City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  Then he stops and I nearly bump into him, and there’s anger in his voice. “But you think of all the people who got burnt up anyway, when the Babylonians came — and what did they do? They weren’t saying the forbidden name of God.”

  We move in the dark, more slowly, past the less famous ruins. “Over there was a market,” Naftali tells me. He’s pointing in the dark, so I can’t see anything but shadows, caused by the light from the few campfires people have made behind the remnants of walls. Everyone’s huddled up, trying to keep themselves warm. “People would sell food there—cloth, oil for cooking, or for lamps. Sandals. My father and mother…”

  He stops and there is a long pause. I can hear the sniffles and sobs he’s trying to cover up. I won’t try to ask him what the matter is, or even hold him, if he doesn’t want me to.

  “My father and mother sold things there, too,” he says at last, and then he’s moving again and I try to keep up with him in the dark, more by sound now than anything else.

  Then ahead I see it: another campfire, the biggest one, nearly a bonfire, flames going high in the sky, and more voices, at least one of them occasionally shouting. I walk behind Naftali toward the fire, tripping a couple of times over pieces of what used to be homes, slipping on the ice, and then climbing up over the rocks that have been piled together the way kids might do it if they wanted to make a fort.

  On the other side of the fort, I see Jeremiah again, the one who told that crowd of people to back off and let me get help for Thea. He’s yelling at everyone around the fire now, but in his case, it’s not quite like he’s mad: “This is God’s promise: in this place, which you say is in ruins, with no joyous soul in these desolate streets of Jerusalem, with animals roaming free of their husbandmen, in this forlorn place there will again come the sounds of joy and gladness! The voice of groom and bride, the wail of newborn babe, the voice of those giving praise to God — all will rise! They will bring new offerings to the temple of God, and these new offerings will find favor with the Lord. And the Almighty will restore them to the land, to this land, as in days of old!”

  He paces as he speaks, and everyone watches him.

  “Amen!” someone shouts. The only someone I know in the whole crowd, someone who also wouldn’t be born for another couple thousand years or more: Andrew Jackson Williams.

  He’s listening to Jeremiah preaching, raising his arms up to the sky, yelling out words and praise in English, while people around him keep sneaking glances over at him, wondering who or what this other stranger really is, not realizing he will be quoting Jeremiah centuries from now, for crowds of people that gather around him.

  Maybe, for Andrew Jackson, this is even a kind of vacation. After all, all he has to do was listen.

  “Him,” I tell Naftali. “He’s the one I need to see.” I point to A.J. and Naftali walks with me, already rubbing his hands and holding them out; it’s warmer by the fire.

  “But these shall be offerings of praise!” Jeremiah keeps yelling. “Not burnt flesh! These shall be covenants of the heart.”

  “He was always my favorite preacher,” A.J. says to me at last, after I’ve been standing next to him. He hardly even seems surprised to see me.

  “Boy, have I come a long way to find you,” I tell him. “And I think you’d better give me some answers. More and more lives are depending on it.” I look at his face through the flames. He looks right back at me, nods a little bit, then points back out in the darkness, towards Jeremiah, who’s still pacing at the edge of the light.

  “Jeremiah strips everything right down to the bone and gets down to business. He puts everything that happens right there in front of you, where you can almost touch it, the good and the bad, and then it’s up to you which one you take” — A.J. taps his chest, over his heart — “right in here. Where the answer belongs.” Then he lets out a big sigh. “Of course, that means you have to have an answer.”

  “I need to have an answer,” I tell him. “I’ve lost my mom, my dad’s almost a prisoner of the government now, I’ll never have a chance to grow up like a normal kid, and all I do is move through history watching grownups burn down cities and start wars. And you always seem to be there. Why? Why are you here? Did you come back to stop slow pox? And if you did, how were you planning to get back?”

  A.J. just watches the fire dance for moment, and doesn’t say anything.

  “Can you just tell me what’s going on, and why my life is so mixed-up with yours? And what’s with this ‘Rebuilder’ name, anyway?”

  Naftali is watching both our faces like it’s a Ping-Pong match. Is Ping-Pong invented yet? At last, A.J. decides to talk.

  “I’m still lookin’ for some of those answers myself, boy. Never thought I’d find myself back here, livin’ out God’s word directly in the Bible. Don’t know if I’m worthy of bein’ in such company. But I don’t know anything about this ‘Rebuilder’ business.”

  “There’s someone who fits your description…who suddenly appears in certain editions of the Bible,” I tell him. “That’s one reason I came back. You seemed to messing up history even more than it already is. Everyone’s scared.”

  He shakes his head. “Then it’s the exact opposite of what I wanted to do,” he says. “I just wanted to vanish. But first I wanted to help your father.”

  “How? Help my father how?”

  “Lotsa answers, son. And we either have all the time in the world, or it’s running out faster than we imagine. I can’t tell just yet. But let’s try starting at the beginning. The path that hooks both of us together also runs through these two.” And then he reaches into his pocket, and pulls out an old photograph — not the microchip kind with different scenes or three dimensions on it, but the old flat-paper type, with just one picture on it that doesn’t move at all.

  But this one doesn’t need to move to keep my eyeballs focused, to almost knock me out, or at least to surprise me more than stepping into the pages of the Bible to have a talk with A.J: It’s a picture of my mom, standing in an old-fashioned dress, from like when Mickey Mantle still played with the Yankees. The kicker is she’s with Rolf Royd, the Dragon Jerk kid, except that he’s a Dragon Jerk grownup in this one. And even worse, his arm is around her.

  And standing next to them is Andrew Jackson Williams.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eli: Uproot and Pull Down

  583 B.C.E.

  I need to ask A.J. about this picture, need to find out what’s been going on with my parents, with my mom, with the whole history of DARPA, but I haven’t gotten the chance, since Jeremiah keeps preaching, shouting out, and A.J. is constantly distracted, listening to him.

  “When was that picture taken?” I ask. “What was she doing?” I reach for him, but he steers my hand away and points toward the campfire. “Shh, son. In a minute. Jeremiah’s catchin’ the spirit now.”

  Apparently, the “spirit” makes you yell a lot: “God said to me, I chose you before I created you in the womb! There is no escape for you! The words you are given will hound you, till you give them voice! — words that will uproot and pull down! Just as He said that our people not only uproot, pull down, and destroy — but eventually replant. And rebuild.

  “These are the words, the visions, I’ve been given. They do not come from me. The come from the Holy Source, from which all life springs. They come from the God we were meant to follow!”

  Jeremiah paces around the fire as he talks. It’s clear and cold this evening, people pull rags and shawls and pieces of whatever they can find over their shoulders, but it’s not enough, and most of them shiver. Most, but not Jeremiah, who has a thin, rough rag over his bony body and bare shoulders, and a sandal on one cracked and scabby foot.

  On the other foot, there’s only bare skin, but it’s tough and scabby too, like alligator hide.

  Naftali raises his hand, like he’s in a classroom. Once he realizes Jeremiah isn’t looking at anyone in particular, but gazing out into the dark as he talks, he just asks hi
s question out loud.

  “We’ve been trying to replant, but all this cold weather came. Will God help us?”

  “Does God play tricks?” Jeremiah asks in return. In the firelight, his eyes seem even sadder now. “You see the hand of the Almighty all around you. Nothing is hidden; everything that has come to pass is in plain view.”

  “But what about the food?” someone else asks, nodding toward Naftali.

  Jeremiah sighs. “Before we can plant, we need to gather seeds. When this snow passes, you can go to the fields the Babylonians put to the torch. Sweep away the ashes. Gather what survives. Raise it up, and let it grow.”

  “Is this another of God’s lessons you’re giving us?” a woman asks. She’s the one who said Thea was Gehenna-marked.

  “No, I’m telling you where to plant crops. This lentil bread should be finished cooking in the fire soon. We will share it when it’s ready.”

  “But then these lentils will be gone!” the woman says.

  “Have you forgotten what time of year it is?” Jeremiah says wearily. “It’s Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Time of think of winter crops, not spring. And time to ask forgiveness for what we’ve done, what we’ve been. Time to ask for blessings.”

  “How? With sacrifices? We have no animals, no offerings to take the temple! We have no more sacrifices to make!” the first man shouts.

  “We’ll sacrifice you!” the Gehenna-woman shouts. “You brought on this misery, with all your talk!”

  The rest of the crowd shouts their agreement and moves to surround Jeremiah. It isn’t just me or A.J. or Thea — anyone can become a “stranger” at a moment’s notice, I guess, when everyone is so scared. And if everyone else is scared, it’s hard not to be that way yourself — whether it’s the middle of war or sickness or just feeling lost and alone. And then you don’t think real clearly, and how do you ever change your situation?

  I’m working real hard on trying not to be scared right now.

  “I just wanted some food,” Naftali says in a quiet voice. I think I’m the only one who hears him. Naftali has even more-basic concerns.

  A.J. has been tending the bread, or what’s called bread. The loaves are like big, thick pancakes, and A.J. reaches into the edge of the fire and rips off a piece.

  “Here!” he says, speaking in Hebrew, holding up the piece of bread. “Here is your sacrifice! A piece of the meal we were to share!”

  The crowd stops, looks from Jeremiah to A.J. A.J. keeps going. “We’ll offer it up to God! We’ll ask for every blessing for what we do!”

  “We don’t have an altar,” the Gehenna-woman says. “We don’t even have a temple.”

  A.J. looks around, like maybe they have a point, but then he turns back to the group. “Then we’ll make one, right here.”

  And he sets the bread down, then starts picking up big rocks from the rubble.

  Naftali’s holding up a torch and following A.J., so he can see what he’s doing, which earns him bites of the lentil loaf A.J. was cooking.

  It seems Jeremiah might be saved, for now. Everyone else is standing around, watching A.J. work.

  I’m helping, too, picking up smaller rocks and carrying them. I’m starting to understand how he got the Rebuilder name. But I also want to talk to A.J., to ask him more about that picture.

  Though right now, all he wants to talk about is the temple.

  “This was the great temple of the early Israelites, son. People would come from all over the country for all the great holidays, like Passover, and the Jewish New Year.”

  “Rosh Hashanah?”

  “Yeah. They were tribal people, mostly, so they’d bring something to offer up to their god.”

  “The sacrifices everyone’s talking about?”

  “Right. Something to let the heavens know you appreciate what you have, and if it wasn’t too much trouble, you’d also appreciate not starving to death in the new year, or for no one to get sick, your kids to be taken care of, all the usual things people want. Hand me that rock.”

  He takes a flat stone I’m holding, and tries to lay it across the other rocks, like a tabletop. He shakes his head. “Too small.”

  “So, since the temple was destroyed…”

  “…they can’t talk to God in the ways they’re used to. Jeremiah was talkin’ about getting blessings for these new crops they want to plant.”

  “Do hungry people have time for blessings?”

  A.J. doesn’t answer that. “I need to find some more rocks,” he says.

  I go with him, and Naftali follows us with the torch.

  “I really need to know more about that picture,” I tell A.J. “You have me all scared that something happened to my mom.”

  “She tried to do some good, son. But the story of that picture really begins with our buddy, Rolf Royd. He came back from his trip through the Fifth Dimension, showing up somewhere in America, in the 1950s, a few years after World War II. That turned out okay for him, because some of the new government agencies, especially the spy agencies that America had created, decided a few of those Nazis knew things that could still be useful. The German rocket scientists, too — we gave ’em jobs workin’ for us.”

  “Scientists? Like the one Thea and Clyne met in that big cave, with the factory in it?”

  “Yeah — Wernher von Braun. Give me a hand lifting this rock up. Yeah, him and other ex-Nazis. But not just building rocket ships. Some of ’em got work with our spy outfits, teaching them what they knew.”

  “What did they know?”

  “How to keep track of people. How to keep your citizens from doin’ things you don’t want ’em to do. It was called Operation Paperclip. Hey, this one look big enough to you?”

  It’s flat enough and big enough to go between those other stones he set up. But it looks heavy. Still, if I help him, it keeps him here, and keeps him talking. “I think so.”

  “Then help me take it over there.” He grunts a bit, but continues his story without me asking. Maybe to take his mind off how heavy the rock is. “Yeah, Operation Paperclip. We took those Nazis right into our own government, because we thought another big war was brewin’, with the Russians.” He shakes his head. “Nobody can really think straight during a war.”

  No kidding. During World War II, there was another secret project we both knew about: Project Split Second — the time-travel research my mom was working on with Samuel Gravlox and his team in San Francisco. She tried to slow the work down, so that time travel wouldn’t be invented too soon and turned into some kind of weapon that might mess up the world even more.

  “After the explosion at Fort Point, which you were part of, they moved their operations to a secret base in the Oklahoma panhandle,” A.J. explains, moving slowly with me as we keep dragging the rock. “Just like the work on atomic bombs, they didn’t slow down their time-travel research just because one war was over. The idea was, the next war would be even more fierce, more destructive.” He shakes his head again.

  “Your mother stayed on the Split Second team, Eli. She tried to be a voice of reason. That’s what got her in trouble.”

  “‘Trouble’?”

  “Accused of being a peacenik, a communist, a spy. Whatever they could accuse her of, because she wanted everyone to think twice about the kinds of weapons we were buildin’. But they had somebody else who knew about time travel, knew how it could work. Someone they decided could run the Split Second team, since they were havin’ doubts about your mom.”

  There was a sick feeling in my stomach, like what happens if you eat donuts and ice cream and a big jug of soda pop, all at once. “Rolf?”

  A.J. just nods.

  “He worked with my mom?”

  “Yeah, after the war. He was part of what they called the ‘team.’ His hair was stark white, even though he was still supposed to be a young man.”

  “He really worked with her?”

  “He worked with everybody. Anybody that could make him more powerful. All the way through the 196
0s.”

  “So she’s definitely still alive.” I don’t ask it as a question. I was always too scared to ask the question. Now I’m just relieved.

  “Ready? Heave!” We lift the flat rock and let it crash down on the two big stones A.J. has set up. It stays put, and we have our table.

  “Altar. It’s done, son. The first part of rebuildin’ the temple for these people.” A.J. wipes off his hands and looks at me. “Maybe things can get back to normal, now. As for your mom...”

  “She’s alive, but you haven’t told me where.”

  “She was alive, certainly back then. But I’ve lost track of her.” My stomach gets all queasy again. “That doesn’t mean anything bad’s happened to her! I just wasn’t always able to keep tabs, since I had some of my own problems with Rolf, and with our fine government folk to contend with.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I’m sick and tired of grownups lying to me.”

  Now he puts his hands on my shoulders, and stares at me, straight in the eye. His own eyes don’t quite seem as crazy anymore — just sort of unknowable, like really deep pools. “I ain’t never, ever gonna lie to you, son. That’s one piece of reality you can hang on to forever. And listen, I got a couple more secrets for you to keep. Here’s the first one.” He hands me something, wrapped in paper torn from a book.

  People have already been watching us since we’ve been “rebuilding” part of the temple, trying to understand the English we’ve been speaking the whole time. Now they see the small item he’s about to pass me.

  Even Jeremiah, who’s been sitting, still surrounded by people, waiting to see how this is all going to turn out. There’s enough firelight to let me see his eyes widen.

  “Maybe later.” A.J. quickly stuffs it back in his pocket, but not before I can see what it is: a small piece of mirror with a little ceramic frame around it, one of those gifts they were giving away at the Fairmont Hotel, where my mom lived when she was in San Francisco. From that old time radio show, One Man’s Family: “You are reflected in your friends, family and times! One Man’s Family on NBC Radio.”