The Trial of Fallen Angels (5 page)

Nana stood in the doorway, watching me explore the space, searching for the wizard behind the curtain.

The next thought that came into my mind was the set of the morning news where Bo had tried to banter with Piper Jackson. As quickly as the memory arose, the wall of colored whales metamorphosed into the sunrise mural that served as a backdrop for the newscasters. Studio cameras stood where the cribs had been, and lighting racks dangled from the ceiling. But like my neighborhood and the day care, the set was deserted.

I thought of my law office next. My desk, computer, files, bookshelves, treatises, diplomas, and pictures of Bo and Sarah surrounded me instantly. Then came Stan’s Delicatessen on Penn Street and my Bellini grandparents’ beach house in Rehoboth Beach, followed by my Cuttler grandparents’ barn and my bed in the physical therapy ward at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where I watched Bobby Hamilton, with both arms amputated, learn to tie his shoes with a long crochet hook in his mouth. I revisited the cinder track behind my high school, where I’d won several races against two-armed opponents and amazed myself and the small crowds. I sat at the bar at Smokey Joe’s on Fortieth Street near the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where I had danced the night away with my girlfriends during law school. I knelt before the altar at Old Swedes’ Church, where my best friend, Karen Busfield, who had become an Episcopal priest, asked whether I would pledge my troth to Boaz Wolfson before God and pronounced us husband and wife. I wept in the delivery room at Wilmington Hospital, where my mother had given birth to me, and then again at Blair Memorial Hospital in Huntingdon, where I’d given birth to Sarah and Bo’s tears dropped onto my lips.

Each room and space from my past came as fast as I thought of it, as though I were plunging down a shaft cored through the center of my life.

I went back to linger, walking the sands of the Delaware shore, climbing the haymow in my grandfather’s barn, pulling on the Nautilus machine that strengthened my left arm to do the work of my right. I revisited not only the locations but the reality, every detail: the sinewy saltiness of Stan’s corned beef, the burning smoke and stale beer of Smokey Joe’s, the warm rain on our wedding day, the cold stirrups of the delivery-room bed. Nana accompanied me, but did not interfere. Her fascination with how I had lived my life nearly equaled my fascination with the power to re-create it. But the exertion of doing all this exhausted me, and soon portions of one space began blurring into others. The images, the realities, congealed into a single nonsensical mass that finally ground to a halt under its own weight.

Everything went blank. And then it filled with an indescribable light that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere. Through this light Nana extended her hand to me in a gesture of love, smothering the blaze of fear that had nearly consumed me.

“You’re dead, child,” she said. “But your life has just begun.”

PART II

7

Y
ou are not prepared for what you would see. So we must limit what you will see, which is only possible, Brek Abigail Cuttler, because you insist upon what you believe is your sight to see.”

Luas spoke these words while placing a felt blindfold over my eyes in the vestibule leading back into Shemaya Station. He was like my father on my wedding day at the rear of the church before giving me away, ironic and wistful, lowering the veil over my face before escorting me into the unknown. He wore the identical gray suit, vest, shirt, and tie Bill Gwynne had been wearing at the office the last day I saw him. The resemblance between Luas and Bill was uncanny, as was his resemblance to both of my grandfathers. He sometimes seemed to be all three men at once, shifting physical features like a hologram. For my part, I looked as fresh and presentable as I did on my wedding day. Nana had fussed over me all morning in a mother-of-the-bride sort of way, making certain my hair and makeup looked just so. But instead of a wedding dress, I wore my black silk suit, from which she had managed to remove the baby formula and the blood.

The suit had become my uniform in Shemaya: the garment that represented my identity, the proof that I had lived a life, and, most important, the symbol and reminder to myself that I fully intended to return to that life. Because I did not, could not, and would not accept the possibility of my death.

It has been said that the first stage of grieving is denial, the essential survival mechanism that protects survivors from the enormity of the loss they have just sustained and that enables them to go on. This is no less true of the dead grieving for themselves and those they left behind. Nana and Luas wanted me to accept it, but I was willing to do no more than humor them and bide my time until I was cured of whatever disease had seized control of my mind.

This strategy helped me cope and kept me sane—yes, one can go insane in the afterlife. But it did nothing to quench the desperate longing I felt for Sarah, which at every moment threatened to consume me and drive me over the edge, whether I was dead or alive.
Where is she?
I worried incessantly.
Who is taking care of her?
Bo was a great daddy and knew what to do, but he wasn’t me. He didn’t wake up three extra times during the night to pull up the covers she had kicked off. He didn’t know the difference between her cries of hunger, dirty diapers, tummy aches, and boredom. He hadn’t memorized the telephone numbers for the pediatrician and the poison control center. He didn’t read the ingredients and nutritional value of everything she ate or study the pharmacological insert sheets and drug-interaction and side-effect warnings of every medicine she took. He didn’t fawn over the toddler outfits in department stores and make sure she was the most adorable child at the day care. And he didn’t take time every weekend to record in her baby book all the milestones of her life and what a beautiful little girl she was becoming.

Oh, how I ached to hold her, to feel her heart pounding and her chest rising and falling, my precious, beautiful brown-eyed girl. My determination to see her again kept me going. I would do everything asked of me to get back to my daughter, my husband, my home, and my life. I willingly conspired with Nana and Luas in the fantasy that I was in heaven while secretly knowing it was just that—a fantasy, an hallucination—and I would be with them soon.

Nana had explained that I would be spending the day with Luas but gave no hint of where we would be going or what we would be doing. It would be my first day away from her since arriving in Shemaya. While primping my hair in the bedroom mirror before leaving her house in Delaware, I asked her if Luas was my great-grandfather Frank, whom I had never met.

“No, no,” she said in her Italian accent, amused by the suggestion. “Luas isn’t your great-grandfather, dear. Frank has already moved on. Luas is the High Jurisconsult of Shemaya.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “High Jurisconsult?”

“It means he’s the chief lawyer here.”

“But I thought we were in heaven,” I said, not quite sarcastically, instantly aware of the contradiction and smiling inwardly. “Why would anybody need lawyers in paradise?”

Nana looked surprised. “You don’t think God would allow souls to face the Final Judgment alone, do you? Even murderers on earth have a lawyer to represent them, and the outcomes of those trials are only temporary. The stakes are higher here, dear. All of eternity.”

I was speechless.

“Luas will explain everything,” Nana assured me. “But let me tell you a little secret. He needs your help. Don’t let him know I told you.”

“He needs
my
help?” I said. “I’m the one who needs help.”

“Yes, dear,” she said, “and by helping Luas you’ll be helping yourself.”

“What exactly does he need my help with?”

Nana paused for a moment and looked at me in the mirror. “He wants to leave Shemaya but he can’t find the way out. It happens to almost everybody. Shemaya isn’t what it appears to be. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Try to remember that. It’s as easy to get lost here as it is on earth. But it’s actually easier here to find your way back home. That’s what people don’t understand. It happens automatically, when you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?” I asked.

“Ready to move on, dear,” Nana said.

I was confused. “I thought you just told me that Luas wanted to leave?”

“Oh, he does, very much,” Nana said. “But he isn’t ready and so he remains. Only he can choose.”

“How long has he been here?” I asked.

Nana thought for a moment. “I think it’s been about two thousand years, dear,” she said. She smiled and put down the hairbrush. “Come along now, it’s time to go see him. He can explain how Shemaya works better than me. His job is to train the new presenters. I only know how to help them leave.”

—

LUAS CONTINUED HIS
instructions to me in the vestibule: “The train station is crowded now with new arrivals,” he said. “You will hear nothing, but you will feel them brushing against you. Make no attempt to reach out to them, and do not, under any circumstances, remove the blindfold. The entrance to the Courtroom is at the opposite end of the station. We’ll be going straight through. Are you ready?”

The blindfold was tied tight around my head, and I was growing increasingly nervous. “Why can’t I see them?” I asked. “And what do you mean, ‘Courtroom’?”

“I’ll explain later,” he said, tugging at the blindfold knot one last time to be certain it was tight. “If we don’t get going, we’ll miss the trial. Can you see?”

“No.”

“Then you’re ready. Follow me.”

He grasped my left elbow and urged me forward, his body stiffening against the weight of the doors. Entering the station, I immediately sensed a great throng of people milling about in ghostly silence. What I thought were bodies began brushing against my hips and shoulders, but heeding Luas’s warning, I made no attempt to reach out to them. Even so, halfway through I could no longer resist the temptation to peek beneath the blindfold.

What I saw is difficult to describe.

The train station was filled not with people’s bodies but rather with their
memories.
Thousands of glittering spheres floated in midair about the train station like stars in the nighttime sky. A person’s entire lifetime of thoughts, sensations, images, and emotions filled each sphere, flashing and arcing inside like brightly colored bolts of electricity. These were raw memories, not the sanitized recollections we tell one another over cups of coffee or even the more honest accounts we record in our secret diaries, but life itself as experienced and remembered by those who lived it. By looking at a sphere, I came into direct contact with the memories inside without the protective filter of another person’s mind, which made the memories seem as though they were
mine
.

Suddenly, like an actor at an award show watching scenes spliced together from a lifetime of films, I found myself reliving the experiences of people whom I had never known but who seemed in a very real sense to be
me
. One moment I’m working a sewing machine in a sweatshop in Saipan, then I look at another sphere and I’m climbing the catwalk of a grain silo in Kansas City. I look at yet another sphere and I’m careening through the streets of Baghdad in the back of a taxicab, then tending the helm of a trawler in stormy seas off Newfoundland, strolling the rows of a vineyard in Australia, driving a front-end loader from a mine shaft in Siberia, severing the head of a Tutsi boy with a machete in Rwanda, kissing the neck of a lover in Montreal. I was more than mere spectator to these events. My fingers cramped as the fabric slid beneath the needle, I choked on clouds of dust billowing over the dry wheat, my body leaned as we swerved to avoid a pedestrian crossing the street, I barked orders to my crew on deck and saw the fear in their eyes as the waves crested the bow, I felt the warm spray of blood as I thrust the machete again into the convulsing corpse, and I whispered softly while indulging the desires of my lover. Alien memories coursed through me as though I were emerging from multiple lifetimes of amnesia, leaving me confused and lost. Unable to stand any more, I pulled the blindfold back down over my eyes. Luas led me on until finally we passed out of the station.

“Are you all right?” he asked as the doors slammed shut behind us.

I was unable to respond; my body trembled.

“Here,” he said, “you can remove the blindfold. Sit.”

We were in a remote, vacant corridor of the train station now and sat down together on a bench. Luas brushed away the hair that had fallen into my eyes and smiled. “I knew you would peek,” he said. “You’re not one to obey rules, even when they benefit you.” He gazed back toward the doors through which we had just emerged. “You see them for who they are, Brek Abigail Cuttler. You have the gift.”

I was barely able to understand his words. It was as though I’d been raised on a desert island without music, books, television, or maps and suddenly been given a glimpse of the world. I wanted to see more. I needed to see more. I got up from the bench and turned toward the doors.

“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.