A Holy Unforeseen Courtship

A short story

Dear reader, if you like this at all, I’m open to other titles. Please submit in comments. If you don’t, well I’ll just go back to the drawing board.

Photo by Hans Moerman on Unsplash

Brian, at last attuned to the situation in which he found himself, began gradually to see with new eyes. They were, quite literally, new eyes. He looked into a splashing fountain as if he were in a dream, and saw that somehow his eyes were brighter, and their colors unknown to him. But the function seemed the same.

He looked about the new life before him and it was clear that his old eyes could never have been capable. A biologist in his earth life (as he suddenly called it in his thoughts), he reasoned that this must therefore mean that he had new optic nerves, a new brain with a new visual cortex.

His mind reeled. His mind? What was his mind? Was he now his mind? Was his mind in the king whose throne blazed before all their eyes in the great white city? He laughed as he realized that he had time to discover it all; and he laughed to consider the fact that in this new life, this endless life, he was busily trying to discover the minutia because the greatness and vastness was too much for him to consider; for now.

Brian, formerly professor Brian Caldwell of Purdue University, now with a new name he could not comprehend, bent once more and again splashed the perfect water of the perfect fountain into his perfect eyes. And he looked about. He would need new words and he would need new descriptors for all was beyond and above perfect. Perfect suddenly a poor word indeed.

He cast his eyes across the white, flawless walls of the great city. He tried to discern stones and minerals, metals and design. It was as if the city had grown up out of the, what, earth? The new, perfect earth? It was seamless; a design with no clumsy handiwork.

He looked across the sea, the endless crystal water that lapped before the celebrants, who splashed and laughed, hugged and wept in joy. He knew faces. He would speak to them. All in good time. How funny was that? In good time! As if time, well, as if time…

There were mountains. And there were fields. His new eyes allowed him to see whatever, and wherever, when he wished. Across horizons and under waters full of beasts too wonderful for comprehension. All shattering the fragile understanding he had before. A place of beauty so hard that nothing less could survive; it would be cut to pieces, crushed, broken by simple proximity.

All of this he took in, spinning and searching, peering and pondering. And then, in a breath, in an instant, in an eternity, his eyes fell on Becky. He did not know why he knew her. And yet, the smile, the eyes (of course), the laughter. But not…the same.

Becky. Why did he know that name? Who was she? Not here, of course, but there. In the other life, in the first life. Brian tried to comprehend what memory meant now. Maybe, memory was only those things that led us here, he thought. Maybe, memory was knowledge uncluttered by sin, by assault. What was memory? What was clarity? Were their neurons in a pre-frontal….his thought was interrupted.

She looked to him and waved him forward. Everything in his being focused now, down, closer, closer into those eyes, that laugh, the limbs, the movement. Becky. Who was she? Here she appeared a queen. An empress. Her straight limbs and straight back beneath a tumble of dark hair.

Arrayed before her were dozens, hundreds who spoke to her and thanked her, who reached to her and touched her fingertips. She held court, on a bright stone beneath a shining tree. She was mercy and grace and love embodied in a new and perfect form, without defect, without….

Then the truth struck him; the white, blinding truth.

Becky! Becky in the wheelchair. Becky, her body twisted to the left. Her mouth a sincere but sardonic parody of drooling smiles, her words twisted in her throat, her right arm withered, her legs spastic, her hair cut short for simplicity. Her skin pale, for she lacked the strength to run in the sunlight. He remembered now. Ah, Becky!

She was the daughter of his friend. Marion, a physicist, cared for her daughter meticulously. Becky met him one day as Marion wheeled her through the halls of the building where they both had offices. The child’s laughter squealed and echoed as she looked from room to room.

When she looked into Dr. Caldwell’s lab, she said ‘stop! I wwwaannt too ggggooo hheeere.’ She instantly cared for him. He had no idea why and was, to be honest, annoyed. He liked clean lines, the clarity of physiology, the relative certainty of taxonomy. He kept his office neat, his desk uncluttered. His relationships formal…and at arm’s length.

Marion would bring the stricken child to work, from the time she was small. She loved the outings. It gave her great joy and distraction from the chronic pain she felt, and the inability to play as other children had or do all of the things other teens did.

Every time, she would struggle to speak and would say ‘take…me…to…dddd doctor, Brian.’

Unsure what to do for the first year, he thought he was humoring her. He would shake her quivering, unsteady hand. And he would bend down to speak to her. She would reach out, carefully, spasmodically and touch his arm. She would pull him down to her for a kiss on the cheek. He was taken back the first time, as her uncoordinated lips alighted on his face.

Brian eventually thought it all simply charming and a bit pitiful. He was kind and gave her balloons as a child and flowers when she was older. Brian, the great researcher, the great and lonely skeptic. He sought the greater answers of the universe as a small universe unfolded before him.

He was the man to whom Becky would say, clumsily, and with uncontrolled lips, ‘I ppp..pray for you. I love you!’

He would nod and say ‘thank you dear, I pray for you too,’ and he lied for he had not, and did not pray. It was for the foolish, the simpletons. It was for those of weak mind. But she seemed to find it meaningful. And Becky would say, teasing, ‘don’t lie tooo, tooo me. You’ll, you’ll see.’

She sent him poems and notes that she composed on her computer, and they were simple, but radiated love. She was not Shakespeare. She was better, perhaps. No decoding was necessary to translate her joy. She prayed, she said, all the time. Her mother confirmed this.

‘Honest Brian, sometimes I can’t sleep at night for her praying at all hours. But that is how John and I raised her. She has such a heart.’

Later she teased him. ‘In another life, I’d ask you about your intentions towards our daughter!’ He feigned laughter and turned slightly red in the face.

Once, when her mother had a sudden meeting and Becky was visiting, Brian took her to lunch in the university cafeteria. He helped her eat and wiped her face, her hands unable to do it all. Before they ate, she said grace. It was long. And beautiful. She spoke so many names with her uncoordinated voice. His own included. She never once asked for her own healing, or for her pain to be lessened.

That was the day, that was the night, when the aging, lonely researcher turned to the King in the quiet of his apartment.

Soon after that, Becky died of a sudden pneumonia. It was unexpected but not surprising. The funeral was like nothing he expected. It was not a private affair of a few sorrowful family members mourning an unfortunate life. It was a celebration of those who loved her, whom he had never met.

Many of those in attendance, with tears in their eyes, said ‘oh, you’re Brian! She spoke of you so often!’

When she passed, Brian was 60 and still alone, and she was 40 in the old life. He sat in his office and wept and wept as he realized his loss. He the lonely man, the rational man, grieving his unforeseen, Platonic lover.

He kept a photo on his desk of the two of them together. It was taken in the spring by a cluster of roses on campus. Years later, he too became ill. When the priest came to his bedside as he neared his own end, he asked that the photo be tucked into the pocket of his suit. He spoke a final prayer of thanks. For his faith and for his small missionary. He closed his eyes.

And then he abruptly woke again. Now he stood before her once more.

Beneath the tree, between the walls and the sea, it struck him with nearly the force of his own reawakening. The life they had was the courtship. Here they were together somehow, in a way more real than any marriage. More real than anything before that merely hinted at this time and place.

He knew it all. If she had been beautiful, how assailed she would have been. If she had been then as she was, now, the enemy would have attacked her most viciously. Or her life would have been an idol of wonder, and how many hours would she have spent praying?

How much communion with the Father, Son and Spirit? Hers was a life of pure pursuit; her clumsy chair, her broken interrupted nerves, her serpentine spine all constituted her own monastic cell and she the anchoress. When she crossed the finish line, ‘she brought captives in HER train,’ he thought, a bit of Bible echoing in his thoughts. He the unwitting captive of her faith.

He heard a voice. He heard her voice. The voice that lived beneath every struggling sentence on earth. Musical and ordered, clear and sweet. No stumbling, no thick, drawn out words, making her unclear. ’Do you remember now, my love? Will you come and hold me?’

Dr. Brian Caldwell stood and walked, and ran, and cried out as the crowds gathered before her parted, the crowds for whom she in her infirmity had prayed day and night, those whose hands she had held, those who saw her halting laughter despite suffering, those touched by her love.

He, the man she prayed to be hers, the man she prayed to come to the truth, ran on powerful legs and swept her up.

He wrapped his arms around her and she returned the favor.

And as so many discovered every second in that place, he saw (as she had known) that the pain was only the path and that nothing was ever as it had seemed. It was far better as each sorrow receded further into the past like so many flecks of powerless dust in the morning sun.

Brian and Becky, sitting under a tree. Kissing; at last.