Deadline (38 page)

He cleared his throat again and laughed half-heartedly. “There’s an irony in that, now that I’m a tax attorney.”

Bingo.

“It didn’t hit me until our ten-year high school reunion. I was so glad to be with everybody again. See, I’d gone back east to college, so I’d missed all the homecomings and everything. I had such great memories of high school. I was student body president, all-state point guard, the whole deal. It was local boy makes good in the big time. Then at the reunion I saw Linda, she’d been a cheerleader—you know, the storybook romance. But the moment I saw her there was such an emptiness, such a shame between us. It took my breath away. I was totally unprepared. My wife was talking to someone else at the other corner of the room, and I was so glad because I couldn’t stand the idea of her and Linda even meeting each other.

“Everybody standing around Linda and I kept saying they were so surprised the two of us didn’t end up together, and we still made such a cute couple. But both of us were
so
uncomfortable. When people backed away I started talking about superficial stuff, just like a guy, right?”

A couple of the men chuckled.

“Then she started crying. I could tell she was thinking about…our secret. Then she came right out and said it—‘Do you ever think about our baby?’

“It blew me away. I was angry. It spoiled the whole reunion for me. I’d lived with this denial, always pushing it out of my mind. Whenever the prochoice issue came up, in college or at work or anywhere, I’d wax eloquent about the woman’s right to choose, like I was some great women’s advocate. And I’d refuse to listen to any evidence to the contrary. The truth was I was trying to convince myself. I even joined a prochoice march and screamed at a group of prolifers. What’s that Shakespeare line? ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’? Sometimes we argue most heatedly for things we want to believe but really don’t. I wanted to believe what my sign and my bumper sticker said, because if it wasn’t true, it meant I had killed two innocent children. I just couldn’t live with that.

“I guess I should explain the second abortion. It was with my wife, our junior year of college, a year before we were married. When we get introduced somewhere I always cringe when someone asks ‘And how many children do you have?’ My wife says one, but I know what she’s thinking, even though we never talk about it, I mean
never.
She’s thinking what I’m thinking. The answer is really two. There were two of them. But now there’s just one. If you had a child who died as a six-year-old, you could say ‘We have one child now, our daughter, but we had a son who died a few years ago.’ People would say ‘I’m sorry,’ but you wouldn’t be hiding anything. They’d know the truth. But we can’t tell them the truth. We have to lie. Because how can you admit the reason the other child died?”

Jake felt connected to this man. His honesty, his ability to express himself. He was the sort of man who could have been his friend. Jake realized as he sat there he hadn’t had many close friends, and since Doc and Finney had died there was almost no one. Who was his closest friend, who could he really talk to? Ollie? Or Clarence—yeah, maybe Clarence. He missed feeling part of a platoon, being with men who shared the same sense of mission and destiny, who depended on each other to make it through the day and the night.

“Our daughter is in seventh grade now. Her brother or sister would be a freshman in high school. I wonder if he’d be a basketball player, like I was. Or a four-point student like his mom. Maybe he’d find the cure for cancer or AIDS. I’ve found it real hard to bond with my daughter. Dr. Scanlon helped me see I’ve guarded myself against a close relationship with her because of what I did to my other children. At first that made no sense to me, but now it does. It’s hard for some parents to fully give themselves to one child when they’ve taken the life of another. It’s hard for me. I love her so much, but I have a real hard time showing it.”

There was no mass of tears welling up, just one single tear that worked its way down his cheek in slow motion. He didn’t wipe it away, didn’t even seem aware of it.

Jake thought of Carly again. Carly, to whom he’d never really given himself.

The man in the maroon sweater, the mammoth one, was unexpectedly drawn into the forum by something the lawyer said. His voice was just as Jake had anticipated it, deep and rich with a mild country flavor.

“I had a friend whose child died of leukemia. Only seven years old. It would be awfully hard to lose a child like that, but at least my friend can treasure the memories and tell himself he did what he could to give that child life. He was there for his boy those seven years. And if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t do it differently.

“But when you’re the one who took the life, not cancer but you, then it’s different. We’ve experienced the Lord’s forgiveness now. We know we’ll see our baby some day. But it’s been a hard road, still is sometimes. I just wish somebody would have told us about it. There was no one outside the clinic when we went there. No one. I see these pictures of prolife people standing outside the clinics now. I’ve never gone back to one since the abortion—I won’t even drive by, those buildings give me the creeps. It’s like the setting for a horror movie or something. But whenever I see these prolifers on the news, I say to myself,
Where were you back then?
Why wasn’t there somebody to warn us, somebody to tell us the truth? Maybe we would have listened. I don’t know, but I’d like to think we would have.”

His head was back on the platform of his big palms, face down, propped up by his arms, elbows dug into his huge thighs.

Dr. Scanlon paused and looked around, as if checking to see if anyone had something to add.

“Well, Jake, those are the stories, in a thumbnail. I guess it gives you an idea what this is about. Have any questions you’d like to ask?”

Jake shook his head no, then thought a moment and looked up.

“Wait. Yeah. Lots of questions. I’d like to know more how you guys come to terms with this. How do you get past the denial? How do you forgive yourself? How do you learn to talk about it? How do you help your wife, or your ex-wife? How do you overcome that distance from your other child you were talking about?”

Jake surveyed the room, for the first time really looking in each man’s eyes. “Yeah, I guess I’ve got lots of questions.”

All the men stayed late, none seemed eager to leave. For the next hour Jake listened to the answers, sometimes scribbling down things that were said, but for the most part his pen hung limp between his fingers. He listened with an interest that went far deeper than journalism, far deeper than the investigation, neither of which, for the moment, occupied his mind.

“This place is so much more magnificent than earth, and so different. Yet I expected it to be more unlike earth than it is. It’s not as much unearth as it is perfect earth. There’s still a body, but a wonderful body; still a physical world, but not one that confines or imprisons, one that liberates. And there still seems to be a sense of time passing.”

“You ask much at once,” Zyor responded. “As for time, eternity is neither endless time nor the end of time. It is the transmutation of time. It is all times at once and all places at once, where every time and place is as accessible as goods on a store shelf or books in a library. Our Sovereign is the lamb ‘slain from before the foundation of the world.’ Before time was, all that time would bring existed in the eternal mind of Elyon. And he shares it with his creatures. The accessibility of all times and all places is another reason why heaven must always be the very opposite of boring.”

It was obvious to Finney that Zyor still hadn’t gotten over his earlier question related to boredom.

“As to another part of your question, Elyon’s Book speaks of the new heavens and the new earth. ‘New’ does not mean fundamentally different, but vastly superior. Think of your own experience on earth, Master Finney. A new car did not mean a car without a steering wheel, seats and doors and tires. It meant a better version of what you already had. This is a physical world because it was made for you, and you are not only a spiritual but a physical being. The body he made you was not a mistake, but a sovereign design. You do not change your species here—you become all God intended your kind to be. You are not an animal, body without spirit, and neither are you an angel, spirit without body. You are both.”

Finney raised his eyebrows. Zyor’s comment about being “without body” seemed strange coming from such an imposing body.

“I take on this body to function in a realm of space and time, to participate in a place made for you. But it is not a part of me. I merely occupy it. Have you noticed how similar this body is to those of my brethren? Or how this body seems different on my kind than yours? It is because I merely inhabit it. It is not part of me. I am spirit capable of taking on body. You, however, are spirit and body integrated into one. That which you take for granted—for instance, inhaling with your body the fragrance of a flower and having it move your spirit—is something I have never experienced, and cannot.

“You could not bring your old body to this world, for it was unsuited. But you are now clothed in a temporary body that allows you to experience this world, all the while awaiting the reclothing, the merger into your new and eternal body. On earth you did not long to be
un
clothed, but
re
clothed. Man’s rebellion against Elyon doomed your old body to decay and death. Your soul was purified through Christ, but your body remained under corruption. Hence you had to experience the unnatural separation from it that is death.”

“But isn’t the spiritual superior to the physical?” Finney asked. “Doesn’t the physical confine and inhibit the spiritual?”

“Many believe spirit is good and body is bad, and therefore imagine heaven as the abode of disembodied spirits. But you are human, made to be soul and body in one. Death is an aberration—two things separated that belong together as one. That is why your people await the resurrection, the rejoining of what was meant to be together. You will not be complete until the resurrection, where your soul again merges with body, this time in perfect unity.

“Elyon promises you a spiritual body. As your physical body allowed you to move and travel and participate on earth, so your spiritual body will allow you to do the same in heaven. The spiritual body is much more than physical, but it is physical: That is why Elyon’s Son, in the prototype resurrection body, walked and talked and ate and was grasped and held by his disciples.”

“Won’t such a body limit the expression of the soul?”

“On the contrary. It will liberate it. The soul without the body is not free to participate in the glories of the material worlds Elyon creates at will. That is why I must take on a body here. But to take it on and shed it is very different than being one with it. Hence, your abilities to fully participate in the material world far exceed mine and always will.”

“I wondered once how our souls would come from the east and west and sit at a table and eat with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Finney said. “I have eaten since coming here, but I have not been hungry. Yet the food was delicious, in a way I would have supposed impossible without hunger. Still, I desired the food, I savored the smell and delighted in the taste, more intense and satisfying than anything I had on earth.”

“The great banquet feast could not be more spiritual, nor could it be more physical. The two are not at odds. You are free from need here, but you are also free to enjoy what you used to need—food and work and rest and exercise. It is, in a sense never envisioned by the phrase on earth, ‘the best of both worlds.’ Your longings on earth were the hunger pangs that prepared you to forever enjoy the feasts of heaven. Your resurrection body will allow you not simply to behold and appreciate beauty as you do now, but to fully enter it and participate in it, to plumb its very depths. Have you noticed here that you recognize people more from their character than their body?”

“Yes, from the moment I arrived.”

“On earth the body hid the spirit. In heaven the body reveals the spirit. But even on earth you could sometimes see the spirit in the face, could you not?”

“Yes. In the eyes, especially. You could sometimes see the depth of a person, his love, his compassion, his honesty, his suffering, his thirst for justice or longing for peace. Or his shallowness, selfishness, greed, dishonesty, hostility, indifference. Someone said the eyes are a window to the soul.”

“Yes. Here it is more transparent. The whole body is a window to the soul. And because the souls have been purified, what you see in someone is often unique, but never frightening, always compelling.”

“In my mother I see the beauty of age, in my daughter the beauty of youth. But how can this be? There’s no age here. Is there?”

“Agelessness does not eliminate ages, rather it embraces all ages. Every age anyone ever was on earth, he is now, here, to someone. Your mother’s mother sees in her the sort of youthfulness you see in your daughter. Your mother sees you as a boy she might want to take into her lap, your daughter sees you as an older man whose lap she might want to crawl up in. They are capable of seeing you in other ways, and will, but each cherishes you in special ways. This is not an illusion, it is real. Everyone is to everyone else their
true
selves, yet each person will focus on an aspect of others most familiar or fascinating, that means the most to them. Everyone sees truly and accurately, but not identically.”

“But I am still a man here, and everyone I see is clearly male or female, more distinctly in fact than on earth. I had thought perhaps there would be no gender here. I had read that we would all be…like angels, like you.”

Zyor looked immensely surprised at this.

“You are like us in that you do not marry and bear children here. But as for your being a man, what else would you be? Elyon may unmake what men make, but he does not unmake what
he
makes. He made you male, as he made your mother and wife and daughters female. Gender is not merely a component of your being to be added in or extracted and discarded. It is an essential part of who you are. You were not a neuter soul in a man’s body. As you were a man in every cell of your body, so you were and are a man in every facet of your soul, for the two are ultimately designed as one. Your sexuality is innate. Manhood pervades your very being, just as womanhood pervades Susan and Jenny and Angela. Elyon redeems fallen maleness and fallen femaleness, but he does not ignore or dispose of what he himself designed.