The Trial of Fallen Angels (9 page)

Toby turns out the light and slides back into bed. He takes Bonnie now with a passion he has never before expressed, but not because he wants her. In fact, he finds her suddenly ugly and repulsive. Instead, he takes her to reestablish who is the father and who is the son, to reclaim his biological position as accuser and Tad’s as accused, to reassert his authority to judge what is right and what is wrong, and who is right and who is wrong. And Toby vows to himself to have Bonnie Campbell more often now, and to boast proudly of it and rub Tad’s nose in it—for Toby believes no conduct can be sinful if it is done in the open and to teach a lesson. He will dare Tad to say otherwise, dare him to tell his mother and risk destroying her life. And if that moment comes, Toby resolves not to deny it, because, in the end, it is Claire’s fault that he has turned to another woman, not a weakness of his own.

—

SUDDENLY THE COURTROOM
emerges into the foreground, displacing Bonnie Campbell’s seedy apartment. The presentation is over and the lights come up. Haissem bows solemnly before the monolith, then walks over to join Luas and me.

“The trial is over,” he says. “A verdict has been reached.”

11

A
fter the trial of Toby Bowles, I knew I no longer existed in the living world to which I had once belonged—your world, there on earth. Something momentous had happened to me, something so altering and absolute that reality itself was replaced by a new archetype of existence that could no longer be postponed or denied. It wasn’t a matter of voluntarily accepting the fact of my death, any more than one voluntarily accepts the fact of one’s life. It was more basic than that: a simple acknowledgment that this is what is now, and the other is no more.

Oddly enough, accepting my death wasn’t terrifying. It was, in a way, liberating. I no longer had to rationalize the bizarre things happening around me and to me. I no longer had to search for a cure to an illness or an injury that did not exist. And, most important, I realized I no longer had to carry the many burdens of life. I no longer had to shower, brush my teeth, eat, sleep, exercise, work, or take care of my husband and daughter. In a very real sense, death is the ultimate vacation away from
everything
.

But death did nothing to ease the pain of losing Bo and Sarah. I missed her desperately. I longed and ached for her to my very core, and the pain of being separated from her was excruciating. Yet I didn’t experience the agonized, gut-wrenching grief of a mother who has just lost her child. This is because even though I knew that
I
was dead, the fact that she wasn’t with me in Shemaya meant that Sarah was still alive.

The thought that Sarah would lead a full and happy life helped ease the pain of facing my own death. On the day she was born, I knew, as every mother knows, that I would willingly sacrifice my life for hers. Realizing that I would not be part of Sarah’s life stung me deeply. I wouldn’t be there to celebrate her birthdays, watch her open Christmas and Hanukkah presents, do school projects with her, help her get ready for her first date, set up her dorm room, dance at her wedding, or be with her for the births of my grandchildren. But at least she would experience these things, the joys of life. And just as I had been reunited with my dead great-grandmother, one day Sarah and I would also be reunited. And also Bo, over whom I mourned like the loss of my own body, for we were joined as one.

So I veered between despair and hope over being separated from Sarah and Bo. But I also found myself experiencing unexpected, darker feelings of deep shame. I could not avoid the conclusion that I had failed my husband, my daughter, and myself. Death is, in the end, the ultimate failure in life, the condition we fear, fight, and avoid at all cost, that our every biological instinct and emotion abhors and resists. Even the words used to describe it are pejorative: you’ve either “lost” your life, as if you’ve somehow been careless and misplaced it, or your life has been “taken,” “stolen,” “forfeited,” or “given up.”

Yes, I was one of the losers now. The fact that all the people in history who had come before me were losers too—and that all the people who would come after me were losers in waiting—didn’t make my death any less humiliating. I had abandoned my husband and child. Even worse, I had abandoned
myself
—Brek Cuttler: human being, mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, friend, lawyer, neighbor, all no more. And I couldn’t even remember how I died! Did I commit suicide? Nothing could be more shameful than that. Is that why I couldn’t remember, or wouldn’t?

The more these thoughts haunted me and the more I began to think about everything I had lost, the more enraged I became. The injustice of dying after only thirty years of life galled me like nothing I had ever experienced before. It was a hot anger that burned hotter because I had no way to express the enormity of my loss. Nana listened patiently, but she could not, I thought, understand my condition, because, unlike me, she had died after having lived a full, complete life, raising her children to adulthood and seeing her grandchildren and even her great-grandchildren.

I also discovered that the afterlife, like life, is governed by a law of special relativity. My death felt not like the death of myself—in some sense I was still thinking, still experiencing something—but rather like the death of the billions of others on earth who remained alive but could no longer be seen. It was as if I was the lone survivor of a nuclear Armageddon. From my perspective in Shemaya, I had not been taken away from my family; my family had been taken away from me. I lost my entire world—the earth that had sheltered me, the waters that had nourished me, the sky that had inspired me, all vanished into a lyrical, haunted oblivion.

What finally broke me, though—the thing that drove me into the prolonged silence of grieving that replaces and becomes anger’s surrogate—was not the gnawing despair of having lost everything, but the sarcastic resemblance of the afterlife to life itself. There was no release in my heaven, no salvation, no comfort, no “better place” to which I had gone after my death. There was, instead, only a perverse continuation of the discordant strands of my old life, freed of physical laws and boundaries, as if life and death were merely potential states of the same cynical mind. Where was the reward? Where was the eternal repose promised by the prophets? I had come full circle: the burdens of life had been replaced by the burdens of death. Paradise was, for me, being trained for a job at yet another law firm: Luas & Associates, Attorneys-at-Divine-Law.

The chilling trial of Toby Bowles had the incongruous effect of both deepening and lessening my own misery by showing me that things could actually be worse. Standing in the corridor outside the Courtroom after the trial, Haissem reported that only a fraction of Mr. Bowles’s life had been presented and that a misleading portrait of his soul had been created. I was stunned, yet Haissem seemed perfectly content, and Luas was altogether indifferent. They seemed almost amused by my concern. I asked Haissem what evidence he would have offered in Mr. Bowles’s defense if the trial had continued.

“Oh, many things,” he said. “Toby Bowles actually lived a noble life.”

“Really?” I said skeptically.

“Yes,” Haissem insisted. “Would you like to see?”

“Sure,” I said. “But how? The trial’s already over.”

Haissem turned toward Luas. “Do you have any objection to me presenting the rest of Toby Bowles’s life?” he asked. “I think we have a few minutes before the next case begins.”

“I think it’s unnecessary,” Luas replied, “but suit yourself.”

“Very well,” Haissem said.

Haissem used his golden key to reopen the doors to the Courtroom.We walked back in. Haissem retook his position at the center chair, raised his arms, and the Courtroom vanished.

What I saw next was an entirely different side of Toby Bowles, one I would never have imagined existed from the side that Haissem had presented earlier. For example, when Toby’s train stopped at the Altoona rail yard, he changed into the Sunday clothes he had packed into his bag and hitchhiked up into the mountains to visit with his sister, Sheila, who lived in a beautiful private home for mentally disabled women on the shore of a small mountain lake. She lived at this home instead of the wretched public asylum to which she had been confined since a child, because every month of every year since the war, Toby Bowles paid the bills that allowed her to live there—even though he would never own a new car or a home as grand as Paul and Marion Hudson’s.

Sometimes Toby and Sheila played together, walking through the rooms of the home on imaginary journeys she created. Toby would be her customer in a store selling only hugs, or the passenger on an airplane flying to the ends of rainbows. They would climb trees and relax in the clouds, or paddle across to the shore on the opposite side of the lake, which she thought was the most exotic place on earth. He was always patient with her, and Sheila would always take Toby up to her room before he left and show him the black-and-white photograph of their mama and papa with their forced smiles on the day she was born, holding their baby Sheila not too close because of the deformities in her face and limbs that are the clinical signs of Down syndrome.

I learned that Toby suffered many injustices during his life as well. He was eleven years old when Sheila was born and that black-and-white photograph was taken. It was the last photograph they had of their father, Gerard Bowles, who came home from the hospital that day with his face dark with disgrace and loathing. He told Toby that his mother had done something very wrong and that God had punished her for it and he must leave and never return. Toby was actually relieved by his father’s departure at first because Gerard Bowles had been cruel to Toby and his mother, sometimes beating them with his belt while quoting passages from the Bible about sin and the purification of the soul.

But Toby soon learned what the loss of a father meant when his mother wouldn’t stop crying and packed up their things to go live with his grandparents. This was when his new sister, Sheila, was taken away as a ward of the state. Lying in bed late at night, Toby worried for Sheila’s and his father’s safety. He prayed for their return and asked God to please forgive his mother for whatever she had done wrong to cause their family to split apart.

In his teenage years, Toby’s unrequited longing and love for his father turned into hatred of the man who had never once written a letter to let them know he was still alive—or to ask if they were still alive. At his most violent moments, Toby fantasized about meeting his father on a street, introducing himself as his son, and pulling a revolver from a pocket and shooting him dead between the eyes. At other moments, when the possibilities of the future seemed expansive and bright, Toby imagined becoming a great success and one day being stopped on the street by his father as a beggar and shoving him aside without recognition or pity.

There were few times in Toby Bowles’s life when he did not feel the pain of his father’s abandonment. But Sheila became the beneficiary of this broken relationship, receiving the love Toby would have given his father. She desperately needed such a champion because her mother blamed Sheila for all that had gone so terribly wrong. When the time came, Ester Bowles gladly handed Sheila over to the state as though she were handing over a carrier of typhus. Toby became as protective of Sheila as he was of his own daughters. He would have gladly gone to jail or bankrupted himself to win her escape from the asylum. He nearly did both in extricating her. All the money he raised by stealing and selling supplies on the black market during the war went to Sheila, not for his own use—not even to feed and clothe his own young children.

The only other photograph in Sheila’s room, next to her bed, was taken by the director of the home on the day Toby brought Sheila a terrier puppy she named Jack that went to heaven a year later when it crossed the road. Arm in arm, Sheila and Toby stand grinning for the camera with the furry bundle—proud sister and wealthy businessman from the big city (for who else, she thought, could afford such an extravagant gift?).

Sheila Bowles died in her sleep one year before Toby’s affair with Bonnie Campbell began. Toby buried her on a brutal February morning in a small cemetery near the house by the lake, not far from the tiny wooden cross with the word “Jack” carved into its surface by her hands. In a voice breaking with grief and love across the windswept knoll, Toby handed his sister over to her Creator, and he told her Creator, his family, and the few mourners from the home, that the earth would never again be graced by such innocence.

“But God heard none of this!” I protested to Haissem, interrupting the presentation and momentarily restoring the Courtroom. “The moment of truth arrives for Toby Bowles, but his life unspools from bad to good instead of good to bad and he’s hurled into hell without appeal . . . without a trace? What kind of God would conduct such a trial?”

“A just God,” Luas replied. “The God of the Flood. Haissem presented the case through Mr. Bowles’s own thoughts and actions. Could any of it be denied?”

“No,” I conceded. “But only his sins were presented.”

“Then only his sins were relevant,” Luas answered, irritated by my challenge. “It was the Judge who ended the presentation, Brek, not Haissem. Who are we to weigh the gravity of Toby Bowles’s offenses and determine what is just and unjust? I warned you earlier not to speculate.”

“Wait, Luas,” Haissem interjected. “It’s appropriate that Brek is concerned. This shows that she takes her job seriously, which is exactly what we want. Understanding the mistakes and triumphs of Toby’s life may help her when she enters the Courtroom on behalf of her first client.” He turned to me. “There’s more to the story. Would you like to see the rest?”

Luas wasn’t willing to let it drop. “My point wasn’t that the other parts of Toby’s life are irrelevant,” he said. “I only meant to say that justice is God’s, not ours, and that justice will be done.”

“I understand, Luas,” Haissem said, curtly. “And my point is that justice has nothing to do with the trial of Toby Bowles at all.”

Luas regarded Haissem suspiciously. “Then I respectfully disagree,” he said.

Haissem ignored the comment and turned back to me. “Let me finish the presentation,” he said. “You haven’t even seen the most important part yet.”

The Courtroom vanished again, and Haissem took us back to when Toby was a soldier in the war.

To avoid a court-martial for stealing medical supplies in Saverne, Toby was forced to leave the Quartermaster’s Corps and “volunteer” for a frontline combat unit. Out of eight men initially assigned to his unit, all but one, Toby, were shot dead or drowned in the Elbe River in eastern Germany on the final push of the Allies to Berlin. Toby himself was hit in the leg while carrying his dying sergeant up the riverbank. He limped away, bleeding and stunned, and collapsed outside a small cabin in the woods near the burg of Kamenz.

When Toby awakened the next day, he found himself inside this cabin, delirious from loss of blood and an infection and surrounded by the family who lived there: a father, a mother, a teenage daughter, and two younger sons. They bandaged his wounds and gave him food and water, and he slept another twenty-four hours until he awoke again, this time to the sound of gunfire and shouting as the mother and children fled into a tunnel beneath the floorboards of the cabin and the father ran from the house with a shotgun.