With her hands on each of Marney’s knees again, Nancy said simply. “Now see the full picture of what is happening around you, what you could not see with mortal eyes at the time.”
In response, Marney gasped and grew utterly silent, as if transfixed by what she saw. Though the time spun past much faster than Steve could have guessed, she sat this way for a full ten minutes, watching something that silenced her fear but did not end the pain.
“Now you must see all of what happened with these eyes,” Nancy said, apparently referring to this other dimension of reality that Marney had discovered in the context of her violent memory.
Ten more minutes followed, with Marney surging and lurching to and fro in her seat, pushing at invisible enemies, stopping her struggle to marvel at something, hunkering down again and going around it all over and over. Steve gripped the arm of the couch with his left hand so tightly that the joints in his hand cracked. He tried to remind himself to breathe regularly and tried not to distract either Marney or Nancy.
Nancy showed no sign of strain or weariness, but her hands stayed in place, her grip tightening or loosening, when she perceived the need. She talked Marney through to another stage, when she finally became still. “All that you have seen is true and real, but it cannot erase the pain, which is also real. It’s okay to mourn the loss of freedom and innocence, to cleanse your wounds with healing tears,” she said.
With that, Marney began to weep again, but this time releasing a mourner’s catharsis. Nancy nodded to Steve who welcomed the chance finally to wrap his arms around his love. As he wrapped her up, she collapsed into his embrace and gripped him with both arms around his waist. Then they both sobbed for several minutes more. Nancy touched each of them gently, transmitting whatever spiritual energy they needed to release the dark, haunting air of fear and disintegration.
When Steve stopped sobbing, he still hung onto Marney, regaining his breath, listening to her weeping begin to subside. The human body can only cry that hard for a short time before it begins to beg for a reprieve, eventually sinking into a dormant state, demanding food, drink and sleep, as well as distance from the pain. Marney slid into that level of exhaustion and lay limp in Steve’s arms. The back of her head resting between his shoulder and neck, she opened her eyes half way and saw Nancy looking at her, compassionate and perfectly focused. In that place, wrapped up by Steve, cared for and guided by Nancy, Marney found a clearing in her soul where patches of sunshine warmed and comforted her.
She had returned to desperate days of violation, her unshackled soul revisiting the most traumatic days she suffered, beyond two earthquakes, a tornado, a volcanic eruption and a world war. All of those disasters had assaulted her externally, her three days of captivity, and repeated rape, by government soldiers, had assaulted her emotional core.
That violation had cut her off from freedom, wrenching away any sense of significant control over her physical person; but she had returned there voluntarily. She had seen multiple dimensions of the event that no mortal would have seen so clearly without the help of someone like Nancy. She had also benefited from the absence of diabolical spirits that feed on the rotting flesh of hearts torn, as hers had been. This empowerment and perspective, started Marney toward a healthy soul, that could love and trust the way God intended.
Steve carried the slender young woman to his car, with help from Nancy at the doors. In the car, Marney and Steve discussed where he should take her. Being alone at home frightened her, and both of them felt uneasy about being alone together at Steve’s place. Then Steve suggested going out to stay with Emma and Rodney. To Marney, the idea seemed a wild shot from the hip, but the idea intrigued her. To Steve it made perfect sense, given the talk he had with Hubert and Rodney.
“What would we tell them?” Marney asked drowsily.
“We could say you had an exhausting experience with returning to a painful memory and didn’t want to be alone,” Steve said. “I think having another woman around would be a good idea.”
Marney had liked Emma instantly, and trusted her, as much as could be expected of such a sparse acquaintance. She knew that Steve trusted Emma and Rodney entirely and decided to rely on that, as well. When she agreed to go, both of them knew they had just experienced the first evidence of healing: that Marney would take a chance on Rodney and Emma.
When they arrived, Marney waited in the car, feeling like she was outside the emergency room of a hospital, while her husband arranged for a gurney to haul her in for medical attention. Steve came back outside with Emma and Rodney, the men hanging back on the porch while Emma went to the car to talk to Marney.
Marney rolled down the window and looked at Emma, her head still back against the headrest. “Hi,” she said weakly.
Emma smiled sympathetically. “Can you walk?” she asked simply.
Marney nodded and tapped the last of her energy to climb out, as Emma opened the door. The two women walked into the house with their arms around each other. For both of them, this opportunity promised healing, and the realization of a sisterhood, that each had longed for in the years since the war had destroyed their lives.
Steve and Rodney discussed whether getting all of the men out of the house was a good idea. Once Emma had settled Marney in the guest bedroom, she joined the discussion.
“I don’t think you should go,” Emma said. “Part of what she’s dealing with is fear and having you guys around may be important for that. But I’ll run the idea past her later.”
“Oh, I hate to think of displacing Rodney and Daniel,” Marney said later, as she sat up in bed, sipping lemonade.
“Try to shut that thought out, for a moment, and see what you really want, deep down,” Emma said.
Marney thought a moment. “I really need to sleep, but I would feel better doing that if you were all here. It feels safer.”
Emma nodded, her instinct confirmed.
For four days, Marney and Steve lived with Emma and Rodney, Daniel and Chip, and the coyotes. On warm afternoons Marney sat on the porch, her legs hanging over the edge, occasionally rubbing Sally’s fur as the coyote lay in the sun, enjoying the attention. On the fourth night, Steve joined her for the night, in the guest room, and the next day they felt free to leave. The routines of the farm, the fawning attention of everyone, the silence of the breezy afternoons and her budding confidence in the people around her, fed and restored a good deal of Marney’s emotional strength. It was the perfect hospital for her recovery.
As they put their stuff in Steve’s car that last morning, Rodney—never particularly demonstrative—felt compelled to give Marney a strong hug. She nearly dissolved into tears, receiving the safety of that contact as one more dose of healing. For Emma and Marney, this began a life-long friendship, which would eventually extend its reach to benefit hundreds of women who had been violated during the war.
The next time Rodney saw Steve was Election Day in Somerville. Most municipalities in the region held local elections during September. For Somerville, offices such as Mayor, Sheriff and City Council would be officially filled, as would representative offices for state and national government. Because he was already serving in the provisional government, Rodney didn’t run for any office.
“How’s she doing,” Rodney asked, after greeting his old friend at the high school.
Steve nodded deep and slow. “She is really mellow these days, just taking it easy and taking in every bit of good stuff she can find. She’s going to her spiritual director twice a week, for the next several weeks, and Nancy came over for a visit. We even had Phil over to talk about a wedding.”
Rodney smiled. The best news of all was Steve’s bright and fresh demeanor, which said volumes about his blossoming relationship with Marney and his hope for the future.
“Any date on the wedding?”
“Before it gets too cold, is all we agreed to,” Steve said. “Phil was encouraging us to do it sooner than later. He’s a pastor, after all, and wants to minimize the living i
n sin part, I guess.”
As non-confrontational and open-minded as Phil seemed, Rodney didn’t think of him as the traditional Ten Commandments kind of minister. The notion that someone could hold those old-fashioned standards and still be pleasant, intrigued Rodney, who considered himself a new member of the faith community. Steve brought him back to the present.
“You know who you’re voting for in all of these races?” he asked, knowing Rodney could tell him plenty about most of the people on the ballot.
Rodney looked at the posted list of offices and candidates. “You won’t do too badly voting for any of those folks,” he said sincerely. “I have to vote for Pete for Mayor or he’s bound to find out. And I’m thinking Warren Kline would be a good Sheriff. Otherwise you could do well flipping a coin on the others, as far as I know.”
There were, in fact, a few names on the ballot that even Rodney didn’t recognize. Residency requirements for running only included current home address, not a long history; which seemed best, given the recent refugee status of so many and the relative newness of the entire social order.
Of the congressional representatives, Will and Sara also appeared on the ballot, running against each other for the same position to which they had been selected temporarily. That created a hard choice, as far as Rodney was concerned, except that he personally thought that Sara and Jay would benefit from Sara sticking closer to home, more than Will and his wife of many years would.
After one last review of this decision, Rodney voted for the first time in five years, feeling the strongest, and most hopeful, sort of patriotism he could remember. The following week, when all of the winners had been determined, he felt that same pride of accomplishment, as well as new confidence in the soundness of what he had helped to begin.
Late in October, the first trees finally began to turn to red and gold, giving the impression that the powers in charge didn’t want to give up the best part of autumn, in spite of the fact that the weather had moderated. The warmer weather meant that November rarely saw a high temperature below seventy, and no one even thought of snow until Christmas time, as the ghostly sparkle of morning frost appeared occasionally.
Emma, who had considered herself on the wrong side of forty to have a baby, even if the very existence of that baby constituted a miracle, amazed herself daily with how good she felt during her pregnancy. She had borne two children before, Daniel and his sister, who had died at birth. Those experiences prepared her for a more difficult adjustment to a fruitful state than she experienced that year. Even as the end of the year—and the beginning of her third trimester—approached, she felt genuinely good.
“It’s almost as if I’m not getting older anymore,” she said to Rodney, one morning over breakfast, when he asked about her health.
He raised his eyebrows and said, “You know, I was working on Miller’s roof yesterday, thinking I feel pretty good, for an old guy. I haven’t been sick for a long time and not so many aches and pains as I remembered, though maybe that’s just me getting used to carpentry again.”
When Emma got up to head for the sink with some dishes, Rodney caught her and wrapped his arm around her hips. “Where’s Daniel?” he asked, in just such a way that his wife knew his intentions, if he could be sure they were alone.
Daniel, in fact, had left early for school that morning, driving on his scooter, in spite of a low temperature around forty. Assured that, at that temperature, there would be no slippery roads to worry about and only frozen ears and nose, Emma had not said anything to discourage her increasingly independent son.
Both Emma and Rodney enjoyed living in the country, no neighbors so close that they felt as if they were being observed all the time. With Daniel focused on school and Tina, and on Socks and his new offspring, not to mention Chip, they enjoyed a sort of extended honeymoon, offering them a pathway into a deeper relationship than that first natural comfort with each other. They could have been content with the ready friendship that they initially felt for each other, but they benefited from their experience with Steve and Marney, to remind them that they could have more, if they were willing to work at it.
Rodney did worry a bit about having another child, and the way that would reverse the liberation that comes with the empty nest. He had confidence that he and Emma could still have room for each other if they both wanted it and committed to it. This added motivation for a more intentional effort on his part to draw closer to his new wife, to prepare a strong root system, before the demands of a newborn stretched and strained them, individually and as a couple.
Tina had already made a reservation as baby sitter for the yet-to-be-named boy. Daniel had looked curiously, and admiringly, at his girlfriend when he heard her talking about this with his mother. He harbored a small suspicion that Tina had some covert motive behind her offer, but even his cynicism couldn’t define just what that motive might be, so he just tallied it as one of those “girl things.” On the other hand, no one looked forward to the arrival of the new baby more than Daniel did. He had embraced Devin’s word to him and felt as if this brother had been promised to him, as much as to his mother and stepfather.
In the meantime, Daniel and Tina had heard of a strange little gathering of people in town. Dale, in the robot shop where Daniel worked, had mentioned that one of his neighbors had stayed out of sight for weeks, watching the live video feed from around the throne in Jerusalem, on a deluxe multimedia system in his home.
That neighbor, Troy Yarbrough, had moved to Somerville in June, taking over an empty house next to Dale’s. He had solicited some help from Dale in setting up an elaborate multimedia system in his living room. Not Dale’s specialty, he did, however, have a fascination with new gadgets, and applied his natural ease with technology to Troy’s 3D, super high definition display, and immersion surround sound system. Of course, Dale wondered what his neighbor would be watching on such a sophisticated system, but Troy slipped that question, apparently embarrassed at the answer. Therefore, Dale assumed it was pornography.
News organizations began streaming video from Jerusalem soon after the King setup his throne. With the immense crowds, however, finding a platform for cameras proved challenging amidst the crowd’s constant movement, packed into inhumanly tight proximity. One European news organization finally invested in high definition robotic mini cameras, which they mounted on the buildings around the throne. Apparently, the King and his worshippers did not object to the publicity and scrutiny. They, in fact, seemed oblivious to the activities of the news videographers.
While production of television and film resumed after the war, no media content attracted as many viewers as those live feeds from Jerusalem. Some viewers became obsessive about it, including Troy.
Once he had finished constructing his video and sound system, he never seemed to leave his house. Alone on his couch, he sat day after day, watching the wild whirl of dancing and singing worshippers. He turned up the volume on the unearthly singing, which consisted of millions of voices so finely tuned and blended that they sounded like no noise he would have ever expected out of a human mouth. The extreme sophistication of his equipment nearly did justice to that sound, like no mobile computer speakers ever could. The impact of that music, combined with the delirious abandon of the three-dimensional dancers, mesmerized Troy.
New to town, Troy had no friends or family around. He had, in fact, not known the whereabouts of his family for decades, not since, at sixteen, he ran away from home to escape an abusive stepfather. First in Chicago, and then Toronto, he had lived on the streets, hustling for every dollar and learning to live on very little. Drugs, taken both voluntarily and involuntarily, contributed to a mounting mental breakdown that left him a muttering, solitary figure, sleeping on a city ventilation grate, arguing with unseen enemies and allowing his body to deteriorate into filth and disease.
When the Dictator took power, Troy escaped capture for a few months, but the police grabbed him and locked him in a mental ward, where he beca
me the subject of biological experimentation. Though these experiments generally hastened the death of the subjects, for Troy, the highly clinical torture did more to prolong his life than his previous place on the street. That prolonged life, however, consisted of biological function alone. His mind had retreated from the dangerous, and uncaring, external world and had hidden itself away from his haunting internal enemies, as well.
On the day when the guards and doctors at the mental hospital all disappeared, Troy remained in his cell for three days, until other inmates found him and set him free. In those first days of freedom, he sat alone listening to the silence. The voices inside his head that had badgered and taunted him had also disappeared. But freedom from his accumulated demons did not change his living habits. After gathering all that he thought useful from the hospital, he left to find a new place to live alone, under the radar.
The hospital was located in Kentucky and he found his way to the town of Louisville, where he made a sort of hidden nest in an abandoned hardware store. Once again, he scraped an existence from garbage cans and handouts, but this time he found the clarity of mind to wonder whether he might be able to do better. That question prompted him to risk trusting an oddly jolly couple who seemed to roam the streets of Louisville looking for people to help.
They did not insist that he accept their explanation of who they were and where they had come from, the strangeness of which reminded him of the delusions he had suffered for decades. They did, however, touch his head and somehow rearrange the disheveled shelves of his brain. As he emerged from his mental illness, they greeted him with money and a place to stay. Later they encouraged him when he proposed to find a smaller town, more like the one he had grown up in, and headed west.
In Somerville, he had initially reverted to scavenging, but he soon discovered that much of what he pulled from wrecked vehicles, demolished homes or abandoned businesses, he could sell for respectable sums. Both mortals and immortals put the electronics and precious metals he recovered to work, or into circulation, in the recovering economy. Along the way, he began to watch the video stream from Jerusalem.
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 38
