The Trial of Fallen Angels (10 page)

Toby was strong enough to hobble along after the man to help. He had left his rifle behind at the river and had only his sidearm. They came to the edge of a clearing where they could see a very large house through the misty afternoon rain. They kneeled behind some bushes and watched as a platoon of soldiers with red stars on their sleeves drove the inhabitants from the house and out into the driveway: an elderly man, two middle-aged women, a teenage girl, two younger boys, and two younger girls, all dressed in party clothes.

The leader of the platoon barked a swift order in Russian, and the soldiers responded by quickly separating the old man and the young boys from the others and shooting them on the spot. When the women lunged toward the victims, they too were cut down in cold blood. Now only the teenage girl and the two younger girls remained standing. It all appeared to Toby as in a dream, through the fine mist, distorted by fever from the infection. Bodies dropping like shadows into darkness, continuing the savage nightmare that had begun for him earlier along the banks of the Elbe River. Suddenly, the man from the cabin, still kneeling beside Toby, jumped up and charged the platoon, firing his shotgun wildly into the air. The platoon returned the fire, killing him instantly and nearly killing Toby.

Toby started crawling back through the brush toward the cabin but realized that he would almost certainly be seen and that he would be leading the soldiers to the man’s family. To save them and, perhaps, himself, he stood slowly with his hands over his head. He limped back out through the clearing, calling “American! American!” The grass was wet and the water soaked through his pants, stinging his wounds. All the while he was thinking not of himself but of Sheila and who would care for her now, and of his mother and how news of his death would plunge her deeper into despair, and of his father and how news of his death might haunt him with regret for the rest of his life.

Two Russian soldiers came forward cautiously with their guns raised, but as they neared Toby and saw his uniform, they lowered their weapons.
“Amerika! Amerika!”
they cheered, embracing him. But one of the soldiers saw the cabin in the distance and began advancing toward it. Toby knew the only hope for the family was for him to convince the soldiers that he had already taken the family as his prisoners.

He stumbled along behind the soldiers as fast as he could. When they reached the door, he slid past them, pulled out his sidearm, and motioned for them to stand back. One of the soldiers grabbed the pistol from Toby’s hand, but Toby pushed the door open, yanked up the floorboards, and ordered the frightened family out of the tunnel. They were white and shaking fear. They glared at Toby for having betrayed them after they had saved his life. Toby pointed at them and then himself and said to the soldiers: “My prisoners! My prisoners!” He grabbed the mother and slammed her violently against the wall, then the daughter and the two boys. He pointed to a medal on one of the Russians’ chests and then to his own chest, where a new medal would be placed if he brought them in.

“My prisoners! My prisoners!” he said again.

The Russians finally understood. They smiled, slapped him on the back, and returned his gun. Toby put the gun against the temple of the mother, completing the charade. The soldiers lowered their rifles and laughed.

“Amerika! Amerika!”
they said, shaking their heads as they walked away.

When they had gone, Toby winked and grinned at his captives and, to their astonishment, put his gun in his holster and gave the mother a hug. When she realized that he had saved their lives, she broke down in tears.

But the celebration ended quickly when the mother and her children realized that the father hadn’t returned. They wanted to go out searching for him, but Toby restrained them and, using crude sign language to warn them of the dangers, convinced them to stay.

Late the next day, after Toby first checked to be sure the Russians had left the area, he led the mother back to the clearing to retrieve the body of her dead husband. Despite the language barrier, he attempted to comfort her as best he could, pointing out the corpses of the people from the house in an attempt to explain that her husband had been brave to confront the soldiers and try to save their lives. The mother finally understood, and only then did she begin to comprehend just what Toby himself had done to spare her family the same fate.

Despite his wounds, Toby himself carried the lifeless body of the man back to the cabin and helped the boys dig a grave. The family’s anguish overwhelmed him, and at times he cried with them because he too had lost a father, just as they had. But Toby wept also out of a desperate and mournful jealousy of these children, who had at least known their father and could bury him, and would remember him as a father who had loved them enough to sacrifice his life for them and others.

Although Toby couldn’t understand their strange prayers, when the sons placed yarmulkes upon their heads and nobody made the sign of the cross, he realized these were Jewish prayers, spoken in Hebrew. For the first time, he realized that the family had not been hiding from the Russians, but from the Germans. He made the sign of the cross anyway, whispering a prayer for the dead man and for his own father, and for the entire world as well. Upon seeing Toby cross himself, the daughter, hysterical with grief, began wailing, “Amina! Amina! Amina!” over and over. She removed a small golden cross of her own from her pocket and made the sign on her own chest. Horrified, the mother reached over to slap her, but suddenly a deep and profound comprehension flashed across her face. She bowed her head and began to weep even more violently. Toby did not understand what had happened between the mother and daughter but helped them fill the grave.

The group began walking west toward Leipzig, where Toby hoped to find Allied troops. At Riesa, they came across an American infantry unit. With a small bribe, Toby was able to get the family all loaded onto a truck headed farther west into Allied territory. They rode together as far as Nuremberg, where they were taken to a field hospital and Toby finally received the medical care that saved his leg from amputation.

At the moment of their parting at the hospital, the mother was embarrassed because she had no way to repay Toby’s generosity. But suddenly her eyes brightened. She whispered something to her daughter and made a gesture, asking a nurse nearby for a pen and a piece of paper. The nurse gave these to the mother, and she carefully copied Toby’s last name from his shirt, B-O-W-L-E-S, on the paper. Then she spoke to Toby in German, saying:
“Mein erstes Enkelkind wird nach Ihnen benannt werden.”
Toby obviously could not understand her, so she held the paper with his name on it against her daughter’s womb and raised her index finger in the air as if to say “first.” Then she held her arms as if she were cradling an infant and tucked the paper into her daughter’s hand. Toby finally understood what she was trying to say. He hugged them both good bye and wished them farewell.

The hospital suddenly vanished and the Courtroom reappeared. I was astonished by what I had seen.

Luas led Haissem and me out of the Courtroom. Standing in the corridor while Luas closed and locked the Courtroom doors, Haissem said, “So you see, Brek, Toby Bowles did lead a noble life. It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“But what about the trial of his soul?” I said, alarmed by the gross injustice of the proceedings. “None of this evidence was presented during the trial. Obviously the verdict is unjust. Aren’t you going to do something?”

“As I said before,” Haissem replied, “justice has nothing to do with it.”

“Again, I disagree,” Luas interjected. “Justice has everything to do with it. Justice has been served. It is not our place to judge.”

“But can’t we file a motion for a mistrial or take an appeal?” I pleaded. “We can’t just do nothing. If this verdict stands, the Final Judgment would be nothing but a sham. What kind of place is this? The accused isn’t present for his trial, which takes place before a tribunal that nobody can see, attended by witnesses the accused can’t confront, while being represented by a lawyer who is also his prosecutor, and the entire thing is ended by the judge before a defense can even be presented? Surely there can’t be less due process in heaven than we have on earth.”

Luas glared at me. “
Never
say anything like that again, Brek,” he warned me. “This is the way of Divine Justice, not man’s justice. We have no right to question it. God and justice are one.”

Haissem touched my arm to calm me down. “I understand your concern, Brek,” he said, “but you can be assured that the trial of Toby Bowles’s soul was performed properly and that the correct outcome was reached. This will all become clearer to you after you’ve handled your first case. I must leave you now, but we will meet again. You’re in good hands with Luas, despite our occasional disagreements.”

Haissem and Luas bowed politely toward each other, and then Haissem walked away. After he had gone, Luas said to me: “He’s the most senior presenter here, but I sometimes wonder whether his time has passed. The things he says sometimes are very dangerous.”

12

M
y one solace in Shemaya was visiting the places that had been dear to me when I was alive. They were all there, exact replicas of my house, my town, my world. The only things missing were the people; it was like walking through an empty movie studio lot. These were lonely visits, but I found this loneliness, at first, to be a comfort. I needed to get away from Luas, the Courtroom, and Nana. I needed to get away from other souls’ memories and other souls’ lives. So I went home. But I didn’t go there to grieve. I didn’t dare look in Sarah’s room or Bo’s closet. I knew I would break down. I just wanted to be happy again.

So, trying to put my death behind me, the first thing I did when I got home was go shopping—my favorite pastime when I was alive. I decided that if God was going to strand me in this sadistic netherworld where everything reminded me of life’s lost pleasures, I might as well indulge in some of those pleasures and enjoy myself a little.

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.