by K. B. Kofoed
Gene nodded. “If he’s crazy enough to believe you’re talking to ghosts, I guess he’ll believe anything.”
“Not ghosts,” said Jim. “Angels.”
In the restaurant, following this conversation, Gene seemed to shrug off what Jim told him. But later, in their apartment as they were watching the TV news, Gene suddenly looked at Jim. “You never said whether the story about the voices was true or not. Now that I’m thinking about it, lots of people hear voices. I mean all the time, in our heads.”
Jim nodded. “The internal dialogue, I think they call it.”
“Well,” said Gene, looking expectantly at Jim. “Did you hear voices?”
“Only three times. And it wasn’t my internal dialogue. It seemed very real. I didn’t understand what it meant then and I don’t today. That’s the truth.”
Jim looked at Gene, alarmed by his expression. “I don’t know how the General heard about it. It wasn’t a big deal. I only told a few folks, long ago, and I swear to you it only happened a few times and that was it. Never again. What made it weird, though, is that it happened in the middle of my day, while I was thinking about other stuff. Work stuff.”
Gene asked the circumstances. Jim, reluctantly at first, related the entire story including the part about the number 6-6-6.
“When was the third time you heard the voice?” asked Gene.
“At John’s,” said Jim. “I was alone in the rec room looking at the model of the ark complex while you were, you know, with the girls.”
“That’s why you split?”
“No. Well, only partly.” His face flushed with embarrassment.
Gene looked grave for a moment, then smiled. “I know who’s talking to you, Jim. It is either your conscience or your dick, and since it probably wasn’t your dick, that leaves only one possibility.” He laughed.
“That’s as good a guess as any,” said Jim, glad to be the brunt of a joke as long as Gene didn’t probe deeper.
Thankfully, Gene was happy to let the matter drop. Jim decided, as he tried to get to sleep, that he’d probably gone a long way toward explaining to Gene’s satisfaction the General’s bizarre ravings.
Gene was snoring righteously. His snore, rumbling through the apartment, sounded more like a bear in a cave. Jim thought to himself, “Good for you, Gene, you’ve got your explanation, so now you can sleep tight. Now, what about me?”
He rolled over, staring at the blank wall, and thought about Kas. He looked over his shoulder at the clock on the nightstand. Midnight. Way too late to call her.
#
The next day they followed the same routine as before. Gene and Jim took the tram, but this time it was just the two of them riding the ‘bumper car’, as Jim called it. The trip to the cavern seemed to take longer every time they took it. Gene tried to read a newspaper as the car slowly rolled down the tunnel. He kept shifting the paper around, trying to catch the lights as they passed overhead. Eventually, frustrated, he crumpled the paper in his lap and sat staring down the tunnel in disgust.
The car’s next lurch around a turn brought a curse from Gene.
“Damn,” he said, “what kind of commuter run is this? You can’t read. You can’t even sit up without the freakin’ car snapping your spine every five seconds!”
Jim smiled and nooded. “Not exactly the Grand Central Express, is it?”
The automatic door framed by light from the cavern beyond was a welcome sight.
“Finally.” Gene squinted as the car pushed the door open into the artificial sunlight.
Jim had thought to put on sunglasses so he wasn’t blinded as before. He was quick to notice that poles that bordered the courtyard of the temple complex were already in place. “Check it out, Gene,” he said. “We have ark sign.”
Gene looked where Jim was pointing. “Oh,” he said. “They’re starting to put in the fencing.”
They both stepped off the tram before it stopped and made a beeline for the gold room to see what progress had been made on the ark.
They door to the studio opened to a deafening noise coming from inside the room. The twin golden cherubim were on the wooden form, sitting on a low bench in the middle of the room, and Aaron was already hammering details of geometric feathers in the gold. Though he wore goggles and a bandanna to tie back his hair, his bared teeth revealed the strain of the work. Studying Aaron’s face Jim realized it wasn’t a grimace but a smile. Aaron was having the time of his life. His joy was palpable.
The meter of Aaron’s hammer and chisel were almost musical. His concentration was so intense and his effort so spirited that Jim and Gene opted to stand well out of the way and wait for a chance to say hello. But they could see for themselves how things were going. Aaron was in a state that seemed almost fearsome. Around him the assistants waited to rotate the work. Marta held a torch that blew a large yellow flame. Its warm flickering light gave the scene a magical quality.
Jim noticed that the laser had been removed. Marta, on the other hand, was definitely still close at hand. Her expression, like Aaron’s, could only be described as rapture.
Someone had piped in music. In the stone room it bounced and flowed and seemed to have no source. It came from everywhere. Jim looked for speakers but saw only piping and lights affixed to the stone ceiling. The music sounded like a blend of brass instruments and voices. It was lovely but not identifiable, and Aaron’s ringing hammer strokes made it impossible to recognize. Yet it served as a perfect tonal backdrop to the scene.
Jim wondered what a DJ might choose to accompany Operation Thunderbolt. He was about to comment on the music to Gene when Marta noticed them and motioned for them to come closer. When Jim looked back at Gene he still hadn’t moved.
Marta’s hair touched Jim’s face as she pressed close to whisper to him. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked in her lovely Swiss accent. “I had no idea Aaron was so familiar with work on this scale.”
Jim was perplexed. “Me either,” he said. “Well, how many arks has anyone built? As I understood it this is his first job at this scale.”
Clearly, as Jim watched Aaron’s hands move along the gleaming metal, Aaron was no novice. He worked the gold with easy, sure strokes. His movements were as efficient as any senior craftsman with decades of practice. Jim thought that John should be there to see how well his servant had embraced such an important job.
Aaron didn’t stop except to wipe sweat from his eyes. Though perspiration poured from him, soaking his shirt and even his pants, he showed no outward sign of being tired. He worked steadily until finally Jim and Gene, tired from just standing by and watching, found a place out of the way and sat down on stools.
Gene shook his head. He closed his eyes and leaned against wall. “My Lord,” said Gene. “What was that?”
“What was what?” asked Jim. “You mean the music?”
Gene looked at Jim like he was crazy. “Music? I don’t hear any music.”
Jim listened for a moment and realized that the sound had been turned off. “I can’t hear it now,” he said. “So what are you talking about?”
Gene closed his eyes. “I don’t think I can explain it,” he said. “Listen. Can we talk later? It sort of hurts. Let me just ...”
Jim was baffled. “What hurts? Gene, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” said Gene. “I just don’t feel too great. Let me rest here a bit.”
Aaron had stopped his hammering and his assistants moved in to turn the Mercy Seat so he could work at a more comfortable angle on the other parabola. Jim noticed that Aaron swayed slightly as he stepped back to examine his work.
His concentration broken, Aaron looked around the room, noticing Jim and Gene sitting on stools by the wall. He stretched his back, put down his tools, and came over to greet them.
He nodded to Jim and slapped Gene lightly on the arm to wake him up. “Gene, wake up! Did my hammering put you to sleep?”
Gene sat up and smiled. “Sorry. I was fine when I came in here. Maybe
it was something I ate.”
“I had the same thing you did,” said Jim. “We both had the buffet.”
Jim turned his attention to Aaron. “That was some effort, Aaron. You seem to be enjoying the work.”
The goldsmith wiped his brow as he looked back at the ark. Marta was moving the large open flame of her torch back and forth over the area of the parabola that Aaron was going to work on next. Aaron studied the ark for a moment from a distance before replying. “Yes, I love the work,” he said. “The gold. I’ve never worked such a large piece of gold before. What a luxury! The gold wants to shape itself. It’s as though it guides my hands.”
Jim remembered the music. “I didn’t know that they had piped-in music down here. It was beautiful. Did you choose it?”
Aaron looked confused. “Music?” he said. “What music?”
“It’s not playing now. You were banging the gold too loud to hear it, I guess. I thought it was something you had them put on. I like to work to music myself. That’s why I noticed. It’s hard to find music that is good to work to but not distracting.”
Aaron shook his head. “I was going to bring a radio but left it at home. No room in my bags.”
Marta finally finished heating the gold and beckoned to Aaron. He excused himself and went back to work.
Gene got off the stool and stood up. “If he’s going to start banging again, I don’t think my head can take it. Let’s go explore somewhere else.”
Jim walked to the door and peered through the window that looked out on the large cavern. The General had arrived and was overseeing the hanging of a small section of the courtyard fence. Jim assumed that it was just a test of the hanging method. Several people stood nearby holding long sheets of gray-brown cloth that Jim thought must be goat hair.
I’m going to go out and talk to the General,” said Gene, shouting over the hammer blows.
“Go for it, Gene.”
Jim walked back to Aaron’s station and moved the stool to where he had a better view of Aaron’s work.
He would have liked to have brought a camera to record the image of Aaron working at the ark, but he knew that was forbidden.
Aaron’s hammer rose and fell in steady even strokes as his chisel traced cherubic wings on the gold. Periodically he stopped while Marta heated the metal to a more pliant state. Slowly the outstretched wings of the cherubim emerged from the gold. What had been flat silhouettes of gold now bore elegant repeating lines of stylized feathers.
Aaron worked for several more hours without a break, and Jim continued to watch, lost in fascination at the primal beauty of the scene. At six that evening the lights flickered in the cavern, marking an end to the day shift. The General entered the workroom moments later, full of energy. Gene was beside him.
“We’re doing great, everybody,” the General said. “Aaron, if you want to slow down a bit you can. Seems you’re way ahead of the guys making the gold menorah and the table of ... what was that thing called?” General Wilcox looked to Gene for the answer.
“That’s called shew breads, or snow breads, I think,” said Gene. Jim noticed that Gene seemed different, more subdued, even grim. Something had happened to him earlier that had made Gene uncomfortable being near the ark. He stood in the background, and when the General was finished with his pep talk he was glad to leave with him.
Jim met Gene outside Aaron’s workshop. “How can you stand the clanging? Horrible!” Gene remarked.
“The time flew by,” Jim answered. “I had a good time watching.”
Gene suggested they have dinner. Jim’s stomach had been rumbling for a while, and he agreed immediately.
Gene mentioned that John Wilcox was coming to Los Alamos for the assembly. “The assembly?” asked Jim as they walked toward the tramway. “When is that?”
“I thought that the General told you,” said Gene. “In a week. Today is July fourth. That makes it the tenth for the first assembly.”
“Oh my god,” said Jim. “I completely forgot the date. It is the fourth.”
“There are fireworks over the mesa, they tell me,” said Gene. “Let’s get up top and breathe some real air.”
“You don’t like it down here, do you, Gene?” said Jim, fishing for a clue to what was bothering his friend.
“It’s not the caverns. It’s that gold room,” said Gene. “It gives me the creeps. It’s that damned clanging,” he explained. “It went right through me.”
They went to dinner at the same rooftop restaurant and counted themselves lucky to get the last seats in the open air bar. When darkness fell over the mesa, fireworks lit up the skies over the trees. Some of the louder bombs that shuddered the stones of the patio unnerved Jim, but Gene loved it. The louder the concussions that punctuated each fiery chrysanthemum, the more Gene seemed to enjoy it.
Their vantage point was on a comfortable veranda surrounded by a large hedge decorated here and there with rose bushes, and they felt like guests of honor.
In spite of the great food and the soft vinyl deck chairs, Jim was uneasy with their vantage point directly under the fireworks. When he was fourteen, he and his family had been involved in a spectacular and devastating fireworks accident. A large box of rockets went off while being carried to their launch site. Eight bombs detonated on a hillside crowded with vacationers, injuring a dozen or so people, including Jim. A piece of phosphorous hit his arm. It bounced off and went out in the damp grass, but it scorched his T-shirt and scared him to death.
Jim could still remember the screams and shouting, the people’s bodies silhouetted by exploding fireworks. His memory wore visual scars, images of people frozen in the hot strobing light; macabre impressions of pandemonium and panic. Jim had them every time he watched fireworks.
Here, however, Jim’s fear was soothed somewhat by a nearby trellis and awning that he could duck under. He wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t stray too far from the trellis during the entire show.
When it was over Gene wore that goofy face a child has when they’ve been drop-jawed for hours. Jim laughed. “I thought you didn’t like noise. Are your ears ringing? Mine are.”
“Say what?” said Gene with a broad smile.
They were tired by eleven o’clock and in spite of a stack of unread documents left by the General, they wanted nothing more than to sleep. Jim felt like an art student again, and the evening of fireworks had tested his mettle enough to make him feel alive. “How strange to feel this good so far from home,” Jim thought as he drifted off to sleep.
#
The next few days saw most areas of endeavor ahead of schedule. The General had seen to that. His steady pressure as he tirelessly toured the facilities spoke of a man who’d had little to distinguish his career. He’d seen the Nam, but as a construction engineer. The Gulf War had him tucked out of the way below decks on the carrier Forrestal, figuring out codes. Now he was hip deep in history.
One evening Gene bet Jim a fifty the old man would blow his own brains out when it was all over, no matter how it came out. “What else in life could top Thunderbolt for a frustrated career monger like General ‘Max’ Wilcox?” said Gene. “He waits his whole life for a biggie, and when it comes he can’t talk about it, can he?”
Whatever his motivation, the General was a driven man. His energy exhausted most people as the pieces of Thunderbolt came together.
Finally the day came to assemble the Tabernacle.
In the great cavern, a large outer wall of goat hair cloth hung from tethered poles. Off center in this large area of smooth dirt, forty-eight gilded boards rose into place, each seated into silver tenons by strong rods of bronze and held together by five long poles that ran through large rings mounted ten to a board.
Jim felt uneasy standing inside the outer curtain, so near the Tabernacle, and he was amazed at how large it appeared.
In his original drawings, he had drawn a figure standing next to the wall to show the scale. He remembered that the figure looked small, but now, standing nea
r one of those walls, the height still surprised him. For so many years he had tried to imagine what it might look like. Now here it was, the Tabernacle of the Ark of the Covenant, resurrected in all its golden glory before his eyes.
As Jim watched, the pillars and veils that shrouded the Holy of Holies, the spot where the ark would ultimately rest, were put into place and secured by hemp rope tied to pegs in the ground outside. Then yards of fabric tenting were unrolled and lifted on poles to form a flat roofed tent covering the Tabernacle.
Within an hour the construction was complete. A white linen curtain decorated with blue and scarlet cherubim motifs covered the entrance to the Tabernacle. This was then drawn back to reveal the five pillars that stood at its entrance.
Jim peered inside. There were the four pillars and the curtain that covered the inner sanctum. He walked between the pillars and entered the golden room within. All the boards fit perfectly, forming a smooth wall of pure gleaming gold. Pinholes of light dotted the ceiling like stars, making pools of light on the bare earth as he walked to the next set of curtains. He stood motionless for a while staring at the empty space beyond. Soon it would be occupied by the object that spawned so much interest and controversy, the ark itself.
He wondered again if his intuition had really been right. Why should his interpretation be more accurate than those of scholars and experts? Now, with so much riding on it, Jim had his doubts.
A shadow passed over him. He turned around to see the General Wilcox standing at the mouth of the Tabernacle. The General’s face was lit with yellow flickering light. He beckoned to Jim to come out.
“Time for a meeting,” said the General.
#
The General looked grave as they entered Aaron’s workshop. Jim noticed weapons being carried by soldiers stationed outside the closed door.