City of Ruins (15 page)

The woman has some helpers — other women,
some old men, and at least one boy, all of them skinny, like they
haven’t had enough to eat. They’re going around, dabbing people’s
heads, squeezing drops of water on them. But I can’t see that
anybody here is getting “cured.”

One of the patients starts laughing at
nothing, and it reminds me of how weird Thea was acting when Mr.
Howe and I were in her room in the DARPA tunnels.

Finally, after carefully pouring drops of
water down an older woman’s throat and patting her forehead with
wet rags, the black-and-gray haired lady walks over to me. I can
tell she must be the one I’m supposed to see; she seems to be
calmer than everyone else around her. She doesn’t say anything for
a while, just looks at Thea, deep into her eyes, then touches her
face.

Thea looks back at the lady and says
“Mermaid.” In Hebrew. That was one of Thea’s family nicknames, and
this woman looks like she could be an aunt of hers or
something.

“You’re not from anywhere around here, are
you?” the woman asks.

“That’s one way of putting it,” I say. But I
can only say it in English. And this woman doesn’t have a
lingo-spot

“What a strange tongue. Do you understand
mine?”

I nod.

“Then news of this place must have reached
you. This was Jerusalem once. The City of David. God’s favorite. Or
so we thought.” She looks around at the people on the straw mounds.
One of the sick people again shouts, “Please!” The Healer motions
for one of her helpers to go over to the bed and see what’s wrong,
and the skinny boy runs over. “It’s all just ruins now, after all
these years of kings — our kings, their kings — and all their wars.
But we’re the ones left in the ashes. The ones the Babylonians
didn’t even think were worth taking into slavery. Most of the
people you see here were already poor, helpless, hopeless, even
before the wars. And because these people were ignored, scorned,
that’s why our city fell. That’s why our king was murdered.
Jeremiah told us we’d stopped listening to God.”

She sighs and looks back at all the sick
people and then at Thea and then at me. “I imagine you’re here
because you think I can take care of her?”

I nod.

“Is she your wife?”

My face goes so red that I wonder if everyone
can see it, even in here where it’s so dark. I mean I know they got
married young back in these old days, but come on.

“The man has stopped shouting now.” The boy
who’d been helping out has wandered over. “But now he doesn’t move
at all. Perhaps, Prophet, you should check him.”

The woman turns to the boy. “Thank you,
Naftali. But you can call me by name. ‘Prophet’ is a title others
gave me. But I am no more favored in the eyes of heaven than you
are. Than any of us.” She looks around the cave, at all the people
who are still moaning and yelling, then back at me and Thea. She
puts her arm around Thea’s shoulders and draws her close.

“My name is Huldah. Leave your friend here,”
she says to me. “I will look after her, though I can’t promise
anything. This new fever only appeared recently, after the first
stranger arrived.”

“ ‘First stranger’!” I repeat the words out
loud. She must mean A.J.

“Such a strange tongue. But I expect we will
come to know what you want. Perhaps you and the stranger are even
countrymen. That would make sense. I expect that because of this,
you didn’t receive the most hospitable welcome when you arrived.
But some people think what the Rebuilder asks is heresy. That it
will bring more trouble to us. And with all the leprosies and
plagues and invasions, we have had enough trouble. Lead him out of
here, Naftali,” Huldah tells the boy, and then, looking at me with
fierce eyes that also remind of Thea, says “I will send for you
when we know something.”

She takes Thea toward one of the empty piles
of straw. “Wait,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me.

“Seraphic plague,” the boy says.

“What?” I say back, in English. He looks at
me, but is able to figure out the question from the look on my
face. After all, it’s probably the oldest question there is, going
back to caveman times.

“Seraphic plague. That’s what they call it.
What the Gehenna-marked have. Because it makes people see things
that aren’t there, like the seraphim.”

He can tell I still don’t get it. “Seraphim.
Angels. From God. It’s not that they start to think they
see
angels, it’s that they start to think they
are
angels. Even
though Gehenna is where they say the dead go. I guess if you have
the plague, it’s like being caught between life and death. People
who have it think they see everything. And then they go crazy, or
they die. That’s why they’re Gehenna-marked. Come on, I’ll take you
up to the Temple ruins and we’ll throw rocks.”

“Not now.” I go over to Thea. “Stay with me,”
I tell her, so softly I’m pretty sure no else can hear us. “Please.
I can’t afford to lose you, too.”

I spend the rest of the night and most of the
next day by Thea’s bedside. I don’t even realize I’ve drifted off
to sleep until Naftali shakes me awake. I’m still holding the rage
I was using to dab Thea’s face. She’s still sleeping, but not
well.

Huldah’s there, too. “You both needed rest,”
she says. “Now I think you need some air. And sunlight. Let Naftali
take you.”

I nod and stand. And then I wave, even though
Thea’s still tossing in her sleep. Guess I better leave before I
get too corny and blow her a kiss. I let the boy, Naftali, take me
by the hand and lead me back up the slippery, rocky steps.

The boy is crying in my arms. We’ve thrown
rocks and it’s getting dark, and it turns out his family was taken
away, or maybe even killed, by the soldiers who came through here
and burned everything to the ground.

He wants me to comfort him like a parent
would, but how can I do that when I’m just an older kid? Maybe I
better take him back down to Huldah. But then, how do I know he
won’t get slow pox, helping out down there? Which leads to a really
weird thought: If he’s seen so many terrible things in real life,
like his family being hurt, then if he got slow pox, or seraph—
whatever they call it — and started seeing things that weren’t
there, could that really be any worse?

Could things sometimes get so bad that you’re
better off with a sickness that makes you think you’re somewhere
else?

Naftali pulls his head away from me and wipes
his eyes.

“Jeremiah says someday it can all be better
again, that the city can be rebuilt, that God will change our
fortunes again, but you can’t rebuild a family, can you?”

I think of my dad, getting lost in his work,
trying to rebuild our family, somehow, and I think of my mom, still
lost somewhere in the time stream, and I don’t have an answer for
him.

“The other stranger wants to help rebuild
everything right away,” he tells me, “but Jeremiah says the time
has to be right, or you’ll just have the same old problems all over
again.”

Naftali seems to brighten up, just a little,
because he’s finally thought of something to do: “I can take you to
Jeremiah! Maybe he can understand you better, since he already has
a stranger to talk to.”

He takes me through what’s left of the
palace, where I guess the king lived. Now it’s just blackened
stumps of wood and big tumbled rocks.

Not too far away, we walk past what’s left of
the temple. Those are famous ruins. They were still fighting over
them when I was born. Usually it involved the killing of innocent
people. Just like Naftali’s family.

I would see Jerusalem a lot on the Comnet
news, because people thought God was such a tiny idea you could
only think of God as being specifically Christian or Jewish or
Muslim, and they’d blow something up, or pull a trigger, to prove
it. But I don’t remember ever seeing something like this on the
news: a giant statue of…a cow, or something, but fallen over, with
one of its horns cracked in pieces on the ground, and a permanent
startled look on its face. Even in the setting sun, you could see
this was one big cow.

“What is that?” I ask. Naftali may not
understand the words, but he sees my pointing finger.

“An ox,” he tells me. “From the time of King
Solomon.”

One big
ox
.

“There were four of them. Huge. Tremendous.
All standing back-to-back, holding a gigantic bowl filled with
water, on their back. And so huge, so God-size, that we called it
the Molten Sea. The priests would use the water to clean
themselves. Those of us who were poor would try to use it, too,
sometimes just try to collect the water that would splash out, in
our hands, or in bowls, so we wouldn’t be thirsty.” He stands
staring at the place where his family tried to get some extra
water. “Now everybody’s thirsty, I guess.”

He shows me the remains of two giant pillars
that stood by the front entrance, tells me about the walls where
grain was stored for the year, and shows me another place, an
altar, where animals were sacrificed.

“People would take one of their best goats,
or sheep or oxen, whatever they had, for one of the feasts, like
Rosh Hashanah, or Pesach, and they’d have the animals’ necks cut,
and then the meat would be burned. You were supposed to be giving
back to God some of the good things you’d been given.” Naftali
stops and looks around the ruins. “Nobody tells you how to give
back any of the bad things. I guess you’re just stuck with
those.

“Anyway, it made the priests mad when
Jeremiah would come around and say that doing the sacrifice in
exactly the right way wasn’t really what God wanted. He said it was
more important how we treated each other, that was the main
test.”

We make a wide circle around some of the
timbers and stones and it’s almost completely dark now and with the
ground so slippery from the frost, in all this wreckage, I keep
tripping and banging my legs.

“Ow!”

“No! Don’t go that way!” Naftali says, like
he’s a little worried for me. “Over there was where the Holy of
Holies was supposed to be. That was the room the high priest would
go into on Yom Kippur. It was forbidden to everyone else. That was
the day all the grownups were supposed to tell their sins, tell
everything they did wrong, and what they wanted to do better in the
year that was coming. Maybe that was the way they tried to get rid
of the bad things they did. I don’t know if it always worked. But
the high priest would go in there — in that special room — and say
the name of God.” His voice gets quieter, almost a whisper. “The
real
name. Not the short versions like Adonai or Yahweh. But
the whole long forbidden name that only the high priest is supposed
to know. If anyone else says it, they get burned to a crisp.”

Then he stops and I nearly bump into him, and
there’s anger in his voice. “But you think of all the people who
got burnt up anyway, when the Babylonians came — and what did they
do? They weren’t saying the forbidden name of God.”

We move in the dark, more slowly, past the
less famous ruins. “Over there was a market,” Naftali tells me.
He’s pointing in the dark, so I can’t see anything but shadows,
caused by the light from the few campfires people have made behind
the remnants of walls. Everyone’s huddled up, trying to keep
themselves warm. “People would sell food there—cloth, oil for
cooking, or for lamps. Sandals. My father and mother…”

He stops and there is a long pause. I can
hear the sniffles and sobs he’s trying to cover up. I won’t try to
ask him what the matter is, or even hold him, if he doesn’t want me
to.

“My father and mother sold things there,
too,” he says at last, and then he’s moving again and I try to keep
up with him in the dark, more by sound now than anything else.

Then ahead I see it: another campfire, the
biggest one, nearly a bonfire, flames going high in the sky, and
more voices, at least one of them occasionally shouting. I walk
behind Naftali toward the fire, tripping a couple of times over
pieces of what used to be homes, slipping on the ice, and then
climbing up over the rocks that have been piled together the way
kids might do it if they wanted to make a fort.

On the other side of the fort, I see Jeremiah
again, the one who told that crowd of people to back off and let me
get help for Thea. He’s yelling at everyone around the fire now,
but in his case, it’s not quite like he’s mad: “This is God’s
promise: in this place, which you say is in ruins, with no joyous
soul in these desolate streets of Jerusalem, with animals roaming
free of their husbandmen, in this forlorn place there will again
come the sounds of joy and gladness! The voice of groom and bride,
the wail of newborn babe, the voice of those giving praise to God —
all will rise! They will bring new offerings to the temple of God,
and these new offerings will find favor with the Lord. And the
Almighty will restore them to the land, to this land, as in days of
old!”

He paces as he speaks, and everyone watches
him.

“Amen!” someone shouts. The only someone I
know in the whole crowd, someone who also wouldn’t be born for
another couple thousand years or more: Andrew Jackson Williams.

He’s listening to Jeremiah preaching, raising
his arms up to the sky, yelling out words and praise in English,
while people around him keep sneaking glances over at him,
wondering who or what this other stranger really is, not realizing
he will be quoting Jeremiah centuries from now, for crowds of
people that gather around
him
.

Maybe, for Andrew Jackson, this is even a
kind of vacation. After all, all he has to do was listen.

“Him,” I tell Naftali. “He’s the one I need
to see.” I point to A.J. and Naftali walks with me, already rubbing
his hands and holding them out; it’s warmer by the fire.