I headed over to the local mall, and, boy, did I shop. This was, without exception, the greatest shopping trip I’ve ever had: no lines, no crowds, no pushy salespeople; I had the entire mall to myself, and, best of all, everything was marvelously, magnificently free. It was, in a way, heaven.
I replaced the black silk suit I’d been wearing since I arrived in Shemaya with a cute, insanely expensive wool miniskirt and top that I robbed from a startled mannequin. I plundered stock rooms, pried open display cases, and hauled my booty around on a merry train of rolling racks weighted down with four seasons’ worth of apparel, shoes, accessories, makeup, and fine jewelry. I disrobed and tried on clothes right in the middle of sales floors rather than going back to the dressing rooms. If I didn’t like something, I just tossed it over my shoulder and moved on. The only limit to my decadence was my ability to cart it all away. Like a looter after a hurricane, I backed my car up to the doors and crammed it full.
After an entire day of this, I dragged myself to the food court and helped myself to a double cheeseburger and milkshake, which spontaneously appeared at the counter, topping it all off with five white chocolate macadamia-nut cookies. I never felt full; only a lingering sense of decorum stopped me from consuming entire trays. Yes, heaven indeed.
By the time I returned home from my shopping spree, I was so exhausted that I left everything in the car and collapsed on the couch. To my delight, the television functioned normally and displayed any channel I selected as long as it was showing something prerecorded, like a movie or a sitcom. The live news, weather, and sports channels displayed only white static, which was fine by me. I dozed in and out, happily watching reruns of M*A*S*H and All in the Family, but as evening came on, the weekend infomercials featuring gorgeous models demonstrating exercise equipment began having their guilt-inspiring effect on me (yes, even after death). I got up, dressed in the sleek new racer-back top and shorts I’d picked up at the mall, and went to the nearby gym for a workout to show them off.
Of course, the gym was empty and there was nobody there to show off to, which was rather disappointing because I thought I looked pretty hot for a one-armed girl who usually wore oversized T-shirts and baggy sweatpants during her workouts. Bo had been begging me for years to upgrade to new exercise clothes and would have loved the change. On the plus side, the fact that nobody was there meant no waiting for machines and no sweaty, smelly men grunting and ogling. It was like being rich and having my own personal health club. I climbed on a treadmill and tried to set the workout time for thirty minutes, but the digital timer, like all clocks in Shemaya, didn’t work and I had to rely on the odometer. I started off at my normal pace and felt so good when I reached three miles that I continued on to six, then ten (more than I’d ever run), twenty, and so on until the indicator flashed that I’d run ninety-nine miles and was resetting itself back to zero. Ironically, being dead improved my endurance. I barely broke a sweat and my pulse remained in the perfect range the entire time. My muscle strength in death improved as well. With no effort at all I was able to lift the huge stacks of weights heaved around by the bodybuilders and football players.
I noticed I looked better dead than alive too. In the mirrors on the walls around the gym, my muscles were as taut and sculpted as an Olympic athlete’s. My stomach and thighs were as tight and smooth as the day when I turned eighteen. No evidence whatsoever that I’d delivered a baby only ten months ago. Preening before the mirrors, my body seemed more beautiful and fascinating to me than it had ever been before. What an exquisite and amazing creation, I thought. A fractured Renaissance sculpture no less perfect for the amputation. It was art, music, science, mystery. I wasn’t given two arms in Shemaya—probably because I could think of myself only as an amputee—but my body seemed all the more beautiful for it. When I brushed against the cold steel frame of an exercise bike, a shiver ran up my spine, reconnecting me to the body I saw in the mirror. In that moment, I regretted how foolish I’d been during my life for not having noticed all these amazing things and what a gift I had been given. This body, my body, just the way it was, had always been holy, had always been mine, and had always been as beautiful and precious as life itself. How could I not have known that? I wondered. How could I have taken it for granted for so long?
I finished my workout perspiration- and odor-free, no need for a shower. Nightfall had come and I considered going to a restaurant and then a movie by myself, but I decided to spend the evening at home, watching something on TV and eating popcorn.
When I got back, I changed into my new silk pajamas. To my delight, a gigantic bowl of buttered popcorn and a tall soda spontaneously appeared on the coffee table. I snuggled up under a blanket and put on the television. The 1950 film noir classic D.O.A. was playing on every channel—as though somebody wanted me to watch it, which was more than a little creepy. I hadn’t seen it since my film class in college, but I liked it then and was content to see it again. It begins with an accountant named Frank Bigelow entering a police station to report a murder—his own. He was mysteriously poisoned and has only a few days to find out who killed him and why before he dies. The similarities between Bigelow’s quest and my own became instantly obvious, which is probably why I subconsciously put the movie on all channels.
Why did I die? I wondered. Had I been murdered? By whom? And, again, why?
These questions quickly distracted me from the movie. I could wait no longer for answers. I decided right then and there that I would do everything I could to find out what happened to me. And I would begin by retracing my steps—the last steps I could remember of my life.
Still dressed in my pajamas, I left the house and roared off in my car toward the convenience store. Everything looked as I remembered it in my dreams: the road, the sky, the buildings. I pulled into the parking lot singing “Hot Tea and Bees Honey” as I had done that night with Sarah. The fall air was fresh and cool. I entered the store, walked to the back, grabbed a carton of milk from the refrigerator case, and turned down the aisle where Sarah had knocked the cupcakes onto the floor.
It’s almost six-twenty,
says Teddy Bear,
Mama’s coming home now,
she’s almost right there.
Hot tea and bees honey,
for Mama and her baby;
Hot tea and bees honey,
for two we will share.
I stooped down to pick up the cupcakes.
This is where all my dreams had ended since arriving in Shemaya—hollow and questioning, like a failed coroner’s inquest. Cause of death: unknown. But, strangely, this time there was no overpowering smell of manure and mushrooms as there had been before. I walked up to the counter with the milk carton and waited, hoping recollection would be stimulated and there would be an answer. None came. I remembered nothing of my life beyond this moment. Frustrated and enraged, I threw the milk carton across the counter. It exploded white against the shelves stocked with cigarettes.
“What happened to me?” I screamed into the silence. “What happened to me?” I walked back out to my car in tears.
On the drive home, a car appeared in my rearview mirror—this was my first encounter with another car since Huntingdon when the traffic had backed up on the street and I thought I was going insane.
The car followed me at a normal distance for a few miles; but when we reached a long, deserted stretch of road with corn and hay fields on both sides, the high-beam headlights of the car behind started flashing and bursts from a red strobe light filled my rearview mirror, hurting my eyes. The red light came from low on the windshield, like an unmarked patrol car. I decided to pull over even though I knew it would be unoccupied. Sitting there on the side of the road with my car idling, admiring the authenticity of the virtual-reality game I seemed to be playing with myself, I remembered Bo warning me he’d recently seen a speed trap on this stretch of road.
Of course, no patrolman appeared at my window, but I decided to get out and go have a look. The engine of
the police car was running but there was nobody inside. I opened the driver’s door. It looked like the interior of a normal four-door sedan rather than a police car after all. There was no police radio or any of the other equipment you would expect; the only resemblance to a police car was the red strobe light on the dashboard, connected by a coil of black cord to the cigarette lighter. Glancing in back, I saw a videocassette tape on the floor and went around to the rear door to get it. But as I slid across the seat to reach the tape, the door slammed shut behind me and locked me inside. Then the shifter on the steering column mysteriously moved itself from park to drive and the car pulled back onto the road without a driver. Looking over my shoulder, I could see my own car following behind.
I laughed. It all could have been very spooky, terrifying even, but after you’ve accepted your own death, what more is there to be afraid of? I picked up the videocassette. Handwritten on the label were the words “What Happened?”
Well, how appropriate, I thought. Maybe God speaks to souls on video and I would finally find out what happened to me. But I would have to wait until I returned home to watch it.
I sat back and relaxed, as if I were on an amusement-park ride, curious to see where the car would take me.
We headed south for a few miles. There were no other cars on the road, and all the homes and businesses were dark. The seasons stopped cycling. It was autumn everywhere now. Colored leaves rained down on the windshield like drops of thick, wet paint. We turned off onto a side road at Ardenheim and up an old dirt logging road into the mountains. The headlights of both cars shut off. We traveled along, hitting ruts and splashing through mud puddles. The car I was riding in finally stopped in the middle of the road. My car following behind stopped as well, but then turned and backed itself off the logging road into a grove of pine trees, pushing beneath branches as it moved until it was covered with pine boughs and could no longer be seen in the moonlight. A moment later the videocassette suddenly vanished from my lap, as if it had been a mirage all along. The car I was riding in backed its way down the logging road in the direction from which we had come and drove out onto the highway, turning its lights back on.
How strange, I thought. But I had seen far stranger things in Shemaya—and I had nothing better to do—so I decided to play along.
The driverless sedan with me sitting in the backseat continued driving south through the night toward Harrisburg. This was the same route I took when traveling between Delaware and Huntingdon, and I began to suspect that Nana and Luas had somehow contrived all of this as a way of bringing me back home. The radio came on, switching itself between country music stations as the signals faded, proving to me that my mind was not in control of the car—I rarely listened to country music.
We passed Harrisburg and eventually Lancaster, finally turning off the main highway and heading into the rolling farmland of Chester County toward Delaware, just as I had suspected. But before crossing the state line, we turned off onto a winding secondary road, following this for several more miles until we turned again onto a smaller country lane. There were no streetlights or power lines now. The sky was coal black. The last uninhabited home passed from view miles ago, asleep in the cool harvest air pregnant with the scent of decaying leaves and apples. Finally, the pavement ended, and we were traveling on a gravel road descending a steep ravine through woods and turning onto a rutted dirt road leading through an open, overgrown field, then back into more woods and down an even steeper slope.
The road ended at a crumbling cinder-block building protruding from the ground like an ugly scab. Its windowless walls stood barely one-story tall and were pocked with black streaks of mold and a leprosy of flaking white paint. It resembled the shell of an abandoned industrial building and looked out of place in the country. I had the feeling I had been there before but no distinct recollection.
The gear selector moved itself to park, the engine shut off, and the doors unlocked. I got out of the car and walked up to the building, lit by the yellow glare of the headlights. The cloying stench of manure and mushrooms—the same odor I had smelled in the convenience store in my dreams—made the air heavy and difficult to breathe. Pulling open the worm-eaten door, I was fearful now even though I knew there could be nothing inside to harm me.
As I stepped inside, bright daylight erupted across the sky, a huge explosion, vaporizing the building, the car, the woods, and my own body.
Suddenly I found myself transported into the bedchamber of a great Roman palace—a structure more immense and splendid than even the Pantheon. White stone columns soared into the bowl of a fantastic marble dome overhead. Beneath it sat a glittering golden bed surrounded by divans covered in plush crimson fabric. Standing in front of this bed, bloated and nude, was Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar. At his feet, groaning and pleading for mercy, lay his wife, Poppaea, fully clothed and several months pregnant with his child. Her white gown was streaked red between her legs.
“You ungrateful whore!” Nero bellowed before driving his foot deep into Poppaea’s abdomen. “I put Octavia’s head on a platter for your amusement and this is how you repay me, by ridiculing me!” He kicked her again, more savagely, and this time her ribs gave way, cracking and breaking like twigs. Poppaea gasped for air, blood drooled from her mouth.
“Get out of my sight!” Nero yelled.
Then the Roman palace vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared. In its place emerged the Courtroom with Luas standing at its center. The faceless being from the monolith whispered something in his ear and then returned to its home inside the stone. I had no idea how I’d gotten from the cinder-block building in the woods to Nero’s palace and then the Courtroom. The journey was seamless and bewildering. Luas walked over and spoke to me.
“Hello, Brek,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to see that. How was your visit home?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, puzzled by what I had just seen. “You just presented Nero? The Nero who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned?”
“Yes,” Luas said. “Foul character, isn’t he?”
“But he died two thousand years ago—”
“Yes, and I’ve been representing him ever since,” Luas said. “The presentation usually ends here, or just after he has the boy Sporus castrated and takes him for his wife. When I return to the Courtroom the next day, I’m informed that a final decision on his fate still hasn’t been reached and I must present his case again.” Luas sighed. “This is my job, it seems, to try Nero’s soul every day for eternity. Seems God isn’t quite ready to make up his mind about this one.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, disoriented and taken aback.
Luas escorted me out of the Courtroom and led me down the corridor toward the train shed. We continued our conversation as we walked.
“Didn’t you say we only present the close cases?” I asked. “Nero’s case seems pretty obvious.”
“Yes, well, there are two sides to every story, aren’t there? It may seem strange, but Nero did have some redeeming qualities—not unlike Toby Bowles. I never get to them during the presentation, of course, but he had them. Anyway, ours is not to wonder why. Nero is a postulant here, and we treat him like all the rest. Just be happy he isn’t one of your clients.”
Before reaching the train shed, Luas led me around a corner into a corridor I hadn’t seen before, one so unfathomably long that I was unable to see the end of it. It seemed to stretch out into space, a hallway in a vast office building with literally thousands of identical offices lining both sides of the corridor, each with tall, slender wooden doors and transoms above them closed tight. Bright fluorescent lights bathed the walls in the uniform and compassionless glare of bureaucracy.
“What is this place?” I asked Luas.
“This is where we have our offices. As you can see, there are quite a few lawyers in Shemaya.”
This startled and impressed me, but I was still struck by Nero’s trial. “So Nero and Toby Bowles are treated the same way?” I said. “No
thing they did right their entire lives is heard in the Courtroom? What’s the point of conducting a trial at all—if you can even call it that? Why not just send them straight to hell?”
“Ah, back to that again, are we?” Luas said. “Please try to understand, Brek, there is no Bill of Rights or anything like that in Shemaya. The procedural protections in which you placed such great faith as an attorney on earth are entirely unnecessary here. No lie can go unexposed in the Courtroom, and no truth can remain hidden. Justice is guaranteed as long as the presenters remain unbiased and do nothing to tip the scales.”
“But how can there be justice if all sides of the case aren’t presented?”
“Do I need to remind you,” Luas answered in a reprimanding way, “that millions of people on earth, including Christ himself, have been tried, convicted, and punished unjustly? Surely God requires no lessons from us about fairness. Of course, justice has many dimensions, and we’ve been speaking only of fairness to the accused. You lost your arm when you were just a little girl, Nero Claudius turned Christians into tapers, and God once drowned nearly every living creature on earth. To know whether justice has been done, one must consider all of its aspects.”
We somehow reached the end of the limitless corridor. Luas stopped us at the last office on the right. A small plaque on the door read “High Jurisconsult of Shemaya.”
“Ah, here we are,” Luas announced, opening the door. “The next phase of your training is about to begin.”
13
There was a simple wooden desk in the office, two chairs behind the desk, a single guest chair in front, and two candles on top. No windows, papers, files, phones, pencils, or other office items. Luas closed the door and struck a match to light the candles.
“Please have a seat here beside me,” he said. “We’re going to interview a new postulant together and then watch the presentation. I will be your proctor. After this, you will be assigned your first client and conduct a trial on your own.”
The Trial of Fallen Angels Page 11