The Trial of Fallen Angels by James Kimmel Jr

Author:James Kimmel, Jr. [James Kimmel, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2012-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

20

When the High Jurisconsult of Shemaya deemed that I had spent sufficient time digesting the life of Amina Rabun, he summoned me back to his office in the infinite corridor. The hallway seemed even more cheerless and institutional than during my first visit—a sort of department of motor vehicles for souls. I figured Luas was the chief technocrat, although after everything I had seen so far in Shemaya, I began wondering whether the bureaucrat, or the bureaucracy itself, was corrupted.

I was furious with Luas for not informing me of Elymas and the possibility of seeing Bo and Sarah. He would know I had gone, of course, as he knew everything about me without me saying a word. I expected the scolding that Elymas had warned me would come, but instead Luas smiled benignly from across his desk and said: “So, how shall we present Ms. Rabun?”

We were both playing the same game of evasion. “Just as she is,” I replied.

“Naturally,” he said. He was dressed in the same sport coat, trousers, and open-collared shirt he had been wearing when he found me bleeding and naked in the train station. I wore blue jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers—the outfit I typically had worn to my office on weekends to catch up on paperwork. He rocked back in his chair. Three thin ribbons of smoke rose into the stale air from the two candles on the desk and the pipe he held in his left hand. “But which part of her?” he asked. “We can’t replay every moment of her life. That would serve no purpose. Our role as presenters is more selective. We must present the choices she made.”

Choices. The same word Haissem had used in the Courtroom to begin the presentation of Toby Bowles: “He has chosen!” Chosen what? To wait in a train shed with thousands of other souls while bureaucrats work the algorithms of their eternities?

“What choices are those?” I asked.

“The choices Yahweh promised Noah we would make,” Luas replied, gripping the pipe between his teeth and talking between them. He was obsessed with Noah and the Great Flood. All his metaphors eventually ended there.

“Did you get here by drowning?” I asked with a smirk.

“No. I was decapitated, actually.”

I looked at him skeptically. “You seem to have a head,” I said.

Luas smiled. “Yes, well, you put it there, so I suppose I do. But during my lifetime, I looked nothing like you now see me. There are no bodies in Shemaya, Brek, only thoughts. You’re free to dress me up any way you like. When the thought of me as a combination of the mentors you respected during your life no longer serves you, my appearance will change.” This reminder of the irrevocability of my death was painful. Most of the time, Shemaya seemed like life, a Disney World sort of place filled with wonder and surprises—and sometimes terrors, but, nevertheless, life. The idea that none of this was real—the candles, the desk, the office, the train station, even our bodies—was not only difficult to comprehend but still deeply upsetting to accept.

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