Suddenly, Elymas and I are standing on the deck of a great wooden ark in near total darkness. The storm lashes the boat, and we are being tossed about; but Elymas insists we must stay on deck and not seek shelter below.
I hear the anxious sounds of animals beneath my feet-the cacophony of an entire zoo assembled under one roof. Each time the ark pitches, the cries of the animals grow louder, but I begin to hear other cries too: awful, relentless shrieks and moans come from outside the ship, rising above the wind and thunder, overcoming the sounds of the animals. These are the most chilling, terrifying sounds I have ever heard.
“What is it?” I ask.
Elymas points a gnarled finger overboard and the clouds lift just enough for the sun’s weak rays to illuminate the churning sea all the way to the horizon. Across all that distance, as far as I can see in every direction, the waters are covered with a slick of bloated bodies, human and animal, and each wave brings them crashing and grinding into the hull of the ark. Those humans still alive on this sea of horror are using the dead as rafts, clinging to the cadavers of their mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, calling out for mercy and forgiveness in languages I have never heard. The stench of decaying flesh is overwhelming, causing me to retch.
A deck hatch opens and through it climbs a young man with his wife, attracted to the surface by the brightening skies. They come to the rail and, looking out upon the carnage, begin to weep. Through the hatch behind them comes an old man, weathered, gray-bearded, and harried. He walks to the middle of the deck, raises his arms and proclaims:
“I PRESENT MANKIND…THEY HAVE CHOSEN!”
“But Father! Father!” the young man pleads. “We must rescue them, as many as we can! We cannot allow them to drown!”
The young man begins running around the deck tying ropes to the rails and throwing them over the side.
“No!” commands the old man. “Only we are righteous, and only we shall be saved!”
The young man’s wife falls to her knees at the old man’s feet. “Oh, please, father, please, let us help them!” she begs. “We cannot bear their suffering. Surely they are people born as you and I, who have done wrong and right as you and I. Surely you see that. You alone, father, were chosen as righteous, and the righteous, father, must take pity upon the wretched. Our ship is large and we could save hundreds, thousands. Please, father, we must try!”
“Ham, take this woman away!” the old man orders. “Take her out of my sight at once or I will throw her over with the others. I do not hear their cries. The time for weeping is past.”
Ham looks upon his father with contempt. How can the great Noah leave them? How can the great Noah be so cruel? He crawls back through the hatch and returns to the deck with his brothers, Shem and Japeth. He leads them to the rail and shows them the sea of bodies, repeating to them what their father has said, expecting them to join him in convincing Noah to have mercy. But Shem and Japeth turn their backs on the people in the sea. They remove their cloaks and drape them behind their heads as curtains, and walking toward Noah they embrace him. Noah turns on Ham for questioning his judgment:
“A curse upon your descendants, the Canaanites!” he proclaims. “May they be the lowest of slaves to the descendants of Shem and Japeth!”
Noah orders them all below and seals the hatch tight. Like a linen shroud soaked with sweet oils and spices, the clouds descend onto the sea, compressing the putrid air into the waves and muffling the groans and screams. The grinding of flesh and bone against the hull of the ark continues for one hundred and fifty days.
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.