Lillian struggled not to react and blow up at her father. “Jason has the gift to heal. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. He thinks everybody has the same ability. Maybe that’s a fault, but all he’s ever wanted to do is show people that they don’t have to suffer the ills of the world. What’s wrong with that?”
“Why does he need a mansion in the heart of London with all those people saying that this is right and that’s not? He’s creating another church, another religion.”
“That’s a mistake we’re trying to correct.”
“By appearing out of the blue and causing hysteria?”
Father and daughter stared at each other like adversaries in a courtroom. Lillian, the acclaimed stage actress, versus the gaunt academic, skilled at convincing judges that his was the correct argument. Alex had never seen this kind of exchange before in his family, and he liked it. Maybe he should follow his grandfather into law.
Nancy cleared her throat and got everyone’s attention. “None of this addresses the situation at hand. How do we explain Jason being here and where did he come from?”
“It’s ridiculous that Jason is not in this conversation, Father.” Lillian nodded to Alex who ran out and brought Jason into the discussion.
Jason entered the room filling out one of Lloyd’s dress shirts. The sleeves were too long, and he still wore his jeans covered in Iraqi dirt. He was barefoot and completely inappropriately dressed for this family. Lloyd was appalled at Jason’s appearance.
There wasn’t a seat for him at the table.
“How on earth do you just appear?” Nancy could barely hide her anxiety.
“I can give you my theory.”
“How can we stop you?” Lloyd said. “You can appear wherever you like.”
“Would I ever appear at your house looking like this, Lloyd?”
Alex pulled an ottoman to the table and gave up his seat to his dad. Lloyd wouldn’t give Jason the benefit of the doubt.
“Lillian, Alex and I have struggled with this since it first happened, and I’d welcome your input in dealing with this problem.”
“So, you think it’s a problem?” Lloyd said.
“Of course, I do. It goes beyond what I’d ever planned to teach in my healing courses.”
“You can’t teach people to heal,” Lloyd replied. “They’re not like you, freaks of nature.”
“Father! Don’t make this personal.”
Lloyd wouldn’t be interrupted. “For the rest of us, all we want is to suffer through this world with some dignity in hopes of a better one to come. But if you’re the new messiah, enlighten us.”
“There’s no need to be hostile, Lloyd,” Nancy said. “We’re family and that’s a fact. Just deal with it.”
Lillian burst out laughing. “I’ve never heard you stand up to Dad.” Her mother’s glare quickly shut Lillian up. Even though her mother looked like a pensioner, albeit a beautiful one, with her permed white hair, she was tough as steel.
“Well then, you don’t know me very well. You think your father and I have survived forty-five years of marriage without some push and pull?”
Jason broke the tension. “I’m not a messiah, Lloyd, and I have no explanation for this phenomenon that I experience. But in theory, if there is a transcendent dimension of life and it coexists with the physical reality, someone with a spiritually developed consciousness can shift between these two worlds.”
“Who’s to say there’re not three or four or five?”
“There can be an infinite number if you accept God as infinite. But in the same way that physical disease disappears in the presence of a spiritually realized individual, can’t that same person have a similarly boundless experience? As Mrs. Eddy said, ‘I am at once the center and circumference of the universe.’”
“She’s a heretic!”
“Even in your church you accept God as omnipresent. Couldn’t someone in God-consciousness be omnipresent also? Or appear somewhere in seeming violation of physical law.”
“I’ve read the accounts of St. Theresa of Avila levitating,” Lloyd said, “and she tried resisting it. Why don’t you just resist it, if you’re such a healer?”
“My whole life has been built on not resisting physical belief or limitation. It’s the only way to heal.”
Lloyd left the room, and quickly returned with St. Teresa’s book The Interior Castle. “I see you’ve been reading this,” he stated holding up the book.
“You have a wonderful library, Lloyd.”
“Do you know what made her a saint?”
“Her union with God.”
“No, her resistance to rapture, Jason. Man isn’t supposed to know or feel the things of God. To look upon God is death. That’s what you’re playing with Jason—death.” Lloyd slammed the book on the table defiantly.
“If you’re such a scholar on St. Teresa you can’t dismiss her autobiography.” Jason closed his eyes, recalling a passage; “In her own words, I quote, … ‘Occasionally I have been able to make some resistance but at the cost of great exhaustion. At other times resistance has been impossible: my soul has been borne away, and indeed as a rule my head also, without my being able to prevent it. Sometimes my whole body has been affected to the point of being raised up from the ground.’”
“Every airy-fairy guru who claims they can levitate refers to that passage as if it were fact,” Lloyd said.
“I’m not claiming that as fact, Lloyd, but it helps explain how I got here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was here this morning when you got up. No car. I didn’t walk…”
Alex jumped up from the table, ran to the front window, and peeked out through the curtains. “Mom, the car that followed us here is gone!”
“Hallelujah!” Nancy got up and followed her grandson to the window. “Perhaps they’ve given up trying to crucify you, Jason.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Lloyd muttered.
“We should go,” Jason said.
“Why? What purpose will it serve going back to that prison before we have to?” Lillian joined her mother and son at the window.
“I have the TV symposium tomorrow,” Jason reminded her from the parlor. “I hate to ask this, Lloyd, but I need to borrow a pair of shoes and a jacket.”
“Can I come?” Alex implored.
“Sure.” Lillian and Alex walked back into the parlor, and Lillian took Jason’s hand. “How do you feel about that? Are you up to it?”
“All I can do is be myself.”
Lillian bit her lip, put on a brave face, and embraced her family. She saw her parents in all their tradition and drew Alex and Jason close to her.
“I guess we better hit the road then,” Lillian said.
Lloyd stood next to Nancy as his daughter and her family left. He looked sternly at Lillian, assured in his righteousness. Nancy, torn between husband and daughter, remained at her husband’s side. They looked like Boaz and Jachin, the pillars in King Solomon’s Temple. They were the strength and stability of God’s promised kingdom, upholding that tradition on earth.
Chapter 29
Stanford House
Thursday Afternoon, November 2004
Barbara Buchanan, her Jamaican assistant Jimmy Powell, and a handful of interns, dressed the studio for the TV symposium scheduled for the next afternoon. On the platform, six armchairs were set up in a semicircle and Barbara didn’t like what she saw. Two of the chairs were a little bit different. “Let’s use six identical chairs.”
“Ok. I’ll have to get them from the boardroom, but this was all I could find down here,” Jimmy replied.
“It’s going to be all knees and crotches in a long shot. Everybody’s got to be equal. What about a table?”
“I thought Mr. St. John liked to get up and move around.”
“I want Mr. St. John stationary for this. We must have a curved conference table somewhere. I want this to look like the UN.”
“Okay.” Jimmy visualized the set. �
��We can do a semicircle with the cameras in the middle. That way they’ll be looking at one another and we can have name plaques in front of each speaker.”
“Good,” Barbara said. “A neutral color on the skirt; not green or white or red. Have an oak veneer on the top and let’s use table mics, not lapels. What about the background?”
One of the interns showed Barbara a sketchpad with ideas for the backdrop. As Barbara flipped through the drawings the intern said, “I kind of like the collage with all the religious buildings and symbols. The other one I like is the picture of London at night. It would make it look like they’re sitting in a window, overlooking the city.”
“No religion. We’re not a religion and this is not about any religion.”
Jimmy said, “How about we just do a paneled wall, like a library? This is a meeting of scholars, right?”
“That’s it! Let’s bring in the table and chairs from the boardroom and have the set convey an academic feel,” Barbara said.
“Why don’t we just broadcast from the boardroom?”
“No, it’ll feel too much like a Ministry event. All these people are used to television studios, so they’ll be more comfortable here.”
Chapter 30
On the Road, England
Thursday Evening, November 2004
That evening Jason St. John drove his family back to London in the Range Rover. He was dressed in one of Lloyd’s old tweed jackets and wore a pair of his ill-fitting shoes. The Three Musketeers were intact. He took the secondary roads, picking the A41 to Whitchurch and Wolverhampton, skirting Birmingham, Coventry, and Bletchlery. They came into London from the west, through Aylesbury and Uxbridge.
They arrived at Stanford House around midnight and found the crowds surrounding the Ministry headquarters rather quiet. Lillian opened the gate to the underground garage with her remote, and Jason parked the Rover without being stopped by a guard. Lillian roused Alex from a fitful sleep in the back seat, and the three of them walked to the main elevator.
“Think we’ll get back to the flat without being seen?” Alex asked, looking at all the cameras.
“We’ve a fifty-fifty chance.” His family groaned at the cliché Jason had used ever since his return from the South Pacific.
They rode the elevator without incident and startled a dozing Thomas Parker. “I thought you were… and Mrs. St. John, you’re supposed to be in Chester.”
“They called. I just went down to help them with their things. I didn’t think I needed to wake you.” Jason gave Thomas a playful punch. “No one will know.”
Jason searched Lloyd’s jacket for his house key before Lillian realized he didn’t have one and pulled out her key to unlock the door.
“How long have you been out here, Tom?” Jason asked.
“Since four this afternoon. They’ve got me twelve on and twelve off.”
“So, you’ve pulled the night shift all week. I’m sorry about that,” Jason told the young man.
“All part of my job.”
Lillian and Alex entered the apartment and Jason pulled Thomas aside. “I like the way you handled things in the dining room last night. I appreciate someone who can grasp a situation and make a reasonable decision. I don’t think you saw me leave to help Lillian and Alex…”
A light started to dawn in Thomas, awakening him to what was going on. “Oh. I had to use the loo.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jason said as he slipped into his apartment.
Chapter 31
Stanford House
Friday Morning, November 2004
“So the St. Johns came home together last night and Mr. St. John was with them. How did that happen? Mr. St. John never left his apartment.” Gary said to a perplexed Thomas Parker. They were in Gary Howell’s spartan office. The young security guard stood at attention under Gary’s stern look. Thomas was mute.
“Come with me.” Gary took Thomas into the ISD command center. The shift captain sat on a raised podium in the middle of the room watching the array of monitors for the forty-eight cameras on the property. The day crew filled a half-a-dozen workstations. Gary pulled a man from a workstation and made Thomas sit behind his monitor. “You have a plum job, Parker, an easy one. All you’re required to do is let the watch captain know when Mr. St. John leaves his apartment. So how come Mr. St. John was with his family when they returned last night?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir. I had no advance knowledge of their return. They just showed up at the door with their bags.”
“When did Mr. St. John leave the apartment?”
“I don’t think he did.” Thomas realized what had happened and quickly added, “At one point I had to use the loo.”
Gary brought up the footage from the surveillance camera outside the St. John apartment and started narrating the events for Thomas. “After Dolan’s little fuckup in the dining hall, Mr. St. John returned to his apartment and you were outside his door until zero two hundred hours.” Thomas nodded. “Then you were relieved by … Mr. Beaumont.” Gary sped up the video. “Beaumont had four breaks during his shift, which were either covered by Mr. Cook or by a dedicated video surveillance. You came on at sixteen hundred yesterday…” Gary slowed the video down, “…took a ten-minute rest at eighteen hundred, a twenty-minute break in the dining hall at twenty-two hundred, and another scheduled break at midnight, just after the St. John party arrived. You had an unscheduled break at twenty-three-thirty and didn’t notify the video controller.”
“That’s when Mr. St. John must have left. I just had a sudden call. I’m sorry.”
“But Mr. St. John didn’t leave the apartment, Parker.”
“That can’t be.”
“It’s happened before. We’re just waiting for the fallout.”
That afternoon Jason St. John politely listened to Tony Bass as Tony went over the bullet points that needed to be addressed in the symposium. They were in the Ministry’s media center, a state-of-the-art sound stage.
“Be sure to stress that apparitions are common throughout the world and there is nothing supernatural about them. Hell, people see the dearly departed all the time. I had a friend who hated funerals because he always saw the person who’d died there—usually laughing! Tony was giving Jason his best sales pitch. When Jason didn’t react, Tony became serious. “Just stick to the bullet points and you’ll do fine. Don’t go into mysticism. This is not the forum for that.”
“I will put the Marsdan affair in a context that will give the religious people a plausible explanation for what had happened and show the secular world how common such things are,” Jason said as if the statement had been rehearsed many times.
“I’m counting on you, Jason.” Tony left the studio. “I’ll be watching from the control room,” he called back.
Jason looked from the script to the stage. A semicircular UN-style conference table was on a dais, and two of Barbara’s assistants reworked the large floral arrangement on the floor in front of the table making sure that no wayward flower disrupted the cameras angled at the participants. Two cameramen glided their cameras around the floor, hitting marks that the director in the control room noted on his console. A third camera would be dedicated to the moderator, the broadcast reporter Theodore Spencer. The backdrop was a wood-paneled wall, so that the setting would create an academic tone.
Barbara changed the seating arrangement at the conference table once again. “You need to be in the center, Jason,” she said, “This is all about you.”
“Where will Spencer be?”
“He’ll be on the floor. I want him to be free to move around when he asks questions and moderates the conversation.”
“So, this is going to be a conversation.”
“You authorized this, Jason. You’re the one who’s going to put apparitions and the Marsdan incident in proper perspective, so everyone gets it.” Barbara tapped her earphones. “Why don’t you take your seat? I’ve just been told that the panelists have arrived.”
Upstairs, in the St. John apartment, Lillian, Melanie, Dorothy settled on the sofa as Alex turned on the TV set and tuned in the channel. “This is cool,” he said as he found a place between his mom and Melanie.
“It’s necessary,” Dorothy said, reaching over to pat Alex on the knee. “People have to hear the truth.”
Lillian hoped Jason wouldn’t go too far.
Melanie, ever the atheist, said, “I don’t believe in miracles, but I know what I’ve seen, so this will be interesting to say the least.
Jason remained just inside the door to the media center’s studio as Rabbi Levinson entered, the first to arrive. He shook Jason’s hand and gave him a fatherly pat on the back. Levinson was in his late sixties, a little overweight, and had wiry gray hair. “Don’t know why you’re doing this, but it takes a lot of guts.”
Catholic Cardinal Richards and Anglican Bishop Eastman were right behind the rabbi, talking intently. They had worked together on many ecumenical counsels and liked each other. The cardinal was tall and thin. His scarlet hat and piping seemed to outline his lanky frame, and at age seventy-three he was badgering the younger bishop. The bishop was approaching sixty and had dyed brown hair combed over a receding hairline. They both greeted Jason cordially, but the cardinal was more intent on making his point with the bishop than he was in engaging Jason.
Sheikh Qamarussaman followed the Christian prelates and Jason greeted him with the traditional greeting of peace, “as-salamu alaykum.” The imam, in a simple suit under a white taqiyah, or robe, kissed Jason on both cheeks and thanked him for including him on the panel. He was forty-one, closest to Jason in age, handsome, and had very kind eyes.
Theodore Spencer arrived last, with Reverend Cyrus Germaine, who was all business and ready to begin.
After the guests had taken their seats, Barbara began her countdown. The panelists all put on their “television” look and Jason closed his eyes briefly in meditation. The last five seconds were silent, with Barbara counting of the seconds on her fingers, and then Theodore Spencer was on.
The Atua Man Page 21