From the kitchen, Rodney looked through to the living room, where Joshua sat at the opposite end of the couch from Simon. He wondered about Baxter’s last comment. How would it shape a young man to have friends who had died and gone to heaven, and who heard the very voice of God in their heads twenty-four hours a day? What would Joshua do with the wisdom he absorbed from such counselors and confidants?
“You go on to bed, my girl,” Rodney said to Miranda. She looked a bit droopy after the long and intense day.
She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Thanks, Dad.”
When he had put all the dishes he could in the dishwasher, he turned it on, after he listened for anyone taking a shower. Then he strolled into the living room, feeling that anything left could be handled in the morning. He overheard Simon and Joshua talking about some kind of new educational method or school, or something. Rodney knew he was tired when he couldn’t muster the energy to be curious about that conversation. He said a muted goodnight and headed up stairs.
His thoughts wandered. His son had just graduated from high school. Yet he had a one-year-old daughter, at the age of sixty-six. Why did thoughts guaranteed to make one feel old and exhausted show up when one is already done in for the day?
Rodney opened his bedroom door to find Emma slipping under the covers. She looked as tired as he felt, but she managed a loving smile nonetheless.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Rodney sat at the desk in his bedroom, looking at the computer, executing the cerebral gymnastics of balancing his business accounts in a spreadsheet. He paused to rub his eyes, thinking that spreadsheets shouldn’t be part of a world under God’s control. “At least there aren’t any more taxes,” he said aloud.
Emma had just walked past the bedroom door toting a pile of laundry. She backed up and looked in. “What did you say, dear?”
Rodney turned to look at her, smiling sheepishly, and said in a mild voice, “Nothing, dear.”
The long summer days, and consistent mild weather, tempted Rodney and his crews to work longer hours and to suck in more work, in an effort to build up their bank accounts. When he stopped to reflect on this urge, Rodney wondered if that urge wasn’t really just like the memory of an amputated limb. The immortals had abolished poverty worldwide, managing food distribution and practicing a reverse taxation that fueled commerce among the mortals. Why work harder and save more, where poverty no longer threatens and deprivation has lost its power?
With the birth of each of the children, Rodney found more reason to relieve Emma of her accounting responsibilities for the construction business. He began to wonder whether the time might be approaching when he should just hire someone.
Joshua poked his head in the room and asked, “Dad, do you have a minute to talk?”
Rodney welcomed the excuse to ignore the dreaded spreadsheet for a while. “Sure, Josh, come on in.”
Letting the door ease shut behind him, Joshua stepped over to the bed and sat on the edge closest to Rodney. “It’s about the mentor relationship Simon is setting up for me,” he explained.
Relieved to hear that this was not some new problem, but an opportunity that they had already discussed, Rodney turned his chair all the way around and leaned back a bit. “What’s on your mind?” he prompted.
“Well, I finally found out who this mentor is supposed to be and I’m wondering if it sounds okay to you.”
“Who is it?” Rodney asked.
“The thing that surprised me is that it’s a woman, an immortal woman, but I mean I didn’t expect it to be a woman,” he explained.
“What do you know about her?” Rodney asked. They had all just assumed that any immortal would be more than acceptable as Joshua’s mentor and that anyone Simon recommended would be perfect.
“Her name is Theresa; she lived in an Amish community as a mortal. But I’m not really thinking that it makes any difference where they lived. They all seem to know way more than I could ever hope to learn and they’re getting their direction from the King himself, so that’s not really an issue.”
“But the fact that she’s a woman is an issue?” Rodney asked.
“I don’t know. You know how you get something set in your mind, you set expectations and when the thing turns out to be different than you expected, it feels wrong? Really, all I’m probably feeling is that it’s different from what I expected.”
“Did you discuss this with Simon?” Rodney asked.
“Yeah, some. But I was too shocked to say much, and he just looked at me like he was waiting for me to get over it.”
“This was yesterday?”
“Yeah, we met yesterday and he explained how the mentorship would work, me working at a job part-time during the day, helping to build the new public library in Des Moines. The rest of the time I’d be reading, writing or meeting with other students and with my mentor. She’d also have me meet with other instructors sometimes, but mostly she and I would spend a lot of time together.”
“Are you still goin’ to be able to live here?” Rodney asked.
Joshua nodded. “Yeah, you know how good the immortals are at transportation.” He grinned, leaving his father wondering what those transportation arrangements would be. “I would use the travel time for reading and writing, watching videos she assigns and sometimes meeting with her, I guess.”
“You haven’t met her yet?”
“No, I’m supposed to meet her tomorrow with Simon.”
“That sounds good. Maybe when you meet with her you’ll get a better feeling about it.”
Joshua nodded again, but his father could see that he was not convinced.
Rodney leaned forward. “You know, Simon understands what you can handle and he knows this woman. I would trust him with this,” he said. “And then, you be honest and decide for yourself whether you can accept what they’ve setup for you.”
Though his father seemed to understand the core of Joshua’s question, the young man couldn’t be sure, so he tapped into some of that honesty and confessed, “Those immortal women are so beautiful, so attractive, I just don’t know if I could concentrate.” He sighed, relieved at having said it aloud.
Rodney smiled lovingly at his son. “Maybe they’ve found the only ugly immortal woman in Jerusalem for you.”
Joshua rolled his eyes.
Rodney laughed. “I know exactly what you mean and so do they. Nothing we think or feel is hidden from them. I mean, these are people who can understand the thoughts of animals. They know what you’re worried about and maybe they have in mind that you should face this head-on. Maybe it’s important for you to study in the context of pure beauty. You know there’s gonna be nothing impure about this woman, so maybe that’s part of what they want you to learn. That’s the benefit of this kind of study, it covers more than cold facts in books; it gives you a chance to absorb wisdom from another person’s life, wisdom about things that cross over the lines between academic subjects.”
Rodney—the commander of men, the father who had lost two children, the stepfather who raised Daniel from teenage to adulthood, the beneficiary of much healing at the hands of immortals, as well as from the loving wife and family God had given him—had prepared all his life for this time, when he could help to launch Joshua into the life intended for him.
“Maybe we’re supposed to admire the beauty of the immortals,” Rodney said. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with what we feel when we see them.”
Joshua showed his surprise at the concept, still confused by what he had heard about groups of people who worshipped immortals as saints or even gods.
Rodney too had heard the stories of people miraculously healed who, in turn, built shrines to the benevolent immortals who took away their sickness or injury. What used to be the Catholic church in Somerville, now contained shrines to two immortals who healed people in the area. Angelina, a woman with long black hair and dark eyes, had rescued two men from a burning vehicle, pulling them clear of the electrical power lines they had
knocked down and healing each of them of their cuts and burns. The two men, brothers by the name of Holdrege, thanked her profusely before she vanished. Within days, however, they had elaborated on their gratitude in the form of a statue of Mary the Mother of Jesus painted to resemble Angelina. When they could find no one to object, they placed that statue in the foyer of the former Catholic church.
Similarly, a woman and her teenage son painted a mural of a man named Demetrius who healed the boy of a fever, which had threatened his life. Because the Holdrege brothers were allowed to keep their shrine in the abandoned church, the woman and her son mounted their mural in that foyer, as well.
The immortals certainly knew about these shrines, and the many others that had popped up in towns around the world, but they didn’t destroy them or rebuke their creators. In other parts of the world, immortals were merely added onto a panoply of gods, as in South Asia and Latin America. The religious, the superstitious and the polytheistic all celebrated the immortals as living saints, or gods manifest in the flesh.
Joshua thanked his dad for the talk, obviously drinking in the reassurance and opening his mind to unimagined possibilities in his relationship with his mentor.
All of this swirled up into Rodney’s conversation with Steve later that evening, when the two old friends went for a walk after dinner at Steve and Marney’s house. They briefly discussed the worship gatherings regularly held in Steve’s living room, where mortals attempted to take part in the Jerusalem worship via the feed over the Internet. Steve had twice seen immortals appear in his living room out of the video, each time to provide some encouragement or emotional healing to one of the people watching with him.
“Manuel Hernandez told me a couple of days ago that his sister received a direct visit from the King, in her home,” Steve said. He waited for Rodney’s response, watching the sunset through the trees along a residential street near his house.
Rodney raised his eyebrows, trying to remember Manuel’s sister. What was her name? He set that aside and said, “Baxter Slatery told me that he was able to recall much about the last time the King came to talk to him in Jerusalem.” Rodney felt like this validated Manuel’s claim, as far as he was concerned.
“I guess Maria told Manuel that the King just talked to her like a long lost friend getting reacquainted,” said Steve. “She’s been attending Jerusalem worship showings all over the area since. She’ll probably come to our house sometime soon, according to Manuel.”
“I wonder why he came to see her,” Rodney said. “Why her? Is he visiting everyone eventually?”
Steve shook his head slightly, not venturing an answer. He looked at a dark gray, Victorian house across the street, with a professionally painted sign in the yard, “Jerusalem Worship Here, Monday thru Friday.”
“I wonder what the Jerusalem worshippers do when the King leaves the throne. Do they even know?” asked Rodney.
“I would think they know, but maybe they’re having such a good time that they don’t stop singing and dancing. Or maybe it’s just that time and space don’t mean the same to them.”
“Does he visit the resisters who escape to the mountains?” Rodney continued to explore the possibilities.
“Maybe,” Steve said, “just to scare the crap out of ‘em.” He laughed with Rodney, at the impious joke.
Rodney motioned with his head and they turned the corner back toward Steve’s place. Gray to purple clouds, like a fleet of ships on the pale pink sky, sailed in for the night.
When they arrived back at Steve’s house, they were surprised to see the video stream set to a news report. Joshua held the remote control pointed at the projection, everyone else—Marney, Emma and the kids—stared silently at the images. Steve and Rodney fell right in with them, needing no explanation.
There, in full 3D projection, lay the wreckage of a commercial jet liner. In the maze of bits and pieces, people ran to each other and hugged, or stood dazed and bewildered. Around them, a dozen people rummaged through the debris. The reporter was narrating when Rodney and Steve walked in.
“Officials are telling us that one hundred and eighty-one passengers, and nine crew members, were on board the flight. The immortals appear to be restoring to life every person they find, including many who have been severely burned or even dismembered. Occasionally a whole and living person will appear where, from here, it appeared there was no one before. This is simply unbelievable,” the reporter said, pausing to catch her breath and to watch the miraculous rescues.
The reporter resumed. “We’ve been told that the immortals know that the cause of the crash was a mechanical malfunction, complicated by a mistaken transfer of power between the engines, when instruments offered inaccurate information. Now it looks as if we will get to interview the pilot and copilot about how it happened. I can see two uniformed crew members standing near the remains of the cockpit already.”
The camera zoomed in on a pair of immortals crouching near a large piece of the right wing. Apparently, they had extinguished the fire that one would normally see all through a crash like this and the video showed the rescuers clearly, with only a faint hint of smoke in the air. The two currently in focus, a man and a woman, seemed to be assembling something small. The camera attempted to focus on their hands and suddenly a small boy appeared out of the nondescript bundle that they had been manipulating.
Everyone in the living room jumped and Miranda screamed. Seeing the little boy suddenly come to life out of what must have been a mere remnant of his body, dislodged each viewer from his or her mental equilibrium.
“Oh, my God,” Marney said.
Emma put her hand over her mouth and then looked at Rodney. His back and neck buzzed with electricity, until he shook visibly like a man suddenly awakening.
The little boy on the video stood, looking around, and then spotted a woman running toward him. She picked him up and hugged him, spinning around so that the camera caught a glimpse of the boy’s smiling face. Again, the viewers in that living room exclaimed in chorus when they saw the little boy’s pristine joy.
The reporter couldn’t see what the camera had focused on twenty yards away, but the camera operator jolted at each of those points where the video watchers had reacted so strongly.
For thirty minutes, they all stared, as one after another of the passengers came to life, rising out of a pile of plane parts, or out of a still and inhuman corpse. Apparently, someone restrained the camera from getting closer, restraint for which most viewers were thankful, given the horrendous state of many of the victims’ bodies.
Rodney wiped tears from his cheeks several times and his sniffles blended with a half a dozen others in the room. After they had watched this without speaking, Joshua finally asked what had crossed others’ minds, as well.
“I’ve heard stories of the immortals stopping a plane from crashing. Remember that one over Canada last year, where two of them actually caught the plane before it hit the ground and hardly anyone was even hurt. Why couldn’t they do that this time?”
As moving as the resurrection healings were, Rodney had already wondered why it was even necessary. No one had ever defined for him exactly the limits of the immortals’ power. Certainly, they had limits; they were not equal with God. But did it even really take two of them to catch a jet liner, could one have made that rescue? For twenty years, Rodney had allowed such questions to exist, as if behind a curtain in his mind, concealed in a private place, where he kept childish questions that were not presentable in adult company.
Rodney saw that Joshua and Steve were both looking at him for an answer. He shrugged his shoulders slightly, shook his head for a second and then said, “I’ll have to ask one of the immortals the next time I see one.” He smiled faintly, feeling the weariness of draining emotions.
The irony in that answer reached Joshua, who realized that he would be speaking with Simon and his new tutor in the morning. He looked at his Dad and smiled wryly when he got the joke. Steve saw this exchange
but missed its significance.
As usual, Betsy’s sleep schedule dictated an end to the evening at Steve and Marney’s. Steve hit the record button to keep what they had watched and to capture the rest of the live coverage. Rodney and Emma said goodnight and gathered their four children for the ride home.
Morning turned over slowly, considering whether to start another sunny day. Rain clouds had lingered later than usual and the driveway still glistened, in spots, when Joshua ran out the door to jump in his electric car and drive to his meeting. A moist coolness invigorated the young man on his way to the car and he relished that feeling by rolling down his window for the quick drive to town.
Rodney watched his son drive away, standing at the screen door with a cup of coffee in his hand and a daydream look on his face. He was thinking, “How did that boy grow up so fast? Why couldn’t he wait until I was ready?”
This day would require Rodney to head to town for a meeting as well, a meeting with the regional National Guard commander. Rodney had remained in the guard until mandatory retirement at age sixty-five and had reenlisted just a month ago, when the Guard adjusted its retirement age, to account for, what most people expected would be, much longer life spans.
Rodney maintained the rank of Colonel and the new commander had been promoted to General. General Herman Frasier had fought in Chicago, during the last war, surviving an ordeal that very few remained to tell about.
At the National Guard office in Somerville, located there by virtue of Rodney’s founding role in the new Guard, the two war veterans met to discuss keeping the peace, aware that, for the most part, peace didn’t really depend on them. Such a disarmed defense system required a new generation of leaders, of which Rodney and Herman provided choice examples.
Though Herman trusted the immortals less than Rodney, he distrusted his fellow mortals even more. His particular concern, since taking command, was the growing population of resisters in the far northwest corner of the state. The landscape there had been transformed by earthquake and flood, before it was victimized by war and toxic spoilage. The immortals had wiped clean the chemical and heavy metal corruption of the land near what used to be Sioux Falls, South Dakota. That intersection of three states, Wisconsin, Iowa and South Dakota, had been abandoned during the war, but now refugees from the Reign had begun to build a growing community out of the shell of one of the former towns, which they renamed Humanity.
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 47