And then the waters receded.
Elymas and I were there when Noah sent forth the raven and the dove, and we were there when the dove returned with an olive branch. Noah and his family were the only people to board the ark, and they were the only people to disembark when it ran aground on Ararat. No one from the sea was saved.
Noah built an altar and made a sacrifice to Yahweh that day, and on that day Yahweh was well pleased. Yahweh blessed Noah and his sons, telling them to repopulate the earth and vesting in them authority over all wild things. When Yahweh smelled the burning flesh of Noah’s sacrifice, he promised never to flood the earth again. As a reminder of that covenant, rainbows appeared in the clouds.
After seeing all this, Elymas turned to me and said:
“Luas accused Noah of being a coward, but now you know the truth, Brek Cuttler. When lesser men would have faltered, Noah made no excuses for humanity. The story is not about love, it is about justice.”
And then, all at once, I was back in the woods behind Nana’s house, on my way to Shemaya Station. Elymas was gone. I was a young woman again, dressed in my black silk suit covered with baby formula stains that turn to blood. I was on my way to the Urartu Chamber to present the case of No. 44371.
42
No. 44371 sits on the same bench where I found myself when I first arrived at Shemaya Station. It is as if no time has passed. My blood is still tacky on the floor, turning red the bottoms of No. 44371’s white-soled prison sneakers.
He looks just as I imagined he would after the executioner sent four thousand volts of electricity crashing through his body. His scalp is bald and raw where it has not been charred into black flake and ash by the electrode; his skin and face are the color of stale milk; abrasions cover his wrists and ankle; his eyes bulge from their sockets; his trousers are soiled. He holds an object in his hands, but when he sees me, he hides it and looks down at the floor, hoping it will open up and devour him. No. 44371 knows that today is the day he will face his eternity.
Next to No. 44371, at the opposite end of the bench, sits a young girl who also stares at the floor. She looks familiar, like a young Amina Rabun playing with her brother in the sandbox, or a young Katerine Schrieberg walking with her father to the café in Dresden, or a young Sheila Bowles playing with a doll on her bed at the sanitarium. She is like all little girls-innocent, preoccupied, dreaming-but she sits naked on the bench, pale and emaciated like death.
What could she have done to be brought to this place?
As if in reply to my thought, she looks up at me and says: “God punishes children for the sins of their parents.”
A low rumbling sound echoes through the great hall, a sound like the grinding of a train entering the station. I turn from the little girl to see Gautama, the sculptor of the sphere from the cocktail party. He is dressed in the same rainbow-colored dhoti wrapped around his waist and legs and he is rolling his magical stone sphere among the postulants. He smiles at them like a peddler, trying to convince them to buy his wares, but they pay him no attention even as the sphere nears them and flashes the patterns of their lives across its surface, mapping their journeys to now.
Gautama stops his sphere in front of No. 44371. It sands itself smooth before erupting into the grotesque rash of Otto Bowles’ life, crisscrossing the sphere like a ball of yarn-here a young boy embarrassed and enraged, unable to forgive his father for striking his grandfather at the football game, there a man firing three bullets into my chest and demanding death by Electric Chair. In his arrogance, sitting here on the bench beneath the dome of rusted girders and trusses, which from far above Shemaya Station might appear to be a manhole cover in some forsaken back alley of the universe, No. 44371 does not notice his life drawn on the sphere, or think about the necessity of sewers to carry off the effluent of Creation. He stares stubbornly into the floor, daring it to rise up and seize him. I do not hear the cry of his soul as I did during my naïve moment of compassion in my office before lighting the candles. I hear nothing at all. I make a note to include his insolence in my presentation.
“Greetings, my daughter,” Gautama says to me.
The surface of the sphere changes as I approach it, reproducing the pattern of my life’s choices. I had seen only glimpses of them at the cocktail party, between the pairs of doors, but now they are displayed in great detail, like a street map on a globe. The trail begins with my birth at the top of the sphere and the earliest injustice of being forced from my mother’s womb, separated forever from her unconditional love. The doors open next onto Nana’s funeral and the injustice of being slapped by my mother-the mother who had created and loved me-for crying when I was forced to kiss her corpse. The sphere shows the nights when my mother was too drunk or depressed to care for me, and her vicious fights with my father, who was too selfish and preoccupied to notice. Through another set of doors, I am thrusting my right hand into the conveyor chain, offering myself as a sacrifice to my parents, and there, through yet another pair, I am an amputee, crying amidst a group of children who have tucked their arms inside their jackets and circled me with their sleeves flapping in the wind. Father O’Brien tells me justice is for God later, but Bill Gwynne tells me it is for us now, and I testify that the chain guard was in place but failed when I stumbled into it. Boys torture crayfish in buckets, and I put them on trial, deciding that day to become a lawyer because justice is the only salvation. The sphere rotates. Here I am again, worrying with my grandfather about fuel prices and recession during the nineteen-seventies, and reading from my other grandfather’s treatises about equity and law. My father announces he is remarrying, and my mother celebrates this, and another anniversary of my Uncle Anthony’s death in Vietnam, with a bottle of gin. I am not asked to the school prom; the boys are too afraid of me, and I of them. Karen, who is not asked either because God has not made her pretty, decides to become a priest.
The sphere rotates again and I am in law school now, meeting my first client on an internship at the welfare clinic, promising that I will find justice for her and her eight children who have not eaten in three days. I overwhelm the bureaucrats with legal papers and easily win the case. There I am later, an intern at the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, meeting my first victims of crime and promising justice for them, too. I outprepare the overworked public defender and easily win the conviction. During the summers, I work at large corporate law firms with granite conference tables and expensive artwork on the walls; we promise the president of a chemical company we’ll do everything possible to defeat the class action lawsuit brought by the heirs of those who died after being exposed to his company’s pesticides. My legal research for the case is thorough, creative, and the partners of the firm are so impressed that they offer me a full-time position.
The sphere rotates again and Bo is in my bed asking me to marry him. I should be thinking about the beauty of our lives together, but instead I am thinking about the practice of circumcision and how each Jewish male child is given the mark of justice itself-indelible, binding, irrefutable. I say yes to him and weep with joy because my children and I will now receive that blessing and that hope; we will become third party beneficiaries of the contract between Abraham and God. Bo and I move to Huntingdon and decide to have a baby. I convince my mother-in-law to sue Amina and Barratte Rabun for her inheritance. I know now how to acquire and control justice, to make it do my bidding and to savor its many pleasures.