I broke down sobbing on the roof of the car. There was nothing left to do. I’d been frightened this badly only once before, as a child in the emergency room of Tyrone Hospital when the attendants laid me on a gurney and placed my severed forearm inside a lunch cooler beside me. I had been amazingly calm until that point. I believed my Grandpa Cuttler when he promised me in his pickup truck as he raced me to the hospital that if I kept my eyes closed everything would be all right. But then they started wheeling me down the hall, and I saw the anguish on his face and tears pouring down his cheeks. The gurney crashed through the swinging doors and deposited me into the nightmarish hell of an operating room. I was crazed with terror. They slashed away my clothes, stabbed needles into my veins, and removed my severed arm from the cooler and held it up to the light like a wild-game trophy. The arm didn’t seem real at first: the skin was slimy and dishwater gray, the white elbow bone protruding from the end, tinged with smears of cow manure and blood, the fingers—my fingers—gnarled into a grotesque fist. I fought the nurses until they forced an anesthesia mask over my mouth and I lost consciousness.
Losing consciousness . . . This was all I hoped for now, howling on top of the idling car in the middle of gridlocked Washington Street. But it wasn’t to be. I stayed on top of the car that first afternoon in Shemaya until the sun overhead divided itself into four different suns, one for each season, each sun setting over the mountaintop at different points and different times, torching the sky into a blaze of pink and gold flames. Inconsolable, I crawled down from the car and walked back home. The traffic jam cleared as the cars continued on their way to nowhere.
When I reached our house, I heard a voice.
“I’m sorry, child,” Nana Bellini said. She was sitting in the rocker on our front porch, enjoying the beautiful evening as though she’d just stopped by for dinner. I was certain now that I’d be locked up soon and sedated. I was obviously insane. I talked to her while I waited to be taken away.
“How was your drive?” I said, adopting her Everything’s normal and we’re all happy to be here attitude.
“We’re not there, dear,” she said.
“We’re not where?”
“Do you remember when you were a little girl and your bedroom turned into a palace and knights rode beneath your windows on great white horses?”
“Who are you?”
“Remember, child? You pretended to lounge in long flowing gowns, dreaming of the prince in the next castle. You created a world within the world that had been created for you. You painted its skies, constructed its walls, and filled its spaces. Like a tiny goddess, you caused a land to exist with nothing more than your mind. But as you grew older, you found the existing structures of time and space more convincing and put aside your own power to create in favor of the creations of others. But the power to create wasn’t lost, Brek. It can never be lost. It’s natural at first for you to re-create the places that have been dear to you.”
“Where’s my husband and my daughter?” I demanded. “Where is everybody?”
Nana smiled—that patient, knowing smile of hers and Luas’s, as if to say: Yes, my great-granddaughter, reach now, reach for the answers.
“We’re not there anymore, child,” she said. “It was a wonderful illusion, but it’s gone. You’ve returned home. You won’t see them again until they come home too. Free will is absolute. We can’t direct the movement of consciousness from realm to realm—”
She was scaring me again. “Leave me alone!” I shouted. I ran back down the walk toward my car.
“Wait, child,” she said. “Where are you going?”
I didn’t know where. I just knew I had to find Bo and Sarah. I had to get help. Maybe it wasn’t Saturday, maybe it was still Friday and I could pick Sarah up from day care and start all over. It’s all just a dream, I kept telling myself, just a bad dream; you have a fever and you’re sick. I climbed into my car and started the engine.
Nana called out to me: “What would the day care look like?”
As soon as I thought about it, I was there. The house vanished, and with it my car, the trees, the street, the entire neighborhood. The rough brick wall of our neighbor’s house was transformed into the day care’s smooth white wall decorated with paper blue whales that Sarah and the other children had painted with Miss Erin’s help. Bright, freshly vacuumed play rugs now covered what had been the lawn. The cubby I’d crammed with fresh crib sheets, diapers, and wipes on Friday morning stood where the passenger seat of my car had been. Colorful plastic preschool toys were stacked neatly near the curb. A craft table with boxes of Popsicle sticks, bottles of glue, and reams of colored construction paper emerged from the porch steps. The scent of baby powder and diaper rash ointment filled the air. But there was no laughter in the day care, no squeals or cries. Not a child. Not a teacher. Not a sound.
Nana stood in the doorway, watching me explore the space, searching for the wizard behind the curtain.
The next thought that came into my mind was the set of the morning news where Bo had tried to banter with Piper Jackson. As quickly as the memory arose, the wall of colored whales metamorphosed into the sunrise mural that served as a backdrop for the newscasters. Studio cameras stood where the cribs had been, and lighting racks dangled from the ceiling. But like my neighborhood and the day care, the set was deserted.
I thought of my law office next. My desk, computer, files, bookshelves, treatises, diplomas, and pictures of Bo and Sarah surrounded me instantly. Then came Stan’s Delicatessen on Penn Street and my Bellini grandparents’ beach house in Rehoboth Beach, followed by my Cuttler grandparents’ barn and my bed in the physical therapy ward at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where I watched Bobby Hamilton, with both arms amputated, learn to tie his shoes with a long crochet hook in his mouth. I revisited the cinder track behind my high school, where I’d won several races against two-armed opponents and amazed myself and the small crowds. I sat at the bar at Smokey Joe’s on Fortieth Street near the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where I had danced the night away with my girlfriends during law school. I knelt before the altar at Old Swedes’ Church, where my best friend, Karen Busfield, who had become an Episcopal priest, asked whether I would pledge my troth to Boaz Wolfson before God and pronounced us husband and wife. I wept in the delivery room at Wilmington Hospital, where my mother had given birth to me, and then again at Blair Memorial Hospital in Huntingdon, where I’d given birth to Sarah and Bo’s tears dropped onto my lips.
Each room and space from my past came as fast as I thought of it, as though I were plunging down a shaft cored through the center of my life.
I went back to linger, walking the sands of the Delaware shore, climbing the haymow in my grandfather’s barn, pulling on the Nautilus machine that strengthened my left arm to do the work of my right. I revisited not only the locations but the reality, every detail: the sinewy saltiness of Stan’s corned beef, the burning smoke and stale beer of Smokey Joe’s, the warm rain on our wedding day, the cold stirrups of the delivery-room bed. Nana accompanied me, but did not interfere. Her fascination with how I had lived my life nearly equaled my fascination with the power to re-create it. But the exertion of doing all this exhausted me, and soon portions of one space began blurring into others. The images, the realities, congealed into a single nonsensical mass that finally ground to a halt under its own weight.
Everything went blank. And then it filled with an indescribable light that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere. Through this light Nana extended her hand to me in a gesture of love, smothering the blaze of fear that had nearly consumed me.
“You’re dead, child,” she said. “But your life has just begun.”
PART II
7
You are not prepared for what you would see. So we must limit what you will see, which is only possible, Brek Abigail Cuttler, because you insist upon what you believe is your sight to see.”
Luas spoke these words while placing a felt
blindfold over my eyes in the vestibule leading back into Shemaya Station. He was like my father on my wedding day at the rear of the church before giving me away, ironic and wistful, lowering the veil over my face before escorting me into the unknown. He wore the identical gray suit, vest, shirt, and tie Bill Gwynne had been wearing at the office the last day I saw him. The resemblance between Luas and Bill was uncanny, as was his resemblance to both of my grandfathers. He sometimes seemed to be all three men at once, shifting physical features like a hologram. For my part, I looked as fresh and presentable as I did on my wedding day. Nana had fussed over me all morning in a mother-of-the-bride sort of way, making certain my hair and makeup looked just so. But instead of a wedding dress, I wore my black silk suit, from which she had managed to remove the baby formula and the blood.
The suit had become my uniform in Shemaya: the garment that represented my identity, the proof that I had lived a life, and, most important, the symbol and reminder to myself that I fully intended to return to that life. Because I did not, could not, and would not accept the possibility of my death.
It has been said that the first stage of grieving is denial, the essential survival mechanism that protects survivors from the enormity of the loss they have just sustained and that enables them to go on. This is no less true of the dead grieving for themselves and those they left behind. Nana and Luas wanted me to accept it, but I was willing to do no more than humor them and bide my time until I was cured of whatever disease had seized control of my mind.
This strategy helped me cope and kept me sane—yes, one can go insane in the afterlife. But it did nothing to quench the desperate longing I felt for Sarah, which at every moment threatened to consume me and drive me over the edge, whether I was dead or alive. Where is she? I worried incessantly. Who is taking care of her? Bo was a great daddy and knew what to do, but he wasn’t me. He didn’t wake up three extra times during the night to pull up the covers she had kicked off. He didn’t know the difference between her cries of hunger, dirty diapers, tummy aches, and boredom. He hadn’t memorized the telephone numbers for the pediatrician and the poison control center. He didn’t read the ingredients and nutritional value of everything she ate or study the pharmacological insert sheets and drug-interaction and side-effect warnings of every medicine she took. He didn’t fawn over the toddler outfits in department stores and make sure she was the most adorable child at the day care. And he didn’t take time every weekend to record in her baby book all the milestones of her life and what a beautiful little girl she was becoming.
Oh, how I ached to hold her, to feel her heart pounding and her chest rising and falling, my precious, beautiful brown-eyed girl. My determination to see her again kept me going. I would do everything asked of me to get back to my daughter, my husband, my home, and my life. I willingly conspired with Nana and Luas in the fantasy that I was in heaven while secretly knowing it was just that—a fantasy, an hallucination—and I would be with them soon.
Nana had explained that I would be spending the day with Luas but gave no hint of where we would be going or what we would be doing. It would be my first day away from her since arriving in Shemaya. While primping my hair in the bedroom mirror before leaving her house in Delaware, I asked her if Luas was my great-grandfather Frank, whom I had never met.
“No, no,” she said in her Italian accent, amused by the suggestion. “Luas isn’t your great-grandfather, dear. Frank has already moved on. Luas is the High Jurisconsult of Shemaya.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “High Jurisconsult?”
“It means he’s the chief lawyer here.”
“But I thought we were in heaven,” I said, not quite sarcastically, instantly aware of the contradiction and smiling inwardly. “Why would anybody need lawyers in paradise?”
Nana looked surprised. “You don’t think God would allow souls to face the Final Judgment alone, do you? Even murderers on earth have a lawyer to represent them, and the outcomes of those trials are only temporary. The stakes are higher here, dear. All of eternity.”
I was speechless.
“Luas will explain everything,” Nana assured me. “But let me tell you a little secret. He needs your help. Don’t let him know I told you.”
“He needs my help?” I said. “I’m the one who needs help.”
“Yes, dear,” she said, “and by helping Luas you’ll be helping yourself.”
“What exactly does he need my help with?”
Nana paused for a moment and looked at me in the mirror. “He wants to leave Shemaya but he can’t find the way out. It happens to almost everybody. Shemaya isn’t what it appears to be. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Try to remember that. It’s as easy to get lost here as it is on earth. But it’s actually easier here to find your way back home. That’s what people don’t understand. It happens automatically, when you’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” I asked.
“Ready to move on, dear,” Nana said.
I was confused. “I thought you just told me that Luas wanted to leave?”
“Oh, he does, very much,” Nana said. “But he isn’t ready and so he remains. Only he can choose.”
“How long has he been here?” I asked.
Nana thought for a moment. “I think it’s been about two thousand years, dear,” she said. She smiled and put down the hairbrush. “Come along now, it’s time to go see him. He can explain how Shemaya works better than me. His job is to train the new presenters. I only know how to help them leave.”
—
LUAS CONTINUED HIS instructions to me in the vestibule: “The train station is crowded now with new arrivals,” he said. “You will hear nothing, but you will feel them brushing against you. Make no attempt to reach out to them, and do not, under any circumstances, remove the blindfold. The entrance to the Courtroom is at the opposite end of the station. We’ll be going straight through. Are you ready?”
The blindfold was tied tight around my head, and I was growing increasingly nervous. “Why can’t I see them?” I asked. “And what do you mean, ‘Courtroom’?”
“I’ll explain later,” he said, tugging at the blindfold knot one last time to be certain it was tight. “If we don’t get going, we’ll miss the trial. Can you see?”
“No.”
“Then you’re ready. Follow me.”
He grasped my left elbow and urged me forward, his body stiffening against the weight of the doors. Entering the station, I immediately sensed a great throng of people milling about in ghostly silence. What I thought were bodies began brushing against my hips and shoulders, but heeding Luas’s warning, I made no attempt to reach out to them. Even so, halfway through I could no longer resist the temptation to peek beneath the blindfold.
What I saw is difficult to describe.
The train station was filled not with people’s bodies but rather with their memories. Thousands of glittering spheres floated in midair about the train station like stars in the nighttime sky. A person’s entire lifetime of thoughts, sensations, images, and emotions filled each sphere, flashing and arcing inside like brightly colored bolts of electricity. These were raw memories, not the sanitized recollections we tell one another over cups of coffee or even the more honest accounts we record in our secret diaries, but life itself as experienced and remembered by those who lived it. By looking at a sphere, I came into direct contact with the memories inside without the protective filter of another person’s mind, which made the memories seem as though they were mine.
Suddenly, like an actor at an award show watching scenes spliced together from a lifetime of films, I found myself reliving the experiences of people whom I had never known but who seemed in a very real sense to be me. One moment I’m working a sewing machine in a sweatshop in Saipan, then I look at another sphere and I’m climbing the catwalk of a grain silo in Kansas City. I look at yet another sphere and I’m careening through the streets of Baghdad in the back of a taxicab, then tending the helm of a trawler in storm
y seas off Newfoundland, strolling the rows of a vineyard in Australia, driving a front-end loader from a mine shaft in Siberia, severing the head of a Tutsi boy with a machete in Rwanda, kissing the neck of a lover in Montreal. I was more than mere spectator to these events. My fingers cramped as the fabric slid beneath the needle, I choked on clouds of dust billowing over the dry wheat, my body leaned as we swerved to avoid a pedestrian crossing the street, I barked orders to my crew on deck and saw the fear in their eyes as the waves crested the bow, I felt the warm spray of blood as I thrust the machete again into the convulsing corpse, and I whispered softly while indulging the desires of my lover. Alien memories coursed through me as though I were emerging from multiple lifetimes of amnesia, leaving me confused and lost. Unable to stand any more, I pulled the blindfold back down over my eyes. Luas led me on until finally we passed out of the station.
“Are you all right?” he asked as the doors slammed shut behind us.
I was unable to respond; my body trembled.
“Here,” he said, “you can remove the blindfold. Sit.”
We were in a remote, vacant corridor of the train station now and sat down together on a bench. Luas brushed away the hair that had fallen into my eyes and smiled. “I knew you would peek,” he said. “You’re not one to obey rules, even when they benefit you.” He gazed back toward the doors through which we had just emerged. “You see them for who they are, Brek Abigail Cuttler. You have the gift.”
I was barely able to understand his words. It was as though I’d been raised on a desert island without music, books, television, or maps and suddenly been given a glimpse of the world. I wanted to see more. I needed to see more. I got up from the bench and turned toward the doors.
The Trial of Fallen Angels Page 5
