The Trial of Fallen Angels (13 page)

“That sounds surreal all right,” I say.

“It was.”

“So, what happened next?”

Karen takes a deep breath and exhales. “Sam asked me to leave but I froze. They were within five minutes of killing millions of innocent people. The enormity of that was beyond comprehension. I was in a position to stop it and save them. Maybe God put me there to do just that. I had a moral obligation. I couldn’t let it happen.”

I shake my head.

“I’m not the criminal here,” Karen says. “In any other context, I would have been a hero for saving those people, and Sam and Brian would have been arrested as terrorists for planning to detonate a weapon of mass destruction. But somehow in this crazy world, I’m the one who’s prosecuted for trying to stop them? That’s insane. It’s like people are drugged or under a spell or something. They don’t see the madness of it. Somebody’s got to wake them up before it’s too late.”

Karen’s eyes bore into me. “You understand, don’t you?” she says. “Please tell me that at least you understand.”

I don’t understand, but I don’t want to argue with her any further. “Okay, Karen,” I relent, “I understand.”

“I guess I need to wake you up too,” Karen says. “That’s okay. There’s still time.”

“Look,” I say, “it really doesn’t matter what I think, Karen. What matters is whether what you did down in that missile silo constitutes treason. So far, I’d say it doesn’t. Is there more?”

“Yes,” she says. “When I refused to leave, Sam picked up a phone on the console and called the SPs—the Air Force Security Police—to come down and escort me out. While he did that, Brian focused on his checklist for getting his nuclear warheads armed and his missiles ready to launch. They brainwash them well. He was completely detached and methodical about it, like he was doing nothing more than sitting on the floor in his living room, following instructions for assembling a piece of furniture. The fact that he was following instructions for killing millions of people didn’t seem to bother him at all. It’s theater of the absurd. If a future race populated the earth after a nuclear war and found a record of this, they wouldn’t believe it. We willingly made ourselves extinct for the sake of getting justice. Incredible. I had to do something. The countdown to the end of the world had begun. We were only four minutes away.”

“So what did you do?” I ask, half wincing, afraid she attacked them.

“I shook him,” Karen replies.

“You said
shook
him, right? You didn’t
shoot
him or anything, did you?”

“That’s not funny, Brek,” says Karen.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” I say. “I just want to be clear. What exactly do you mean by ‘shook’ him?”

“I grabbed him by the shoulders from behind and I shook him. I was trying to wake him up. That’s what I’ve been telling you. They were in a trance. They all fall into some kind of trance when they go down into the MAFs. As soon as they get on the elevator, morality and rational thought get suspended. Somebody needs to wake them up.”

“Did you hurt him?”

“Of course not,” Karen says. “Look at me. I barely weigh one hundred pounds. Those guys are both over six feet. He didn’t even feel me shaking him. It was like I wasn’t there, Brek. He just kept going through his checklist, flipping switches, reconfirming launch codes, checking the gauges and monitors. A day earlier, he was playing with his two young children in the nursery of the base chapel, rolling on the floor with them, laughing and hugging them. Now he was a machine—a machine of death. It was chilling. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Karen looks at me grimly. “When I couldn’t wake him up by shaking him,” she continues, “I went around in front of him. I pushed his checklist out of the way and grabbed his wrist. ‘Brian,’ I said, staring him in the eyes. ‘It’s me, Karen. Wake up. You can’t do this,’ I said. ‘You can’t kill millions of people. Even if you survive, you’ll never forgive yourself. They’re people like you and me. They’re mothers and fathers and little children like your children. They have families and dreams. Please, Brian,’ I said, ‘wake up.’”

Karen looks off into space, reliving the moment. The pain on her face is palpable. I think of Bo and Sarah, and of my mother and father and grandparents. My eyes start tearing up a little. I understand now. For a moment, I am awake.

“What did he do?” I say.

“It was terrible, Brek,” Karen replies. “He shoved me, hard enough to knock me onto the floor. Then he unbuckled himself from his seat, pulled his service pistol from the holster under his arm—they’re all required to carry them—and he stood over me, pointing his gun down at me with both hands. His eyes were wild. ‘Get out of here!’ he yelled at me. ‘You’re interfering with a nuclear missile installation! I’m authorized to use lethal force, Captain Busfield! Get the hell out of here right now or I’ll kill you!’”

“Oh my God, Karen,” I say.

“I looked over at Sam for help, but he didn’t even turn his head. He just kept going through his checklist, getting his warheads and missiles ready. Before I could get up off the floor, two SPs burst through the door with their guns drawn. It was over. They handcuffed me and led me out. They kept me under guard on the surface for a few hours until a team of FBI and CIA agents arrived. They flew me here to Leavenworth that night, and they’ve been interrogating me ever since. They think I’m a spy or a double agent or something. More theater of the absurd. Obviously the entire thing was a false alarm and there was no North Korean missile launch, or we wouldn’t be here having this conversation right now.”

I look at Karen with my mouth gaping open in shock. “I’m glad he didn’t shoot you.”

Karen brushes back the hair from her face. “Me too,” she says. “So, that’s what happened. Will you take my case?”

My look of shock turns slowly into a grin of admiration. As crazy as it was, she had risked everything for her convictions. “Well,” I say, “on the flight here I thought of at least twenty possibilities of what could have landed you in jail for treason, but none of them involved nuclear warheads. Like you said, doctors go to hospitals, lawyers go to prisons . . . and I guess priests go to missile silos.”

“I guess so,” Karen says proudly.

I’m silent for a moment. “But there’s always the risk, isn’t there,” I say, “that we’ll get too close and catch our patients’ diseases?” I reach out and take Karen’s hand, causing the prison guard to rap on the window again. I don’t care. “Yes, Karen,” I say. “Of course I’ll take your case.”

—

ALL THIS CAME
back to me while sitting in Luas’s office, waiting for the new postulant to arrive. Luas said nothing more. He had accomplished his goal of immersing me so thoroughly in the miasma of my own past that there could be no chance of me becoming lost in the life of another soul. Or so I thought.

Luas struck a match to light his pipe, adding a third flame to the darkened room. Suddenly the door opened and the faceless gray-robed being from the Courtroom appeared. In a subservient voice, it asked whether we were ready.

“Yes,” Luas said, exhaling a cloud of smoke from his pipe. “I believe Ms. Cuttler is now prepared. Please send in Amina Rabun.”

15

A
mina Rabun’s life passed before my eyes in an instant, ending sixty-seven years after it began in the quiet dawn of a day that looked like any other day. Our interview of Amina Rabun consisted only of sitting in her presence and receiving the record of her life. No questions were asked and no conversation took place. None was necessary. The memories of Amina Rabun came to us whole and complete unto themselves.

Even so, I caught only a few brief glimpses of her life at first, as I did with the other souls in the train shed. In a sense, meeting the soul of Amina Rabun in Luas’s office was like picking up a novel and leafing through a few random pages. I lighted upon a moment, at the beginning, from her early childhood in Germany before the start of World War II, when her father held her in his arms on a tree swing during a warm summer evening and sang her favorite song. Everything at that moment seemed so safe and peaceful, so fresh and promising for such a beautiful little girl and her loving father. But then I cheated and skipped ahead to the last page of the book to find that Amina Rabun died bitter and betrayed in the United States. How could everything have gone so disastrously wrong? And I found a meaningful passage somewhere in the middle of the story where our lives had briefly intersected—when she received the complaint I had drafted against her on behalf of Bo’s mother, seeking reparations for the crimes perpetrated against the Schriebergs by the Rabuns during the war. That I had known this woman whose life would soon be judged in the Courtroom was chilling—not only because of the momentousness of the Final Judgment, but also because I knew her innermost thoughts, feelings, and memories.

As I said, these were only brief chapters, snapshots. I could not even begin to comprehend Amina Rabun’s life, or the choices she had made, or the worlds in which she had lived and the people who populated them, until I read all the pages from beginning to end. This would take time. And Luas’s effort to help me keep my life separate from hers had succeeded in making me far more interested in rereading chapters from the autobiography of my own life. I experienced no difficulty distinguishing myself from Amina Rabun, at least not at first. Our interview ended in what seemed simultaneously like a flash and a lifetime. Soon the being from the Courtroom reappeared at the office door and ushered Amina Rabun’s soul back to the great hall of the train shed, where it would wait with the other souls until her case was called.

Luas eyed me warily in the flickering candlelight of his office, trying to gauge how I had fared. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Brek Abigail Cuttler,” I said, proudly. “That wasn’t so hard after all.”

“Good, very good,” Luas said. “Let’s see if it stays that way. The risk of relapse among new presenters is high and can occur at any moment. It can be very disorienting and disconcerting. I want you to stay with your great-grandmother until we’re certain you’ve adjusted fully to the burden of having another life resident inside your own.”

“Okay,” I replied, having nowhere else to go anyway. This was one of the advantages of Shemaya—no plans, no appointments.

Luas stood up behind the desk and blew out the candles. “I’ll check in on you in a few days to see how you’re doing and discuss the case.”

“Great,” I said.

We left the office and began walking back through the impossibly long corridor. About midway down the hall, one of the office doors opened and a handsome young lawyer emerged wearing a dark blue suit and white shirt with a blue-and-gold-striped tie loosened at the neck, as though he had just finished his workday. His round wire-rim glasses seemed to require constant attention to keep from sliding down the steep slope of his nose. He didn’t notice us and nearly backed into Luas while closing the door behind him.

“Careful there,” Luas said, stepping wide to avoid a collision and coming to a stop. “Ah, Tim Shelly, meet Brek Cuttler.”

Tim extended his right hand but, seeing I had no right hand to return the gesture, sheepishly retracted it, stepping with me the same awkward dance I had stepped with countless others during my life. He seemed perfectly nice, but I had a distinct uneasy feeling, as though I’d met him long ago and he wasn’t who he now seemed to be.

“Brek here is our newest recruit,” Luas said. “She just met her first postulant.” Luas turned to me. “Tim hasn’t been with us much longer than you, Brek. He’s had a more difficult start of it, though. Came away from his first meeting with a postulant convinced he was a waitress at a diner. Wouldn’t stop taking my breakfast order—poached eggs and toast, no butter, mind you, Tim. It wasn’t until he made a pass at me that we achieved a full separation of personalities.”

Tim seemed embarrassed but I found the story hilarious. It felt good to laugh again. It had been so long.

“You’d make a good catch, Luas,” I said, joining in.

“Now, now,” Luas said, “you mustn’t tease me. Tim—or rather the postulant—was interested in me only because her boyfriend made conversation with a pretty woman at the other end of the counter and she was trying to make him jealous.”

Tim nodded in agreement. “I really was lost. It took me a while to separate her memories from my own.”

“Well,” Luas said, “I must attend to some administrative matters. Tim knows the way out. Would you be so kind as to escort Ms. Cuttler?”

“Sure,” Tim said.

“Splendid. She’ll still need the blindfold before entering the hall.”

“Understood.”

“As I said, Brek,” Luas cautioned, “I’ll check in with you to see how you’re doing. Sophia knows how to reach me if there are difficulties. Please make no effort to evaluate Ms. Rabun’s case. There’ll be opportunity for that later. Just get accustomed to her memories and emotions, both of which are quite powerful, as you well know. You should spend most of your time relaxing. Sophia will be with you. You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yes . . . yes, I’m fine,” I said.

“If she starts taking breakfast orders, we’ll know who to blame,” Tim said, gamely, getting in the last jab.

“Guilty as charged,” Luas said, bowing in mock apology. “I must be off.”

We watched him walk down the corridor and disappear into one of the offices.

“How long have you been here?” I asked, eager to learn about Tim’s experience and everything he knew about Shemaya.

“I’m not sure exactly,” he said.

“I know what you mean,” I replied. “Where are all the clocks and calendars? That’s been one of the most difficult parts of the transition for me.”

We started walking toward the great hall.

“Have you done any presentations on your own yet?” I asked.

“No, I’ve only watched,” Tim answered. “Luas says the next one’s on my own, though.”

“Me too . . . after Amina Rabun. Are these all presenters’ offices? There must be thousands of them.”

“Yeah, I just got mine. There are a bunch of empties down at this end. Where are you staying?”

“With my great-grandmother, at her house—or what I remember of her house.”

“Nice. I stayed in a tent with my dad when I first arrived. He and I used to go hunting in Canada, just the two of us. He died a couple of months before I got here.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Or maybe I shouldn’t be . . . I guess you’ve got him back now.”

Tim hesitated. “I guess,” he said. “It was great seeing him at first, and he really helped me adjust, but he’s gone again.”

“Gone? Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. One day he just told me I was ready to live here on my own, but that we’d see each other again someday. That’s when I realized that we can live anywhere we want while we’re here. You don’t have to stay at your great-grandmother’s.”

“What do you mean, anywhere?”

“Well, anywhere you can imagine . . . Let’s see, so far I’ve lived at Eagle’s Nest in Austria and Hitler’s bunker in Berlin—I’m really into Nazi history.” These seemed like odd choices. It made me think of Harlan Hurley and Die Elf and their endless fascination with all things Hitler. But maybe it was no stranger than Civil War reenactors living in canvas tents on weekends. Tim went on, “I’ve also stayed at the White House for a while, Graceland, West Point. I’ve flown bombers and fighter jets and driven tanks. I even took a trip on the Space Shuttle. If you can imagine it, you can do it.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing. I thought you could only go to the places you’ve visited during your life. That’s all I’ve been doing.”

“No, anywhere you want. I’ll show you when we get outside. You can’t do it in here.”

When we reached the train shed, Tim opened a bin near the doors, removed a blindfold, and tied the thick felt cloth over my eyes. Passing through the great hall, I peeked again at the souls. It was like walking through a library and randomly sampling paragraphs from the thousands of autobiographies cramming the shelves, each authored by a different hand but, like all autobiographies, revealing the same truths, suffering, and joys. I closed their covers when we reached the vestibule on the other side, neither confused nor weakened as I had been before.

Despite my uneasiness about Tim, for the first time since arriving in Shemaya I felt a flicker of hope rather than apprehension, the way a visit from a friend brightens the darkness of an extended illness. I flipped off the blindfold, and Tim and I virtually raced outside like two kids let out of school.

I could see the roof of Nana’s house through the trees. The train shed somehow bordered the western boundary of Nana’s property. The entrance into it was little more than a disturbance in the air between two maple trees that had been there since I was a child.

Could the entrance to heaven have been so near all along?
I wondered.

But, of course, we were nowhere near Delaware or my Nana’s home. It was all being made up spontaneously in my mind. I could even hear the sound of light traffic along the road.

“Nice place,” Tim said, looking around. “Okay, so where do you want to go?”

“Um . . .”

“Just pick any place, you can see them all.”

“Well, okay . . .” I couldn’t think of anything on the spot, then
Gone With the Wind
popped into my mind for some reason. “Tara,” I blurted, of all possible things.

“I’ve never been there,” Tim said. “What would it look like?”

All at once we were there, standing on the wine-colored carpet sweeping through the foyer and up the grand staircase of the fictional plantation mansion. Crystal chandeliers tinkled softly in a gentle spring breeze that stroked the plush green velvet curtains of the parlor, carrying the sweet afternoon scents of magnolia, apple blossom, and fresh-cut lawn. With our heads turning, we walked out to the portico with its whitewashed columns, then along the sun-drenched veranda and back into the dining room with its sparkling tea service and glassware.

It didn’t matter that Tara had been only a description in a novel or a set in a movie any more than it mattered to readers of the book or audiences in the theaters. Nor did it matter that I could not remember the exact details as they appeared in the book or on the screen. My mind instantly provided what I expected to see, feel, and smell. I was slightly out of breath when we reached the top of the stairs, and I felt a very real stab of pain when I banged my shin into the corner of a dry sink, proving that we were not wandering through a mere illusion. Everything was in its place, except Rhett and Scarlett, of course. I bounced on her bed, giggling like a little girl, intoxicated by the dream turned reality. Tim had never read the book nor seen the movie and did not share my enthusiasm, but I dragged him through each room anyway like a starstruck movie-studio guide: “This is where she shot that Union scoundrel,” I squealed. “And this is where Rhett left her.”

Back in the parlor, we stopped to examine a miniature ship in a bottle on the fireplace mantel. As quickly as my mind recognized the ship, my thoughts replaced the plantation with ocean and the mansion with the masts and hull of a sixteenth-century caravel on the high seas. There we were on the wooden deck, dressed in our business attire like a pair of farcical bareboat charterers. A huge wave caused the caravel to roll sharply to port in gusting winds, forcing us to claw our way on hands and knees toward the starboard rail through a drenching saltwater spray.

“Maybe you could warn me next time you’re about to think about a ship!” Tim shouted. We fell off the crest of another wave, and the ship lurched to starboard, knocking him onto the deck. I had seen it coming and braced myself against the bulkhead.

He collected himself and rose wearily to his feet. “Think calm seas!”

I did and the seas quieted instantly, as if two gigantic hands had reached down from the heavens to tuck and smooth the immense sheet of ocean, snapping the surface flat as a pane of glass. The skies instantly cleared and the sun came out. Tim sat down on the deck and I joined him. We could see what looked like a small Caribbean island in the distance.

“My grandfather took me sailing on the Chesapeake Bay when I was a girl,” I said. “Sometimes I’d fall asleep with him at the helm and dream I was one of the early explorers lost at sea.”

A tropical breeze rocked the boat, cooling the warm touch of the sun. We floated adrift with only the far-off sound of gulls and the easy slap of water against the tired wooden hull breaking the silence. I was exhausted and stretched out on the sun-splashed deck, propping my head against a hatch cover.

I soon fell asleep in this paradise. In my dreams I returned to the Chesapeake Bay. I was on my Pop Pop Bellini’s sailboat and he was teaching me to steer. The day was perfect, breezy, and warm. The sunburned skin of my grandfather’s bare chest and shoulders added color to the spotless white fiberglass coaming around the cockpit of the boat. A weathered, old blue captain’s hat shaded his eyes as they darted from the jib to a landmark on shore toward which he told me to aim to make the most efficient use of our tack. As soon as we sailed out of sight of the dock in Havre de Grace he allowed me to take off the life jacket my parents insisted that I wear because swimming with one arm is virtually impossible.

But my beautiful little dream about sailing with my grandfather suddenly turned into a nightmare—a nightmare that often awoke Amina Rabun, whose memories now lived inside me. Because I experienced Amina’s memories as my own, I experienced the nightmare directly as though I were Amina.