In the Beginning: Mars Origin "I" Series Book I (14 page)

The rain didn’t let up for at least
another week. But I still couldn’t shake those feelings of doom I had, and I
couldn’t shake that incident from the pizza parlor.

Mase said that I was losing touch with
reality by staying locked up translating that “thing.” He was sure, he fussed,
that was the reason for “The Pizza Fiasco,” as he called it.

I didn’t like him giving a name to my
near, if not spurious, scrape with death. His reasoning, I fussed right back,
was definitely flawed as he only made fun because he was just trying to pass
the blame onto me so I wouldn’t be mad at him anymore for not being home.

That also brought a chuckle. “Because,” he
said, “No,” not his fault, but mine for “being obsessed over those things.”
And, he wouldn’t let it rest. He wanted me to understand how loony those
manuscripts, that I didn’t even have, he emphasized, were making me.

Of course, I didn’t agree with that.

So what I didn’t have the manuscripts?

But I knew, not even deep down, but right
on the surface of my consciousness, he was right.

I decided not to work on the translations
anymore – well, for a while. My warped sensibilities needed time to heal. Which
wasn’t easy. I had to actually concentrate on not concentrating on them. I mean,
all the words were right there seared into my brain.

But after a couple of weeks I started to
feel better.

I decided that perhaps, no one was trying
to kill me and maybe it wasn’t ever a cover-up or a mystery. That dumb Dr.
Yeoman just did a bad thing in hiding them from everyone. Sure they were
important, but, I thought, maybe it’s not big enough to let it have such a big
effect on me.

And without using all my energy to
translate the manuscripts I suddenly could do other things like housework, go
grocery shopping, laundry and even work on the tour.

If Dr. Margulies knew how I was obsessing
and letting it get in the way of this tour - ‘his baby,’ as he called it, there
would be no end to his chastising. And I couldn’t stand for him to be upset
with me. Just the thought of disappointing him made my chest hurt. I had to get
it together.

The Friday after Halloween, I got up early
and tried to get some laundry done before leaving for work. It was about eight
thirty and I was in the basement putting the last load in the dryer when the
phone rang. It was Ghazi.

I didn’t remember giving him my home phone
number. Then I found out Claire was on the line, too. I laughed to myself, what
were those two up to? Claire talking to this man on the other side of the world
early in the morning.

It didn’t take long for me to find out why
they were calling. Ghazi told me that Dr. Margulies had had a heart attack and
died.

Just like that. I couldn’t believe it.

I had run up from the basement to answer
the phone and grabbed the wall phone in the kitchen. The phone cord didn’t
reach over to a chair so I just slid down the wall and sat on the floor. Tears
flooded my eyes. I opened my mouth to breath but it seemed as if the air
couldn’t get past the lump in my throat.

“How do you know?” He was so far away. How
did he find out before me and I was right here in the city? I opened my mouth,
trying to suck in some air. My nose was running, saliva running out the sides
of my mouth.

Dr. Margulies had just called me yesterday
and left a message on my voice mail at work to say that he wanted to talk to
me. I hadn’t had the chance to call him back.

 “I can’t believe he’s dead,” I said.

“I’ll be right over,” Claire’s voice came
through the phone.

Ghazi told me that Dr. Margulies had
actually been on the phone with him when he had the heart attack. He started to
gasp and then got quiet. Ghazi said he hung up and called back to his office
and had his assistant check on him.

I let the phone drop and crawled across
the kitchen and got under the table. And that’s where Claire found me. She
crawled under there with me and put my head in her lap.

“Shh. Shh,” she said over and over. I wept
and I screamed until my voice was hoarse.

“C’mon,” Claire said after a while, and
guided me out from under the table. She stood up and reached down for me. I
crawled out to her. I could barely get up.

“We have to take care of a few things
first,” she pulled me up, “and then, we’ll get you upstairs.”

She went over and got the phone. I sat on
the floor next to it. One by one she made calls. First she called Mase who had
left on a road trip that morning. Then my office to let them know I wouldn’t be
in. Then Sophie, Dr. Margulies’ daughter to give our condolences and then his
wife. I don’t know what I told her or if she understood anything I said because
I sobbed through that entire call.

Claire went to the sink and got a glass of
water, she reached in her pocket and handed me a pill and gave me the glass. I
looked up at her and took what she handed me. She sat down on the floor next to
me.

“When that valium starts to work, we’ll
put you to bed.”

I took the little blue pill and downed all
the water and handed the glass to Claire.

Groggy, puffy eyed, and face still smeared
with tears that refused to subside, she led me to my bedroom. I got in the bed
with all my clothes on and she covered me up. She crawled in across the bottom
of my bed. I was so glad she was there. I so didn’t want to be by myself.

Sleep came fast. The dull ache in my chest
eased up as I drifted off.

But at some point the Valium wore off and
I peeled open my eyelids. I glanced over at the clock. It was half past three.
I had slept all morning. The shades were drawn and only a muted light came
through them. I felt thick-headed and woozy. My chest was aching again. My mouth
was dry.

I remembered. Dr. Margulies was dead.

I pulled up and rested on my elbows. There
was Claire, sleep, at the foot of my bed. Mase was asleep in the chair.

It wasn’t a dream. It was real. I sunk
back down in my pillow, curled up into a ball and started to cry again. I
rocked back and forth, sobbing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.

This must have been the reason for that
bad feeling I was having.
I’m so stupid
, I thought, thinking it had to
do with those manuscripts. I had just let them consume me and my thoughts.

Dr. Margulies’ funeral was the hardest
thing in the world for me to do. Mase pulled me out of the car and steered me
over to the gravesite. My large black hat and sunglasses covered my
tear-stained face. My heels sunk down into the soft grass as the shiny black
and silver casket drew closer and closer.

As I neared the hole where they were going
to put Dr. Margulies, I started having those same feelings that I had before
going to Jerusalem.

What if there really isn’t a heaven or a
God? What if Dr. Margulies is lying cold in the ground and that’s all? It’s
just over for him. No heaven, no hell. Nothing. It’s just over.

That next week was so hard for me. I
called Dr. Margulies’ wife a few days after the funeral to let her know I was
available for whatever she needed, although I don’t know how I thought I could
help her when I was having a hard time helping myself. This time I was able to
talk. I was in my bedroom cleaning out my jewelry box when I came across the
diamond and gold bracelet that Dr. Margulies had given me when I received my
Ph.D. He had it engraved “A Shiny Star, for my Shining Star.” I held it in my
hand as I talked to Mrs. Margulies.

She told me that Dr. Margulies’ mother had
died just about a week before he did. That they had just returned from Virginia
settling her affairs. I hadn’t known. He had been gone so much lately for the
museum that I didn’t even think anything of it when he was away.

I was teary-eyed the whole time I talked
to her. After we hung up, I put on the bracelet he gave me. Clutching the
engraved charm, squeezing it in my fist I laid across the bed and was grabbing
Kleenex off of the night stand when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Margulies
again. She said she forgot that she had some of Dr. Margulies things he worked
with to give to me. It was just some old notebooks, articles and books, but she
wanted me to have them so I could have a part of him with me, too. She said she
knew he would want me to have them because she knew how much he loved me. I
really started to cry then. I promised I would come and get them soon. I
thanked her, hung up the phone and buried my head in my pillows.

The museum tour was completely in my hands
now. I had to put all this craziness concerning the manuscripts and my own
personal bout with madness aside and give the tour my undivided attention. I
decided to dedicate the exhibit to the memory of my teacher and my friend whom
I dearly loved and would sorely miss. I named the tour,
“
מורה
נפלא:
Our Passage to Antiquity.”
“מורה נפלא” pronounced mo-REH
neef-LAH, is Hebrew for “wonderful teacher.”

Not working on the manuscripts actually
didn’t make me feel any better, but it was a start. I concentrated on life. The
Christmas holidays were coming up, so I kept busy with that. I baked, shopped,
cleaned up my house, and shopped. Worked extra, extra hard on the tour for the
museum (Dr. Margulies would have been pleased) and shopped some more. Shopping
was a wonderful distraction.

Thinking about Dr. Margulies made me
realize that I hadn’t gotten over to see Mrs. Margulies yet, though I had kept
in touch by phone. She was always so happy to hear from me. I promised myself I
would see her before the New Year came in.

It was pretty easy to let the tour occupy
my thoughts. There were so many things that had to be done. Dr. Margulies’
death had created a lot of extra work, work that truly needed to be done by
more than one person. But I refused to let anyone else work on it because I
wanted it to be the best it could be. My mother always said, “If you want
something done right, do it yourself.”

My family had planned our usual Christmas
gathering minus our parents who were out of town. My father’s sister had taken
ill all of a sudden and my parents went to see about her. But even with my
parents away, we decided we would still all go to my parents’ church and then
go to their house afterward, exchange gifts and have dinner there. Our parents’
house was “home” for all of us. The dark wood ceiling beams and woodwork,
eggshell walls in every room and their kitchen that belonged in the seventies
always made everything feel good.

My mother was so sad that she wasn’t going
to be home with us for Christmas. The first time ever. She even thought about
not going with my father and staying home with us. But my father can’t even
pick out a shirt to put on in the mornings without my mother, so we convinced
her to go. She was so pitiful. She just cried when she left, you would have
thought she was never coming back. I would be so happy to get away from my
kids, especially if I had kids like Greg, Gerald and Doobie. I don’t know
what’s wrong with my mother.

In preparation for our Christmas
celebration, on Christmas Eve, Mase, my brothers and Callie’s husband went out
to get the Christmas tree for my parents’ house. They got the biggest tree I
had ever seen. It was beautiful.

My siblings spent the better part of
Christmas eve decorating the tree and arguing whether it was straight or not
and how to decorate it. We listened to the Temptations’
A Soulful Christmas
and Mariah Carey’s
Merry Christmas
play in the background and reminisced
about Christmases gone by. The kids played games, while the adults laughed and
talked. The family interaction, the fresh smell of the tree, the crackle of the
fire, the twinkling of the lights and, I guess more importantly, the reason for
the season really lightened my mood. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits. Even
“Grumpy Greg” who had been constantly teasing me about our little excursion to
Jerusalem, was pleasant tonight, to everyone, including me.

We of course had food. No way could we
have gotten my brothers to work or the kids to sit still without filling up
their bellies. So everyone had brought a dish or two, and me, Claire and Callie
also brought desserts.

I refused to help do much in decorating or
in preparing the food except for giving directions. I sat on the couch most of
the night and read my
Time Magazine
. I let Callie and Claire heat up the
food and set the table while I peeped over the top of my magazine and watched
as my brothers broke up half of my mother’s Christmas decorations trying to
trim the tree. She would probably kill them when she got back for destroying
her “precious memories,” as she called them, which was fine with me.

I had started a subscription to
Time
not too long after the Pizza Fiasco (yes, I started calling it that, too). I
had to have something to occupy my mind. Every week I would read them from
cover to cover. I had found that from week to week the articles in the magazine
seemed to be right in sync with my mood. I usually sat, with a box of Kleenex,
at the kitchen table or in my study.
Time
had become my psychoanalyst.

“Justin, come eat.”

I looked up from my magazine and saw that
everyone had sat down to eat. Claire was standing beside the table waiting for
me. She of course would make sure I wasn’t left out.

“What are you reading anyway?” Gerald got
up from the table and came over and snatched the magazine from me and tossed it
to Doobie as I reached up to get it back. “You’ve been reading that thing all
night.”

I can’t believe she’s reading that.” Greg
said. “When did you start keeping up with current events?”

I knew he couldn’t be nice for long. He
started with the “All you know about are two thousand-year old dead people”
jokes.

“World Hunger?” Doobie read the title of
the article I was reading. “What a depressing article.” He looked over at me.
“Why are you reading this stuff?”

“Give me back my magazine.”

Doobie flipped through the magazine,
“Here, this is what you should be reading.” He threw the magazine down in front
of me. “Movie and Music Review. Just keep it light, Justin. No need to read all
that depressing stuff. You’ve been in such a blue funk lately. You don’t need
anything to add to your mood.”