Ark (24 page)

Gene shook his head. He closed his eyes and leaned against wall. “My Lord,” said Gene. “What was that?”

“What was what?” asked Jim. “You mean the music?”

Gene looked at Jim like he was crazy. “Music? I don’t hear any music.”

Jim listened for a moment and realized that the sound had been turned off. “I can’t hear it now,” he said. “So what are you talking about?”

Gene closed his eyes. “I don’t think I can explain it,” he said. “Listen. Can we talk later? It sort of hurts. Let me just ...”

Jim was baffled. “What hurts? Gene, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” said Gene. “I just don’t feel too great. Let me rest here a bit.”

Aaron had stopped his hammering and his assistants moved in to turn the Mercy Seat so he could work at a more comfortable angle on the other parabola. Jim noticed that Aaron swayed slightly as he stepped back to examine his work.

His concentration broken, Aaron looked around the room, noticing Jim and Gene sitting on stools by the wall. He stretched his back, put down his tools, and came over to greet them.

He nodded to Jim and slapped Gene lightly on the arm to wake him up. “Gene, wake up! Did my hammering put you to sleep?”

Gene sat up and smiled. “Sorry. I was fine when I came in here. Maybe it was something I ate.”

“I had the same thing you did,” said Jim. “We both had the buffet.”

Jim turned his attention to Aaron. “That was some effort, Aaron. You seem to be enjoying the work.”

The goldsmith wiped his brow as he looked back at the ark. Marta was moving the large open flame of her torch back and forth over the area of the parabola that Aaron was going to work on next. Aaron studied the ark for a moment from a distance before replying. “Yes, I love the work,” he said. “The gold. I’ve never worked such a large piece of gold before. What a luxury! The gold wants to shape itself. It’s as though it guides my hands.”

Jim remembered the music. “I didn’t know that they had piped-in music down here. It was beautiful. Did you choose it?”

Aaron looked confused. “Music?” he said. “What music?”

“It’s not playing now. You were banging the gold too loud to hear it, I guess. I thought it was something you had them put on. I like to work to music myself. That’s why I noticed. It’s hard to find music that is good to work to but not distracting.”

Aaron shook his head. “I was going to bring a radio but left it at home. No room in my bags.”

Marta finally finished heating the gold and beckoned to Aaron. He excused himself and went back to work.

Gene got off the stool and stood up. “If he’s going to start banging again, I don’t think my head can take it. Let’s go explore somewhere else.”

Jim walked to the door and peered through the window that looked out on the large cavern. The General had arrived and was overseeing the hanging of a small section of the courtyard fence. Jim assumed that it was just a test of the hanging method. Several people stood nearby holding long sheets of gray-brown cloth that Jim thought must be goat hair.

I’m going to go out and talk to the General,” said Gene, shouting over the hammer blows.

“Go for it, Gene.”

Jim walked back to Aaron’s station and moved the stool to where he had a better view of Aaron’s work.

He would have liked to have brought a camera to record the image of Aaron working at the ark, but he knew that was forbidden.

Aaron’s hammer rose and fell in steady even strokes as his chisel traced cherubic wings on the gold. Periodically he stopped while Marta heated the metal to a more pliant state. Slowly the outstretched wings of the cherubim emerged from the gold. What had been flat silhouettes of gold now bore elegant repeating lines of stylized feathers.

Aaron worked for several more hours without a break, and Jim continued to watch, lost in fascination at the primal beauty of the scene. At six that evening the lights flickered in the cavern, marking an end to the day shift. The General entered the workroom moments later, full of energy. Gene was beside him.

“We’re doing great, everybody,” the General said. “Aaron, if you want to slow down a bit you can. Seems you’re way ahead of the guys making the gold menorah and the table of ... what was that thing called?” General Wilcox looked to Gene for the answer.

“That’s called shew breads, or snow breads, I think,” said Gene. Jim noticed that Gene seemed different, more subdued, even grim. Something had happened to him earlier that had made Gene uncomfortable being near the ark. He stood in the background, and when the General was finished with his pep talk he was glad to leave with him.

Jim met Gene outside Aaron’s workshop. “How can you stand the clanging? Horrible!” Gene remarked.

“The time flew by,” Jim answered. “I had a good time watching.”

Gene suggested they have dinner. Jim’s stomach had been rumbling for a while, and he agreed immediately.

Gene mentioned that John Wilcox was coming to Los Alamos for the assembly. “The assembly?” asked Jim as they walked toward the tramway. “When is that?”

“I thought that the General told you,” said Gene. “In a week. Today is July fourth. That makes it the tenth for the first assembly.”

“Oh my god,” said Jim. “I completely forgot the date. It is the fourth.”

“There are fireworks over the mesa, they tell me,” said Gene. “Let’s get up top and breathe some real air.”

“You don’t like it down here, do you, Gene?” said Jim, fishing for a clue to what was bothering his friend.

“It’s not the caverns. It’s that gold room,” said Gene. “It gives me the creeps. It’s that damned clanging,” he explained. “It went right through me.”

They went to dinner at the same rooftop restaurant and counted themselves lucky to get the last seats in the open air bar. When darkness fell over the mesa, fireworks lit up the skies over the trees. Some of the louder bombs that shuddered the stones of the patio unnerved Jim, but Gene loved it. The louder the concussions that punctuated each fiery chrysanthemum, the more Gene seemed to enjoy it.

Their vantage point was on a comfortable veranda surrounded by a large hedge decorated here and there with rose bushes, and they felt like guests of honor.

In spite of the great food and the soft vinyl deck chairs, Jim was uneasy with their vantage point directly under the fireworks. When he was fourteen, he and his family had been involved in a spectacular and devastating fireworks accident. A large box of rockets went off while being carried to their launch site. Eight bombs detonated on a hillside crowded with vacationers, injuring a dozen or so people, including Jim. A piece of phosphorous hit his arm. It bounced off and went out in the damp grass, but it scorched his T-shirt and scared him to death.

Jim could still remember the screams and shouting, the people’s bodies silhouetted by exploding fireworks. His memory wore visual scars, images of people frozen in the hot strobing light; macabre impressions of pandemonium and panic. Jim had them every time he watched fireworks.

Here, however, Jim’s fear was soothed somewhat by a nearby trellis and awning that he could duck under. He wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t stray too far from the trellis during the entire show.

When it was over Gene wore that goofy face a child has when they’ve been drop-jawed for hours. Jim laughed. “I thought you didn’t like noise. Are your ears ringing? Mine are.”

“Say what?” said Gene with a broad smile.

They were tired by eleven o’clock and in spite of a stack of unread documents left by the General, they wanted nothing more than to sleep. Jim felt like an art student again, and the evening of fireworks had tested his mettle enough to make him feel alive. “How strange to feel this good so far from home,” Jim thought as he drifted off to sleep.

#

The next few days saw most areas of endeavor ahead of schedule. The General had seen to that. His steady pressure as he tirelessly toured the facilities spoke of a man who’d had little to distinguish his career. He’d seen the Nam, but as a construction engineer. The Gulf War had him tucked out of the way below decks on the carrier
Forrestal
, figuring out codes. Now he was hip deep in history.

One evening Gene bet Jim a fifty the old man would blow his own brains out when it was all over, no matter how it came out. “What else in life could top Thunderbolt for a frustrated career monger like General ‘Max’ Wilcox?” said Gene. “He waits his whole life for a biggie, and when it comes he can’t talk about it, can he?”

Whatever his motivation, the General was a driven man. His energy exhausted most people as the pieces of Thunderbolt came together.

Finally the day came to assemble the Tabernacle.

In the great cavern, a large outer wall of goat hair cloth hung from tethered poles. Off center in this large area of smooth dirt, forty-eight gilded boards rose into place, each seated into silver tenons by strong rods of bronze and held together by five long poles that ran through large rings mounted ten to a board.

Jim felt uneasy standing inside the outer curtain, so near the Tabernacle, and he was amazed at how large it appeared.

In his original drawings, he had drawn a figure standing next to the wall to show the scale. He remembered that the figure looked small, but now, standing near one of those walls, the height still surprised him. For so many years he had tried to imagine what it might look like. Now here it was, the Tabernacle of the Ark of the Covenant, resurrected in all its golden glory before his eyes.

As Jim watched, the pillars and veils that shrouded the Holy of Holies, the spot where the ark would ultimately rest, were put into place and secured by hemp rope tied to pegs in the ground outside. Then yards of fabric tenting were unrolled and lifted on poles to form a flat roofed tent covering the Tabernacle.

Within an hour the construction was complete. A white linen curtain decorated with blue and scarlet cherubim motifs covered the entrance to the Tabernacle. This was then drawn back to reveal the five pillars that stood at its entrance.

Jim peered inside. There were the four pillars and the curtain that covered the inner sanctum. He walked between the pillars and entered the golden room within. All the boards fit perfectly, forming a smooth wall of pure gleaming gold. Pinholes of light dotted the ceiling like stars, making pools of light on the bare earth as he walked to the next set of curtains. He stood motionless for a while staring at the empty space beyond. Soon it would be occupied by the object that spawned so much interest and controversy, the ark itself.

He wondered again if his intuition had really been right. Why should his interpretation be more accurate than those of scholars and experts? Now, with so much riding on it, Jim had his doubts.

A shadow passed over him. He turned around to see the General Wilcox standing at the mouth of the Tabernacle. The General’s face was lit with yellow flickering light. He beckoned to Jim to come out.

“Time for a meeting,” said the General.

#

The General looked grave as they entered Aaron’s workshop. Jim noticed weapons being carried by soldiers stationed outside the closed door.

The General’s son John and Gene were waiting for them, and both waved as he and the General entered the room. The General gave them all sullen looks and motioned them to the far side of the room. Jim noticed that the finished ark had been fitted with a cover made of a dark heavy material.

“Hi, Jim,” said John, slapping Jim on the back.

The General cleared his throat and everyone looked at him.

“What’s the matter, pop?”

“The president got a call today from the President of Israel. A short time later the president contacted Helmstrom at the mountain. Then, in the middle of a ... well, I get a call from him.”

“Is the story out?” asked Jim.

“Denial can go only so far,” said the General. “Especially with them. How they do it is anyone’s guess, but I hear Israeli Intel can tell the color of the president’s shorts before he puts them on in the morning. Anyway ... we do it tomorrow, then we gotta shut down this phase. Everything is here, all we have to do is put it together. Tech micro wants more time but we want to scrub this ASAP and maybe do the analysis later.”

Jim touched the fabric that covered the ark. The material was coarse, rubbery and cold. It seemed to tingle under his touch.

Gene snorted softly in disgust. “So how many really know about Thunderbolt, General? Once the gold starts to move ...”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re probably right. Screw them,” said the General. “They don’t know anything. Just fishing.”

“Then what are we having a meeting about?”

“Just to make you all aware that we HAVE to be doubly conscious of what we say to outsiders.”

As Jim and Gene took the tramway back to their rooms, Jim tried to remember what, if anything, he might have said on the phone to Kas. As far as she knew he was producing a catalog, taking days in the desert with jewelry and photographers. Jim had only talked to her once and the conversation had been brief. When they got to their apartment he and Gene discussed the General’s news.

“He might have been looking for a reaction,” guessed Gene as he switched on the cable news channel. “Shit, I feel so cut off in here. Even the world up top is like another planet,” he said, muting the sound on the TV. “Don’t get me wrong. I like the West. Fostia and I had a couple of great vacations here.”

“It’s the secrecy,” said Jim. “I’m sure there’s a phobia people get when they’re around too many secrets. C-I-A-itis?”

Gene nodded. “You’re probably right.”

“What’s this about the Israelis?” asked Jim. “What difference does it make if they know?”

“Come on, Jim,” said Gene. “Are you serious? It’s one thing to go and build an ark. It’s quite a different matter when a government undertakes the task, and quite something else when it’s using the nation’s gold reserves to do it. You’ve heard of the separation of church and state, I guess?”

“Don’t patronize me, okay? The truth is I was only thinking of the accuracy of our plans when I was watching over the construction. I don’t give a shit about politics.”

“Okay,” Gene replied. “but isn’t it obvious that the Israelis or the rest of the world, for that matter, would have something to say about it? What about the Vatican? What would the Pope say?”