“That’s good, right?”
“It simplifies things, yes.”
“When can I see my mom?”
“We’ll have a nurse come fetch you as soon as she’s settled in.” He glanced at Maggie again. “I’m sorry, young lady, but visitation in the ICU is for family members only.”
“I understand,” she said.
“I want to stay with my mom tonight,” Ethan said.
“That’s fine,” said Dr. Sung. “In fact, we encourage it. Comatose patients often respond well to the presence of loved ones. It can be quite therapeutic . . . for all concerned.”
“Will she be able to hear me?”
“That’s hard to say, but it can’t do any harm to assume that she can. At least, that’s been my experience.”
Ethan nodded again. “Thanks, Dr. Sung. For saving my mom.”
“You’re welcome, young man,” said the doctor. “But I’ve only given her a fighting chance. The rest is up to her, and to God.”
By night the hospital seemed a very different place than it had during the day. During the day there was a ceaseless buzz of activity, even in the ICU. But at night the number of visitors dropped nearly to nothing, only one or two others like Ethan; he caught sight of them from time to time, a young woman and an older woman, shambling up and down the corridors when sleep wouldn’t come, just as he roamed about when he could no longer stand the awful sounds of the room where his mother lay still as death upon a bed, her body swathed in bandages, tubes attached to her arms and to her head, the only noises those of the machines that were keeping her alive. They passed each other with nods and occasional words but exchanged no meaningful conversation, each of them sunk too deeply in their own concerns. Even the nurses going about their rounds had a ghostly aspect to them, so silently did they move, or rather drift, down the dimly lit corridors, pushing their carts and carrying their clipboards like workers from the afterlife come to keep tabs on those who would soon join them there.
It had been early afternoon when a nurse had come to the waiting room and told Ethan that he could come to his mother. Peter had gone and returned with his mother by then, and Maggie had not left Ethan’s side. But they could not follow where he was going now, though they told him they would wait for him there until visiting hours were over, if he wanted to come and talk or just sit in silence in the company of those who loved him.
But he had only gone back once, briefly, feeling like he no longer belonged in their healthy world, that even by being there for a few moments he was deserting his mother when she needed him most. He’d gone just the same to thank them for coming and to kiss Maggie and tell her that he loved her and would see her tomorrow. Then he’d gone back up to the ICU and the room in which his mother was fighting for her life.
The first time he’d walked into that room and seen her there on the bed, he’d had a feeling of déjà vu stronger than anything he’d ever experienced. He’d stopped just across the threshold of the door as the nurse looked back at him with curiosity and compassion on her features, thinking no doubt that it was the shock of seeing his mother in such a grave condition that was responsible for his gasp and his pallid complexion as he stood frozen on the spot. But it was more than that. It was an inescapable sense that he’d seen this before, or something like it: his mother lying close to death. Yet he hadn’t. How could he?
So he’d pushed it from his mind, or tried to. And mostly succeeded, because the here and now was terrible enough to overwhelm the vaporous promptings of a past that could never have occurred.
Dr. Sung had told him that his mother could hear what he said to her, or anyway that he should assume it was so, and thus he’d talked to her for hours, pleading tearfully with her to get well and sharing the old stories that bound their family together, of vacations and birthdays and funerals, happy times and sad. He was trying to bring her back, calling to her as if from a great distance. But if she answered, he couldn’t hear it.
As evening drew on into night, and night stretched out as if there were no such thing as morning, the desolate loneliness of the ICU seemed to suck his hope away, until he felt small and helpless, hardly even visible as he sat there at Lisa’s bedside, holding her limp hand in his own, looking at the tubes that went into her bruised arms.
He prayed as he had never prayed before.
When he began to get sleepy, nodding out in the chair, he would get to his feet and wander the halls, never straying far, following a circular route that brought him past her open door every few minutes, so that he could see that she was still clinging to life. He would do this because it seemed to him that if he slept even for a minute, she would slip away, cross over whatever boundary separated the living and the dead and be gone from him forever.
How was it that he could love someone so much and yet be helpless to save her? Helpless to do anything for her at all but be a witness to her suffering? Surely there was something wrong with love if it couldn’t make a difference when it was needed most. How was it that God could have created such an emotion, such an intimate tie between people, only to make it, in the end, powerless? It seemed unfair, even cruel, that love couldn’t pour itself out from one person to another like a transfusion of blood, of breath, supplying what he or she lacked and needed to live. Why couldn’t it? He would wring his heart dry like a sponge, empty his lungs, for his mother’s sake. But he didn’t have the power. The choice, the sacrifice, wasn’t his to make.
Finally, as Ethan wandered the bleak corridors, he took a turn that he didn’t remember having seen before. The white tiles beneath his feet gave way to reddish dust and rock, and the fluorescent lights overhead drew back and merged together into a sun as bright as a silver ingot. Gone was the air-conditioned chill, replaced with a heat that beat down on his head and shoulders like a molten weight. He knew then that he had fallen asleep and was dreaming, and he turned frantically, hoping by this to wake himself before it was too late, and his mother, as he feared would happen, escaped his vigil, leaving him alone in the world, an orphan. But when he saw stretching behind him the same desert landscape as had stretched ahead, a wasteland in which no living thing grew or moved save the dark shapes of birds spiraling high overhead, he knew that it was too late, that she had gone where he could not follow.
He had lost her.
Something broke in him then, and he sank down into the dust and wept.
After a time, he heard footsteps, and he raised his head to see a gaunt, bearded man in a ragged robe and sandals drawing near. “Why are you crying?” asked the man.
“My mother has died,” said Ethan.
“Dry your eyes,” said the man. “She lives.”
“How do you know?”
“It is given me to know.”
Ethan climbed to his feet. He tried to get a good look at the man’s face, but the sun was in his eyes, or so it seemed. “Who are you, mister?”
“Don’t you remember me?”
“Sort of . . .” He gave up trying to look at the man’s face and instead took a good look around. “Have I been here before?”
“A long time ago. You were just a boy.”
He smiled apologetically. “I guess I must have forgotten.”
“Children forget. Are you still a child?”
“What?”
“You have been asleep,” the man said. “It is time for you to wake up.”
“I don’t—”
“Wake up!”
His voice was like a crack of thunder. Ethan bolted up in the chair.
There was a furious beeping from the machines in the room, and suddenly a nurse came rushing through the door. “Oh Christ,” she said, then hit an intercom on the wall. “Code blue!” she cried. “Code blue!”
Ethan shot to his feet. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“You have to wait outside,” said the nurse.
By then more medical personnel were arriving, nurses and technicians and the night resident, Dr. Holtzbrink. Ethan was bustled out
of the room, into the corridor, the door shut firmly in his face. From the other side, he heard the sounds of frantic activity.
So this was it, then, he thought. This was how his mother would die.
Yet the man had said she was still alive . . .
No, that had been a dream. Or had it? It had seemed so real, and he remembered it now so clearly: the dust of the road, the barren landscape, the suffocating heat. The man’s voice, kindly yet commanding. You have been asleep. It is time for you to wake up.
A strange feeling crept over him, as if he were still asleep and dreaming. As if none of this were real . . . or as if reality itself were something more malleable than he had known. Yet it seemed to him that he had known it once.
Children forget. Are you still a child?
What had the man meant by that? Of course he wasn’t a child. He was eighteen, a man.
Wake up!
Again that voice, like a thunderclap. Ethan staggered, as the wall he’d erected in himself ten years ago came tumbling down, falling like the walls of Jericho blasted by the horn of Joshua.
He remembered.
Remembered how his father had really died, and everything his mother had told him about the Doctrine of the second Son, about the Congregation and Conversatio. He remembered how he had walked through the red dust of the wasteland for three days and three nights, how the spirits of his dead father and the dead priest had come to tempt and torment him, and how a third figure had finally appeared and helped him to escape that place.
It is too early for you to walk this road, the man had said. His brother. Too early for you to climb the hill that waits at the end.
He remembered that the man he had thought of as his father was not his real father, and the woman he had called his mother was not his real mother. He had been adopted. Hidden away.
Hunted.
Everything he had known and understood on that long-ago night as he lay in the backyard of their house with his mother, gazing up at the stars, came flooding back to Ethan now. And as he had done then, he flinched from the overwhelming implications of it. Yet he was no longer a child, no longer so easily frightened. Forgetting was not an option for the man he had grown to be. He could do it, of course. Make himself forget again, just as he had before. He had that power. But what had been forgivable in a boy was shameful in a man. He had a duty. A mission.
It was a different mission than that of the man in the wasteland, his brother, though both of them had been sent by the same father. A different mission . . . but no easier.
The fiery words of Ezekiel blazed in his mind. Now, thou Son of Man, wilt thou judge, wilt thou judge the bloody city? Yea, thou shalt show her all her abominations.
Ethan bowed his head, weeping with the knowledge of what would come. He would not hide from that knowledge. Not anymore. It was part of him now. Part of who he was, both man and Son of man.
“Mr. Brown?”
He looked up. Standing in the doorway of the room was Dr. Holtzbrink
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brown. Your mother is dead.”
He nodded. This, too, he had foreseen. And more. But he would not stray from the path again. “I know you did everything you could, Doctor.”
“You can have some time alone with her if you like.”
“Thank you.”
When the room had been cleared, Ethan entered. The chair he’d been sitting in had been pushed away, so he pulled it back over to the bedside and sat down. His mother, or rather the woman who had raised him, the woman he loved as if she really had been his mother, looked so calm, so peaceful. At rest. She was beyond the reach of any human agency now.
But not beyond his reach.
He stretched out his hand and laid his palm on the white bandages that swathed her forehead.
He hesitated then, not because he was uncertain or afraid, but because he knew that from this moment there could be no going back. Once he did this thing, events would be set in motion that had been prepared from the very dawn of time. Prepared . . . yet it was given to him to make the choice, an exercise of free will, that human curse and blessing in which he shared by right of birth.
“Mother,” he said, for what else could he call her now, at this moment of all moments? “Mother, wake up.”
With a gasp, he came awake, heart hammering in his chest so fiercely that he thought at first he was having an attack. But almost at once he realized, as he sat up in bed in the darkness of his room, that what had woken him had been a shock to more than just his own system. The whole world had shuddered with it.
Ten years ago, Papa Jim had stood in an observation room in a private hospital outside Phoenix, Arizona, and watched something incredible take place on the other side of the one-way glass. Something impossible. Doctors, men and women of science, had fallen to their knees . . .
He had rushed from the room. Flung the door open . . .
And stepped into his office, in South Carolina, a thousand miles away. The hospital and what it contained forgotten. Or no, not forgotten: the very reality of it wiped clean, erased from the blackboard of history.
A miracle!
It all came flooding back to him now.
It’s true, he realized. As he’d realized ten years ago.
There really is a second son.
The Son of man.
He had cloaked himself. Hidden from prying eyes, from the powers of the world that had sought to kill him or to use him.
No more. In an instant, somewhere, somehow, he had revealed himself after all this time. Ethan Brown, as the boy had been called.
His great-grandson, if the boy had only known it.
Boy no longer.
But why? Why now?
Papa Jim didn’t know.
But he was sure as hell going to find out.
The young priest pounded up the stairs and down the corridor, past the Swiss Guards who stood as rigidly as robots, their eyes not even blinking as he dashed by . . . if a man of such rotundity could be said to dash. Of course, his coming had been cleared electronically; no surprises were permitted in the private quarters of the pope. Ever since Islamic terrorists had infiltrated the Vatican and murdered the previous pope in 2011, clearing the way for the present occupant of St. Peter’s throne, the first pontiff to assume that name since the original, over two thousand years ago, Vatican security had been placed into the hands, metaphorically speaking, of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith—which meant, as only trusted agents like the young priest knew, the artificial intelligence program called Grand Inquisitor. What a mass of contradictions the Vatican was, the priest thought, not for the first time since his arrival here two months ago, in its mix of ancient protocol and a technology that went so far beyond anything known to the rest of the world that it smacked of science fiction. For instance, that a messenger should be dispatched to alert His Holiness to information that might more easily and quickly come to him wirelessly . . . why, he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself, hadn’t sat there silently in the bowels of the Vatican as other messengers came and went, marveling at the waste of it, the anachronism. Yet now that he had been entrusted with such a message for the first time in his still-brief career, the young priest no longer thought it quite so wasteful, and the anachronistic aspects seemed freshly appealing to his sense of the continuity of history. Yes, he could see how the Vatican might change a man, given enough time. He might even sweat off a few pounds running hither and yon.
After a time, he came to the door of the antechamber to the pope’s private rooms. He halted, panting for breath, sweat streaming down his plump, buttery-smooth cheeks. On either side of the door, a Swiss Guard stared impassively ahead. “F—father O’Malley to see His Ho—holiness,” he wheezed out at last.
The guards did not move, yet the door behind them swung open.
The priest swallowed nervously and entered, sucking in his belly to squeeze past the guards with a half-wincing smile of ingratiation and apology. Oh dear, he thought. I
really have to cut back on the pasta.
Waiting for him in the richly appointed antechamber was Cardinal Ehrlich, the pope’s oldest friend and closest confidante, as well as the nominal head of the Congregation. He was a matchstick of a man, with piercing gray eyes that seemed perpetually alight with suspicion. “O’Malley, is it?”
“Y—yes, Your Eminence.” He bent low to kiss the proffered ring, wheezing again at the effort.
“For God’s sake, man, give me your message before your heart gives out.”
Father O’Malley felt his cheeks burning. Mustering his dignity, he mopped his forehead with a white handkerchief drawn from his surplice and said, “In a hospital in Olathe, Kansas, a little over an hour ago, a deceased woman was brought back to life.”
Cardinal Ehrlich raised a flinty eyebrow. “Is that all?”
O’Malley couldn’t tell if the man was being ironic or not. Was it really such a run-of-the-mill occurrence, the resurrection of the dead? Perhaps so. “No, Your Eminence. The other patients were also cured.”
“What?” There was no mistaking his surprise. “All of them?”
O’Malley nodded, trying to hide his satisfaction at having provoked a reaction. “Apparently so, Your Eminence. No one seems to know who was responsible. There are conflicting reports. Some say it was a boy or a young man, a relative of the dead woman. Others claim to have seen angels. And UFOs. In other words, a lot of confusion, even hysteria. Agents have been dispatched, but Grand Inquisitor thought His Holiness should know.”
“I’ll inform His Holiness at once,” said Ehrlich. “Well done, Father O’Malley.”
“What does it mean, Your Eminence?” the priest dared to ask.
“Eh? Mean?” Cardinal Ehrlich gave him a grim smile. “It means things are about to get interesting, that’s what.”
Sister Elena was kneeling in the dirt of the garden and pulling up weeds when a shadow fell across the ground. She looked up, startled, for she’d heard no footsteps.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
Godsent Page 22