button; they’ve got questions and they need somebody to talk to.”

“I can imagine,” I said, “but that’s not treason either.”

Karen held her eyes on me. “They went on alert while we were down there. A satellite picked up what appeared to be two North Korean ICBMs. Sam and Brian said it was probably just a false alarm due to a sunspot or something, but it might be the real thing and they had to be ready to launch their missiles within five minutes.”

“Did they ask you to leave?”

“Not right away. Since I was an officer with clearance and it was probably just a false alarm, they said I could stay.”

“Then what happened?”

“It was totally surreal. The MAF capsules are suspended on huge shock absorbers in case of a nuclear blast, like an egg yolk inside an egg; the entire thing started rumbling and shaking. Sam and Brian explained that this was normal and caused by the huge steel blast doors over the missiles sliding open. We could see it on the closed circuit monitors. Within seconds, the tips of the missiles were pointing toward the sky.”

“That’s pretty scary.”

“Yes, it is. So, Sam and Brian begin their preparations and their countdown. One minute, they’re just two perfectly nice, normal guys with families, you know, but suddenly they have the power to destroy ten cities at once by pushing a few buttons and turning a few keys. When the alarms go off, their humanity is switched off and they’re turned into machines. They’re actually trained not to think about what they’re doing or the consequences of it, to just obey their orders and launch their birds. Ironic isn’t it…? They call them, birds. If the right set of numbers and letters blip up on a screen, they take a key, open a box, get another key, put it in a console, lift a panel, press a button, and in a few minutes fifty million people are erased from the planet. They’re gods. The Air Force missileers are gods.”

I glanced again at my watch. “This is all fascinating,” I said, “but we’re running out of time. What happened that caused you to be arrested and taken to Leavenworth?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Okay, so the countdown winds down to two minutes before launch. The fuel and oxygen lines disconnect from the missiles; there’s lots of hissing and white vapor clouds rise out of the silo on the video monitors. Sam and Brian pull out their top secret launch codebooks, strap themselves into their seats, and take their first set of keys and open their launch panels. I’m in disbelief at this point. It looks like they’re really going through with it; two minutes until the end of the world. It’s crazy. How could I just stand there and let them murder fifty million people?”

“Because it’s not your decision to make,” I said. “It’s the president’s decision.” Karen looked annoyed again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s obviously a huge deal and it must have been very difficult. Nobody wants to murder fifty million people. Go on.”

“So I tried to reason with them and get them to stand down.”

“What did you say?”

Karen ran her fingers through her hair and laughed. “You’d think at a time like this,” she said, “-the two most important minutes of my life-maybe the two most important minutes in the history of the world-that I’d have something eloquent and convincing to say to save humanity, but the only words that came out of my mouth were: ‘Hey, come on, guys, you’re not really going to do this, are you?’-like I was trying to stop them from having a squirt gun battle or something. Unbelievable. They didn’t respond, of course. They were automatons by this point, reading off their checklists; the only thing they were worried about was whether they completed everything in the correct order, as if any of that would matter in two minutes.

“Well, apparently somebody on the surface didn’t like that I was down there during an alert because suddenly two armed SPs-Air Force Security Police-burst into the capsule to escort me out. I’m convinced now that this isn’t a drill and they’re going to launch. It’s like a nightmare: I’m standing there seconds before the nuclear exchange that ends the world and I can do something to stop it. ‘For God’s sake!’ I say to Sam and Brian, ‘don’t do this. What if it’s a mistake? You’ll kill millions of people-women, children, mothers, fathers, maybe all life on the planet. For what? For an order? For an eye for an eye? For justice?’

“They glance at each other but say nothing and continue with their checklists, launch codes, and buttons. The two SPs order me out, but I stall a little longer and keep pleading with Brian and Sam. At this point, a new alarm starts sounding and an ominous computer voice comes on through the speakers. I’ll never forget it, it’s burned into my brain: ‘Warning! Warheads armed! Launch in sixty seconds! Warning! Warheads armed! Launch in fifty-nine seconds.’ We’re one minute from destroying the world. One minute. There’s this big red digital clock in the MAF and it’s counting down to the end of time. You have no idea what it’s like until you’re in one of these silos. They’re the scariest places on earth.”

“This is unbelievable, Karen,” I said, riveted by the story. “It’s like a movie or something.”

“I wish it were only a movie. One of the SPs finally walks over to me to lead me out by the arm… That’s when I saw my chance.”

“You’re chance for what?” I asked.

Karen stared into my eyes. “I grabbed his gun from its holster and told Sam and Brian to get away from the launch consoles.”

“Oh, my God, Karen.”

“I know. Another warning comes over the speakers: ‘Warheads armed! Launch in forty-five seconds!’ The other SP pulls his gun and orders me to drop mine, but Sam orders him to hold his fire. I tell him I’ll drop my gun only if Sam and Brian move away from the launch consoles.

“Another warning sounds: ‘Warheads armed! Launch in thirty seconds!’ Everybody looked scared now, but not because I had a gun; none of them had ever seen a countdown go this far. They confirmed that they had received valid launch codes, and Brian crossed himself. They were going to go through with it. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t let them launch the missiles, but I had no intention of shooting anybody either. I yelled again for them to get away from the launch consoles, but they refused. I’m no sure shot, but I had basic small arms training in Officer Training School. I steadied the gun with both hands, aimed it at Sam’s launch console and fired two shots to scare them and maybe disable the launch controls. The SP with the gun pleaded with Sam for permission to fire but Sam refused.”

“You could have been killed, Karen!”

“Yeah, I know. The bullets went through the metal of the console but didn’t disable anything or hurt anybody. And they didn’t cause Sam or Brian to move either. They stayed at their launch consoles under fire; their commanders would have been proud. At ten seconds, a new siren sounded, signaling the final phase of the countdown. We all realized now it wasn’t a false alarm or drill. They were about to launch their missiles. We were ten seconds away from Armageddon.”

“Unbelievable,” I said. “What did you do?”

Karen smiled. “I put my gun down.”

“What? You put it down?”

Karen looked past me and her face became blissful, like the face of a monk meditating. “I could see it all so clearly in that moment,” she said. “Everything became perfectly calm and still. I suddenly understood what Jesus had been trying to teach us by not resisting his executioners and forgiving them. To reunite with God, we must be like God, and we must love like God. Even God wasn’t going to come down from the sky and shoot Sam and Brian. He had already forgiven them for launching the missiles and destroying the world, just as Jesus had already forgiven his executioners. A great God loves without condition-even when we murder millions of people, even when we attempt to murder God Himself. In that instant, I was standing in the Garden of Eden, Brek, right there inside that nuclear missile silo.” Karen’s eyes glistened. “I had come home. It was the most sacred moment of my life. I got down on my knees and laid the gun on the floor as an offering. I touched the face of God.”

For a moment, I thought I could almost feel what Karen was feeling, that I could almost sense her ecstasy; but suddenly some inmates started shouting at each other in the hallway and I snapped out of it. We were talking about nuclear warheads here, not beautiful sunsets. I was worried Karen might be forced to spend years in a prison or a psychiatric ward for the sake of her spiritual epiphany.

She smiled at me. “You think I’m crazy.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be. This was a gift from God.”

“So, what happened next? They obviously didn’t launch the missiles.”

“At six seconds, a new mechanical voice came on telling them to abort the launch and stand down. Sam and Brian folded their launch consoles and put the launch keys away. The SPs arrested me. Five FBI agents were waiting when they brought me to the surface. They flew me here to Leavenworth that night. Two FBI agents, and a CIA agent, have been interrogating me ever since. Can you believe it? They actually think I’m a spy! They keep reminding me that treason carries the death penalty. It’s ridiculous. I was set up. It was all a charade.”

“Set up? What do you mean you were set up? You tried to stop them from launching the missiles and you fired a gun. I’m not saying I can’t get you out of this, but I’d say they’ve got a pretty good case.”

“They told me they’d been watching me for months. Apparently some of the missileers who I’d been meeting with and counseling that launching nuclear missiles is morally wrong reported me. No surprise there; I knew it wouldn’t last long. But, like you said, they could have simply discharged or transferred me if they didn’t like what I was saying. Instead, they let me keep my clearance…and go down into a missile silo knowing all along I’m morally against it? There was never any North Korean ICBM launch, mistaken or otherwise; they set it all up to see what I’d do. I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds like entrapment. I’ll bet Sam and Brian will admit it if you ask them. I don’t think they really believe I’m a spy. I think they want to make an example out of me to deter others. The only thing they didn’t anticipate was me taking an SP’s gun and shooting a launch console; but that just makes their case stronger, doesn’t it? And you know what? I don’t care. They can do whatever they want to me. Something happened to me in that silo, Brek. I’ll never be afraid of the government or anybody else again. Let them fry me if they want. This case is going to draw more attention to the danger and immorality of nuclear weapons than a lifetime of protests.”

All this came back to me while sitting in Luas’ office, waiting for the new postulant to arrive. Luas said nothing more. He had accomplished his goal of immersing me in the miasma of my own past so that I could not become lost in the past of another soul. He struck a match to light his pipe, adding a third flame to the darkened room. There was a soft knock at the door and the faceless gray robed creature from the Urartu Chamber entered. In a subservient voice, it asked whether we were ready.

“Yes, Legna,” Luas said, exhaling a cloud of smoke from his pipe. “I believe Ms. Cuttler is now ready. Please send in the next postulant.”

15

Amina Rabun’s hard life passed before my eyes, ending sixty-seven years after it began in the quiet dawn of a day that looked like any other day.

I saw nothing of her soul coming or going from Luas’ office. She had no shape or size like Nana, Luas, or Haissem. Rather, I saw Amina Rabun only as she had once seen herself: reflected in mirrors brushing her long, brown hair; in the reactions of those for whom she cared, and those for whom she thought she should care; in the memories and fantasies of who she had been and who she might have been; in the photographs that could not be trusted because they were always at odds with mirror and mind. She was a woman both ugly and beautiful, as she had accepted and rejected those qualities in herself from time to time; and so, at the end of her life, when she passed on from one world to another, the she that passed was, as we all are, a collection of thoughts and ideas-bits of data transferred from one realm to another, like moving computer files to a new machine that can open and read them again.

Our interview of Amina Rabun consisted of sitting in her presence and receiving the record of her life. No questions were asked, no conversation took place, and none was needed. The memories of Amina Rabun came to us whole and complete unto themselves, an entire human life copied from one storage device to another. I felt full after meeting her the way one feels after reading an epic novel: having entered another world and become part of it heart and soul. Like such a reader, at first I found no difficulty in separating my life from hers. When I closed the book of Amina Rabun’s life-the most wonderful book I had ever read because it contained a full and complete life with all its nuances, far more than any human author could ever hope to achieve-Legna, the meek librarian of Shemaya, reappeared to return the volume to the great hall of the train shed where it would wait on the shelf with the many others until Amina Rabun’s case was called in the Urartu Chamber.

“Who are you?” Luas asked me in the flickering candlelight after Legna left.

“Brek Abigail Cuttler,” I said proudly. “That wasn’t so hard after all.”

“Good. Very good,” Luas said, standing up behind the desk and blowing out the candles. “But I want you to stay with your great-grandmother until we’re certain you’ve adjusted fully to the burden of having another life resident inside your own.”

“Okay,” I replied, having nowhere else to be anyway. This was one of the many advantages of Shemaya: no plans, no appointments.

Walking back through the impossibly long corridor of offices, one of the doors opened midway down the hall and a handsome young man appeared. Unlike Amina Rabun and the other postulants inside the train shed, he had both shape and size and was the first soul I had seen in Shemaya besides Nana, Luas, and Haissem. He wore a dark suit and white shirt with a blue and gold striped tie loosened at the neck, as though he had just finished his workday, and round wire rim glasses that required constant attention to keep from sliding down the steep slope of his nose. He didn’t notice us and nearly backed into Luas while closing the door behind him.

“Careful there,” Luas said, stepping wide to avoid a collision and coming to a stop. “Ah, Tim Shelly, meet Brek Cuttler.”

Tim extended his right hand and, seeing I had no right hand to return the gesture, sheepishly retracted it, stepping with me the same awkward dance I had stepped with countless others during my life. I broke the tension the same way: “My left hand’s got a better grip than my right,” I said. He laughed uneasily, as they all did, and shook my left hand. He stared uneasily at my empty right sleeve, visibly unsettled. I, on the other hand, was excited to have found someone in Shemaya closer to my own age… and, I admit, a bit smitten by his good looks.

“Brek here is our newest recruit,” Luas said. “She just met her first postulant.” Luas turned to me. “Tim hasn’t been with us much longer than you, Brek. He’s had a more difficult start of it though: poor fellow came away from his first meeting with a postulant convinced he was a waitress at a diner. Wouldn’t stop taking my breakfast order-poached eggs and toast, no butter mind you, Tim. Miserable wretch brought me biscuits slathered in butter every time; and when I threatened to dock his tip, he’d grumble, take the biscuits back, scrape them clean, and return them to me stone cold. For a little fun I started ordering dishes that weren’t even on the menu; he’d become irate with me and storm off to his imaginary kitchen. When I refused to order altogether, he threatened to throw me out for loitering! As I recall, Tim, it wasn’t until you made a pass at me that we achieved a full separation of personalities. No offense, but you’re just not my type.”

Tim seemed embarrassed, but I found the story hysterical. It felt so good to laugh again; it had been such a long time.

“You’d make a good catch, Luas,” Tim shot back gamely.

“Now, now,” Luas said, “you mustn’t tease me so. You were interested in me only because your boyfriend made conversation with a pretty woman at the other end of the counter and you were trying to make him jealous.”

“I think Tim is right, Luas,” I said, joining in the fun. “You’d make a fine catch.”

“You do seem to have adjusted better than me,” Tim said, plainly impressed. “I really was as lost as Luas says.”

“Well,” I, said nodding at my empty right sleeve, “Luas had plenty of material to prepare me with. He made me so preoccupied with my own past I couldn’t possibly mistake it for anyone else’s.”

“I have something of a confession to make, Tim,” Luas said. “Unlike Brek here, I dropped you in cold with your first postulant as part of a little experiment I was conducting. I couldn’t tell you in advance for fear of tainting the results.”

“What kind of experiment?” Tim asked.

“Well, as you know,” Luas explained, “the object of every presentation is to project an accurate and unbiased representation of the postulant. I wanted to test whether this could be improved upon by removing any trace of personality of the presenter.”

Tim seemed unamused. “You mean you subjected me to the memories of my first postulant without preparing me at all?”

“You, among others,” Luas said. “I also maintained a control group for comparison.”

“What if I wasn’t able to handle it?” Tim said. “What if I’d lost who I am?”

“I knew you would do well,” Luas replied. “And I was obviously correct. Besides, I kept a cache of your most important memories handy to bring you back in case of emergency.”

“I guess,” Tim said, resigned, but still annoyed. “Well, did you learn anything useful?”

“Yes. There’s no difference among well-trained presenters-and you were well trained.” Luas smiled slyly. “I also discovered that you care for me far more than I could have imagined.”

I laughed uneasily. Tim stood frozen-faced.

“Well,” Luas said, “I thank both of you for your flattery and would very much enjoy hearing more, but I must attend to some administrative matters. Tim knows the way out. Would you be so kind as to escort Ms. Cuttler?”

“Sure,” Tim said.

“Splendid. She’ll still need the blindfold before entering the hall.”

“Understood.”

“I’ll check in with you periodically, Brek, to see how you’re doing. Sophia knows how to reach me if there are difficulties. Make no effort to evaluate Ms. Rabun’s case; there’ll be opportunity for that later. Just get accustomed to her memories and emotions, both of which are quite powerful, as you well know. You should spend most of your time relaxing. Sophia will be with you. You’re okay?”

“Yes…yes, I’m fine.”

“If she starts taking breakfast orders, we’ll know who to blame,” Tim said, getting in the last jab and letting Luas know he was no longer angry.

“Guilty as charged,” Luas said, bowing in mock apology. “I must be off.”

We watched him walk to the end of the corridor, disappearing through a set of locked doors.

“How long have you been here?” I asked, eager to learn about Tim’s experience and everything he knew about Shemaya.

“I’m not sure exactly,” he said.

“I know what you mean,” I replied. “Where are all the clocks and calendars? That’s been one of the most difficult parts of the transition for me.”

We started walking toward the great hall.

“Have you done any presentations on your own yet?” I asked.

“No, I’ve only watched,” Tim answered. “Luas says the next one’s on my own though.”

“Me too…after Amina Rabun. Are these all presenters’ offices? There must be thousands.”

“Yeah, I just got mine. There are a bunch of empties down at this end. Where are you staying?”

“With my great-grandmother, at her house-or what used to be her house.”

“I stayed in a tent with my dad when I first arrived. He and I used to go hunting in Canada, just the two of us. He died a couple of months before I got here.”

“Sorry- Or not…you’ve got him back now.”

“I guess. It was great seeing him at first, and he really helped me adjust, but he’s gone again.”

“Gone? Where? I didn’t know you could leave here.”

“I don’t know where he went. One day he said I was ready to live here on my own, but that we’d see each other again someday. You can live anywhere you want when you’re ready.”

“What do you mean, anywhere?”

“Well, anywhere…let’s see, I’ve lived at Eagle’s Nest and Hitler’s bunker in Berlin-I’m really into Nazi history-let’s see, the White House, Graceland. If you can imagine it, you can go there.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing. I thought you could only go to the places you’ve visited during your life. That’s all I’ve been doing.”

“No, anywhere you want. I’ll show you when we get outside. You can’t do it in here.”

When we reached the train shed, Tim opened a bin near the doors, removed a blindfold, and tied the thick felt cloth over my eyes. I peeked again as we passed through the great hall, sampling paragraphs from the thousands of autobiographies cramming the room, each authored by a different hand but, like all autobiographies, revealing the same truths, pains, and joys. I closed their covers when we reached the vestibule on the other side, neither confused nor weakened as I had been before.

For the first time since arriving at Shemaya, I felt a flicker of hope rather than apprehension, the way a visit from a friend brightens the darkness of an extended illness. I flipped off the blindfold and Tim and I literally raced outside like two kids let out of school. The entrance to the train shed somehow bordered the western boundary of Nana’s property; it was little more than a disturbance in the air between two maple trees that had been there all along, since before I was a child, diaphanous, like a faint patch of fog. Could the entrance to heaven have been so near all along? I wondered. But, of course, we were nowhere near Delaware or her home; it was all being made up spontaneously, conjured from…I had no idea if there was even air. In any case, I could see the roof of Nana’s house through the trees, however it emerged, and hear the sound of light traffic along the road.

“Nice place,” Tim said, looking around. “Okay, so where do you want to go?”

“Um…”

“Just pick any place, you can see them all.”

“Well, okay… Tara,” I blurted, of all possible things.

“I’ve never been there,” Tim said. “What would it look like?”

All at once we were there, standing on the wine colored carpet sweeping through the foyer and up the grand staircase of the fictional plantation mansion. Crystal chandeliers tinkled softly in a gentle spring breeze that stroked the plush green velvet curtains of the parlor, carrying the sweet afternoon scents of magnolia, apple blossom, and fresh-cut lawn. With our heads turning, we walked out to the portico with its whitewashed columns and made our way to the rail fence over which Gerald O’Hara leaped but never returned, then under a giant sycamore, through the gardens and back onto the sun-drenched veranda. We examined the dining room, with its sparkling tea service and glassware, and the study lined with Farmer’s Almanacs, English poetry, and some French volumes. It didn’t matter that Tara had been only a description in a novel or a set in a movie any more than it mattered to readers of the book or audiences in the theaters. Nor did it matter that I could not remember the details as they appeared in the book or on the film: my mind instantly provided what I expected to see, feel, and smell, extrapolating outward from memory. I was panting when we reached the top of the stairs, and felt a very real stab of pain when I banged my shin into the corner of a dry sink, proving that we were not wandering through a mere illusion. Everything was in its place, except Rhett and Scarlet. I bounced on her bed, giggling uncontrollably, intoxicated by the dream turned reality. Tim had never read the book nor seen the movie and did not share my enthusiasm, but I dragged him through each room anyway like a star-struck movie studio guide: “And this is where she shot that Union scoundrel,” I squealed. “And this is where Rhett left her.”

We went back into the parlor; Tim sat down on the formal sofa, bored and unimpressed with the mansion, but amused by my first giddy moments at the controls of such magical powers to re-create it. I admired the porcelain figurines on the shelves and stopped to examine a miniature ship in a bottle on the fireplace mantel. As quickly as my mind recognized the ship, my thoughts replaced the plantation with ocean, and the mansion with masts and hull. Suddenly, we were deposited onto the deck of a sixteenth-century caravel on the high seas, and Tim was all enthusiasm. She was leaning-to in rough weather off the coast of a Caribbean island; there we were, dressed in our business attire like a pair of farcical bare-boat charterers. The caravel rolled sharply to port, forcing us to claw our way on hands and knees toward the starboard rail through a drenching saltwater spray; we kicked off our shoes to gain better hold of the slimy oak decking. With the next wave the ship listed heavily starboard, sending us scrambling back across the deck for the port rail. Despite the battering, the ship carried full sails on the foremast, main, and missen, and the tattered red and gold stripes of Spain. The deck was deserted. I made my way to the wheel to bring the ship under control and Tim went for the rigging to bring in the sails. He found a hatchet and cut loose the yards, sending the beams, ropes, and sails plummeting to the deck with a tremendous thud. With the reduction in wind power, the rudder responded and I was able to steer a course directly into the waves, stabilizing the ship. Tim made his way back to the transom over the heaps of canvas and rope littering the deck. He was dripping wet by the time I saw him, the long locks of his dark brown hair matted to his forehead in jagged inky stripes, his shirt, pants, and suspenders torn almost to tatters and his round glasses lost to the sea.

“Maybe you could warn me next time you’re about to think about a ship!” he shouted, breathless, his ruddy face breaking into the smile of one who has shared a common peril and cheated a common fate. We fell off another crest and the ship lurched forward knocking him onto the deck. I had seen it coming and braced myself against the bulkhead.

“Next time!” I shouted back, laughing.

He collected himself and rose wearily to his feet. “Think calm seas!”

I did and the seas quieted instantly, as if two gigantic hands had reached down from the heavens to tuck and smooth the immense sheet of ocean, snapping the surface flat as a pane of glass. Tim folded back the sails and cleared a place to sit on the starboard side of the deck facing the island.

“My grandfather took me sailing on the Chesapeake Bay when I was a girl,” I said. “Sometimes I’d fall asleep with him at the helm and dream I was one of the early explorers lost at sea and sailing through a storm.”

A tropical breeze rocked the boat, cooling the warm touch of the sun. The mottled timbers and planks of the ship dried quickly with a powdery white brine on their surface. We floated adrift for a while with only the far-off sound of gulls and the easy slap of water against the tired wooden hull breaking the silence. I unbuttoned the neck of my blouse and Tim helped me roll the sleeves up to my shoulders for me. He seemed very uncomfortable doing this, and happy when it was over. We stretched out on the sun-splashed deck, propping our heads against a hatch cover.

I soon fell asleep in this paradise, and in my dreams I returned to the Chesapeake Bay. I was on my Pop Pop Bellini’s sailboat and he was teaching me to steer. The pink skin of his bare chest and shoulders added color to the spotless white fiberglass coaming around the cockpit of the boat; a weathered, old blue captain’s hat shaded his eyes as they darted from the jibsail to a landmark on shore toward which he told me to steer to make the most efficient use of our tack. The day was perfect, breezy, and warm; as soon as we sailed out of sight of Havre de Grace he allowed me to take off the life jacket my parents insisted that I wear because swimming with one arm is virtually impossible. These little signs of trust made me adore him. We talked about school and sports, even boys and music, anything I wanted. Although he was an attorney, Pop Pop Bellini’s manner was informal and easy, the way men confident of their position in life tend to be. My other grandfather, Grandpa Cuttler, was more uncertain of himself and, because of that doubt, less comfortable with me after the accident. He never stopped blaming himself for what happened, and I never had the courage to tell him I’d done it on purpose to release his guilt; we didn’t have much to talk about except the energy crisis and Jimmy Carter and the demise of the American farmer. But with Pop Pop Bellini, whose interests were vast, I could talk about anything-except Uncle Anthony, and my mother’s drinking habits, both of which tapped into emotions so intense that even he could not control them. Regardless of the subject, he spoke of all things-politics, history, art, science, religion-in terms of right and wrong, fair and unfair. I guess this is what being a lawyer did to him. Francis Bellini, Jr., Esq. saw the world in black and white; he had no belief in gray. Neither did I, which is another reason why we got along so well. He was successful and well-respected, one of the high priests of justice upon whom God smiled; he was my role model and my hero. I loved my father dearly, but I never aspired to be like him because he and my mother had always bathed themselves in those confusing shades of gray.

We anchored at the mouth of the Sassafras River for lunch and returned to the harbor by five, a glorious day; but as we motored into the slip, the boat and the harbor faded away in my dream, and I found myself back at the convenience store, carrying Sarah up to the counter, then alone with Luas in the train shed. Even while dreaming I felt the frustration of that gap in space and time. Then my dream descended into a more bizarre realm.

My little brother Helmut and I are playing near the beautiful sandbox built lovingly by our father out of colored bricks and mortar. Papa had arranged the bricks on three sides of the box into patterns of ducks and flowers and extended the backside into a wide brick patio area, the opposite end of which turned ninety degrees straight upward into a chimney stack. Beds of roses, carnations, and begonias surround the two opposite ends of the sandbox, and our lush green lawn spreads across the front.

Despite the obsessive state of tidiness in which my father maintains our patio and yard, the sand in the box is excreting a putrid odor. I do not want to play in it until papa adds fresh sand, and I tell Helmut he should stay away too, but he plunges in without concern. Soon his legs, hips, and torso are swallowed up, as if he is sinking in quicksand.

“Help, Amina! Help me!” he cries. I reach in to grab him, but as I peer over the edge into the box I realize there is no sand after all. Instead, the arms of thousands of cadavers, tangled, blackened, and rotting, are swarming around like snakes inside the box, clutching at Helmut, pulling him down into an immense grave that extends deep into the earth, as if the box is situated over a portal into hell itself. I call to papa for help and pull as hard as I can to free Helmut, but I cannot overcome the strength of all these thousands of arms.

When the last traces of Helmut’s blond hair vanish into the chasm, I suddenly awaken from the dream. Tim Shelly is holding my left arm and pulling me back onto the deck of the caravel. I had been teetering on the edge of the cargo hatch, my screams echoing out of the hold as if they were too horrified to stay below. Then the ship and the ocean disappear, and I am standing on the porch of Nana’s house. Nana takes my hand, thanks Tim for looking after me, and leads me upstairs to my room.

16

Helmut Rabun died at the age of seven years and three months, but not in a sandbox. A five hundred pound bomb punched through the roof of the gymnasium at his school, killing everyone inside. The old men who had no children in school and could, therefore, examine the scene objectively, the way men do in their fascination with destruction, said it happened that way because the debris was driven outward in a ring around the blast zone; and this was not questioned by the hysterical mothers and fathers or the city elders and townspeople. Helmut liked the pommel horse and the trampoline.

The bomb that hit Der Dresden Schule für Jungen at 0932 hours on 22 April 1943 instantly dissected and immolated the thirty-two little boys playing beneath it, scattering many times that number of arms, legs, and other body parts hundreds of yards from where they had last been assembled. The Nazi officials who took control of the scene collected these remains and divided them into roughly equal sheet-draped mounds, one for each family believed to have had a son in gym class that day. With solemn voices during the invocation, they said the supreme sacrifice for Das Mutterland had been made by the children and, for that, we should all be very proud. Despite the dark hairs that curled around the edges of our little sheet, we cried and prayed over it as if it were our own little blond-headed Helmut. Mama swooned and had to be carried from the street and sedated for a week.

My nose itches. I reach to scratch it with my right hand, miss, reach again, and miss again, as if I am swatting a fly rather than part of my own anatomy. There is a throbbing, penetrating numbness in my arm. This is the phantom pain. The ghost of my forearm haunts me each night, deceiving me during sleep into reattaching itself to my body and performing the functions a forearm performs, like scratching itchy noses and swatting flies. Having set me up this way, it exacts its revenge for my carelessness around the manure spreader by vanishing just as my eyes open in the morning, so that I am forced to re-experience the terror of seeing a bandaged stump quivering above me like a broken toll gate on a windy day. The stump points indiscriminately at the eighty-seven squares of ceiling tile in my hospital room; I have counted them often and am certain of the number. The morning nurse, Nurse Debbie, comes in and eases the stump back down to my side, sending bolts of pain shrieking to my brain and from there to my vocal chords. She apologizes.

“Time for breakfast and more morphine,” she says, calling me sweetie and fussing over me.

Luas and Nana sit at the foot of my bed. Their mouths move but I cannot hear them, so I ignore them. Globs of gray oatmeal dribble down my chin from a spoon held by fingers not yet accustomed to holding spoons. Nurse Debbie serves the narcotic after breakfast, injecting it directly into the intravenous tube that still replenishes the fluids I drained onto the field, my grandfather’s pickup truck seats, and the emergency room floor. The poppies submerge me into a warm, perfect, opiated sleep from which I always regret returning.

At the suggestion of Vater Mushlitz, the parents of all the little boys killed at the school in Dresden agreed to bury their gruesome parcels in a mass grave as a sign of communal loss. All except my papa.

“My son will have his own grave!” he raged, in denial of the fact that only God himself could determine which sheet or sheets concealed Helmut. “He will not be buried like an animal! Like a common Jew! He will be buried in the family plot outside Kamenz!”

Papa ordered his staff to design a monument appropriate for the son of a wealthy industrialist, constructed, he insisted, of the gymnasium’s broken concrete and twisted rods of steel so no one would forget the cowardice of his murderers.

“It must be bigger by three-fold than all other monuments in the cemetery! It must be completed immediately!”

He permitted himself only two days to bury Helmut and grieve; then he returned to Poland with the explanation that the war effort there had intensified despite our having conquered the country years earlier. “The Third Reich urgently requires the expert services of Jos. A. Rabun & Sons,” he said, “to assist in various matters of national security that cannot be discussed.” Papa stopped smiling after his first trip to Poland; his eyes turned darker and narrower, as if he were being hunted by someone or something.

In the half-century since grossvater Rabun opened the doors of his small masonry shop near Kamenz, Jos. A. Rabun & Sons had swelled into the mighty Korperschaft that trenched modern Dresden’s sewers, paved its streets, and erected its buildings. Our little family business became the premier civil engineering and construction firm in all of Saxony province, providing for our needs very well. Because of this, its demands were never questioned by the family. We had far more than most: ample food, beautiful clothes, sufficient funds with which to enjoy dining out, the opera, and even wartime travel abroad. We lived comfortably on my grandfather’s estate with its large chalet-style house, riding stables, and gardens reflecting his love of the Alps. Other less fortunate citizens of Deutschland sacrificed so much more.

After papa left for Poland, I met Katerine Schrieberg at our secret place on the estate-a hollow in the woods surrounded by a dense grove of pine trees and guarded by a thicket of briars and vines. She was nervous and pale as always, her fingers incessantly rubbing all the blessings that could possibly be extracted from the gold crucifix I had given her to present if she were ever stopped by the Nazis in the woods. I could see that my failure to appear during our last three scheduled meetings had made her very concerned. When I told her the sad news about Helmut, she cried as if it had been one of her own brothers, so much so that I found myself comforting her instead of she comforting me. Of course, she was fond of Helmut and felt sorry for me; but she wept also for herself and her family-for if the mighty Rabuns of Kamenz were no longer safe, where did that leave the weakened Schriebergs of Dresden? She asked if I would come back with her to her house and I eagerly accepted the invitation, welcoming the opportunity to escape, for even a moment, the pall that had descended onto my life with the Allies’ five hundred pound bomb.

The house in which the Schriebergs lived was not really a house at all. It was an abandoned hunting cabin built by my grandfather deep in the immense tract of forest that stretches from Kamenz all the way to the Czech border. Before taking up residence there, the Schriebergs lived in a beautiful townhouse in the finest section of Dresden and owned several theaters, two of which, in fact, had been constructed by Jos. A. Rabun & Sons. Katerine and I grew up best friends: we had taken dance and violin lessons together since I was eight years old, and her parents and mine held seats on the boards of many of the same civic and charitable organizations, until the Nazis banned Jews from such positions. Then, in nineteen forty-two, the Schriebergs abruptly booked passage to Denmark after accepting the then-generous but insulting offer to sell their theaters, home, and belongings to my uncle Otto for thirty-five thousand Reichmarks in total, rather than allow the government to seize the properties for nothing. They had family in Denmark who had agreed to house them, but when news spread of Nazis rounding up fleeing Jews at the train stations and loading them onto boxcars headed for Poland, they changed their plans and decided to take their chances by staying and hiding. Katerine made contact with me and asked about the hunting cabin. She and I had sometimes slept in it on warm summer nights and talked about the boys we would marry. The cabin had not been used by my family since the start of the war, so I agreed and soon began these discreet visits to our meeting place with baskets and sometimes small wagons loaded with food and supplies, always honoring their constant pleas not to tell anyone of their existence-not my mother, not Helmut, and most importantly, not my father or uncle Otto. No one.

Katerine’s father, Jared Schrieberg, and her younger brothers, Seth and Jacob, were industrious and immediately set to excavating a tunnel beneath the cabin through which to escape if anyone should approach. She told me they drilled their flight twice daily regardless of the weather and could silently vanish below the carefully reinstalled floorboards within thirty seconds exactly. They came and left from this tunnel, did most of their cooking at night to avoid attracting attention to the smoke from their fires, and relieved themselves far away from the cabin to avoid even the scent of habitation. It was a miserable and demeaning existence, and I felt sorry for them, but their precautions proved unnecessary. The very boldness of hiding on the property of a Waffen SS officer (the organization into which my uncle Otto accepted a commission) made life there secure for them in the way that life for certain tropical fish is made safe by living among lethal sea anemone.

When Katerine told her parents the news about Helmut, tears filled their eyes and they said they would sit shiva for him, which they explained to me was the Jewish mourning ritual. In my youth and ignorance, I panicked. I did not want them confusing God with their Jewish prayers into mistakenly sending Helmut to the Jews’ heaven. As politely as I could, I begged them not to do this. When they insisted, I grew furious. I had helped them at great personal risk and would not tolerate their interference in such matters. My grief for my brother and my hatred of his unseen murderers found an outlet in the Schriebergs, and I yelled at them in a voice more than loud enough to remind them upon whom they depended for their survival:

“Beten Sie nicht Jüdisches für meinen Bruder!”

The room fell silent. Katerine stared down at the floor, biting her lip as Frau Schrieberg dug her fingernails into Katerine’s arm. Seth and Jacob looked to their father in horror, expecting him to punish my impudence as he had so often done to them. But Herr Schrieberg only smiled coldly at me, revealing a flash of gold through his graying beard and mustache, unwittingly contorting his long, bulbous nose into the very caricature of a Jew mocked regularly in German newspapers of the day. As if surrendering a concealed weapon, he cautiously pulled the black yarmulke from the balding crown of his head and placed its flaccid shape before me on the battered plank table that served the family as dining area, desk, and altar. The Schriebergs would not offer prayers for my brother’s soul. I glared back at the old man and thanked him with a healthy dose of teenage smugness, having for the first time cowed an adult. He had no option. I left without another word and ran quickly through the woods, regretting my resort to such tactics but intoxicated by exerting my will so forcefully and effectively against my elders. The Schriebergs’ submission to my demands made me feel powerful and, for a moment, in control of the uncontrollable world around me. At least I didn’t have to live like them, like animals.

The skin has miraculously knitted itself over the amputation and the bandages have been removed, but even so, I refuse to touch or even look at the stump of my right arm. It terrifies me. Dr. Farris, the psychologist assigned to all amputees at Children’s Hospital, assures me this is perfectly normal.

“I’ve counseled many children in your situation, Brek,” he says. “Victims of firecrackers, car accidents, farm kids like you, too. Most react the same way. They think that what remains of their arms and legs are monsters poised to take what’s left of their bodies, but you must remember that this is the same arm you were born with. It’s been terribly injured and it needs your love and compassion. You’re all it’s got. Can you do that?”

“I’ll try, but it isn’t fair,” I cry.

Dr. Farris looks at his watch. “Oops, time’s up for today. I’ll see you next week, okay? I think you’re doing great.”

I find my mother reading a fashion magazine in the waiting room.

“Done?” she says.

“Yep.”

We run into Luas in the hallway outside Dr. Farris’ office. My mother doesn’t see him. Luas smiles and extends his left hand without first extending his right, pulling me with the gesture back into Nana’s living room in Shemaya.

“Sophia and I were beginning to wonder whether you would ever return,” Luas says.

I look around the room, dazed and confused by the flood of images, emotions, and personalities rushing through me. Nana brings me a cup of tea, and I sit down on the sofa.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Ms. Rabun,” Luas says. “She led an interesting life.”

I slide my hand into the right sleeve of my bathrobe and trace the familiar contours of my arm: the shrunken, atrophied bundle of biceps; the rough, calcified tip of humerus jutting like coral beneath a puffy layer of flesh capping the bone.

“Yes, yes she did,” I say.

“The Schriebergs lied, you know.”

“About what?”

“They sat shiva for Helmut.”

17

On the rainy afternoon of 23 April 1945, a Soviet scouting patrol advancing south toward Prague stumbles upon the Rabuns of Kamenz. It is the day of Amina Rabun’s eighteenth birthday celebration.

The Allies hold Leipzig to the west and the Russians are massed along the Oder to the east, making escape impossible. Amina’s father, Friedrich, and her uncle, Otto, had already pulled back to Berlin with the retreating remnants of Hitler’s forces but advised their families against leaving Kamenz, reasoning that the Russians were interested only in Berlin, that the western Allies would soon take Dresden, and that the armed forces of the latter were preferred to the former with respect to treatment of civilians. Privately, the Rabun brothers were also concerned for their affairs and property, which almost certainly would be looted if abandoned-if not by enemy soldiers then by their own German neighbors who have suffered such privation during Hitler’s desperate last stand.

Unaware of the approaching Russian forces, Amina rises early this day to begin baking for the party, but not before grossvater Hetzel, who has risen even earlier to slaughter a pig to roast in a pit dug several paces from the long garage full of polished Daimler automobiles owned by the Rabuns, the axles of which rest on thick wooden blocks because there is no fuel to run them. By noon, the sweet scent of pork, yams, cabbage, and fresh küchen tease aunt Helena ’s four hungry children, two boys and two girls, who have been playing hide-and-seek all morning despite a soft rain and their mother’s unwillingness, in anticipation of the feast, to prepare their usual hearty breakfasts. Sensitive to the effect displays of prosperity can have during such lean times, only family members have been invited to the party, all of whom, save those living in the manor, conveyed their regrets due to lack of transportation to the country. It is thus agreed that leftovers will be delivered to the hungriest of Kamenz by anonymous donation to the cathedral. Amina also plans secretly to smuggle a portion to the Schriebergs, who have enjoyed very little meat recently and, having long ago relaxed observance of Kosher laws in their cabin, will happily accept scraps of pork.

All goes merrily and well into the early afternoon, with everything and everyone cooperating except the weather. The soft rain becomes a downpour just as grossvater Hetzel is removing the pig from its pyre. Everybody races inside as much to stay dry as to enjoy the feast. They assemble in the formal dining room around a large table upon which has been arranged the finest place settings and two large hand-painted porcelain vases overflowing with bouquets of wildflowers freshly picked from the surrounding gardens. Colorfully wrapped gifts are arranged near the seat of honor at the head of the table, including several packages for the birthday girl delivered by special SS courier from Berlin. The anticipation builds until finally, with considerable ceremony, the grinning pig atop a tremendous silver platter makes its debut to ravenous applause. The browned head and body of the beast remain intact, resting peacefully in a soft bed of garnishes as if it has fallen asleep there. Toasts of precisely aged Johannisberger Rheingau are made first to Amina, then the cooks, and finally to the safe return of Friedrich and uncle Otto and, solemnly, a swift end to the war. A phonograph whispers Kreisler and Bach into the air. Amid the happy conversation, laughter, and music, the revelers cannot hear the Soviet patrol approaching and, therefore, have no opportunity to defend themselves or flee.

The soldiers enter from three sides of the manor and quickly herd the Rabuns and Herr Hetzel out into the rain in front of the garage. After conducting a thorough search and satisfying themselves they have everyone, the soldiers segregate the old man and the young boys, ages six and twelve, from the group and without warning or hesitation shoot them on the spot before they can offer either protest or prayer, as if this is simply a matter of routine for which the soldiers assume everyone has been rehearsed. Amina’s mother and aunt are shot next while running to their aid. Left standing, like statuary in a graveyard, are Amina Rabun and her stunned cousins, Bette and Barratte, ages eight and ten. The three girls’ features are petrified into rigid sculptures of terror, waiting for the next bursts of gunfire that will join them with their fallen family members. The girls are spared such a fate, however.

Suddenly two shots are fired from the woods behind the house. The soldiers drop to the ground and return a fearsome barrage with their automatic weapons. Amina and her cousins stand motionless in the crossfire, afraid even to breathe. Then everything becomes silent. Amina sees a man in uniform in the distance across the field, in the direction from which the shots were fired. He has his hands over his head as if he is surrendering, and he is shouting something unintelligible that sounds vaguely like, “Amerika! Amerika!” The commanding officer of the Russians directs two of his men to roll out and circle around the house toward this man, making a pincer-like gesture with his fingers. The rest of the platoon holds its position. Many minutes pass; finally Amina hears some words shouted back from the woods in Russian and the commander gestures for his men to get up. After several more minutes, the two Russian soldiers return, one of them carrying a simple double-barrel shotgun, the kind Amina has seen her father pack away on hunting trips.

Laughing at the weakness of this threat, the soldiers present their trophy to their commander and the rest of the platoon joins in the cheering and congratulations. And then, as if the same idea has struck all of them at the same time, attentions are turned toward Amina, Barratte, and Bette, who still have not moved. The men look from the girls to their commander and back to the girls. Their eyes are hungry and wild. They cheer louder and louder, insisting that their request be granted. The commander looks at the girls and then his men and shakes his head no in mocking disapproval. The cheering becomes more frantic. Finally, like Pontius Pilate, the commander turns his back on the girls and wipes his hands. Amina, Barratte, and Bette are dragged into separate bedrooms of the manor and raped and beaten throughout the night.

At dawn, the commander of the unit orders his men to move on. Amina is certain they raped little Bette long after she had died, because when the drunken and gorged Russians permitted Amina to use the toilet, she slipped briefly into Bette’s room and found her naked body cold and blue, already bloated, her face broken and bloodied almost beyond recognition because she would not obey their orders in Russian to stop crying. Even after that, Amina heard men with Bette at least three times.

I cried so long for Amina Rabun and her family. I cried for her more than I had even cried for myself after I lost my arm. I lived each horrifying moment with Amina: the bewilderment of being rushed out of the house at gunpoint, the shock and disbelief when the soldiers executed her grandfather and cousins, the terror, almost into unconsciousness, when blood began spouting from her mother’s chest; I smelled the stench of the Russian soldiers as they pressed their bodies against her; I swooned in the horror of Bette’s open, unseeing eyes. I believed I would die in the agony of the soul of Amina Rabun, if dying from death were possible. I was traumatized.

Nana Bellini and I sat together on her porch one evening, watching the seasons struggle with each other for space in the cramped sky, like quadruplets in a womb. She said:

“Luas introduced you to the souls of Toby Bowles and Amina Rabun for a reason. New presenters are exposed to souls with whom they have had some relationship, because in doing so they come to see the hidden relationships in their own lives. This, in turn, encourages them to search for hidden relationships in the lives of their clients, which may be decisive during a presentation.”

“Katerine Schrieberg, Amina’s best friend, became my mother-in-law,” I said.

“Yes.”

“She was in the cabin in the tunnel under the floorboards; she was led away by Toby Bowles, who saved her life; she had no idea Amina and Barratte had been raped by the soldiers when I convinced her to let Bill Gwynne and me sue them to recover her inheritance.”

“That’s correct, she didn’t. But neither did you.”

“And Amina never knew that it was Katerine’s father who fired the shots at the soldiers from the woods, that he lost his life trying to save her and her family.”

“Yes.”

“My husband was named after Toby Bowles. Katerine had lost the sheet of paper with his name on it but remembered the sound of his name-Boaz, Bowles-and almost got it right.”

“Yes.”

On another day, Tim Shelly came to visit me to see how I was doing. We went for a walk along the Brandywine River behind Nana’s house. I had created a row of snowmen on the riverbank in the alternating bands of winter. Portly and resolute, they watched over the river and me, keeping me company. Tim liked them and saluted each one as we passed.

Tim told me that he, too, had some connection with his first postulant-the waitress in the diner-but he didn’t want to discuss it with me. He wanted to talk instead about his mother. He seemed suddenly nervous and upset. She hadn’t been well since his father died, he said, and he was worried about how she was taking his own death. Tim’s father didn’t have life insurance and they had lost their mushroom farm when he died. His mother was too old to find a job or a husband; Tim was all she had left. Now, he was gone too. How would she survive?

We stopped in a band of spring, at a patch of wild daffodils where a large tree hung out over the river, defying gravity. “Do you ever wish you could see your husband and daughter again?” Tim asked.

“Always,” I said.

“My dad told me we can’t go back. We can’t see the living or communicate with them.”

“I know. My Nana told me the same thing.”

Tim picked pieces of bark off the tree and threw them into the river. They floated away like tiny ships in the current.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it’s just…”

“What?”

“It’s just that I visited her recently.”

“Who?”

“My mother.”

18

"Shall I take you to them?”

Elymas appeared as Tim Shelly told me he would, during a moment of despair when going forward seemed no more possible than going back. That moment for me came on the rocking chair in Sarah’s room. I had not been home since my last visit there to disprove my mortality had so thoroughly confirmed it instead. Home teased me the way a casino teases a gambler, luring the eyes and the mind into a world offering pleasure and hope, but delivering only pain and disappointment. Tim’s addiction had taken him back over and over to his family’s mushroom farm, which was as deserted as Sarah’s room, making the sudden appearance of Elymas so startling and so welcome.

Elymas was older than Luas and more poorly preserved. His withered body floated inside a pair of green plaid pants that piled at his ankles, and gathered high around his chest, held there by a moldy brown belt that drooped in a flaccid tail from the buckle. A food-stained yellow shirt sagged over his narrow shoulders, buttoned crookedly so that the left side of his body appeared higher than the right. He had a corncob face and relied for balance upon a cane with four tiny rubber feet at the bottom. He was completely blind; his eyes glowed glassy, white, and terrifying.

“Shall I take you to them?” he asked again, hovering in the doorway of Sarah’s room, too vulnerable and frail to have made such an impossible, gigantic promise. A light breeze could have lifted his body like a scrap of paper and carried him off.

I had been crying, mourning the loss of my daughter and my life. “But they said it isn’t possible-” I sniffled.

“You did not listen carefully. They said it is not possible to direct the movement of consciousness from realm to realm. They said nothing about you visiting and interacting with it. Shall I take you to your husband and daughter?”

“But-”

The old man banged his cane fiercely against the floor. “Do not question me! Many wait for my services. You must tell me now whether you wish to see them.”

“Yes, yes desperately.”

“Then open your mind to me, Brek Abigail Cuttler. Open your mind and you shall see them.”

The old man’s eyes dilated until they consumed his entire face from the inside out, and then they consumed me. I felt a sudden motion in the darkness of his eyes, as if I were being hurled through space. Two small points of light emerged in the distance from opposing directions, each emitting a soft, warm glow like the flames of two candles carried from opposite ends of a room, growing as I approached them. At the instant their coronae touched, they exploded into one mass of brilliant white light, and this light finally dimmed, distilling into an expanse of an azure sky, an outline of poplar and ash trees, a swing set, a slide, a jogging stroller. Then the shapes of Sarah and Bo, with Macy barking at their feet! The playground near our home! I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Sarah toddled toward me. I swept her into the air, pulling her close, burying my nose in her hair, drinking in the sweet scent of her baby shampoo. She wrapped herself around my neck and pressed her face against mine so that my tears dripped down her cheeks. Then Bo’s strong long arms enveloped us both. I felt his scratchy Saturday beard against my neck and smelled the clean sweat on his back from his long run through the college to the playground. He wore his faded blue jogging shorts and a t-shirt with a large red “ 10” stenciled on back and a small “WTAJ” over the left breast on front. Macy whimpered and leaped into the air to get my attention.

“I miss you so much,” Bo whispered. “Sometimes I don’t think I can go on.”

“I know,” I whispered, “me too.”

I turned my face to his and we kissed, looked into each other’s eyes, and kissed again, longer and deeper. I could taste the salty sweat on his face and the fiery warmth of his mouth. Sarah squirmed to free herself and return to the swing, and Bo and I exchanged disappointed but happy smiles. He buckled her into the toddler seat and we took positions in front and behind to push her, her face sailing within inches of ours as she squealed with delight. Bo had her dressed in my favorite denim jumper and sneakers, with her hair tied into a fountain on top of her head.

As Sarah flew through the air, I recognized my own features in her face-my dimpled chin and cheeks, my small nose and olive shaped eyes-and behind them, an unbroken line of ancestors-of Bellinis, Cuttlers, Wolfsons and Schriebergs, of Putnams, Savellis, Stefankos, Schenks, Giampietros, Ashers, and LeFortes-a line of families whose names have long since been forgotten, marching back in history and time, waiting there to step forward into the next generation. This little girl sustained their memories and kept alive their hopes and dreams. And mine.

Bo and I talked over Sarah’s laughter and the squeaking chains of the swing. He had just returned to work for the first time, he said. He had taken my death very hard. They had stayed with his brother and sister-in-law at first; then his mother visited for a few weeks to help out until he could get used to taking care of Sarah alone. He had put the house up for sale because the memories were too painful, and he was looking for a job at one of the New York television stations to be closer to his family. They were doing fine though, he insisted; work helped occupy his mind, and Sarah woke only twice during the night now looking for mommy. He had the roof fixed and had gotten the garbage disposal running. The Bostroms had their baby, a boy, Anders, eight pounds, seven ounces. Bill Gwynne had called from the firm to offer any help he could with settling my estate, which was kind of him. My parents called once or twice a week, but the conversations didn’t last long and were filled with awkward gaps of silence. Karen came by to talk and left some books about grieving that sometimes helped.

So much to say. I tried to assemble my thoughts-not about what had happened to me since my death, but about what I wanted for their future. Bo looked so strong and handsome standing there in his shorts and t-shirt-so determined and resilient, yet so wounded and vulnerable. I fell in love with him all over again, deeper than before. I wanted to tell him that, and tell Sarah how proud she should be of her daddy. I wanted to tell her how I wanted her to be like him. And me. I wanted her to know me-who I had been, how I had gotten there, the experiences to have, the mistakes to avoid. I wanted her to live life to the fullest because I could not. But as I struggled to form these words, which for some reason would not come, the sky brightened again into the harsh whiteness that began our visit, bleaching the color from their faces and the green from the grass and leaves and the blue from the sky. They were fading from view.

“No! No!” I cried. “Bo! Sarah!”

“We love you!” Bo called back. “We love you forever…”

And then they were gone.

I was back in Sarah’s room. Elymas stood in the doorway. I lunged at him.

“Take me back!” I pleaded with him. “Please, it’s too soon. Please, take me back.”

A toothless smile spread across the old man’s face. “But of course,” he said, patronizingly. “We’ll go back, Brek Abigail Cuttler. In due time. In due time.”

“No, take me back now!”

He turned toward the stairs. “That is not possible.”

“Wait,” I said. “Please, don’t leave me.”

He grunted for me to follow him. Using his cane to feel his way by lowering it to the next step, he slowly climbed down the stairs. When we finally reached the bottom, he said: “Listen very carefully, Brek Cuttler. Whether you see your husband and daughter again is up to you. But know there are reasons you were told otherwise. Luas is concerned about your effectiveness as a presenter. He believes you should devote your efforts to the Chamber, and he is concerned you will spend too much time with your family and that it may affect your work. Sophia is concerned that you will not be able to adjust to your death unless you let your loved ones go. It was easier for them to tell you contact is not possible. Do you understand?”

No, I did not understand. I was furious.

“I do not share their views,” Elymas said. “I do not presume to determine what is best for others. The choice is yours, just as they, too, have been free to choose. I come only to present you with possibilities. I do not criticize your decisions. Now, I must be going.”

“Wait, please. I want to see them again.”

“But, you must understand that when Luas and Sophia learn of your decision they will be angry. They will deny that it is even possible and do everything in their power to convince you of this. They will say it is all an illusion, and they will slander me and claim I am nothing more than a sorcerer and a false prophet. They may even threaten your position as a presenter and insist that you leave Shemaya.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want to see my husband and my daughter.”

The toothless smile flashed again across the old man’s unseeing face. “We visit them in their dreams. Take your time, Brek Cuttler. They will be there when you decide. Think about what I have said.” Then Elymas banged his cane three times on the porch floor and he was gone.