“Thank you,” she whispered, gaping. “Thank you so much …”
“Don’t forget—tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. She was beaming.
He left her and her awed smile standing there. She stared at him as he descended the stairs and exited the shop.
“Damnit!” I yelled. “What did you do to her? What did you show her? What happens tomorrow? What did she see? Damnit!”
Thus ended the encounter that I wouldn’t hear of for many, many days yet.
~~*~~
Calliel reboarded the trolley under leaden skies. He’d put my book in his coat pocket; sitting, he pulled it out and started reading from page one. I’d written a small foreword for students, what amounted to a two-paragraph pep talk that mathematics, like any discipline, required time to master, but if they were serious, they would succeed. He finished it and gave an approving nod.
He continued reading all the way back to H Street, and then on the bus that let him off near his home. He repocketed my book and went inside, where he took his shiny new boots off and put them by the door, then cooked himself dinner (a ham sandwich and macaroni and cheese for a side; lemonade to wash it down), which he ate with distracted relish, because he’d fetched my book and was reading it again.
He finished eating and put the dishes in the sink. With my book in hand, he shuffled into his study, where he grabbed some blank paper from the printer and sat down and started working the exercises in the first chapter.
I watched him. He followed my initial instructions (page three) carefully: to copy the problem down on the top of the page first; then, one step at a time, to work through it slowly. He slipped up quite a bit at first, but over time his confidence began to increase, and with it the mistakes became fewer and fewer. When he checked the solutions index in the back two hours later, he discovered only three of his answers were incorrect. He went back and re-read the pertinent sections, then retried the problems, all of which he got right the second time.
“Son of a bitch,” he crowed after another steady hour of work. “I’m learnin’ math! I think I’ll join a fraternity and get me a cheerleader!”
When an answer eluded him, he’d growl low and curse at it. Then, as before, he’d carefully recheck his work after re-reading the section. Sometimes he’d start the problem afresh. One particularly difficult problem got him to say, “You’re a tough bronc, Beatrice, but I’m gonna bust ya!” I, of course, could easily see the mistake he kept making. “The constant!” I yelled. “The constant! You’re subtracting it, but it’s negative! Add it, add it! Damnit, man, get drunk so you can hear me again!”
I must admit that I admired his persistence. Another hour passed and he refused to give up. At one point he threw his pencil down and left the room, but it was only to pee and make himself another half a sandwich, which he brought back to the study. He sat down, grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and his pencil, which he sharpened. “It’s you and me, Hoss,” he said with renewed determination, his mouth half full. “Only one of us is leavin’ this main street alive, and it ain’t you. I saw the undertaker sizin’ you up earlier. Now c’mon—”
And with that he tried the problem once more. When he finally got it right, I celebrated with him. “There you go!” I shouted, my smile higher than ever. “The mighty angel of death can solve a system of linear equations! Watch out, world! Woohoo!”
I thought that might be it for him, but he continued on, not stopping until well after 2 a.m. When he bookmarked the page he was on and stood, stretching and yawning, my admiration of his sticktoittiveness had doubled. He didn’t give up. I felt intense gratitude that such was so.
“Your mother must’ve thought you were one giant pain in the ass at Christmas,” I said as he made his way into the bathroom.
Before he went into his bedroom, he stopped in the hallway and said: “I don’t know if you’re still around, Ray, but let me say this: you’re one helluva teacher.”
I didn’t know what to say. As the night passed (uneventfully; I wasn’t swept up in any visions), I found myself repeating, “Thank you, cowboy.” It was with gratitude and a continuing smile that, surprisingly, I too found rest, and slept peacefully.
~~*~~
I heard the shot. It was quite loud—loud enough to alert the neighbors.
Calliel snarled and kicked the door, which flew off its hinges. He ran over it into the kitchen, where I lay in a spreading pool of blood. The gun had flown out of my grip and lay smoking in the sink.
“You dumb son of a bitch!” he yelled, kneeling next to me and slapping his hand on the gushing wound. “You dumb, dumb, dumb son of a bitch!”
Was it a miracle that sirens sounded out almost immediately, and that the paramedics came to my aid within five minutes? I couldn’t say. It certainly seemed that way as I watched them work furiously to save my life. I know Calliel hadn’t alerted them. If I had been blessed with a miracle, it had come from a higher source.
It was with that thought that I was swept up suddenly in a great gust, both externally and internally. Terror gripped me, and the vision dissolved.
For a moment I thought I was being blown into Oblivion, and cried out in fear. But I wasn’t. I was falling—falling in darkness. Falling and screaming. I was buckled up in my airplane seat, which spun wildly as it dropped through space.
I saw the lights of San Diego flash dully over the dark Pacific, and then I slammed down into it. I thought I’d feel terrible pain, but I felt nothing.
I was in total blackness, what I was certain was Oblivion. But I wasn’t frightened and didn’t feel threatened that insanity was coming to take me. I felt in fact infinitely reassured, an infant in a mother’s steady, protective, warm embrace.
Intense drowsiness overcame me, and I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
Chapter Fourteen
The Pond
~~*~~
I CAN count on one hand the number of times I had a perfect night’s sleep: the kind where rest soaks into me like pure, warm water into a sponge, where dreams disperse like smoke or don’t come at all, where my breath feels almost nonexistent, not because it is, but because my lungs have become perfect conduits to every cell in my being.
That was the kind of sleep I had. I woke knowing it instantly, and knowing I had been largely responsible for why so many thousands of other nights had fallen so short. Life doesn’t guarantee perfection in anything; but why then make the possibility of it a pipedream or an enemy?
My life on Earth was over. There would be no more anxious days, and no more sleepless nights. Not, at least, as Ray Wilms, human being. Calliel had said that he wanted me to become an angel. But wasn’t Calliel the angel a human being too? I was certain that wasn’t the case. If anything, Calliel was a meta-human being. In modern parlance, he was human 2.0. I wondered if there were humans 3.0, or 4.0, or greater. Was Nora Williamson a human 3.0 or 5.0? Were decimals necessary?
I found myself mulling these things as the perfect sleep left my system as water slowly drains from a tub. As consciousness reasserted itself, I realized I was flat on my back on something soft—not a mattress. I opened my eyes and looked.
I was lying on green grass, fresh and dry. It held my attention for only a moment. What was above me was far more important.
Stars. Galaxies. But stars and galaxies as I’d never seen them before. I sat up, then stood.
Something really bothered me about that—standing. I tried to trick it out, then gave up and looked up once more.
It was as if the universe had been squeezed into a tremendous world-sized glowing ball and suspended just above my head. I could just make out its circumference. It rotated very ponderously and grandly, just quickly enough that I could sense its motion. Its light was much brighter than that of a full moon on a clear night.
I had no doubt that what I was looking at was in fact the universe, and that I was somehow outside it, beyond it.
Beyond it … surrounding it … was nothing. Oblivion.
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Which meant that I was in Oblivion too … which meant, by definition, it couldn’t be Oblivion. Could it?
It didn’t matter. It was what it was, despite the logical problems declaring otherwise. I brought my attention back to the universe.
Somewhere, lost utterly inside that unignorable ball, was a galaxy, and lost inside that galaxy was a tiny blue planet. On a nondescript shore of one of its continents, a kind old woman had taken my ashes and scattered them at sea many days or weeks or months or even years or centuries ago. I was standing outside of time and looking in. There was no way to know how long ago all of it occurred.
I was still alive—still conscious. I felt for my carotid artery and pulse, found them. I estimated my heart was beating at 70 beats per minute. I lifted my hands and inspected them. They looked the same as ever: familiar liver spots, the same small white hairs, that tiny patch of dry skin over the base knuckle of my right index finger. That tiny hangnail on my left thumb (I had been a lifelong nail-biter) was still there; as I stood there staring up I bit it off.
I was wearing the clothes I’d worn the day I boarded the doomed airliner: a button-down scarlet shirt and tan corduroys, and brown shoes. I felt around for my wallet, found it, pulled it out and opened it. There was my driver’s license; my credit cards; several reminders for appointments, including one to my physician; my social security card; an old prescription I never filled; two folded post-it notes of old grocery lists; and an old, old penny I found by Lory Hall one day, dated 1924.
Why would these things—my clothes, my shoes, my wallet, the penny—be here with me? For that matter, why would my pulse, my liver spots, or my hangnail? Was that what was bothering me, or was it something about standing? Perhaps it was this: Shouldn’t I be some sort of disembodied spirit? Perhaps I was, or perhaps I was imagining it all. But if I died, and if my materialist worldview was valid and true, then I couldn’t imagine anything, because I no longer existed.
Had I somehow survived the fall to the ocean? Was this another “near death experience,” reviled by atheists and materialists worldwide? (I had had one myself not long before I got on the plane, and now found the term grating and disparaging.)
No. I was dead. That much was certain. I was dead, and yet I was still conscious. This wasn’t a “near death experience.” I had zoomed past the city limits and was now solidly in downtown Death.
Was that what was bothering me? That I was dead?
I gazed up at the fourteen billion light-year-wide ball I once believed was the totality of existence and abstractedly tried to compute my distance from it. That seemed a rather meaningless activity, so I gave up and turned to look around.
The horizon was frighteningly close. I wasn’t on a planet, but a rock, perhaps an asteroid. It somehow had an atmosphere, and life (grass) covering it, and Earth-like gravity. I gazed down at my feet. Where I had lain was a Ray Wilms-sized imprint.
I wasn’t hungry or cold. The hint of a pleasant breeze whispered occasionally around my ears. It smelled like morning. Somewhere nearby was a meadow full of wildflowers. I glanced around. I couldn’t see any. It was grass in every direction.
A hill rose in uneven steps maybe a quarter mile behind me. I set off for it. Perhaps at the summit I could get a better look at my surroundings.
There it was again. Something was bothering me. I stopped and gazed down at my feet. Was it walking that bothered me, but not standing? Was it both? To walk, one must stand. I stood, and was promptly bothered by it. Then I walked, and the same troubled sensation returned.Why couldn’t I figure it out?
Perhaps, I thought somewhat facetiously, it was this: Shouldn’t I have wings now? But Calliel didn’t have wings, and I didn’t expect that I would be receiving any either.
I pushed the bothersome feelings away as best as I could and continued on.
At the top of the hill I saw them: the wildflowers. They spread away from the base towards a silver stream that flowed into a small pond before dropping off a startling cliffside waterfall whose bottom was lost to sight. There was more grass, and a variety of short, stout trees I’d never seen before with beautiful, gleaming onyx-black leaves outlined in serrated ruby, which stood in small groves here and there to the horizon, which couldn’t have been more than two or three miles distant, tops.
I stood on a terraformed space rock beyond the universe.
I felt no fear. I knew, somehow, that this was where I was supposed to be. For now. It was that ‘for now’ that prompted me to start down the wildflower side of the hill for the creek. I wasn’t meant to stay here; I knew that too. But if I didn’t know how I got here, how could I leave? There were no glowing universe-transcending spacecraft in sight. I didn’t expect to see any.
The wildflowers reminded me of childhood, of my mother and sister, of Troy and possibilities, of youth unsullied by the creeping, corrupting rust of adulthood. Their smell held me up for a long time. When it dawned on me that most of them were poppies, tears welled up and spilled down my cheeks.
“Oh, Patty,” I blubbered into my hands. “Patty …”
In 1982 I got a call from her. She was living in San Francisco. She wanted to see me. She sounded despondent.
We’d stayed close, calling each other at least twice a week. In 1982, Patty Wilms, my beautiful little sister, killed herself. I watched her do it.
She’d been jilted by her latest girlfriend and was heartbroken. She was also struggling with heroin addiction.
I pounded on her apartment door. I’d been on the road fifteen hours and was bone tired. I could hear music playing. I pounded again: “Patty? Patty, it’s me, Ray. Open up. Patty?”
When she didn’t answer, I went on a search for her landlord. I found the super instead and told him to open her apartment door, that I feared for her life. He unlocked it, took one look inside, and bolted down the stairs to call the ambulance.
Patty was on the couch, a needle stuck in her arm, puke in a thick pool on her bare chest. She was still breathing—barely.
She died in my arms before the paramedics arrived. She was conscious enough to know I was there and cried into my neck and held me weakly. I felt her final breath leave her body.
I fell to my knees in the poppies, head in my hands.
A calm and familiar sense of outrage stole over me, one that was born in 1973 when Mom died prematurely of multiple sclerosis. I declared war back then not on the gross injustices that had finally overwhelmed her, and then my sweet Patty nine years later, but on that essential part of my being that demanded I go to war with them, to fight them, to stamp my feet and roar at the heavens and stand toe to toe in the stinking mud with them. And the only way I could fight that war was to deny that essential bit of me, to repudiate its existence utterly.
It was cowardice. And because of it, because I gave up that day, the rest of my life would be spent twisting and mangling who I truly was out of everything decent and true and worthy. That essential bit of me wasn’t holy! Nothing was holy! In point of fact, however, it was nothing less than my beacon through life, my guide, my compass. It was that part of me that breathed love into the language of mathematics, that gave substance to the lengthening shadows of the day, that felt joy when a student understood a difficult concept, that prompted me to write that book, that had me roll down the window of my Bug and let the warm San Diego air buffet my face as I tooled around town. In a word, it was God.
As the years passed the unavoidable darkness of nihilism—the terminus of atheism and materialism—overcame me. In other words, the true Oblivion.
I don’t know how long I stayed in those poppies. When the tears finally passed I lay down and let sleep come once more. As before, when I woke up, I realized I had slept perfectly. I gazed up to see Creation wheeling soundlessly above me.
I got to my knees and then to my feet, brushing myself off in stages. I closed my eyes.
I love you so much, Patty. Forever and ever, I love you. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you. I’m so sorry. Y
ou helped me find myself again; I pray that someday I can help you find yourself.
I knew somehow that whatever part of Patty had survived her own darkness could hear my unvoiced cries. I felt a gentle warmth wrap around my heart, one not of my creation. It startled me at first, but then I let myself feel it as deeply I could. When I opened my gushing eyes, I understood what I had to do. I looked down the hill at the stream and started for it.
At the bank I knelt and dipped my hand in, then withdrew it fast. It was cold water, all right—but it was something else too. For that brief moment, I found myself suddenly somewhere else: in a jail cell. More surprising still: I was someone else. Whoever it was was sleeping or unconscious. I was separate only because I was separate out here, beside the stream.
I knew who it was. It was Calliel!
I felt tempted to dip my hand in again; I don’t know why. I went back and forth with myself for a long time whether I should, then stood and began walking the bank, staring at the water continuously.
Was this Calliel? How could it be? Then again, how could I be what I was now? How could any of this exist? Was this a way station for souls, or was this put here for my benefit? Was that what was bothering me?
The bank of the Calliel Stream was pleasant and easy to negotiate. I came to the pond at the cliff edge and received a new shock. Reflecting back from the calm surface wasn’t the gloriously spinning orb of All That Is, but a pair of … boots?
I stared, craned my neck forward.
Sure enough, those were boots I was looking at. And in the foreground pants—jeans. It was like I was staring down the length of his body, which I determined was lying down. Just visible at the edge of the reflection were, sure enough, bars—jail bars.
I knew exactly what I was looking at then.
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