Karen nods obediently. “Okay, no more talking.”
“Good, now tell me what happened.”
She looks at me and then, fidgeting with her fingers, looks away.
“I can’t help you unless you talk to me, Karen.”
“I know.”
I sit quietly, waiting, but she won’t speak. I can tell she’s completely humiliated. “Okay,” I say, finally, “I’ll tell you what. Let me tell you something I’ve never told anybody before, something I did wrong once.”
“You’ve never done anything wrong,” Karen says.
“Yes, I have,” I say. I tug on the empty right sleeve of my suit—the same black silk suit I was wearing when I arrived in Shemaya; I wore it that day because I knew I would need all the confidence I could get to meet the U.S. attorney. “Do you see this?” I say, showing her the empty sleeve. Then I proceed to tell her everything about how I had lost my arm, including my perjured testimony during the trial. When I finish, Karen smiles gratefully and compassionately—like a priest.
“You were only a child,” she says, softly. “You’ve already been forgiven. Do you know that?”
“Yes,” I say, “I know. And you’ve already been forgiven for whatever you’ve done too. Do you know that?”
She smiles again and wipes her eyes. “Yes, I guess I do.”
“Now tell me what happened.”
“Okay,” she says, summoning her strength. “Well, since you’re my lawyer, I guess I can tell you . . . I’m a chaplain to the missileers.”
“The who?”
“The missileers—the airmen who man the nuclear missile silos. You know, the ones with their fingers on the buttons, ready to launch ICBMs to end the world when the president gives the command?”
“Really?” I’m impressed. “I thought you were just an ordinary base chaplain ministering to enlisted men and their families or something.”
“I was. Do you remember about a year ago when I told you they were transferring me to Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Minot is one of the bases that has Minuteman intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles on alert. Because of the sensitivity of what they do there and the special security clearances I had to receive, I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody that part of my duties included serving as a chaplain to the missileers and their families on base. They don’t want the Russians or North Koreans turning clergy into spies.”
“Interesting,” I say. “Okay, so what happened?”
“I’m against nuclear weapons,” Karen says.
“That might be a problem,” I reply. “But it’s not treason.”
“Well,” Karen says, “I guess I told some of the missileers that launching nuclear missiles is wrong and they should refuse to do it if they’re ever ordered to.”
I stop her. “Wait a minute. When you say ‘wrong,’ you mean wrong as in wrong unless we’re attacked first, right?”
“No,” Karen says, “even in retaliation.”
“So if the Russians or North Koreans launch nuclear missiles at the United States, we’re not supposed to respond?”
“We’re supposed to forgive, Brek. We’re not supposed to resist violence with violence.”
“But that’s what the military does, Karen,” I say, incredulous. “They resist violence with violence. That’s their line of work; it’s their entire reason for being. Why did you become a military chaplain if you don’t agree with what they do?”
Karen looks puzzled. “Would you ask why a doctor works in a hospital when she doesn’t agree with sickness and disease? We go where we’re needed most, Brek. Doctors go to hospitals because that’s where the sick people are—and lawyers go to prisons to help people charged with crimes. Nobody needs more help in practicing nonviolence and forgiveness than the military—and nobody in the military needs to learn about it more than the people who can destroy the world in a fit of revenge-seeking.”
I’m stunned—it’s the crayfish trials all over again. “That’s all very nice in theory,” I say, “but the best way of deterring a nuclear attack is to make sure our enemies understand they’ll suffer the same fate if they ever try it.”
“But if we’re attacked,” Karen replies, “then, by definition, nuclear deterrence will have failed, so why bother to retaliate?”
“I don’t follow you,” I say.
“Let’s say we’re attacked by nuclear weapons this afternoon,” Karen explains. “If that happens, it will be despite our threat of retaliation and mutually assured destruction. In other words, our threat of retaliation didn’t work—it didn’t deter the attack.”
“I guess so . . .”
“So if it didn’t deter the attack, then retaliating would be risking the destruction of the world to carry out an already failed strategy. It would be both illogical and immoral.”
I scratch my head, trying to follow her logic. “Look,” I say, annoyed, “I’m not here to debate national nuclear strategy. I’m here to defend you against a charge of treason and espionage. There’s a right to free speech in this country—a right we protect, by the way, with nuclear missiles—and it means that you can say anything you want regardless of whether others agree, so I still don’t understand what you did wrong and why you’re here. Telling missileers not to launch their missiles might be a breach of your duties as an Air Force officer and get you a dishonorable discharge, but it’s not treason. You didn’t levy war against the United States or give aid and comfort to our enemies.”
Karen glances at the guards and lowers her voice. “There’s more to it than that,” she says. “I went down into one of the missile silos.”
“What? Did you break in?”
“No, one of the officers in my congregation, Sam—I mean Captain Thompson, one of the missileers—let me go with him and Brian, Captain Kurtz, during their shift in the MAF.”
“What does that mean, MAF?”
“Missile Alert Facility, that’s what they call the underground launch-control capsules. Each MAF controls ten Minuteman missiles.”
“Was he allowed to take you there?”
“He got special permission. See, they’re normally two-person crews and they stay underground for twenty-four hours, but the Air Force has been studying whether three-person crews spelling each other over longer shifts would work better, so having me along wasn’t entirely unusual. And I already had a high security clearance because I counsel them. I wanted to see what it’s like down there so I could understand better. You have no idea how much stress they’re under, sitting for hours on end with their fingers on the button. They’ve got questions and need somebody to talk to.”
“I can imagine,” I say, “but going into a MAF isn’t treason either.”
Karen holds her eyes on me. “They went on alert while we were down there. A satellite supposedly picked up what appeared to be the launch of two North Korean ICBMs. The protocol required Sam and Brian to have their missiles ready to launch within five minutes.”
“Wow, did they ask you to leave?”
“Yes.”
“And did you?”
“Not exactly, not right away. It’s surreal down there, Brek. The MAF capsules are suspended on these huge shock absorbers, like egg yolks inside eggs, to help them withstand a nuclear blast. They rattle around a lot, so the first thing Sam and Brian are required to do is buckle themselves into their chairs. The entire place started rumbling and shaking when the huge steel blast doors over the missiles slid open. We could see them on the closed-circuit monitors. Within seconds, the tips of the missiles were pointing toward the sky.”
“That sounds surreal all right,” I say.
“It was.”
“So, what happened next?”
Karen takes a deep breath and exhales. “Sam asked me to leave but I froze. They were within five minutes of killing millions of innocent people. The enormity of that was beyond comprehension. I was in a position to stop it and save them. Maybe God put me
there to do just that. I had a moral obligation. I couldn’t let it happen.”
I shake my head.
“I’m not the criminal here,” Karen says. “In any other context, I would have been a hero for saving those people, and Sam and Brian would have been arrested as terrorists for planning to detonate a weapon of mass destruction. But somehow in this crazy world, I’m the one who’s prosecuted for trying to stop them? That’s insane. It’s like people are drugged or under a spell or something. They don’t see the madness of it. Somebody’s got to wake them up before it’s too late.”
Karen’s eyes bore into me. “You understand, don’t you?” she says. “Please tell me that at least you understand.”
I don’t understand, but I don’t want to argue with her any further. “Okay, Karen,” I relent, “I understand.”
“I guess I need to wake you up too,” Karen says. “That’s okay. There’s still time.”
“Look,” I say, “it really doesn’t matter what I think, Karen. What matters is whether what you did down in that missile silo constitutes treason. So far, I’d say it doesn’t. Is there more?”
“Yes,” she says. “When I refused to leave, Sam picked up a phone on the console and called the SPs—the Air Force Security Police—to come down and escort me out. While he did that, Brian focused on his checklist for getting his nuclear warheads armed and his missiles ready to launch. They brainwash them well. He was completely detached and methodical about it, like he was doing nothing more than sitting on the floor in his living room, following instructions for assembling a piece of furniture. The fact that he was following instructions for killing millions of people didn’t seem to bother him at all. It’s theater of the absurd. If a future race populated the earth after a nuclear war and found a record of this, they wouldn’t believe it. We willingly made ourselves extinct for the sake of getting justice. Incredible. I had to do something. The countdown to the end of the world had begun. We were only four minutes away.”
“So what did you do?” I ask, half wincing, afraid she attacked them.
“I shook him,” Karen replies.
“You said shook him, right? You didn’t shoot him or anything, did you?”
“That’s not funny, Brek,” says Karen.
“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” I say. “I just want to be clear. What exactly do you mean by ‘shook’ him?”
“I grabbed him by the shoulders from behind and I shook him. I was trying to wake him up. That’s what I’ve been telling you. They were in a trance. They all fall into some kind of trance when they go down into the MAFs. As soon as they get on the elevator, morality and rational thought get suspended. Somebody needs to wake them up.”
“Did you hurt him?”
“Of course not,” Karen says. “Look at me. I barely weigh one hundred pounds. Those guys are both over six feet. He didn’t even feel me shaking him. It was like I wasn’t there, Brek. He just kept going through his checklist, flipping switches, reconfirming launch codes, checking the gauges and monitors. A day earlier, he was playing with his two young children in the nursery of the base chapel, rolling on the floor with them, laughing and hugging them. Now he was a machine—a machine of death. It was chilling. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Karen looks at me grimly. “When I couldn’t wake him up by shaking him,” she continues, “I went around in front of him. I pushed his checklist out of the way and grabbed his wrist. ‘Brian,’ I said, staring him in the eyes. ‘It’s me, Karen. Wake up. You can’t do this,’ I said. ‘You can’t kill millions of people. Even if you survive, you’ll never forgive yourself. They’re people like you and me. They’re mothers and fathers and little children like your children. They have families and dreams. Please, Brian,’ I said, ‘wake up.’”
Karen looks off into space, reliving the moment. The pain on her face is palpable. I think of Bo and Sarah, and of my mother and father and grandparents. My eyes start tearing up a little. I understand now. For a moment, I am awake.
“What did he do?” I say.
“It was terrible, Brek,” Karen replies. “He shoved me, hard enough to knock me onto the floor. Then he unbuckled himself from his seat, pulled his service pistol from the holster under his arm—they’re all required to carry them—and he stood over me, pointing his gun down at me with both hands. His eyes were wild. ‘Get out of here!’ he yelled at me. ‘You’re interfering with a nuclear missile installation! I’m authorized to use lethal force, Captain Busfield! Get the hell out of here right now or I’ll kill you!’”
“Oh my God, Karen,” I say.
“I looked over at Sam for help, but he didn’t even turn his head. He just kept going through his checklist, getting his warheads and missiles ready. Before I could get up off the floor, two SPs burst through the door with their guns drawn. It was over. They handcuffed me and led me out. They kept me under guard on the surface for a few hours until a team of FBI and CIA agents arrived. They flew me here to Leavenworth that night, and they’ve been interrogating me ever since. They think I’m a spy or a double agent or something. More theater of the absurd. Obviously the entire thing was a false alarm and there was no North Korean missile launch, or we wouldn’t be here having this conversation right now.”
I look at Karen with my mouth gaping open in shock. “I’m glad he didn’t shoot you.”
Karen brushes back the hair from her face. “Me too,” she says. “So, that’s what happened. Will you take my case?”
My look of shock turns slowly into a grin of admiration. As crazy as it was, she had risked everything for her convictions. “Well,” I say, “on the flight here I thought of at least twenty possibilities of what could have landed you in jail for treason, but none of them involved nuclear warheads. Like you said, doctors go to hospitals, lawyers go to prisons . . . and I guess priests go to missile silos.”
“I guess so,” Karen says proudly.
I’m silent for a moment. “But there’s always the risk, isn’t there,” I say, “that we’ll get too close and catch our patients’ diseases?” I reach out and take Karen’s hand, causing the prison guard to rap on the window again. I don’t care. “Yes, Karen,” I say. “Of course I’ll take your case.”
—
ALL THIS CAME back to me while sitting in Luas’s office, waiting for the new postulant to arrive. Luas said nothing more. He had accomplished his goal of immersing me so thoroughly in the miasma of my own past that there could be no chance of me becoming lost in the life of another soul. Or so I thought.
Luas struck a match to light his pipe, adding a third flame to the darkened room. Suddenly the door opened and the faceless gray-robed being from the Courtroom appeared. In a subservient voice, it asked whether we were ready.
“Yes,” Luas said, exhaling a cloud of smoke from his pipe. “I believe Ms. Cuttler is now prepared. Please send in Amina Rabun.”
15
Amina Rabun’s life passed before my eyes in an instant, ending sixty-seven years after it began in the quiet dawn of a day that looked like any other day. Our interview of Amina Rabun consisted only of sitting in her presence and receiving the record of her life. No questions were asked and no conversation took place. None was necessary. The memories of Amina Rabun came to us whole and complete unto themselves.
Even so, I caught only a few brief glimpses of her life at first, as I did with the other souls in the train shed. In a sense, meeting the soul of Amina Rabun in Luas’s office was like picking up a novel and leafing through a few random pages. I lighted upon a moment, at the beginning, from her early childhood in Germany before the start of World War II, when her father held her in his arms on a tree swing during a warm summer evening and sang her favorite song. Everything at that moment seemed so safe and peaceful, so fresh and promising for such a beautiful little girl and her loving father. But then I cheated and skipped ahead to the last page of the book to find that Amina Rabun died bitter and betrayed in the United States. How could everything have gone so disas
trously wrong? And I found a meaningful passage somewhere in the middle of the story where our lives had briefly intersected—when she received the complaint I had drafted against her on behalf of Bo’s mother, seeking reparations for the crimes perpetrated against the Schriebergs by the Rabuns during the war. That I had known this woman whose life would soon be judged in the Courtroom was chilling—not only because of the momentousness of the Final Judgment, but also because I knew her innermost thoughts, feelings, and memories.
As I said, these were only brief chapters, snapshots. I could not even begin to comprehend Amina Rabun’s life, or the choices she had made, or the worlds in which she had lived and the people who populated them, until I read all the pages from beginning to end. This would take time. And Luas’s effort to help me keep my life separate from hers had succeeded in making me far more interested in rereading chapters from the autobiography of my own life. I experienced no difficulty distinguishing myself from Amina Rabun, at least not at first. Our interview ended in what seemed simultaneously like a flash and a lifetime. Soon the being from the Courtroom reappeared at the office door and ushered Amina Rabun’s soul back to the great hall of the train shed, where it would wait with the other souls until her case was called.
Luas eyed me warily in the flickering candlelight of his office, trying to gauge how I had fared. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Brek Abigail Cuttler,” I said, proudly. “That wasn’t so hard after all.”
“Good, very good,” Luas said. “Let’s see if it stays that way. The risk of relapse among new presenters is high and can occur at any moment. It can be very disorienting and disconcerting. I want you to stay with your great-grandmother until we’re certain you’ve adjusted fully to the burden of having another life resident inside your own.”
“Okay,” I replied, having nowhere else to go anyway. This was one of the advantages of Shemaya—no plans, no appointments.
Luas stood up behind the desk and blew out the candles. “I’ll check in on you in a few days to see how you’re doing and discuss the case.”
The Trial of Fallen Angels Page 13
