The Tenth Song

by Ragen, Naomi

  Abraham and Isaac, Abigail thought, looking at the two of them. Somehow, it made the whole scene less intense. Natan was just a man, after all—not a prophet; a young man with a small child in his life, and a wife too, no doubt, one of those slim, tall women swathed in a colorful Indian skirt and cotton turban. Whatever would happen would be part of the real world of children and families, despite the exotic locale.

  Kayla climbed the last few steps toward the cave entrance, then hesitated, shuddering. It was so dark inside in contrast to the brightness of the day. She crossed the threshold hesitantly. It was huge, she realized, startled. Outside, there had been no hint. However many people entered, they were immediately swallowed up. The air was cool and dry, a bit rancid with dust.

  “Find a place to sit!” Rav Natan called out.

  Kayla was shocked. The emotional pitch of his voice was startling and unfamiliar. She had never heard her teacher sound like that. His voice seemed to bounce off the walls, the echo intensifying and doubling their impact. She walked farther into the cave. People were pointing and gasping. There, on the back wall, were four stone monoliths engraved with Hebrew lettering.

  They crowded around the tablets, fingering the indentations, all speaking at once in amazement. The cave began to fill with an intensity of sound that Abigail found frightening, the noise discordant and unrecognizable as human language, all the words nullified as they overrode each other.

  She held her ears, feeling her body begin to sweat. She had to get out of here, she thought, feeling faint.

  “Please, silence,” Rav Natan ordered. And as quickly as the noise had started, it suddenly stopped. The silence, too, was intense.

  “Everyone, sit down. The professor is an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is going to read these words to you, translating them into modern Hebrew. Afterward, we will discuss their meaning. But we need silence; otherwise, the echo will destroy whatever we say.”

  There was a scraping of feet as people found places on the floor. A child cried. Rav Natan’s small son pulled insistently on his leg and was again lifted into his arms.

  “A time is coming . . .” the professor began, tracing the letters with his finger,

  when children of light will have lost their way.

  Man, woman, and child will honor the dishonorable

  Laud and seek the indecent

  Praise corruption.

  Hands will be raised in solidarity with purest evil.

  The day is coming when God will look at His world and ask: What have you done?

  Then will come the time of reckoning:

  The sky will darken, and the sun will be hidden as the earth turns cold. A cataclysm will strike the North and South beyond human imaginings. East and West will be devastated. The earth will disintegrate like a caterpillar, all its vanities, ugliness, beauty, truth, lies destroyed. It will lie dormant until the movement of rebirth begins. And then, as the earth reaches its purification, the time of resurrection will start.

  The graves will open, the blameless dead will rise, all their wounds healed.

  Time itself will be reborn: Every moment that did not show God’s glory will be resurrected to live again. All moments of cruelty or ugliness or injustice will be reborn and relived in kindness, beauty, and justice.

  Every unworthy conversation, every unworthy deed, every unworthy gesture or thought will be reborn again in worthiness.

  Then the earth will sing, as it fills with the knowledge of God, leaving no room for doubt, for wrong or evil choices.

  And then no man or woman will wish their will to be separate from God’s will.

  And death and evil will be banished forever, and tears shall be wiped from all faces.

  The words, repeated and intensified by the echo, were like thunder, making their bodies shake. Like a powerful drug, the ideas coursed through their minds, a river that had broken its banks and refused to stay in its bed, gathering everything before it in a wild rush.

  Seth got up abruptly, feeling his way through the crowd, his hands clutching the walls to steady himself.

  He sat outside in the light, his heart pounding, his mouth dry. He felt almost as if he’d been hypnotized. He took deep breaths, trying to clear his mind.

  He felt frightened. Words written thousands of years ago by ignorant people, who thought the world was flat . . .

  Yet . . .

  Maybe I am just tired, he told himself again. The long flight, the harrowing car ride, the shock of seeing Kayla with another man. And then this long desert trek. The heat! He was not himself, his mind repeated calmingly. In a few days, in his dorm, he would tell his roommate all about this. They would laugh.

  But he couldn’t budge his fear. He thought of what Kayla had said to him earlier: What do human beings understand about anything? Can you understand what it means that you didn’t exist, then you were born? Where do we all come from? And what does death mean?

  There were things he had not thought about for years. Even as a child, looking at the stars, when he had tried to imagine God, infinity—the larger it grew in his mind, the more frightened he’d become. How can a person imagine something endless, or something that always existed? It was impossible. He had never allowed himself to think about it again.

  But that didn’t mean it didn’t exist or it wasn’t the truth.

  I am a coward, he realized. Afraid to face the big questions, the true meaning of my own existence, and thus the meaning of my life and all my actions.

  He didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be forced into it. He looked around him desperately for some way to escape. But all he could see in every direction was desolation and death. Only here, inside this cave, on this mountaintop, was life immediately possible. There was no place to run to. No place, he finally admitted to himself, he wanted to run to.

  Slowly, he turned around and walked back into the cave.

  Rav Natan had taken the professor’s place. He was speaking.

  “The people who wrote this prophecy lived two thousand years ago. And yet, their vision of the world is not very different from our own. Everywhere they looked, they saw evil. And what was their solution? They left their communities, cut their ties to their families, and went to live in the desert, hoping that while others succumbed and were destroyed by evil, they would survive. They did not succeed. History tells us that it was these desert communes whom the apocalypse found first, whether in the form of Roman soldiers or an earthquake. They died out; nothing is left but their scrolls and stone tablets, their olive and date pits.

  “It is we, the descendants of those who stayed behind to struggle with the world as part of it, who have survived to read their words. Our community in the desert is not a final destination. It is a place to become the best you can be, so you can return and transform your little corner of the world for the good, to make the world a better place one good deed at a time.

  “Men despair at how little they can do. Do that little thing, the tiny thing you know you can do! Each of us has a true and authentic song as old as the earth, but when it rises from our souls and is lent our voice, it becomes new again, and is renewed as we grow spiritually from day to day. When all seems lost, sing that song, the Tenth Song, to save yourself and the world.”

  Kayla reached up, touching Daniel’s cheek. It was wet with tears. She wiped them away with her thumb. He kissed her fingers.

  They staggered from the cave, exhausted, yet feeling that a nugget of gold had been thrown into their laps, a private treasure to be cherished that would enrich them forever.

  “What now?” Seth asked without his usual arrogance. He too looked pale, subdued.

  Abigail took two steps toward them when the pains in her stomach suddenly turned lethal. She doubled up, clutching her body.

  “Oh God!” she moaned.

  “Mom?”

  “Lay her down here,” Daniel demanded. He felt her head. She was burning up. “Abigail, Abigail, where does it hurt you exactly?”

  S
he moaned. “I can’t stand the pain.”

  He gently probed her abdomen. “Does it hurt here?”

  “Oh God,” she screamed.

  “I think it’s her appendix.” He took out a strange-looking phone from his bag. “It’s a satellite phone, for places that have no cell-phone reception.”

  “Who are you calling?” Seth demanded.

  “I’m calling the army base nearby. They’ll need to send a helicopter immediately to evacuate her.”

  “Is that really necessary? Maybe she’s just dehydrated?”

  “Seth, shut up!” Kayla shouted at him. “Mom, Mom!”

  Abigail heard her daughter’s voice as if it were coming faintly through a bad long-distance phone connection. “I’m dying,” she whispered.

  “What? What did you say?” Kayla repeated, filled with a sudden panic.

  It couldn’t end now! Just as they were on the same path to discovery. It was too soon, they were both too young! I will never get to know you, Kayla thought, horrified.

  They waited twenty minutes. It felt like two days. Finally, they heard the sound of helicopter blades whipping against the wind, creating a sudden sandstorm as it hovered, then landed.

  Abigail cried out in pain as they lifted her body onto a stretcher, every jostle and footstep agony.

  “There is only room enough for two of you besides the patient in the helicopter. Who’s coming?” an army medic shouted.

  “I’m her daughter!” Kayla shouted back above the din, jumping into the helicopter. She looked at Seth and Daniel, reaching out impulsively. “Daniel, get in!”

  “No, Kayla.” Daniel shook his head. “You and Seth have unfinished business.”

  She looked at him, stunned.

  Seth took two steps toward the helicopter. Then he put his hands behind Daniel’s shoulders, pushing him forward. “She needs you. Not me,” Seth said. “And I think whatever business we once had together is over. Right, Kayla?”

  “Thank you, Seth. Thank you so much! For everything. Forgive me.” She reached out to him, and he moved toward her, letting himself be hugged and hugging her back. Then he caught Daniel’s arm, helping him into the helicopter. “Take good care of her,” he said hoarsely.

  The doors slid shut, and the helicopter lifted.

  Kayla looked out of the window. She saw Seth move away, covering his eyes from the swirling sand and dust that darkened his bright gold hair. Then she saw him look up, lifting his hand in a final farewell. She raised her hand and waved back, watching his figure shrink and fade into the distance as they flew over the mountains, her eyes blurring with tears.

  She felt Daniel’s arms around her.

  “Is my mom going to be all right?”

  “We’ll be in the hospital in minutes,” he assured her, not answering her question.

  “Daniel . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’ve found that one good thing inside me I’ve been looking for.”

  “What is it, my love?”

  “It’s how I feel about you.” She put her arms around him and wept.

  Ten minutes later, they landed.

  Am I going to die? Abigail wondered calmly as she was wheeled down the hospital corridors. Somehow, it was not the awful thought she had always imagined it would be. She felt at peace as the pains lessened with the drip from the intravenous tubes. Perhaps they had put in some kind of painkiller. Or perhaps you didn’t feel pain when you were about to die.

  She was given a CT scan, confirming Daniel’s diagnosis.

  “It’s her appendix. But there are all kinds of hazy lines around it. It may have burst, or be infected. In any case, it has to come out immediately.”

  “Mom, they are going to operate. It’s your appendix. You are going to be all right, Mom!”

  It all seemed so far away, Abigail thought, the voices, the visions of people scurrying to and fro. She didn’t feel part of it anymore. She felt detached, as if she were in an audience watching this on some giant screen.

  She looked up at her daughter’s young, beautiful face, so drawn and pale, reaching up to caress her freckled cheeks. She beckoned her to come closer. “You were always my pride and joy, my precious, spoiled little Kayla,” she whispered into her ear. “I never worried about you. You were so smart, so successful. I just assumed you were all right. I should have taken more care to see that you were happy.”

  “Mom, no one can make another person happy. You are a great mother. You did your best for me, for all of us. Please, don’t . . . !”

  “I’m not going to die, God willing. I still have my Tenth Song left. I haven’t yet sung my Tenth Song,” she murmured, the preoperative sedatives beginning to make her words blur one into the other.

  She felt them wheel her urgently down the corridor, Kayla on one side, Daniel on the other.

  The massive operating-room lights hovered above her like UFOs. She closed her eyes. She felt frightened, murmuring a desperate prayer to God, asking Him to hold her hand. They put a mask over her face. “Breathe in and count to four,” she heard a voice say, “and that will be the last thing you feel until you wake up.”

  She had a moment of deep understanding that surpassed anything she had ever experienced before. Whatever this “thing” was she had been involved in, this consciousness, these waking moments—sight, smell, thought, understanding, love, activity, desire, pain—the light that came at intervals, replaced by darkness and the overweening sense of space, objects—sky, moon, mountains, sea, earth—whatever this was they called living, it was finite. It would come to an end. And all she had experienced and known would leave her. This certainty came to her as a dream, a nightmare, and a deep sense of peace. She was reconciled to it, to leaving all she had known behind. She felt quiet inside, ready, giving up her possession of body and mind, ready to forfeit it all if that was ordained, laying it at the feet of her faith. What would be would be. She could not fight it. She was small, finite. And her fate too was finite.

  She did as she was told, breathing deeply, wondering if this was the last thing she would ever do on this earth; wondering if all this time she had been singing her Tenth Song.

  32

  Adam squirmed in the leather conference chair in his lawyer’s fancy conference room, his hands gripping the wooden armrests. He was in the place he least wanted to be in the world, except the courtroom. The whole legal team seemed to be there. For some reason, he thought of the words “gang rape.” Except that unlike most victims, he’d be paying each one of them four hundred dollars an hour for this experience.

  “Adam, you are due back in court tomorrow. We, your legal team, really want to impress upon you the risks you are taking. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather reconsider now, and let us talk to the federal prosecutors and work out an advantageous deal for you? When we get to court, it will be too late.”

  They sounded like an old record, Adam thought, furious, considering all the money he had spent on this case so far, nearly bankrupting him. He thought about all the horrible headlines and how unimaginably quickly a single article in the newspaper or on the Internet had turned longtime friends and clients into distant accusers. He had steeled himself to go through the horrors of the court trial by dreaming of the day when the newspapers would declare his innocence, bringing shame and chagrin to all those who had thought the worst of him. To do what they were now suggesting would mean the end of that dream forever; it would mean new headlines, ones which read BOSTON ACCOUNTANT PLEA-BARGAINS ON TERRORIST FUNDING CHARGE. It would be the same as being convicted.

  He looked across the room at the expectant faces of the men he had hired to protect him. He saw pity and compassion in their eyes, along with doubt. Even they, he realized in despair, didn’t believe he was innocent. Not completely.

  “Do you remember John Proctor, that character accused of witchcraft from The Crucible?” he said, and they looked at him, puzzled. “All John needed to do in order to go home to his wife and children was to confess to som
ething he didn’t do. Imagining the terrible death awaiting him, his separation forever from all those he loved, he broke down at a certain point, ready to lie. But then they asked him to sign his name to his confession. And that he could not do. ‘Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! . . . How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!’ ”

  They sighed, leaning back in their chairs.

  “We understand,” Marvin said. He, among them all, seemed to look at him with a newfound respect. “But it is my duty as your lawyer to tell you that there is a more than even chance that you will lose.”

  “But what about all the new information you’ve found? About Hurling’s terrorist connections? About Dorset’s gambling debts in Vegas that were suddenly paid off anonymously?”

  “It is all conjecture, not facts. We don’t have any witness who proves that Hurling knew Gregory Van. And without that, we have no credible defense.”

  Adam slumped, all his resolve rushing out of him like stale air from a punctured balloon, leaving him crumpled and weak.

  “There are no leads at all on Van?“

  Marvin shook his head. “He is obviously connected to terrorist regimes. He could be anywhere by now, in places that no one will be able to look.

  “Adam, this is, of course, your choice. But I beg you to reconsider,” Marvin implored, while the others nodded in agreement.

  Wasn’t that always the story? Adam thought. The criminals are always the ones who are smart enough to elude the law. Only innocent people are stupid enough and honorable enough to get caught and put through the legal wringer. “I will need to discuss this with my wife. She’s abroad right now.”

  The lawyers shifted uncomfortably.

  “That’s another thing, Adam. Your wife and daughter have both left the country. You remember what happened last time in court? I’m afraid this time the judge will be less charitable and easier for the prosecution to convince. You could be taken into custody immediately. Isn’t there some way you can get her and your daughter to return in the next few days?”