Deadline

by Randy Alcorn

  There was no mass of tears welling up, just one single tear that worked its way down his cheek in slow motion. He didn’t wipe it away, didn’t even seem aware of it.

  Jake thought of Carly again. Carly, to whom he’d never really given himself.

  The man in the maroon sweater, the mammoth one, was unexpectedly drawn into the forum by something the lawyer said. His voice was just as Jake had anticipated it, deep and rich with a mild country flavor.

  “I had a friend whose child died of leukemia. Only seven years old. It would be awfully hard to lose a child like that, but at least my friend can treasure the memories and tell himself he did what he could to give that child life. He was there for his boy those seven years. And if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t do it differently.

  “But when you’re the one who took the life, not cancer but you, then it’s different. We’ve experienced the Lord’s forgiveness now. We know we’ll see our baby some day. But it’s been a hard road, still is sometimes. I just wish somebody would have told us about it. There was no one outside the clinic when we went there. No one. I see these pictures of prolife people standing outside the clinics now. I’ve never gone back to one since the abortion—I won’t even drive by, those buildings give me the creeps. It’s like the setting for a horror movie or something. But whenever I see these prolifers on the news, I say to myself, Where were you back then? Why wasn’t there somebody to warn us, somebody to tell us the truth? Maybe we would have listened. I don’t know, but I’d like to think we would have.”

  His head was back on the platform of his big palms, face down, propped up by his arms, elbows dug into his huge thighs.

  Dr. Scanlon paused and looked around, as if checking to see if anyone had something to add.

  “Well, Jake, those are the stories, in a thumbnail. I guess it gives you an idea what this is about. Have any questions you’d like to ask?”

  Jake shook his head no, then thought a moment and looked up.

  “Wait. Yeah. Lots of questions. I’d like to know more how you guys come to terms with this. How do you get past the denial? How do you forgive yourself? How do you learn to talk about it? How do you help your wife, or your ex-wife? How do you overcome that distance from your other child you were talking about?”

  Jake surveyed the room, for the first time really looking in each man’s eyes. “Yeah, I guess I’ve got lots of questions.”

  All the men stayed late, none seemed eager to leave. For the next hour Jake listened to the answers, sometimes scribbling down things that were said, but for the most part his pen hung limp between his fingers. He listened with an interest that went far deeper than journalism, far deeper than the investigation, neither of which, for the moment, occupied his mind.

  “This place is so much more magnificent than earth, and so different. Yet I expected it to be more unlike earth than it is. It’s not as much unearth as it is perfect earth. There’s still a body, but a wonderful body; still a physical world, but not one that confines or imprisons, one that liberates. And there still seems to be a sense of time passing.”

  “You ask much at once,” Zyor responded. “As for time, eternity is neither endless time nor the end of time. It is the transmutation of time. It is all times at once and all places at once, where every time and place is as accessible as goods on a store shelf or books in a library. Our Sovereign is the lamb ‘slain from before the foundation of the world.’ Before time was, all that time would bring existed in the eternal mind of Elyon. And he shares it with his creatures. The accessibility of all times and all places is another reason why heaven must always be the very opposite of boring.”

  It was obvious to Finney that Zyor still hadn’t gotten over his earlier question related to boredom.

  “As to another part of your question, Elyon’s Book speaks of the new heavens and the new earth. ‘New’ does not mean fundamentally different, but vastly superior. Think of your own experience on earth, Master Finney. A new car did not mean a car without a steering wheel, seats and doors and tires. It meant a better version of what you already had. This is a physical world because it was made for you, and you are not only a spiritual but a physical being. The body he made you was not a mistake, but a sovereign design. You do not change your species here—you become all God intended your kind to be. You are not an animal, body without spirit, and neither are you an angel, spirit without body. You are both.”

  Finney raised his eyebrows. Zyor’s comment about being “without body” seemed strange coming from such an imposing body.

  “I take on this body to function in a realm of space and time, to participate in a place made for you. But it is not a part of me. I merely occupy it. Have you noticed how similar this body is to those of my brethren? Or how this body seems different on my kind than yours? It is because I merely inhabit it. It is not part of me. I am spirit capable of taking on body. You, however, are spirit and body integrated into one. That which you take for granted—for instance, inhaling with your body the fragrance of a flower and having it move your spirit—is something I have never experienced, and cannot.

  “You could not bring your old body to this world, for it was unsuited. But you are now clothed in a temporary body that allows you to experience this world, all the while awaiting the reclothing, the merger into your new and eternal body. On earth you did not long to be unclothed, but reclothed. Man’s rebellion against Elyon doomed your old body to decay and death. Your soul was purified through Christ, but your body remained under corruption. Hence you had to experience the unnatural separation from it that is death.”

  “But isn’t the spiritual superior to the physical?” Finney asked. “Doesn’t the physical confine and inhibit the spiritual?”

  “Many believe spirit is good and body is bad, and therefore imagine heaven as the abode of disembodied spirits. But you are human, made to be soul and body in one. Death is an aberration—two things separated that belong together as one. That is why your people await the resurrection, the rejoining of what was meant to be together. You will not be complete until the resurrection, where your soul again merges with body, this time in perfect unity.

  “Elyon promises you a spiritual body. As your physical body allowed you to move and travel and participate on earth, so your spiritual body will allow you to do the same in heaven. The spiritual body is much more than physical, but it is physical: That is why Elyon’s Son, in the prototype resurrection body, walked and talked and ate and was grasped and held by his disciples.”

  “Won’t such a body limit the expression of the soul?”

  “On the contrary. It will liberate it. The soul without the body is not free to participate in the glories of the material worlds Elyon creates at will. That is why I must take on a body here. But to take it on and shed it is very different than being one with it. Hence, your abilities to fully participate in the material world far exceed mine and always will.”

  “I wondered once how our souls would come from the east and west and sit at a table and eat with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Finney said. “I have eaten since coming here, but I have not been hungry. Yet the food was delicious, in a way I would have supposed impossible without hunger. Still, I desired the food, I savored the smell and delighted in the taste, more intense and satisfying than anything I had on earth.”

  “The great banquet feast could not be more spiritual, nor could it be more physical. The two are not at odds. You are free from need here, but you are also free to enjoy what you used to need—food and work and rest and exercise. It is, in a sense never envisioned by the phrase on earth, ‘the best of both worlds.’ Your longings on earth were the hunger pangs that prepared you to forever enjoy the feasts of heaven. Your resurrection body will allow you not simply to behold and appreciate beauty as you do now, but to fully enter it and participate in it, to plumb its very depths. Have you noticed here that you recognize people more from their character than their body?”

  “Yes, from the moment I arrived.”<
br />
  “On earth the body hid the spirit. In heaven the body reveals the spirit. But even on earth you could sometimes see the spirit in the face, could you not?”

  “Yes. In the eyes, especially. You could sometimes see the depth of a person, his love, his compassion, his honesty, his suffering, his thirst for justice or longing for peace. Or his shallowness, selfishness, greed, dishonesty, hostility, indifference. Someone said the eyes are a window to the soul.”

  “Yes. Here it is more transparent. The whole body is a window to the soul. And because the souls have been purified, what you see in someone is often unique, but never frightening, always compelling.”

  “In my mother I see the beauty of age, in my daughter the beauty of youth. But how can this be? There’s no age here. Is there?”

  “Agelessness does not eliminate ages, rather it embraces all ages. Every age anyone ever was on earth, he is now, here, to someone. Your mother’s mother sees in her the sort of youthfulness you see in your daughter. Your mother sees you as a boy she might want to take into her lap, your daughter sees you as an older man whose lap she might want to crawl up in. They are capable of seeing you in other ways, and will, but each cherishes you in special ways. This is not an illusion, it is real. Everyone is to everyone else their true selves, yet each person will focus on an aspect of others most familiar or fascinating, that means the most to them. Everyone sees truly and accurately, but not identically.”

  “But I am still a man here, and everyone I see is clearly male or female, more distinctly in fact than on earth. I had thought perhaps there would be no gender here. I had read that we would all be…like angels, like you.”

  Zyor looked immensely surprised at this.

  “You are like us in that you do not marry and bear children here. But as for your being a man, what else would you be? Elyon may unmake what men make, but he does not unmake what he makes. He made you male, as he made your mother and wife and daughters female. Gender is not merely a component of your being to be added in or extracted and discarded. It is an essential part of who you are. You were not a neuter soul in a man’s body. As you were a man in every cell of your body, so you were and are a man in every facet of your soul, for the two are ultimately designed as one. Your sexuality is innate. Manhood pervades your very being, just as womanhood pervades Susan and Jenny and Angela. Elyon redeems fallen maleness and fallen femaleness, but he does not ignore or dispose of what he himself designed.

  “Part of the grandeur of heaven’s music is the melody of the female set to the harmony of the male. No one here will ever resist or reject the gender within him. What woman would want to be other than woman when her womanhood is the very glory of Elyon? And what man would want to be other than man when Elyon intended for him to be nothing else? The multifaceted dimensions of Elyon’s character are fully reflected neither in the man nor the woman, but only in the two together. The two genders shall never war against each other here, any more than hydrogen would war against oxygen in a vain attempt to be water by itself. Both are redeemed and completed, both will find in the other the perfect complement Elyon intended from the beginning. You experienced a foretaste of that mystical union on earth, in your marriage with Sue. It prepared you for a dimension of heaven many come unprepared for, never having known the sacred dimensions and distinctions of male and female.”

  Zyor’s powerful body suddenly seemed far less awesome than that which would one day be Finney’s.

  “You shall be all man was meant to be, in full strength and full sensitivity, in full power and full compassion, never one sacrificed for the other, each fully realized in the other. You shall be what man was meant to be, and what he has yet been only once, in the perfect spiritual body that is Elyon’s Son. Your resurrection body will be the body and soul of a man. It could be nothing else, master Finney, for by the decree of none less than God himself you were, are, and ever shall be a man.”

  Jake stopped at Morely’s Market on his way home from Scanlon’s office. While dozens of cars circled the front parking lot in search of a space, he smugly pulled around the back of the building. He stopped in his favorite parking place, unmarked by yellow lines or anything else.

  Morely had given Jake night parking privileges in the back where deliveries were made during the day. At night there were just a few employee cars, most of which he recognized, maybe all but the brownish late model Volvo. The back of the store was still, dark and quiet, an eerie contrast to the perpetual motion, glaring headlights, and commotion at the front of the building. Jake hopped out into the darkness, using as his beacon the store light shining through the wired window of the employee entrance. He carefully climbed the concrete stairs, then pushed the button by the door. The back room manager on duty peered through the window, smiled, and let Jake in.

  Jake bought his usual coffee, turkey pot pies, cereal, diet pop, eggs, soup, crackers, and a few other miscellaneous items. As he shopped, he pondered the day. What more could be crammed in it? He looked forward to getting back home, wrestling with Champ, and maybe writing in his journal to help crystallize his thoughts. Jake paid at the front of the store, then turned and headed to the back again, a plastic grocery bag in each hand. Congratulating his good fortune in avoiding the zoo of the front parking lot, he stepped out the back door, pausing a moment to introduce his eyes to the darkness, then slowly stepped down the stairs.

  Without warning he noticed out of the corner of his eye a shadowy image, eerily like the Statue of Liberty. He felt a stunning blow to the back of his neck. As he crumpled to the asphalt, he heard the crash of soup cans and the cracking of eggs. He turned his face toward the source of the blow, the back of his head still on the ground. Jake looked up at his stocky assailant who appeared, as best he could tell in the shadows, to be wearing a ski-mask.

  The man’s strong arms raised something over his head again, something long and thick—it appeared to be a baseball bat. The apparent target was Jake’s head, which lay vulnerable on the bare asphalt. Jake braced himself, but the man seemed in no rush to finish him off, giving him time to think, I’m going to die. And then a corollary. But I’m not ready.

  Why was his attacker hesitating? Each second allowed Jake time to regain his wits. His neck and shoulders throbbing, he lay perfectly still, to give no hint there was any fight left in him. He readied himself to move his head out of the bat’s path, which seemed now more like an executioner’s ax, the ski mask being the modern equivalent to the medieval executioner’s black hood. Jake visualized catching the attacker off balance, then rolling toward his legs and tripping him to the ground where he would take him on in a fair fight, one he could hope to win. The bat was poised for what seemed an eternity. Did the masked man have second thoughts? Or was he savoring the smell of murder as he might a fresh cup of coffee before drinking? Suddenly the thick arms, fully extended, tilted slightly back and the broad chest inhaled. The ax was about to fall. Jake tensed, knowing that making his move—if indeed he could move—too fast or too slow would be equally deadly.

  The surface between the assailant’s feet and Jake’s head suddenly exploded like a Claymore mine, followed by a rush of deafening sound. Jake instinctively closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. He felt sharp edges of splintered asphalt cutting into his exposed flesh.

  When he opened his eyes, ears still ringing from the explosion, he saw the stocky man running, like a panicked animal, still clinging to his bat, flailing away at his side. In a moment the darkness swallowed the shadowy figure, and the two became one.

  Suddenly another figure was at his side. A hand reached down and pulled him up, rougher than he could have wished. Jake’s head swam. He saw a hand only a foot from his face. The hand held a gun, pointing into the darkness. It was a huge piece, a .44 Magnum.

  “You okay, Woods?”

  “What?” The voice seemed familiar. “Mayhew?”

  Jake was confused a moment, then realized he was still being followed by the FBI. Agent Mayhew had dra
wn duty.

  “I could have nailed the creep on the dead run, but the Bureau frowns on shooting people in the back, even when they’ve tried to waste somebody. You’re lucky I was on your tail, Woods.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Mayhew. I really mean it. I owe you.” Jake felt a little guilty for his previous hostility toward Mayhew and Sutter and the Feds.

  Mayhew seemed uncomfortable with the whole thing and obviously wasn’t as trained in aiding victims in crisis as he was at using his gun. “Want a ride home? Need to go to the hospital?”

  Jake moved his neck around, feeling the back of his shoulders with his hands. “No. A hot shower sounds good though. Maybe you could help me pick up my groceries?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Mayhew looked painfully out of place collecting dented soup cans and sorting out cracked eggs from uncracked, but seemed to be a good sport about the whole thing.

  Once Jake and his groceries were in his car, Mayhew said, “I’ll follow you home.”

  Jake drove home very slowly, applying the brakes quickly with every shifting shadow. It embarrassed him, knowing Mayhew saw how edgy he was. After parking his car in the apartment lot, he waved and nodded thanks to Mayhew and headed inside. He knew Janet would have insisted he go to the hospital, but that wasn’t Jake’s style. Janet—what made him think of her again?

  As Jake turned the key in the lock he noticed Mayhew, across the street, settle in to the front seat of his car just like it was his living room. The night was hopefully over for Jake, but Mayhew was still on duty, watching over him sleeplessly.