***
“I don’t think I was very nice to you, Vincent. I’m sorry about that,” I said.
“Stop it, already.” Vincent looked me in the eye. “Do you think it matters one tiny, tiny bit in the grand scheme of things? You teased me a little, but you paid attention to me, and you helped me get through.”
“I just remember giving you a bad time.”
“No, man—you helped me with inspections, and cleaning my rifle, and my sloppy uniform. Don’t you remember? You got me squared away all the time.”
“I don’t remember all that, but I was probably covering my own behind somehow.”
“No, Somerset, you were all right.”
“Well, it’s nice to hear you say it, anyway. Wow…Private Rosario…I can’t get over the change in you. Is there a wife in the picture?”
Vincent finally looked up at his boy, still jumping back and forth across the boulders. “She left us a long time ago. She said I was getting too fat. Do you believe it?” He laughed after that, just for a second. “I wish she could see me now, but she didn’t make it.”
“She’d be proud of you, Vincent,” I said, “Maybe she makes it out.” I was hopeful but not optimistic.
He looked sideways at his son. “Maybe.”
“My wife left me, too, but it was all my doing,” I offered.
“No, she didn’t…not you, Somerset!”
“Yeah, she did. What a couple of schmucks, huh?” I said.
“Yeah, a couple of schmucks,” he said.
***
Thicker crowds hurried past us along the highway. Many were still hitching rides, hopeful to catch some daylight in the great city, but it was already too late in the day and even the vehicles wouldn’t make it before nightfall.
“Will you walk with us?” asked Vincent.
“I’d like that,” I said.
Vincent gathered his son, who skipped ahead while we walked together for a few miles, talking and laughing about the Old Earth, the Army, the guys we knew. We remembered PFC Rocklin, who needed a place to stay after his discharge and made us padlock him in a vacant room with a big cup so he’d have somewhere to pee. This, so he wouldn’t be discovered when they cleared the barrack rooms for morning assembly. And Private Ryder, a tall blond kid, who robbed houses in Philadelphia before joining and was blamed every time something turned up missing. There was Private First Class Reed, whose feet stunk like cat food, so bad nobody would bunk with him. And Sergeant Kyle from Oregon, with his huge head and torso, and skinny, skinny legs, wanting to fight with everybody all the time because he was some kind of All-American wrestler in high school or something. Then there was Private Lowe, slyly unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his trouser fatigues while he stood conversing, uncomfortably close. He’d work his pants and boxer shorts below his knees, until his Johnson was hanging out an inch from your own crotch. He’d continue to tell story after story just to see how long it took you to notice. When you finally did, and reacted by jumping back a few feet, screaming at him, or smacking the son of a gun, old Lowe would fall over laughing for about a half hour.
They were good guys, all of them. None of us ever made it out of Fort Sill. The Gulf War was over before we even finished training. We all thought we wanted to go, but instead we spent two years training and hanging round the fort. That’s when I gave up on real soldiering and became the older frat brother in a platoon full of teenagers.
***
The Gulf War started after Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, decided he didn’t have enough people in his own country to torture, rape, and murder, so he decided to invade his neighbor Kuwait. George Bush, the president at the time, gathered a coalition of other nations to help liberate the tiny country and to drive Saddam and his army back to Bagdad. Playing politics, Bush and the other leaders allowed Saddam to remain in power and to continue his reign of terror against his own countrymen.
Later, his son, George W. Bush, would also become president of the United States, sending an army himself into Iraq. He told the American people that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction and needed to be taken out. He was mistaken. By the time U.S. troops pulled out, a half million people were dead.
Why did he do it? Critics said the president wanted the oil in Iraq. They also believed his vice president, Dick Cheney, put him up to it to make a fortune off military contracts for the companies he was in bed with. Others said he wanted to finish what his father started. And some said he simply hated Saddam and wanted to take out the fiend.
What was the answer? Demons told him it was a good idea. They were messing around again.
***
We reached a clearing along the road where a herd of deer frolicked on the other side of a stream. Vince Junior asked his father if he could play with them. Vincent looked toward the sun, which was getting pretty low on the horizon. “Might as well,” he said. “I don’t think we can make it before dark anyway.”
“Thanks, Dad.” The boy ran through the clearing and right over the stream without creating so much as a ripple. The deer looked up, and for a moment, I thought they might run, but they began a dance of excitement, circling the boy and playing happily.
“It’s beautiful; he’s beautiful,” I told Vincent.
“Yeah,” he said, and he paused. “He never knew his mother. He was just a baby when she left. She hated me. She never wanted to get pregnant. She got mixed up with some bad people, druggies and the like. A lot of it was my fault. We used to party all the time. But I wanted to quit after he was born. She kept it up. It was hard after she left, but it changed me. I stopped being a slug. I took care of myself. More importantly, I picked up a Bible and began going to church again. I used to go when I was a kid. I don’t know why I stopped. It was so amazing coming back. Most people didn’t understand what it could do. I gave it all up to Him—all the worry, all the fear, all the ugliness I had in me…all the weight. I let it go, but I couldn’t have done it without my boy.” He looked at his son running freely with the herd. “That’s why I’m here, because of him.”
“I’m proud of you, Vincent. I’m not sure I ever gave it all up to Him,” I said.
“You must have,” he said.
“I don’t know. You ever think you don’t deserve to be here?”
“Every day,” he said.
“Yeah.”
***
We sat down near the edge of the clearing and talked some more about our Army days. After a while, Vincent decided to play with his son. He asked me to join them. It would be dark in a half hour, I surmised, and I told him to go ahead, I would be leaving soon anyway.
“Well, goodbye, Somerset.”
“Goodbye, Rosario.”
He saluted and turned, sprinting after his son like an Olympian. I remembered yelling at him during PT one day because he had cost everybody an extra mile on the morning run for being so slow. I was a jerk. Seeing him now brought shame and joy to my heart at the same time.
***
I watched them play awhile longer. It made me smile and think of Sophie. I didn’t like being so far from her. And even though I didn’t get to see her all the time, now that she was an adult, living together with my ex-wife like sisters, living her own life, the years of separation during the Tribulation had taken their toll on my psyche, and I needed her close. I had asked her to come with me, but she told me I needed to go alone the first time. She was right.
Sophie was always right. Sophie was a smart girl on the Old Earth, but here she was some sort of ethereal genius. She had already spent nearly eight years in heaven. Still thirteen when I first saw her again, still my little girl, but different. She reminded me of the angels I’d met, brighter and more loving than most humans, childlike but fiercely and beautifully moral. She knew things instinctively—even back when I first saw her again—things of a spiritual nature, things about heaven and the universe, about God and people, things I would’ve had to dig up at the Hall of Knowledge. One night, a few months after I�
�d arrived, we were lying on the grass in front of her house looking up at the stars, and I asked her what it was like after the Rapture. She didn’t describe it as I expected, as any thirteen-year-old might; she said this:
“I was weightless, Daddy, removed from the pain and the darkness I felt on the Old Earth. It was all there. I could see it, but it meant nothing. There was light coming out of me, so much light, Daddy—much more than now. All the people had so much light and the angels did, too. I could see the light, but it wasn’t that. It was that I could feel the light. There was so much of it. It was in me and around me, Daddy, and I thought it was all the beauty that could possibly be. How tiny, how meaningless, my Old Earth troubles, a dark ball I could hold in my hand or toss into oblivion. But I didn’t. I watched it from afar because I wasn’t quite ready to let it go. But I could have, Daddy…I could have let it go.”
She was teaching me. My dark ball was a great big boulder I carried on my back that I needed to drop before it crushed me. That much I knew; I just didn’t know how. I should have asked her. I had become the child in our relationship. Perhaps I always was. And though it was shameful, I felt only pride for her. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
***
I left Vincent and his young son to continue my journey. As darkness fell, the glow of New Jerusalem grew brighter with each mile, until it felt so close I couldn’t contain my excitement, and I began running as fast as my new body would let me. I suppose I could have run all the way from my shack, but there was a time to run and a time to walk. This was a time to run.
Up and down the low hills I ran. I soon left the highway to follow the glow, darting through yet another valley of orange grass, this one circling a shiny silver lake. I ran beside the lake until I reached the base of a long ridge, which looked to be mostly flat on top. I spotted the trailhead, which led to a series of switchbacks, and I slowed to a fast walk to savor the anticipation now building frantically with every step.
Looking up, all I could see was an intense and massive light that would have blinded an Old Earth pair of eyes. I don’t know how long it took me to reach the top, though it wasn’t long considering the number of switchbacks I’d traversed. But even having climbed so high, I couldn’t see the city because it was below the far edge of the massive ridge.
Not that it made a difference—I was immersed in such a glaring light I could only see my feet now, shuffling carefully toward the other edge. But instead of reaching the edge, I stumbled into a maze of boulders not visible from the bottom. The boulders gave me a break from the light, and my eyes quickly adjusted to the night sky.
Weaving my way through the huge rocks, I began to hear strange sounds. I knew they came from the city, but it wasn’t the clanging, honking, yelling, screaming, screeching, frantic noise of an Old Earth metropolis. This sound was low and smooth, calm and beautiful—more beautiful as I moved closer. It was music, a chorus of angels welcoming the new arrivals.
***
Rays of light pierced the surrounding rocks, and I knew I had reached the last boulder. I paused for just a moment, turned a corner, and beheld the great city for the first time.
28
Nothing could have prepared me for New Jerusalem. It was more spectacular than any had described or I could possibly have imagined. Spread across the great valley below me, which must have stretched fifty square miles, the city seemed to reach the horizon on three sides. The center of the valley, a slight plateau, cradled the giant pyramid, glazed in gold and glass. Its base covered at least five square miles of the plateau, and its peak reached another mile into the sky. Its surface was impossibly smooth, as if somehow lifted from a mold in one piece.
As tall as the giant pyramid was, directly behind it, but a great distance away, a silver skyscraper was stretched so high I couldn’t see even its middle and top at the same time.
Surrounding the pyramid were hundreds of smaller buildings of every shape and size, made from gold, platinum, silver, bright copper, and other metals I could not name, each magnificent in its own right.
A street of gold brick circled the pyramid, more streets jutting from it like spokes in a wheel. Thousands of people milled and moved about, and vehicles of all kinds went to and fro, gliding high and low. Brilliant light came from everywhere, yet no fixture, lamp, or bulb could be seen.
***
I stared in awe for close to an hour, and I could have stood on that ridge for days, but I was also anxious to see what the city had to offer, so finally I looked for a way down.
There were many to choose from. Now I noticed others along the ridge choosing their routes. To my left were elevators, moving at great speeds; just below me, a wide staircase; to my right, large platforms where bus-like transports picked up scores of waiting passengers; and beside those, smaller platforms, scattered hundreds of feet apart, where children leaped like frogs in quick succession down to the valley floor.
Jumping with the children was not an option, and the buses and staircase were extremely crowded, so I went to the elevator and waited my turn. Once inside, I barely had time to blink, when suddenly the elevator came to a halt, and the door slid open at the bottom of the ridge. Now I was nearly eye level with the great city, and it seemed to absorb me just as I absorbed it.
***
All streets seemed to lead to the giant pyramid, like sun rays in reverse. I moved as one with the masses, carried in the current of a slow but determined river of light. The shops and stores lining the streets were mostly empty because the crowd had one intention, to reach the pyramid, now a mere block away, before it closed for the evening.
***
As I mentioned before, the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by demons posing as gods. New Jerusalem was a replica of the City of Heaven from where the fallen angels had been exiled hundreds of thousands of years before. Giza was their attempt at recreating part of that city. And though they managed to build an amazing structure, they failed miserably. Theirs was but a child’s clay model in comparison to the monolithic brilliance of the Great Pyramid. The demons knew they had fallen short with Giza, but it was their way of thumbing their noses at God, letting Him know the Earth was their kingdom. And in a way it was, for a while anyway.
***
But now it belonged solely to God, and it was glorious. I was humbled again, and I felt my smallness, and felt blessed, so blessed to be there—as I knew most of those around me were, because I felt their joy.
***
Yet there were a few—I sensed them—a tiny, unbelievable few, like those from Tent City, who were feeling a twinge, a slight, nearly imperceptible sliver of jealousy. I looked around and I became sad. I began weeping then, weeping for those poor fools. And I saw that others were also weeping. But the few did not notice, and they marched toward the pyramid with their germ intact.
***
Vehicles circled to view the Great Pyramid, stopping occasionally to drop passengers. I continued moving toward it. Crowds from every direction converged on pillars marking the entrance. Like some opulent and eclectic Halloween party, the crowd wore clothing from every period of the Old Earth. I reached the steps below the pillars and continued with the flow of glowing bodies, moving past pillars and under an enormous gold archway engraved in ancient Aramaic. It was John 3-16: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
***
I could read it because I could read, speak, and understand all languages. I could read, write, and speak fluent Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, French, and Russian as well. I was also fluent in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Nepali, Somali, Romanian, Wu, Xiang, Fula, and hundreds more. I wasn’t extra smart or special or anything. Everyone here could do it—an added bonus of our new bodies.
***
Once inside, we passed through a long tunnel leading to the center of the pyramid, a vast open space. On the opposite wall there hung a crucifix
carved in gold and measuring nearly four stories. On either side, only slightly smaller and carved out of multi-hued marble slabs, were hung the Stations of the Cross. Looking up, I could not see the ceiling, only elevators speeding into blackness.
Nobody in our group went directly to the elevators, but like me, they studied in awe the magnificent carvings: Jesus is condemned, Jesus carries His cross, Jesus falls, Jesus meets His mother… These carvings were like nothing seen on the Old Earth, not in any cathedral, not in the Vatican itself. They seemed to breathe, to speak somehow, and the intense detail brought most, including myself, to tears, and I cried for the second time that evening.
I didn’t know exactly what the others were feeling, but I knew it must have been something like I felt. It was like my own daughter was going through Christ’s ordeal, and I couldn’t bear it. I was overwhelmed, and along with many others, collapsed to my knees with heartache.
***
There were hundreds of wooden benches set back in small vestibules where people sat collecting their thoughts. Other groups headed toward the elevators. More came through the entrance and the tears continued.
I stayed, crouched on the floor, for some time. I thought I knew pain. I thought I knew sacrifice. I knew nothing.
***
Not everyone was hysterical. Some had been here before and some had seen their own children suffer and die; their bodies knew well the pain, and they comforted the others. A kind woman put her arm around my shoulder and led me to one of the benches. I immediately felt better.
Her name was Umut; I knew it meant hope. Umut told me she was from Turkey, that two of her children were murdered in front of her. She said she cursed God and tried to kill herself by cutting her own throat. Some nuns found her and patched her up. Umut woke up in the back of a church. She told me she hated God. And for a long time, she still wanted to kill herself. She couldn’t handle the pain. But the nuns prayed for her and told her to pray for peace and understanding. She resisted at first, but they were insistent. They told her that time was a gift from God, that time would ease her pain. They were right. As the pain subsided, Umut prayed more and more, until she came to an understanding. It was the only understanding she needed. It was this: her children were with God and they were happy.
What the Hand: A Novel About the End of the World and Beyond Page 29
