“A curved wall,” I respond.
“Indeed. And the landing we stand inside of?” He points to the large circumscribed circle on the ground where future steps, that are part of the wall system we are building, will land.
“It is to be a world unto its own,” Samuel says, repeating Manuel, Sr.’s words, “a tiny universe used for gatherings and dining in the garden. A world with a continuous edge and no corners, set into the natural landscape. It will be a small sanctuary of simple order within the complexity of mother nature.”
“I said that?” our teacher asks.
“Almost verbatim,” I confirm.
Just then Manuel, Sr.’s phone rings and he answers it. I hear a diesel horn honk from the street level that is multiple stories above the backyard where we work. Manuel speaks for a minute then hangs up. “Our delivery has arrived. Time to haul cement.”
His son beams at the prospect. “All right!” he says enthusiastically. For him, it’s a chance to get away from the tedium of laying brick, of doing one at a time, carefully, again and again. He drops the wheeled mortar raker on top of the partially finished wall and sets off up the hillside to the gate at the street. Samuel and I are less enthusiastic.
Manuel, Sr. sees the lack of joy in our faces and says, “Don’t worry, men. I made a point of ordering 60-pound bags for you instead of the heavier 90-pound bags. I didn’t want you hurting yourself climbing up and down the hillside.”
He leads us up the hill to where a flatbed truck maneuvers to offload pallets of bags of concrete at curbside. Once the pallets are unloaded, Manuel, Sr. pulls the plastic wrap from the first pallet and we each grab a sack and start the long process of carrying them down into the backyard hillside garden and then walking back up for the next one. We start around 9 am and finish at 4 pm, working almost non-stop, taking breaks for water and snacks every now and then, but mostly we are a human conveyor machine until the end.
“A job well done,” Manuel, Sr. says, surveying the bags that have been restacked on pallets at the bottom of the hill. “Get a good night’s sleep and be back at 7:30 am tomorrow to lay more brick. It will be a nice break for the three of you from all of this hauling of cement bags.”
I can’t think about tomorrow. My back is aching and my legs feel like lead. I just want to take a shower and eat and fall asleep in front of the television. But Samuel reminds me Kinshasa is cooking tonight and my appearance is mandatory.
“No. I can’t make it,” I say with fatigue. “I just want to lie down.”
“Not allowed, David. You do not want to disappoint her. She has some big thing planned for everyone. Tell me you aren’t hungry.”
“I could eat and eat,” I tell him, “but I don’t know if I’m ready for the lecturing tonight.”
Samuel slaps me on the back. “You’ll survive.”
We climb into his pickup and drive with the radio on full blast, too loud to talk, which I assume is what he wants. When we arrive at our houses next door to each other, I see three chopped Harleys parked in front of his house. “Company?” I inquire.
“Friends of Kinshasa, dinner guests for tonight. My parents invited them. Looks like we might be late. Hurry up and shower and get back here. It’s no fun without you.”
I hop out of the truck, swing through my house, announcing myself and letting my parents know I’m eating over at Samuel’s again. I take a quick shower, slip on clean clothes and let my parents know I’m leaving. When I walk into Samuel’s house I am immediately taken with the odor of heavenly prepared food. Starving, I head past the assemblage of people in the living room, ignoring them and moving right for the kitchen where I find Kinshasa dressed in a red apron, a loose black housedress, and a red bandana wrapping her hair. She is barefoot as usual. She gives me only a cursory glance and then orders me to take a plateful of hors-d'oeuvres into the living room full of people. I pop one in my mouth before I pick them up and smile immediately. “Delicious,” I pronounce.
She swats me with a ladle and says, “For them. Make sure you come back for more. I need your help.”
“Yes Massa,” I say. “At your beck and call, Massa Kinshasa,” as I make a quick exit. When I turn to go back into the living room, I take a moment to study the crowd. Samuel’s dad is in a quiet conversation with three big black guys who wear typical motorcycle “colors” jackets. Each has a red bandana on his head. One of them is turned so I can read the back of his vest that says, “Sons of Blood.” All three of them wear faded jeans and black leather boots. Off to the side, I see Samuel’s mom laughing it up with three black women who I assume are dates for the men. Two of them wear red bandanas while the third sports a red baseball cap. All three of them wear skintight pants and shirts. I don’t see Samuel anywhere. A Chicano couple is sitting on the couch with their infant. They are somber and seem distressed.
I swoop in among the group, drop my culinary payload off and then hustle back to the kitchen where Kinshasa has more waiting for me.
“Start setting the rest of this stuff on the dining room table,” she orders.
So it goes—me as houseboy and her as slave driver. When Samuel eventually makes his appearance, everyone stops talking. All eyes go to him as he walks to the guest nearest him and introduces himself. This is how it is when Samuel enters a room full of the Chosen. Everyone feels his presence and is struck by it. And this is a room filled with the Chosen. I felt it when I first entered the house. It’s like coming in from a cool outside to a warm familiar—always comforting.
When Samuel shakes hands or makes contact—skin on skin—they always react in the same way. A dreamy look comes into their eyes for just a moment, as if they had a sudden epiphany. They sometimes bow in honor, or kneel, or kiss his hand, but mostly they give him loving bear hugs that linger. That was the case tonight with the three motorcycle guys. Their dates were a little more relaxed and casual, laughing and giving him kisses on the cheeks as well as the requisite lingering hugs.
But the festive mood evaporates when Samuel kneels to the Chicano couple. The woman has tears rolling down her cheeks and the man looks devastated. Their problem is not an uncommon one. They are Chosen, but their newborn child is not. I feel it standing there watching them. Their newborn sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb to my senses. It’s every Chosen parent’s nightmare. Samuel speaks with them in hushed tones, commiserating with them and then advising them on what would be best for them. Everyone in the room knows the couple has to make the decision to give up the baby or face living with and raising someone who is unselected. If they keep the baby, chances are it will end tragically at some later date because we all believe the days of the unselected are numbered. No one knows how soon, but we all know the Chosen have a much better chance of survival in the coming years than the unselected. It is nature’s way of selecting the fittest.
I can’t watch them in their agony. It’s bad enough that being one of the Chosen and being of a group mind, I share their anguish to some extent, but watching makes it worse so I escape into the kitchen.
I’m shaking my head in sadness when Kinshasa sees me. “An unchosen baby,” she says. “I know. I feel for them. Lord, how I feel for them.”
She knows, even though she is not a Chosen person, so I assume it has been spoken of in front of her. Just then a scream comes from the living room followed by three successive gunshots. I don’t have to know what happened because I feel it immediately. It’s all a horror show. Kinshasa rushes past me, pushing me to the side. In the living room, there is a cacophony of yelling and crying with a stifled scream.
I force myself to go into the room even though I know what I’ll find. On the living room couch sits the dead Chicano mother with her head lolled back against the bloody wall behind her. A bullet hole mars her face. In her arms is a still baby with a small bullet hole in its forehead. The Chicano father leans off away from them, his head at an odd angle, his eyes wide open and part of the side of his head a bloody mass. The gun is still in his hand.
Solilquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 12
“My God!” is Messenger’s response to my tale of what I just experienced. “What kind of future are our children in for? Or our children’s children? Or our children’s children’s children?”
I’m struggling to get a fix on the timing of events. Things from David’s life as a child don’t seem all that different from our time. His adult life was only a little more advanced. Yet, it is hard to tell. So I make one more foray into David’s head and come out a little later with a greater picture that I can then lay out for Messenger and Forbes.
“Let’s start by defining the Calling. Those who are unselected have characterized it as a viral infection, or a bacterial infection, or simply a pathogen of unknown origin. It appears to be spread by touch. But what it actually is, is open for debate. Even those who are chosen do not know what it is. What both sides do agree on is that once exposed to whatever it is, some are changed by it while others are completely unaffected. Hence the borrowed saying, ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’
“The calling started before David was born. No one in his time has been able to pinpoint exactly where or when it started. What I can say is when Samuel and his family came back from their missionary trip in the Congo, they were what the unselected would call ‘infected.’ Within a few weeks after their arrival in the States, David and his family were infected as well. They were all now part of the Chosen.
“So now, we need to define what it means to be Chosen. When you are Chosen, it means you have an awareness of others who have also been Chosen. You can feel them, smell them, and even sense them spiritually. If you are in the same room with them, you have an immediate familiarity with them, a sense of camaraderie. When you are gathered as a group of Chosen, like a church gathering, and the group focuses on the life force behind the Chosen, you gain an awareness of other groups of the Chosen around the world. To be Chosen is to be indoctrinated into a family, a worldwide family.
“Within the Chosen, there are those who act as lightning rods for all the Chosen. They take in all of the group mind of the Chosen and consider it and pass along those considerations to others who are like them. They describe them as ‘Messiah class Chosen.’ Samuel was Messiah class. They are not rulers in the ordinary sense; they simply act as wise men or women to the rest of the Chosen. Some seem to have greater insight than others. Samuel, as he grew older, seemed to outshine all the other Chosen of the Messiah class.
“Out of all of this grew the Church of the Chosen. The Chosen went from being informal groups to become a sophisticated mass movement with the survival of the Chosen being their primary goal. To this, they dedicated enormous amounts of money and time to the study of immunology. They went right for the basics—the DNA codes. Their scientists studied the immune repertoire which is in the diversity of all the different DNA codes in a person’s body. They began sequencing and analyzing the repertoires of all Chosen people. They compiled a dictionary of sorts that allowed them to figure out which bit of an immune cell’s DNA matches up with a disease. The enormous amount of information they compiled would have been worthless if they had not also developed the computers to handle it. Enter quantum flip-flop cubits computing, the holy grail of the computer world. Once they developed that, immunization was made infinitely more attainable. A blood sample of a Chosen person was analyzed and, based on the DNA, select vaccinations were able to be administered. The concept of ‘one shoe fits all’ was abandoned and each Chosen person received vaccinations tailored only for them. The Church put into place a system that reached out to all of the Chosen all over the world.
“An unfortunate side effect of this was the Chosen could be carriers, but not be affected by whatever disease they had come in contact with. This is why the unselected accused the Chosen of being the cause of the diseases that were running rampant over the whole world. And there were terrible new diseases that mutated out of old diseases that were wreaking havoc among the unselected. In some cases, there was a 90% kill rate among the unselected. All the Chosen could do was either bury the bodies or incinerate them. The collapse from overpopulation was devastating.”
“Are you saying the Chosen systematically excluded the unselected?” Messenger asks.
“Yes and no. Only the Chosen allowed themselves to be guinea pigs for the initial testing. The scientists couldn’t, by law, experiment on ordinary humans, and animal testing was deemed to be inadequate. Chosen people died in the name of progress. They died willingly for the betterment of the group. But I have to add something I neglected before. A Chosen person is different from an unselected in many ways. Once you are called and selected, a transformation takes place. You are no longer the person you used to be, all the way down to your DNA. Their scientists worked only with Chosen DNA. The dictionary they built did not work for the average unselected. If they had more time and willing unselected people to work with as trial patients, they would most likely have had immunization techniques for the unselected, but the laws across the lands forbade that sort of thing. Their scientists worked outside of the law. They were beholden only to the Chosen, not the unselected who would have used the courts to shut them down and probably imprison them.
“Consequently, the Chosen survived while the unselected died off. Even worse for the unselected, when they decided to turn against the Chosen and start persecuting them, the Chosen were ready. They had placed themselves in most of the crucial positions of power. They defended themselves and it quickly became a life and death matter. First, they protected themselves from disease, and then they protected themselves from the unselected.
At the moment David was removed from his time, they were in the middle of a ‘selected vs. unselected’ war. David was a valued prisoner because of his relationship with Samuel. The unselected had the mistaken notion that Samuel was the head of the Chosen and if they could cut off the head, the body would flounder.”
“David was subjected to terrible torture for not revealing Samuel’s whereabouts. If giving Samuel up would have saved himself and done no harm to the Chosen, why not sacrifice Samuel for himself?” Forbes queries.
“Because even if Samuel were one of the lowliest Chosen, David would not betray him. That’s not who he is,” I tell him.
“So we have a hero in our midst,” Messenger notes.
“It would seem so,” I respond.
“What about their church services?” Forbes asks.
“Yes, when they got together. For David, it was good from the start. People from all walks of life united to honor the life force they believe is in all of us. Some of the congregations would have open confessions, others kept it directed towards prayer. There was no set rule. Each congregation simply adapted parts of other religious ceremonies to make the ceremony their own. There were congregations from all walks of religious belief: Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Moslem. Every belief was blended into the Chosen.”
“And their Messiahs?” Forbes asks.
“Oh yes, there are many of them. It is what they of the Chosen know. From their point of view, Prophets and Messiahs have been with humanity for as long as recorded history. Of course, every religion says their respective Prophet or Messiah had or has a unique relationship with God and their words were or are God’s words. Each religion contends their Prophet or Messiah is the last word on the subject and all others are either outdated or simply false. You are either with them or against them. Unfortunately, wars are waged on those words. Murder, torture, and hatred are part of what all these religions spawned.
“The Chosen believe that even though the religions all have the same goal of uniting the world under their particular belief, they all fail for the same reason. They offer only words that can be perverted, disputed, and disbelieved. In the case of the Chosen, it is entirely different. Once selected, they develop the ability to sense others who have been Chosen. When collected as a group, they bridge the space between each other. They become as one. There is nothing like it with the other religions
. The Chosen believe being chosen is evolutionary and the other religions are merely vestiges of the past.
“Historically, religions have used folk tales to explain life’s mysteries. When science came into conflict with those tales, science was dismissed. With the Chosen, it is the opposite. They work as a group around the world to grow and expand their knowledge of the universe. They are not held back by old beliefs. They build upon each other, not against each other. They shed past beliefs like an animal sheds hair.
“In many ways, they believe they are the new humans. Those who are called and left unselected are the past—the Neanderthals, so to speak, the dinosaurs. They will pass into extinction while the Chosen forge ahead into the future. The Chosen believe it is the way of the life force. It is simple evolution.
“Our time is a different time than theirs. The world will undergo much change between now and their time. Disease will sweep the planet. The Chosen will survive while the unselected will fall to deadly maladies. Population will diminish.
“Because of that, in David’s time, the unselected are striking back in a last ditch effort of fury. They blame the Chosen for their problems. The unselected claim the Chosen intentionally released the diseases. They claim the Chosen are responsible for the havoc wreaked by them.”
I pause and frown. “They do terrible things to the Chosen. David knows this firsthand.”
Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series Page 16
