“When we first made love?
“No, no, way before that. Do you remember our walk around the fountain in Marshall the day we met?”
“Uh huh, I sure do! What are you saying?”
“That I can pinpoint the exact moment the feeling began. I’m not declaring I fully loved you then, I just knew that I would. The realization came to me a couple of hours before our first kiss. That kiss was just the exclamation point.”
“Nice! I remember thinking it was perfection among kisses.”
Mark gave her an instant replay and then went on.
“As we strolled around that replica of the ‘Temple of Love’ in Marie Antoinette's garden, something about you touched me deeply.
“It wasn’t a specific word or look; more like a sensation. Or maybe it was a command from whatever might have inhabited the ‘Temple of Love’ that day.”
“I knew she heard me—”
“Whatever the source, submitting to it was the smartest thing I ever did. And the most unusual—I’m not usually impulsive.”
Mark was silent for a moment, looking into the distance before murmuring:
“Could it have been divinely ordained…?”
They lay for a few minutes in each other’s arms, drinking in the loveliness they could hear and smell, see and feel.
When the splendor became too much, Janine broke the silence.
“My beautiful man, have you ever imagined yourself in a private paradise where the temperature is ideal; the food and drink are so exquisite that you don’t want to swallow; and you are enjoying all this with the partner of your dreams, arrayed in next to nothing and panting for your touch?”
She wondered if Mark was more transfixed by the twinkle in her eye or the articles of clothing dropping to the ground.
“I think it is time to possess our paradise by the sea!”
As he grabbed her hand, he was humming a Bon Jovi song:
‘Take my hand and we'll make it I swear...’
When they reached the water’s edge, the waves took over and hummed the chorus.
“I wonder if the sea will say of us, ‘they loved one Sunday,’ like in the McKuen song.” Janine mused aloud.
“My darling, I’m quite certain the sea knows that my love for you is as deep and endless as its seamless merging with the ocean.
“One Sunday - yes, it knows of our loving today but the sea doesn’t separate today from an eternity of Sundays.
“Just as the sea can’t escape beyond its shoreline, we cannot escape once we assent to loving. It might take on different forms but our love will never die. I’ll be yours for always.” He sealed this declaration with a kiss.
“You have a marvelous way with words.” Janine congratulated him. “With kissing too; your lips bring to life every part of me. It goes far beyond the physical. More like the doorway to a sacred place. Is that what surrendering to love means?”
“Dear Janie, I’m not a philosopher, just a man who loves you. Finding words to express my love is like trying to capture the essence of the sea.
“One minute it’s like a prism, separating the colors in the sky; the next, it’s a stallion, rearing up to take its place among the forces of nature.”
***
As the couple expressed their love in the words and ways of humankind, they were unaware of the disappearance of their isolation, the end of being distinct from the natural world. Becoming as the sea, tossed, stroked and set free to revel in reckless passion, their lovemaking became unbounded joy.
The tide came in and the tide went out. The surrounding hills, dressed in vibrant shades of green, watched. The shimmering aqua sea, with its frilly white edges massaging the shore, listened. The ancient gray rocks, large enough to lie on, with markings remarkable enough to study for hours, knew the scent. Love was in the air and its fragrance lingered everywhere.
As the sunset came upon the lovers, still lying lost in each other, it bathed the scene in breathtaking hues of purple and peach, the water mirroring the heavenly colors and flinging the palette from the sky back into the heavens.
Never had a sunset painted a more beautiful picture of human emotion. Although the couple seemed to pay no heed to their surroundings, they felt all the beauty of sky, earth, and water enter their souls and magnify their love. What they saw through each other’s eyes spoke of the certainty of heaven come down to earth.
***
Looking down on the deliriously happy couple, Zachri lifted a prayer heavenward that this scene might come true.
27
PARADISE GIVES WAY
Startled awake from a sound sleep, Janine’s first thought was of Mark. The emotion filling her breast was an alien sensation, so intense that she thought her heart might actually burst. What was happening to her? Her intuition told her that the emotion must be linked to a dream centered on Mark, but the details would not come into focus.
She knew they had been together in some sort of paradise. She couldn’t recall what they had been doing together, only that she was sorry to be here in her bedroom instead of with him in that incredible encounter. Something wonderful must have taken place. Could it be that he was coming out of the coma?
She jumped up and ran to the computer, hoping for an e-mail message from him. If only she would see one of the acronyms that Mark always added to his salutations: typically LOML for ‘love of my life’ or YFF for ‘your forever friend’. A message was waiting…from Martin. Hardly daring to open it, she tried to recapture the hope that had come with her dream and then clicked.
Martin’s message was not what she had hoped for but it was not bad news. His dad was still in the coma but Martin had seen such a look of love on his father’s face during the night that it had erased the pain of waiting, at least for a few minutes. He wrote that when the doctors made their rounds in the hour just before dawn, they, too, had seemed heartened by his appearance and eye movement. The doctors had noted a slight sound slipping through his parted lips—one doctor had interpreted it as a sigh.
Martin wrote: “This gives me hope. I’d like to believe it’s a sign that the end of this nightmare is in sight. I will keep you informed, or maybe you will hear directly from Dad, but please, don’t give up praying quite yet.”
Janine went through the day feeling happier than she had since Mark had kissed her goodbye on her front porch three weeks earlier. Her waking emotions, although not as forceful as when she had first opened her eyes, remained tucked in a corner of her heart. Her world was a happy place again. One of her friends, a nun, added to her faith by calling to say she had a strong sense that Mark’s healing was imminent.
It was the time of waiting; just before a decision is promised. Janine intensely disliked waiting. Mark’s condition hadn’t helped to control that flaw in her character. If it wasn’t in her power to change a situation, the next best thing was to distract herself from it. She could think of only one guaranteed way to get her mind off the reality that Mark was still in a vegetative state— a visit from her grandchildren. She made plans to pick them up the following day.
***
“Gram, let’s go to the D-I-A.”
Saying the letters very slowly and distinctly was Emily’s way of ensuring that her grandma understood she wanted to go to the Detroit Institute of Art.
Seeing paintings through the eyes of children was an extraordinary way to break out of one’s personal boundary of the meaning of things. Janine had a strong sense that this would lead to important insights for her present challenge. With Emily and Nathan in tow, she used her camera to capture images she thought Mark would most appreciate. Her plan was to compile the images into a gallery she could e-mail. This would give him something unique to view while recuperating.
“What does this look like to you?”
Responding enthusiastically to Janine’s question, Emily said it was a strange-looking man, looking somewhat like the Rumpelstiltskin of her storybook images, his head all in blue and topped with a torn blue cap
.
Nathan’s perception was considerably different—he saw a dirt road bordered by trees, and “a blue tornado hanging over the road with a huge mouse jumping out of it.”
Emily burst out laughing at his answer, but as the tears began to drip from Nathan’s eyes, Janine hugged them both and praised them for their creative interpretations—and marveled at being able to see what Nathan saw!
Their next point of interest was a seascape where the artist had drawn a tempestuous scene of a man fallen overboard, his colleagues reaching for him as a shark was making its way, mouth open, toward the helpless man. “What do you think of this picture?” Janine asked her enthralled grandchildren.
Nathan, always the impetuous one, said he wanted to get in the water and tie up the shark’s mouth so the man would be safe. Emily called the painting cruel and disgusting and demanded they move on quickly or it would give her nightmares.
Finally, they found some artwork that mesmerized both children and grandmother: a virtual dining room table where a hand magically appeared serving food from multiple platters scattered around the table. When that course was removed another was served… and another and another. While seated around this table, the guests could almost taste the delectable cuisine that was put before them, but it was only virtual reality. What visitors touched was a tabletop with nothing whatsoever laying on its glass surface.
Another hour of touching or staring, meandering or sprinting, and her grandchildren were growing grumpy.
***
After depositing the tired but happy little ones with their parents, Janine went home to ponder the experiences of this delightful day, fully expecting the happy ending—some very good news from Martin. There seemed to be a message almost within reach of her conscious mind, and as she sat in her favorite chair—the mauve-colored fifteen-year-old recliner that still cradled her body restfully, she let her mind drift.
Janine fantasized throughout the evening, starting by allowing herself to envision walking into the Swiss clinic, taking Mark’s hand and kissing his lips. That’s where she planned to stay and what she planned to do through the days or weeks of his recuperation. As she slid beyond the conscious state, the images changed. Scenes from the day’s museum tour barged into her mind, starting with the transformation of Mark’s dear head into the blue head…the swirling tornado that Nathan had seen.
No longer just a representation of a recognizable human being, the blue head rotated a full 360 degrees, but with each quarter rotation, it exhibited the features of people she had known, even her deceased ex-husband.
Returning to its starting point, it again took on Mark’s facial characteristics with one exception: his face wore a beatific look, one that melted her heart. As the image dissolved, the face of Mark looked back and gazed directly into her eyes. In the final instant before disappearing, he winked.
In her next vision, she could feel the restlessness of the waves lapping against the side of a boat. As she bent over to grab onto the man’s arm—which she was sure was attached to Mark—the others who were squeezed in the boat with her, grabbed onto her clothing to keep her from falling overboard too.
The man in the water lay semi-conscious with one arm stretched skyward. The gunmetal-colored shark was close enough to count its three rows of needle-sharp teeth.
When the man’s hand was almost within her reach, the strange blue cloud appeared directly overhead. Janine looked at the cloud and then back to the sea.
In the instant her eyes were focused elsewhere, Mark’s body was lifted out of the water, but with no detectable prop. The shark arched upward and forward, making a graceful arc with fully two-thirds of its body exploding out of the water, but it could not reach its prey.
In the next movement, Mark was standing in the boat with her but, just as suddenly, the boat was gone, and then the sea was gone, and finally the people in the scene were only charcoal etchings within the original painting’s gold leaf frame.
Janine awoke sufficiently to move from her chair to bed, not bothering to undress. Almost instantly, she was in a deep sleep. This time her inner screen was projecting a party. The table in the art museum was the centerpiece, but it was no longer a virtual reality—all the joyful people around the banquet table savored the flavors and fragrances of each course, the lovers most of all. It was Elizabeth W. Garber’s poem “Feasting” come to life. ‘I am the feast this kitchen was blessed to prepare waiting for you to enter open mouthed in awe in the mystery we've been given, our holy feast.’
***
Mark was isolated in his hospital room. Zachri was the only available target.
“I want the life I’ve been living with Janine! I don’t know if it was really happening or a vision called forth from my desire, but I need that. I don’t need any more magical trips with you.
“I remember what Janine and I experienced in the Samet Islands. And I remember our commitment to love each other all our lives. Surely, dreaming cannot produce that degree of clarity.
“If this is a glimpse into the future, I want it to begin now! I didn’t make my commitment to Janine lightly or just to legitimize our lovemaking. I truly love her. She deserves so much and I am willing to make any sacrifice to bring her joy and peace.”
Zachri responded gently.
“I know it was real to you. I also understand how much you care for her.”
“What can I do for her, what sacrifices can I make, when I’m not even a functioning human being? I’m totally dependent on these doctors for the barest form of survival!
“Let me have something to live for, or let me die! I don’t know what is beyond, but it has to be better than this. Paradise at that resort with Janie was like playing a video game except that when the game is over you know whether you have won or lost. In my present condition, the game seems to go on and on.
“Zachri, are you real? Am I talking to a being with a physical, or at least a spiritual essence, or are you a dynamic holographic image from my psyche that I’ve been projecting into my closed universe? If you are more than crazed conjuring, help me!”
“I am real, Mark. I’ve told you that I’ve come as a messenger. In Jewish tradition, I’m Zachriel, the angel who governs memories and helps humans to review their strengths and weaknesses. There is an image of me as a white-bearded winged male with a gilded sword for cutting through illusions. The last part is close enough. At least they put me in a purple gown, distinguishing me from Santa Claus! It helps humans to relate to a being not of flesh and blood. I’m more than that though, Mark.
Do you remember reading that Job knew he had a witness, an advocate in heaven who was his friend as well as intercessor?”
“Vaguely.”
“Like Job, people who lived before Christ were far more open to the spirit world. I’ve always been with you. We can’t be separated, even when you die. That’s why I always want what’s best for you, but I can’t force my will on you.”
“So you’re my guardian angel?”
“No. Like most people, you want to picture me as an angel. I told you about the tradition of painting me in wings.”
“Then I have no image to relate to.”
“That’s correct. Have you seen your own spirit?”
“Of course I haven’t!”
“But do you believe you’re more than a mind and body?”
“Well, yes, I know there are things that can’t be defined or understood by just thinking and touching.”
“Very good, Mark! As a part of your spirit, I know almost everything about you although, while in the flesh, your spirit is incomplete. All the parts won’t merge until you cross over. Until then, some things are hidden from me.”
“Do you know what will happen to me next? Will I be discharged soon?”
Zachri felt the poignancy of Mark’s tone. His reply was boldly reassuring and blatantly devastating.
“Mark, the decision on what your life will become is yours to make, but what you have just stated; that ‘you are w
illing to make any sacrifice to bring her joy and peace’, necessitates exploration.”
“Don’t give me that! No more journeys into my past!”
“Please, listen to me before you choose, Mark. I promised no more trips into your past.”
“Then what do you mean by ‘needs exploring?’”
“I am able to see the world that you and your lover will inhabit if things remain on their current path. The near future is not one of visits from super-aliens and it is not ecological destruction brought on by global warming —that comes later.
“Nor is it annihilation by an atomic bomb or other weapons of mass destruction detonated in another world war—that also comes much later. In a short time from now, the power structure on Earth will become very different, causing massive changes in living conditions for the vast majority of people.”
“Okay, now I’m sure I haven’t imagined you. This is way too bizarre to be my creation.”
“Believe me or don’t, Mark. It’s your choice but I’ve been given the authority to reveal glimpses of your future. Most people reject this offer because they don’t expect to still be there or they are certain there’s nothing they can do.
“I don’t believe you are like most people, at least not any more. If you accept my invitation, you’ll receive a free guided tour of the mid-twenty-first century. If what you find there is intolerable, I’ll suggest a way you could make a difference.”
“Can’t you just suggest some action I could initiate right now, or at least as soon as I’m unbound, without having to drag me by the spirit—if I said by the hand that would be a mistake, wouldn’t it?—into the unknown?”
“It’s good that you can find a little humor in your situation, Mark. Life is often serious; your condition is very serious but not in an alarming way if you will trust us. I assure you we wouldn’t ask you to do anything that isn’t crucial.
“Remember when you read about living conditions in Somalia and other countries in the Global South? You believed what was written but without personal experience, you weren’t motivated to act. The same is true with most miseries. Believing is more than just seeing. Witnessing is unsettling. From some, it exacts a personal sacrifice. Has my argument convinced you to choose a tour over advice, Mark?”
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