“Not yet,” Luas warned. “It’s too soon. You’re not ready.”
I grasped the door handle.
“No, Brek.” Luas spoke sternly. “You must do exactly as I say or you will lose who you are. Do you understand?”
“Who am I, Luas?” I said, confused and lost. “Or, should I say, who was I?” I pulled on the door.
Luas tugged on the empty right sleeve of my suit jacket, causing me to turn toward him.
“You did it on purpose,” he said, indicating the empty sleeve. “Quite bold, actually. Why, there isn’t a child who hasn’t comforted herself to sleep knowing that if pushed too far she could simply deny her parents what they treasure most of all. Children play the same dangerous game adults play on the tips of ballistic missiles, but unlike adults most children recognize the futility of trying to win by losing. Not you, Brek Cuttler. No, you heard your grandfather’s instruction to stand clear of the conveyor chain as an invitation to trade a pound of your own flesh for the pleasure of the pain on your parents’ faces and the sorrow in their voices.”
I was stunned. My darkest secret. His tactic was instantly effective. I remembered now who I was, and that my life was very different from the lives of the souls in the train shed.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Oh, I know many things about you, Brek Cuttler,” Luas said.
“Then you should know they were getting a divorce,” I said, “and that my mother was an alcoholic and my father hit her and he . . . You should know I thought I’d only get a cut when I reached into the machine, not that I would lose my arm. I just wanted them to listen. Can you understand that? I just wanted them to stay together. Is that too much for a child to ask?”
I glared at Luas as if he were my own father. Luas was silent.
“You have no right to judge me,” I said. “I’ve been punished my entire life for the sin of trying to keep my parents together. I’ve more than paid for my crime, if you can call wanting a family a crime. You know all my secrets, is that right? Do you know about the phantom pains, when you think your arm is hurting even though you don’t have an arm? Do you know what it’s like not being able to hug another human being because you’re missing an arm to hug them back? Do you know about bathing, dressing, eating, and sleeping with only one hand, and about the jeers of children and the cruelty of adults? Do you know about the awkwardness of every new meeting? Do you know about clothes with useless right sleeves?”
“All that was forgiven long ago,” Luas replied.
“Forgiven? Really? I don’t remember forgiving anybody.”
“Please, Brek,” he said, “sit down.”
I released the door and sat back down with him on the bench. Two sculptures had been chiseled into the stone wall opposite the bench. One was of a Buddhist temple in the foothills of Tibet and the other of a synagogue in the foothills of Mount Sinai. Luas noticed me looking at them. They seemed out of place in a train station.
“Have you heard of the Book of Life and the Book of Death?” he asked.
I nodded.
“They don’t exist,” he said.
I exhaled in relief, prematurely.
“God doesn’t maintain them. We do. Each one of us. A record of every thought, word, and deed in our lives. The storage is quite perfect, actually. It’s the recall that’s incomplete. Not that this is a defect. Important reasons exist for narrowing the field. Forgetting traumatic events helps one cope, and there’s the exquisitely practical need to discard portions of an ever-growing body of experiences to avoid being consumed by them. Memory isn’t the defective tape recording you’ve been led to believe. It’s the tape player itself, playing back the tracks of music we select—and sometimes those we don’t. Replayed on the right machine—a high-quality machine—the music can be reproduced with great fidelity and precision, nearly as perfect as when it was first created.”
Although hewn from solid rock, the stone reliefs on the wall metamorphosed as Luas spoke, reworking themselves into brooding animations of viscous stone. Two elevated thrones surrounded by great mounds of crumpled scrolls replaced the temple and the synagogue. In front of the thrones queued long lines of people, naked, their faces erased from their egg-shaped bald heads. Thin, fat, young, old, male, female, tall, small, each person carried a scroll, some bulging and heavy and others compact and light. Upon the thrones sat identical orbs like the sun with rays emanating in all directions. At the foot of the thrones stood a robed soul who received the scroll from the next person in line and appeared to read aloud as the parchment unspooled. When the end was reached, the scrolls were cast by the readers onto the mounds and the bearers disappeared without direction or trace, replaced by the next in line for whom the process was repeated. Luas paused to watch the somber procession.
“You’ve been given the privilege, and the responsibility, of replaying the tape for others,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“That is what we do here, Brek,” Luas explained. “It’s why we’ve been brought to Shemaya, to read and dissect the record of life and plead to the Creator the imperfect case of the created, as oil and canvas would, if they could, explain to the artist flaws of texture and color, or as string and bow would, if they could, explain to the composer disturbances of pitch and tone. We’ve been appointed to tell the other side of the story, Brek—to explain their fears and regrets, their complicity and victimization, their greed and sacrifice. We’re here to make sure justice is served at the Final Judgment.”
Luas’s words should have literally put the fear of God in me, but, as I said earlier, I hadn’t accepted my death at this point. To the contrary, I’d been waiting and watching for an opening to rejoin the life I once led. Yet what Luas said was so outrageous that my earlier thoughts of fever and illness turned into the possibility that I might have been involved in a terrible accident and suffered a serious brain injury.
Maybe I was in a car crash, or fell off a cliff during the hike up Tussey Mountain. Maybe this is what a coma is like. Maybe when Nana was dressing me before entering the train station, she was really my nurse preparing me for surgery and Luas is my neurosurgeon. Maybe the blindfold he lowered over my eyes is an oxygen mask to keep me alive.
I clung to these hopes now as Luas explained things, terrifying things, I could neither comprehend nor accept—things that could not be so unless I was, in fact, dead.
“Okay,” I said, playing along, afraid that if I let him know I was on to him he might make a mistake during the operation and either kill me or leave me a vegetable. “So you’re my lawyer and you’re trying to help me avoid being sent to hell for sticking my hand in the manure spreader, is that right? Can’t you get me a plea bargain or something? Credit for time served?”
“Hardly.” Luas laughed. “Why did God promise not to flood the earth again?”
A puzzled expression flashed across my face.
“Oh, come now,” Luas said. He removed a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and packed the bowl as he spoke. “Surely you know the story. Things only got worse after the fiasco in Eden. Cain murdered Abel, and later one of his children murdered a young child. Humans began mating with beasts and engaging in every sort of debauchery. God was furious—and rightly so. He decided to destroy the lot of us as justice demands, but when the flood waters receded, He felt remorse. Imagine that, Brek. God regrets what God has done. Remarkable, isn’t it? He makes us a promise: ‘I’ll never do it again,’ He says, and He drapes rainbows from the clouds as a reminder. First He decides that extermination of the human race is the final solution—to borrow an ugly phrase—but as soon as He’s driven humanity to the brink, all is forgiven and our survival is guaranteed, even if we return to our wicked ways. Why the change of heart? Why even spare Noah in the first place?”
“I guess because Noah was the only one who obeyed,” I said.
Luas paused to strike a match and light his pipe. “Correct,” he said, “and if Noah had disobe
yed?”
“He would have been killed with the others.”
“Correct again,” Luas said between puffs. “Divine justice. But what explains God’s last-second change of heart about the rest of us? It’s because of this astounding about-face that beyond those doors at the end of the corridor, inside the Courtroom, there will be argument for many souls today that they have a place in the Light and, for those same souls, the Dark. They’ll learn their fates today and greet their eternities. You see, Brek, every birth of a human being is a potential crime and a pending trial. It’s the Courtroom, not a pot of gold, that sits at the end of God’s rainbows. God promised us those rainbows would guarantee a place for man in the world of sun and clouds, but He said nothing about the worlds to come.”
Luas rose from the bench and gestured for me to follow him down the corridor.
“Of course,” he continued, puffing on his pipe, “we do not deal here with bodhisattvas or saints, caitiffs or fiends. The conclusions for them are foregone, the judgments obvious and unassailable. Our concern in the Courtroom is for the rest of humanity—the good people who sometimes cheat, the bad who sometimes do good, the billions who failed to sacrifice everything to become priests or prophets but resisted the temptation to become demons or demigods. We put on no false airs here. We do not ask whether there has been renunciation for the Hindu, awakening for the Buddhist, reckoning for the Muslim, salvation for the Christian, or atonement for the Jew. These are mere obfuscations of Divine Law. There is only one question to be answered during the Final Judgment of every human soul, and it is the same question that concerned God before the Great Flood: What does justice demand?”
We stopped in front of the doors.
“Accounts rich and grave are reconciled beyond these doors, Brek Cuttler,” Luas said. “Could you speak honestly of yourself there? Could you damn yourself if damning is what you deserved, setting aside fear and hatred for truth? Could you stand before the Creator of energy, space, and time and save yourself? Could you pass through those doors, knowing your experience of eternity would be forever shaped by what you said and left unsaid? Could you explain what, during your entire life, defied explanation?”
I began to panic. I couldn’t have made up these words if my brain had been knocked around inside my skull during a car accident or falling off a cliff. And I couldn’t have made up the memories I experienced passing through the train shed either—they were too vivid, too exotic, too real. The possibility of my own death was becoming more and more inescapable.
“You’re taking me to be judged, then?” I said, backing away. “I really am going to hell for putting my arm in a manure spreader?”
“Judged? You? Of course not!” Luas said, genuinely surprised by my question. “I told you all that was forgiven long ago. I’m taking you to receive your heavenly reward, Brek, not to send you to hell. You’ve always hoped and prayed you would come here. Shemaya has been the motive behind your every decision and the basis of your every interaction from the moment when you realized you suffered after the loss of your arm, not because you would never again be able to dangle from monkey bars or swing a softball bat or play a violin but because it was unjust that millions of other girls could.”
Luas paused a moment to gauge my reaction and puff on his pipe. I kept my distance, convinced that I was about to be condemned.
“A member of the bar, not the clergy, offered you justice after the accident, isn’t that right?” he continued. “You discovered at an early age that the legal system provides the redemption religion can no longer afford, and that lawyers are the true priests and judges the true prophets. You craved justice more than anything else in your life. And so on the day your childhood friend, Karen Busfield, told you she was accepted into a seminary to become an Episcopal priest, you were filled with despair, not joy. You were already in law school by then. Do you remember how you mocked her? You said: ‘When a child with bruises on her body reveals to you her father did it, Karen, what will you do? Tell her to pray and put it in God’s hands? And when she says she’s been praying every night for ten years but the beatings still continue, what will you say then? God’s hands can’t be bothered with children, Karen. If you really want to save people’s souls from sin—not just the sin of hating others and themselves but the sin of hating the God who breathed life into them and then abandoned them—you won’t pray for them, Karen. You’ll give them one of my business cards and tell them to call me.’”
I stared at Luas, trying to understand how he could possibly know all these things.
“And do you remember Karen’s reply?” Luas went on. “She said you didn’t let her finish. She was planning to join the Air Force, like her father, and become a military chaplain. ‘The Air Force doesn’t call lawyers when somebody misbehaves, Brek,’ she said. ‘They drop bombs on them. Now that’s justice.’ And you said to her: ‘They’ll never take you, Karen. They’ll see right through you.’”
Luas stopped to puff on his pipe.
“You understood the great truth of life, Brek Cuttler,” he continued. “You understood that the pursuit of justice is the purest form of religion and the highest human aspiration. You became a disciple of justice. Now the time has come for you to receive your reward. You’ve been chosen to join the elite lawyers of Shemaya who defend souls at the Final Judgment. I was being facetious when I asked you if you could defend yourself in the Courtroom. That always gets the attention of new arrivals. No, the only question now is whether you can walk through those doors if someone else depends upon what you say and leave unsaid. If you speak for humanity, not yourself. But this question was answered about you long ago, was it not? My job is not to assess your fitness but to show you the way.”
Luas emptied his pipe into an ashtray on the wall, then slipped his hand into his vest pocket and removed a golden key from which dangled a sparkling Magen David, the crescent moon of Islam, figures of Shiva and the Buddha, the yin and yang, and a crucifix. “This is yours,” he said, handing me the key. “It’s the key to the Courtroom.”
I refused to take it.
“Go on,” Luas insisted. “This isn’t the time for fear and indecision. You’ve been waiting for God to smite the evil and reward the righteous since you were eleven years old and you put those boys on trial for murdering crayfish. How wonderful! To you, even crayfish deserved justice! Rejoice, Brek Abigail Cuttler! Your prayers have been answered! There is justice after all! Finally, praise God, justice!”
8
Behind my best friend Karen Busfield’s house, beyond the ash piles left over from the old coal furnaces and a small abandoned building, glistened the wide pleasant stream known as the Little Juniata River. The Little Juniata flows north out of the Allegheny Mountains, draining the small creeks and springs that bless the hills and valleys with life, then due south when it reaches Tyrone, Pennsylvania, where my father’s family, the Cuttlers, who were simple farmers, are from. When the Little Juniata reaches Huntingdon, it spills into the big Juniata River, which is a big river only once every twenty years during a hurricane and at other times is just normal-sized, not wide, not deep, and not fast. The big Juniata River continues south until it empties into the Susquehanna River at Clarks Ferry near Harrisburg, and the Susquehanna, which is a big river all year round, continues south until it reaches Havre de Grace, Maryland, where it flows into the Chesapeake Bay. There is a marina there, where my mother’s family, the Bellinis, who were more wealthy and better educated than the Cuttlers, docked their sailboat. And so it was that my father’s and mother’s families were connected in this way, by the rivers, long before my parents met. I remember being astonished when I discovered this relationship on a map, like suddenly recognizing the shape of a connect-the-dots rabbit. I wondered about its meaning, and, like an astrologer searching for signs in the heavens, I began reading all kinds of maps for signs of what my future might bring. After that, when I waded into the Little Juniata River or sailed the Chesapeake Bay with my grandparents, I co
uld not resist wondering where the water had come from and where it was going and whose lives it would bring together.
The Little Juniata River is shallow in midsummer and has a limestone bottom of slippery, moss-covered river rocks. Karen and I could walk for miles through its knee-deep, clear waters wearing cutoff shorts and old sneakers, stumbling, sliding, drenching ourselves, and laughing merrily. We carried our lunches with us and ate along its banks, pretending to be early explorers charting the river for the first time. The aboriginal tribes we encountered, which is to say the boys from the different neighborhoods along the river, tracked our movements warily, as if we really were from a faraway land.
Girls never played in the river, but Karen and I weren’t like most girls—not because we were more tomboyish or brave, but because we saw the world differently. For example, we thought the river was interesting and full of possibilities, which most girls did not, and we believed we had equal right with the boys to play in it, which most girls would not. Ours was a difference of curiosity and perspective.
One hot July afternoon, while Karen and I were exploring the river, we shocked ourselves and the boys by catching crayfish with our own bare hands—no easy feat for a girl with only one arm. Little Juniata River crayfish are difficult to catch. Like handicapped girls, they’re timid little creatures, seemingly aware of their vulnerability and embarrassed by their own bizarre bodies. You must approach them from behind without casting a shadow, while they’re sunning themselves in shallow waters on the mossy green river rocks they try so hard to imitate. They dart backward when frightened, vanishing in a cloud of silt into the nearest crevice. You must be fast, and you must grab them by the large middle shell to avoid their sharp pincers—like lifting a snarling cat by the scruff of its neck. Held this way, they’re perfectly harmless. But make a mistake, and they’ll give you a painful snip and you’ll drop them back into the water.
The Trial of Fallen Angels Page 6
