“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.
The sphere rotates a final time. I am scolding Bo because he has left his clothes all over the floor again. He does this all the time, even though I’ve reminded him. He has no defense. He just stands there in his shorts and t-shirt, looking confused. When he fails to apologize or concede the seriousness of his crime, I bring him to justice too. I am unwilling to allow even errant socks and underwear to pass unpunished for fear that injustice will tighten its grip around my life and my world.
“You think I’m your maid?” I shout at him at the top of my lungs. “Put here to run around behind you and pick up your clothes and wash the dishes you leave in the sink? You don’t get up with Sarah during the night, and you don’t get her ready in the morning! No, you’re in way too big of a hurry to see the weathergirl! We can’t go anywhere on weekends because you’re always watching football, baseball, or basketball. If we don’t talk about sports, we don’t talk about anything! You haven’t said a nice word to my parents in five years and you act like you can’t stand them and then wonder why they hate you!”
My teeth bare and my muscles clench. I throw things around the room, seething with irrational, unjustifiable rage. Watching it being replayed on the sphere-every word spoken, and every object thrown, a passage through another pair of doors-I begin to wonder whether the pursuit of justice itself is irrational and unjust, as Karen had told me when we were kids. Then the sphere inches forward and shows me in my law office, writing a brief to help Alan Fleming escape repaying his debts on a legal technicality.
The sphere has come almost full circle now, displaying the final two choices of my life. The first is my decision not to shoot Ott Bowles in the mushroom house, choosing the door on the right. The second is my change of heart, my decision to shoot him as he steps toward me, choosing the door on the left. With that decision, the circle is closed and sphere has returned to the place of my beginning, to the place of unconditional love where I was separated from my mother’s womb. Gautama rolls the sphere slightly toward No. 44371 and the sphere superimposes his choices over mine. Somehow we have taken similar paths. Our meeting in the mushroom house seems mathematically certain, the inevitable result of a series of parallel equations and geometric principles. We spent our lives protecting ourselves from the unbearable pain of injustice. We spent our lives renouncing the inconceivable possibility of forgiveness.
The girl on the bench stirs. She is interested in the sphere and reaches out with her right hand to touch it but cannot because there is only a stump ending at the elbow. I remember her now: I had seen her in the great hall during the cocktail party, when Luas showed me the postulants among the shadows. I was unable to see inside her soul then, and, for some reason, the surface of the sphere reveals nothing more of her now.
The sphere erases itself again. Two pairs of doors appear. They look like miniatures of the doors to the Urartu Chamber. Above one pair is the word JUSTICE, and above the other, the word FORGIVENESS.
“Noah once stood before these doors,” Gautama says. “And Jesus of Nazareth, too, was humbled by them. Now your time has come, my daughter.”
The girl looks from Gautama to me, retracting the stump of her arm.
“You saw Yahweh butcher them,” Gautama continues. “Mothers, fathers, babies. You sailed with Noah upon the sea of horror, you smelled their rotting bodies and heard their pathetic cries.”
“Yes,” I say.
“And when the waters receded and the sun returned, you saw Noah look up at the Murderer. You saw him with your own eyes, my daughter, and yet, you still do not see.”
“I saw Divine justice unfurled in rainbows,” I respond in my defense.
“Rainbows are not the colors of justice, my daughter. They are the colors of forgiveness.”
“God forgave no one.”
“That is true, my daughter. But Noah forgave God, and the colors of God’s joy burst through the clouds. Thousands of years later, on one dark and terrible afternoon, the people tortured and murdered God. God forgave the people, and the colors of our joy burst through on Easter morning. Love is shown to be unconditional, my daughter, only when it embraces that which is least deserving of love. What you do not yet understand is that justice is the exact opposite of all that love is and all that you are. The longer you pursue it, the farther you run from the place you wish to be. The Kingdom of God cannot be entered along the path of justice.”