Blessed Child (28 page)

The last thing Jason saw before leaving with a grinning but otherwise unaffected Leiah was the black-clad avengers. The wind must have blown their picket signs away, but they still wore their hoods. The CBS crew was interviewing them and they weren't smiling.

20

C
A
LEB LAY ON HIS BED IN THE DARK
.

Well, it wasn't really dark because the lights were flashing on his wall in reds and blues and greens. The television lights. But he was trying not to look at that.

A day had passed since the meeting when the wind had come. He knew it was a day, because Jason and Leiah had visited once. Leiah was beginning to see, he thought. Or at least she
wanted
to see, which was just as good, because it all started with wanting. The wanting and then the surrendering.

“Surrendering is like
not
wanting,” Dadda said.

“You want and then you
don't
want?”

“You want to enter the kingdom and then you decide it's worth everything in your life. You decide not to want your own kingdom. Like the man who sold all he owned for the field. See?”

He saw, but he'd never really understood why Dadda should call it surrender, because it didn't feel like giving anything up. It had always felt more like gaining.

Until now. Now he was fighting; not watching the moving painting felt like Dadda's surrender. And it was harder than he would have guessed.

He wasn't sure why watching was something he shouldn't do, only that he shouldn't. Well, for one thing, it was mean things and bad people over there on the picture. At least to him it felt bad. And that could not be good.

He rolled onto his side and began to hum softly.

He had been doing well with the witch, he thought. He was eating all of his dinner food, because it seemed to please her. The bitter mush was an every-night thing now, but with enough water, it really wasn't that bad. At least she hadn't hit him again.

Martha had said that he'd go to two more meetings this week. They really liked that, didn't they? Of course, who wouldn't? The wind had been like God's breath. Like something from the life of Elijah or Elisha, who were two of his favorite people. Not that he was really them; for one thing they were a lot older. And for another thing, they spoke to kings, and Caleb didn't think he was really a prophet or anything like that. But when those prophets asked God, fire fell from heaven, and ax heads floated, and all kinds of amazing things happened. Things like God's wind blowing on the faces of the sick and healing them. He chuckled.

Of course there was always Moses. Maybe he was more like Moses, and Moses was one of his favorites too. He didn't speak well in front of people either, did he? He used Aaron instead. But when it came to calling down frogs and turning the sky black with insects and making the rivers red with blood, Moses didn't seem to have a problem. He hit a rock once and water poured out— enough water to flood the monastery, Dadda said. That's how much it would take for them all to drink. Maybe Ethiopia needed a Moses during the droughts.

A shiver ran through Caleb's bones at the thought, and he smiled. Elijah had once been fed by birds. Did that mean he liked birds too?

Caleb had been walking in the kingdom a long time now, five years at least, but never had he seen how easily the kingdom could spill over into this world. Like light into darkness. But then he'd never seen so much darkness either. Definitely not in the monastery. By the way some of the people were acting in the theater, you would think that they no longer believed in people like Elijah and Moses. Or God, really. They no longer believed in God. At least not
God,
God.

The miracles were God's choice, of course. Father Nikolous might think he had something to do with what happened, but really Caleb had done what he'd done because his Father had given him the power to do it. And because his heart felt so heavy at seeing the people. He could have walked off the stage, but why would he? Not with so many hurting. And he knew that it was all a part of God's plot for sure. He wasn't completely sure of the plot, but it was unfolding like a thunderstorm, wasn't it?

An hour later Caleb was still thinking, not in meditation or in the light. Just thinking. In fact, he wasn't really thinking about anything when he suddenly decided to sit up and look at the television.

He watched the colors and the figures running around, and his heart began to pound. It was terrifying and exhilarating at once. And it was only looking. That's all it really was. He wasn't going into the picture and joining them; he was only studying them like he might a book.

He watched them for three minutes before throwing his head into the pillow and wrapping the covers over his ears.

His chest felt like it might explode, and he began to cry softly. Then he began to shake with sobs. He begged his Father for forgiveness, and he soaked his pillow with tears.

21

Day 24

E
VERY ONCE IN A WHILE, maybe every hundred years or maybe every five hundred years, something comes along that makes life on earth very different. That's what the talking heads were starting to say on the tube. Things like the Industrial Revolution or the discovery of electricity or Mohammed's penning of the Koran or the death of Jesus Christ. Well, maybe, just maybe we are witnessing another one of those moments. That's what they were saying.

It was no longer just an American phenomenon; the mind-boggling footage said just as much in Arabic, or German, as it did in English. You could be a seven-year-old girl walking down the sidewalk and see the pictures on the television through the shop window in Copenhagen just as easily as in Boston. And either way, if you asked your mother if those legs straightening was a trick or not, she would probably shake her head and say something like, “I don't know. They say it isn't.” It took the Beatles years to find worldwide recognition; it took Hitler months; it took the boy two weeks.

Despite the relative autonomy of the Holy Ascension Church, the Archdiocese of the Greek Orthodox Church was beginning to flex its muscles. In a statement made public by Donna, the archbishop was skillfully avoiding any clear position on either the boy or the local parish's dealing with him. It was too soon to draw judgment.

In short, although they weren't enthusiastic about the way Father Nikolous seemed to be thrusting the boy into the spotlight and charging for admittance, they weren't eager to distance themselves from Caleb either. You could not, after all, ignore the boy's power.

Two more meetings had been held since the night the wind rushed through the Old Theater, each two days apart. Nikolous had paid a premium and preempted a big junior-league hockey game and a heavy-metal comeback tour scheduled for the Old Theater.

He had also raised the price to a hundred dollars a ticket in the orange and red seats, and two hundred dollars for the floor. The boy was pulling in well over a million dollars per show.

They operated out of two entrances now, a western one on the street for those who could walk, and a southern one facing the parking structure for those who couldn't. Four thousand people were wheeled in through the southern entrance on the first night, six thousand on the second. It took four hours to get them all situated.

As promised, Donna had her exclusive interview with Nikolous. When she asked him why he held the meetings so close together, Nikolous told the world there was no guarantee that Caleb's powers would last, and he recited Dr. Caldwell's analysis as his reasoning. Either way, as a man of deep humanitarian convictions, he didn't see how he could do any less. The world needed the boy
now,
not a year from now.

Already one consumer advocacy group was making it clear that Nikolous seemed more interested in the ticket price than in humanitarian concerns. A hundred bucks a pop was price gouging. Unfortunately there were no recorded regulations that dealt with the reasonable charge for a boy who could rock an arena with not much more than a nod. At least not yet.

Caleb had come out with more confidence on each night. He walked with more purpose, and he didn't look around as though lost for as long. He appeared to be getting the hang of these gigs, as one commentator put it. During the last event he'd even said a few words into the microphone. They were simple words rebroadcast a thousand times since. “You can walk into the kingdom of God with the power of the Holy Spirit,” he said. That was all.

The words only expanded the raging controversy over the true source of the boy's power.

The debate over the authenticity of the phenomenon was already fading. Only the most ardent skeptics (those who had their heads planted so firmly in the sand of their own dogma that they would not accept the existence of the ocean, for example) even questioned the miracles as genuine. And when they did, their arguments came off as silly and embarrassing in the face of what was happening. You can only say the world is flat for so long before even the most common man starts snickering. Evidence has a way of making its own arguments, and in the case of the boy's authenticity, there was gobs of evidence. Nearly as much as that which suggested the world was indeed round.

As Jason had predicted, the antichrist crowd was growing. The black-hooded demonstrators had swelled to occupy four entire rows on the right side. Their leader had made it abundantly clear in a dozen interviews that the world was pandering to a child of the devil. Why Nikolous allowed them in was unclear. They made excellent camera coverage, and in their own way they lent added excitement to the meetings, but they also posed a threat to the boy. Jason confronted Nikolous about them once, but the man seemed to think restricting attendance might impact the boy's popularity. Like all of their discussions, this one proved mostly fruitless. He did persuade the Greek to double stage security, which was something.

Jason kept his eye on the leader of the cult, which was unnerving for the simple reason that the ominous lizard-eyed fellow seemed to be keeping his eye on Jason.

At the third meeting Caleb had hopped off the stage and run through the crowd ecstatic, much like he had at the handicap convention. People's eyes lit up like Christmas lights as he approached, and they leapt from their beds and chairs and danced in the halls after he passed.

At the fourth meeting he prayed a very long prayer in Ge'ez. He began to cry, and he fell to his knees and appeared to be begging his God. Then he fell prone on his face and lay still. An earthquake hit Southern California that night. Magnitude 4.3 on the Richter scale. It shook the entire Los Angeles basin, but its epicenter was later determined to be under the Old Theater on Figueroa Street. There were no broken windows or toppled trees to show for the quake. There was only a mess of wheelchairs scattered about the vicinity of the epicenter, abandoned by their owners in its aftermath.

To say that Caleb had become a national sensation would be a bit of an understatement. And this all in the span of fourteen days since first having his face displayed to the nation through Donna's camera—twenty-four days since first entering the country with Jason and Leiah.

Jason sat in his living room in the corner recliner, nursing a cup of hot coffee. He stared at the television, only half listening to the talking heads beating the issue to death. Leiah sat on the couch adjacent to him, both legs tucked to one side on the cushions, nursing her own cup—a
Tiggers-are-wonderful-things
mug someone had given Jason at Stephen's birth.

It struck him that she'd been here with him at night like this only twice since coming to America. Not that it meant anything, just a thought. She looked comfortable leaning against the corner pillows, studying the picture tube. Her tan work boots stood heel to heel at the door.

Burn scars still covered her skin, head to foot. All around her people were being healed, but her condition hadn't been affected by the boy. Jason had decided that it was because she probably didn't really need healing. Or at the very least,
she
didn't think she needed healing. Plastic surgery was not exactly something someone
needed
. She hadn't asked the boy, of course. She'd probably considered and rejected the notion already. Something along the lines of, “Asking would be like confessing that I have a problem. And I don't have a problem.” Case closed. Some would call her brave and principled. He thought of her more as stubborn. It was a trait she would take to her grave, he thought.

It was also a trait that would have saved a marriage. On balance he liked it.

She caught him looking at her. “What?”

He smiled. “Nothing.”

“Hmm.” She lifted an eyebrow and turned back to the television. But she couldn't hide the smirk on her lips.

Their relationship had slowly warmed after those first few days of cooling in the wake of the unveiling at Jim's Fish House. He was beginning to think that she might not hate his guts after all. And he was also beginning to look for reasons to be in her company. Silly little excuses, like meeting for lunch before their visit to Caleb each day. Antonio's Barrio was on the way, after all. Or like taking a ride together down to World Relief 's Garden Grove office to talk to John Gardner about the prospects of removing the boy from Nikolous's custody, when he knew full well there were no such prospects.

Or like watching this round-table discussion on NBC together. At his house. Not that it wasn't an important event, but they both knew she could just as easily have watched it at her apartment. Still, she hadn't hesitated when he'd suggested they watch it together.

Jason rose from his chair. “More coffee?”

“No thanks.”

He walked into the kitchen, topped his cup, and returned. He lowered himself onto the couch beside her, set his cup on the end table, and calmly crossed his legs. The move from recliner to couch felt a bit obvious, and he avoided her look. But it was his couch, wasn't it? And he did have a better view of the television from this angle. A little better anyway.