Lee banished the thoughts that had become her standard bedtime reverie and set to work helping grapple the threshold stone into place.
“A little to the left. That’s it. Right there. Ease it down. There—good.” Gaëlle stood back and admired their handiwork. “Is that not a superb fit?”
“I have to admit, you have a great eye. Well done.”
Gaëlle extended her hand with a grin. “Congratulations.”
“For what?”
“For a one-time overseer, you’ve certainly mastered working in the trenches.”
Lee played along. “I was an overseer? Did I have a chariot?”
“No, but you had a whip, and you sure knew how to use it.”
“Ouch. Did I use it on you?”
“Once or twice, but I was an excellent stonecutter, and you mostly left me alone.” Gaëlle picked up another stone off the cart and carried it to the end of the circuit they were working on.
Lee watched Gaëlle carefully place her stone and shook her head. To listen to Gaëlle speak, millennia past were as real to her as last night’s excursion to the Four Corners Café. The woman was a walking cryptogram. Lee doubted she’d ever break the code. She wasn’t entirely sure she even wanted to try.
“Hey, did someone call a coffee break that I don’t know about?”
The teasing words echoed across the labyrinth, and Lee picked up a stone. “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.” I’m sure I liked it better when I was overseer!
Lee and Gaëlle emerged from the spa into the late-afternoon sun.
Lee turned her face up and blinked at the bright sky. “Are you as blissed out as I am?”
“I’m way past bliss and well on the way to Nirvana. Wasn’t that amazing?”
“It’s hard to believe that this time yesterday we were hauling fieldstones.”
“I don’t think believing was hard for the manicurist. Did you see the disapproving way she looked at our hands?”
Lee laughed as she looked at her nails. She couldn’t remember them ever being so shiny before. “No kidding. But at least you didn’t freak out the esthetician with facial scars. I’m sure she thought I’d been in a gang fight.”
Gaëlle linked her arm through Lee’s as they walked down the street. “Oh well. So we’re not their usual sort of clients. At least the masseuse was friendly.”
“Mine wasn’t unfriendly, but I could feel her looking askance at some of my old war wounds.”
“Emblems of honour.”
“Some are. Some are just reminders of youthful foolishness.”
Gaëlle squeezed Lee’s arm. “It’s called living. None of us make it out completely unscathed.”
“Not even you?”
“Of course not, though my marks are mostly the invisible kind.”
Suddenly, Gaëlle was jerked violently and fell to the ground.
Lee grabbed for her. “Gaëlle!”
“I’m okay, Lee.”
A man ran down the street with Gaëlle’s purse.
“Hey! Stop him!” Lee took after the thief but came to a jolting halt when she heard Gaëlle call out, “Lee, stop. Come back.”
It went against every one of Lee’s ingrained instincts to let the thief escape, but she abandoned her pursuit and quickly ran back to Gaëlle’s side. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Really.”
Lee helped Gaëlle to her feet. “Sonofabitch! I can’t believe that happened in broad daylight. Where the hell are the police when you need them? And why didn’t anyone stop him?” Lee glared at the people who had jumped out of the way of the fleeing thief rather than tripping him.
“Lee, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay! That fucking bastard got away with your purse. We need to call the police and also get your credit cards cancelled immediately. I hope you weren’t carrying much cash. Jesus H. Christ!”
“Calm down.”
“Calm down? Are you kidding me? You were just robbed. I was a foot away, and I didn’t stop it. Some fucking protection detail I am.”
“Look at me.”
Lee swung her angry gaze from the hapless bystanders to Gaëlle.
“I know it’s your nature, but it’s not your job to protect me.”
“Then whose job is it? Because they’re not very damned good at it.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“That prick got away with your purse!”
“All he got away with was a fifteen dollar purse, some tissues, a brush, and assorted sundries. Nothing valuable. Nothing irreplaceable.”
Lee frowned.
Gaëlle reached into her front pants pocket and came out with a well-worn wallet. “See? Cash and cards still safe. Nothing to worry about.”
“What the hell? Do you always carry your wallet separately?”
“No. When I was dressing after the massage, I got a nudge, so I transferred my wallet from my purse to my pocket.”
“You got a what?”
“A nudge. Look, can we move along? I don’t like being stared at.” Gaëlle took Lee’s arm and steered her in the direction they’d been walking.
By the time they reached the restaurant, Lee was still seething. For the first time in weeks, she ordered a drink, but when it was delivered, she merely toyed with it.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Lee.”
“I’m mad.”
“I know that. Why?”
“Because it isn’t right. Maybe all he took was junk, but he hit you and he robbed you, and he got away with it.”
“And you want to hit him.”
“Damn right! I want to knock his fucking teeth down his throat.”
“You’ve always hated injustice—”
“Don’t. Don’t go there. Not now.”
Gaëlle sipped her wine quietly as Lee calmed.
Finally, Lee looked up to find Gaëlle regarding her serenely. “How can you do that?”
“Do what?”
Lee glared at Gaëlle. “How can you be so bloody peaceful about this?”
“I suffered no injury to person or purse. Why get angry?”
“Because...because...because he’s a low-life bastard, and he won.”
Gaëlle leaned forward and took Lee’s hand. “What did he win? By wronging me, by wronging us, he added to his own bad karma; he didn’t affect mine. Don’t let him affect yours.”
“I just can’t look at it that way. I want him to pay for his crime in this life. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the next life. You’re giving him a pass. What happens when he does this again, and he knocks down some old lady and breaks her hip? What if that old lady never has quality of life again because of what that punk did to her? What if I could’ve saved that old lady by catching the thief today?”
“Remember what I said about ‘what ifs’?”
Lee scowled. “They can drive you crazy.”
“Exactly. Don’t do that to yourself.”
The waiter came to take their order. Lee randomly picked something off the menu. When the waiter departed, she resumed their debate. “Don’t you believe in evil?”
Gaëlle sighed. “I don’t think that purse snatcher was evil. I think he was a young soul who has many lessons to learn, and he will have many lifetimes in which to learn them.”
“That’s not answering my question. Don’t you believe in evil?”
“That’s something I’ve wrestled with for years. I’ve gone from believing in absolute evil to absolutely rejecting it, even as I accepted that many souls do evil things. In recent years I’ve settled somewhere in the middle. I’ve had to reconcile my understanding that all souls emanate from the Source with the abundant evidence that many of those souls have wreaked horrendous evil on the world during their lifetimes. How can it possibly be that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe—the list, sadly, is endless—how can these men be sparks of the Divine just as the Master Jesus was, and yet their atrocities drip blood on the pages of history?”
>
“You mention Jesus. So you’re a Christian? Do you believe in heaven and hell?”
“No and yes.”
Lee shook her head in confusion.
Gaëlle smiled gently. “I’m not a Christian, because, by definition, Christianity excludes non-Christians. I’m not an adherent of any formal religion, because they’re all exclusionary. God...or the Divine...or the Source...or whatever term you’re comfortable using, is the antithesis of exclusionary. His love is limitless and available to all. No religious door pass is needed.”
“And heaven and hell?”
“They’re just words to express concepts. All souls will go to an afterlife that we create for ourselves. Call it what you want—heaven, Nirvana, Summerland. The name doesn’t matter.”
“And hell? Do you think that thief today will go to hell?”
Gaëlle’s face saddened. “He’s in the process of determining where he’ll go. Like pulls to like, so if he doesn’t amend his ways, he’ll find himself in the company of fellow ne’er-do-wells in a rather unpleasant place. But he doesn’t have to stay there for eternity. There is always hope. There is always the potential for spiritual evolution. It’s much better to achieve our personal evolution on this side, but we continue to work on it once we cross over. No soul is ever abandoned. Help is always available for the asking.”
Lee scrubbed her arm across her eyes. “You’re making my head hurt.”
“I’m answering your questions based on what I’ve learned and what I’ve experienced, Lee. You’re perfectly free to accept or reject my observations based on your own knowledge and experience.”
“Fair enough. Well, right now my experience says I hope that bastard rots in hell.”
Gaëlle’s face tightened, but she said nothing.
Lee frowned. “What?”
“Nothing. Ah, here’s dinner. Doesn’t this look good?”
Lee knew an evasion when she heard one, but Gaëlle was right, dinner did look and smell great, so she let it go.
Later that night in the hotel room they’d decided to share, Lee lay awake in her bed, staring at the ceiling as Gaëlle finished up in the washroom.
“Okay to turn the light off?”
Lee grunted in response.
Gaëlle flipped the switch and made her way to her bed.
Lee listened as the sheets rustled and her roommate settled in. Lee quickly heard deep, steady breathing. She was surprised and somewhat envious of how rapidly Gaëlle fell asleep.
A few minutes later Gaëlle asked, “What’s the matter, Lee? What’s bothering you?”
Lee rolled onto her side. There was sufficient dim illumination in the room that she could tell Gaëlle was facing her. “I guess I just don’t understand how you can simply move past being mugged. How can you not be angry? Or outraged? Or any of the many other emotions a normal human being would feel? Doesn’t anything bother you?”
“Of course. Believe it or not, I am a normal human being.”
There was a trace of hurt in Gaëlle’s voice, and Lee instantly regretted her choice of words. “Hey, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant—well, it goes back to what I said earlier. It feels like you’re giving this guy a pass for really bad behaviour.”
Gaëlle sighed. “Have you ever read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables?”
“Geez, segue much? No, but Dana dragged me to see Les Miz on stage. Does that count?”
“Of course. I loved Les Miz, too.” Gaëlle hummed a few bars of I Dreamed a Dream. “I took the kids to see it in Saskatoon in the late eighties. Afterwards, I bought the tape as soon as I could and played it endlessly until Britten begged me to stop. Given her loathing for that play, it rather amuses me that she ended up living in Paris, but I digress.”
“That’s okay. But what does Les Miz have to do with giving that mugger a pass?”
“Since you saw the show, you know that Jean Valjean was treated terribly for his original ‘crime’ of stealing bread to feed his sister’s children.”
“Yup, I remember that. Didn’t he do twenty years or something?”
“Just about. He emerges from prison a deeply embittered man and is redeemed by another man’s kindness.”
“Okay, but I’m not seeing a correlation to our mugger. While he may well have spent time in prison, I doubt it was due to such an injustice.”
“Patience, my friend, I’m coming to it. Despite Valjean’s redemption and subsequent good deeds, he is pursued with a single-minded passion by Inspector Javert.”
“I never really did get that. What was Javert’s problem, anyway?”
“Well, in the book, Valjean isn’t immediately redeemed. He rather mindlessly steals a small amount of money before he completely repents. So there is a warrant out for his arrest. Plus he abandons the yellow passport all ex-convicts are required to carry. In Javert’s eyes, this is more than enough to condemn him and justify years of pursuit.”
Lee yawned. “Sorry, but you’d better cut to the condensed version. It’s been a long day.”
“Okay. So, had Valjean not been originally condemned for what was in reality not that great a crime—after all, he was just trying to keep innocent children from starving, and to my way of thinking that justifies stealing a loaf of bread—then events wouldn’t have led to Javert’s relentless pursuit and the fallout from his obsession.”
“Would’ve made for a very short musical.”
Gaëlle laughed. “True. But here’s my point. Javert was a hardliner, what today we might call a far right-winger. He believed absolutely in the law, with no allowance for the fact that Valjean had suffered a grievous injustice. Javert didn’t have a problem with a man being sentenced to five years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread or for fourteen more years for trying to escape his onerous fate. Javert was all black and white. No room for any shades of grey in his world view.”
“I’m following so far, sort of.”
“Today’s mugger—what do we know about him?”
Lee snorted. “He’s a thief, and he can run like hell.”
“That’s a pretty accurate summary. And it’s also amazingly little to condemn a man on.”
It was Lee’s turn to be hurt. “So you’re calling me Javert?”
“No, not at all. I’m simply making the point that judging someone else’s journey isn’t wise. Perhaps the mugger has also endured injustices. Perhaps everything in his life pointed him in the direction of being a criminal. Maybe there was never a kind bishop who gave him a chance to be anything else.”
Lee kicked off her covers. “That doesn’t give him a free pass to be a thief and prey on others.”
“I’m not saying that society doesn’t have the right to protect itself against such men. I’m saying that on an individual basis, we shouldn’t judge.”
“You mean without knowing the facts.”
“No, Lee. I mean we shouldn’t judge at all.”
“Oh, c’mon. A few hours ago, you cited all the evil done by men like Hitler and Hussein. Granted the mugger isn’t in that category, but you can’t deny we have a duty to recognize evil and condemn it as such. To do otherwise is just freaking insane.”
“If this life is the be-all and end-all, I’d agree. If, instead, you take the view that this life is merely a school, and that each soul is working its way through a particular course of lessons, with circumstances set up in the best way for them to learn those lessons, then who are we to judge another soul’s progress?”
Lee shook her head. “No, no, no. You cannot claim to excuse murderers, rapists, thieves, and dictators just because they’re working or, more likely, not working their karmic lessons. That’s simply not right. You’re inviting even more chaos into the world.”
“No, I’m really not. I said that societies have the right to protect themselves against such people. I’m certainly not advocating the overthrow of laws, police, or courts.”
“Then I’m not getting it.”
“I’m talking about your soul, my s
oul—our choices about how we react to the world around us. When we cross over, we’ll judge ourselves on how we did. We don’t get to judge other souls. So I choose—just for myself—to try and practice that now. I judge myself and how far I fall short of my own expectations. I’m not going to judge that mugger’s soul.”
“What if I had caught him and he was brought up on charges? Would you refuse to testify against him?”
“No, of course not. I live in this world, too. As you so astutely pointed out, who might he hurt next if he’s not caught? I would certainly participate in the mechanics of our social justice; I just wouldn’t condemn his soul to hell. That’s not my right.”
Lee recalled what she’d said in the heat of the moment. “Well, I didn’t mean it literally. I was pissed off.”
“I know. I also know this may well be semantics to you, but I genuinely believe that what we put out comes back to us. However satisfying it might feel in the instant, sending out such violent negativity is not healthy for a soul.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I can agree with you on this.”
“That’s okay. I won’t judge you.” Amusement was clear in Gaëlle’s voice.
Lee grabbed a pillow and heaved it at the other bed.
Gaëlle laughed and batted it aside.
Lee rolled on her back and wriggled deeper under the covers. A few minutes later, she began to drift off. Suddenly, a pillow landed on her face, startling her awake. “Hey!”
“Negativity out, negativity in. I’m just saying.”
Chapter 11
“Dale! Oh, Lee, there he is.”
Lee smiled at the excitement in Gaëlle’s voice. All the while they’d been standing outside the gate, waiting for Dale, Gaëlle had been growing more anxious by the moment.
It wasn’t difficult to pick out which arriving passenger was Gaëlle’s son. There was a distinct family resemblance, though Dale had a much deeper tan, despite his mother’s hours in the sun.
Walking the Labyrinth Page 14
