Arch/Eternal - Chapter Four

Jackson River meets Rita Freeman

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Chapter Four: Rita

The day she got the call that Andre hadn’t made it, Nali wrote this in her journal:

A woman could lose her faith over this. And you’d be hard pressed to blame her. 

You’ve taken the boy’s father, his mother, and his grandfather. He had one good friend in the whole damn world, and you just took him away. You just took him away. 

I’m all he has left. So I guess I’m going to have to keep on living for a good long time, aren’t I? 

But then, that’s what I thought when his father ran off. Watch over this girl, I prayed. You owe me that much. Shows how much I knew. 

I remember the guilt I felt when my Sarah left. Guilty. Well, no, I was furious. At God, at the hard-edged universe. I was furious, but I hid that fury, which scared me to death, with self-blame. I kept telling myself I must have failed in some irredeemable way, and that Sarah was the cost. Sarah, who I should have saved. 

“God gives, and he takes,” Thomas told me. “And takes.”

When he died, it was just fear. Existential fear that I was actually cursed. As though I was the target of divine malice. I felt alone, unequipped to care for that little boy, who had it even worse than I did, but didn’t even know it. At least I had parents. Parents who loved me and taught me to love. My blood, my history. 

What now? 

Well, now there’s no hiding the anger. What am I supposed to believe? 

What kind of God does this? How can I define this as anything other than cruelty? Perhaps the universe is as black and cold as all the smug atheists claim. Perhaps I hope it is, because otherwise I have devoted my life to a miserable wretch of a deity. 

No, I won’t apologize. I won’t shame myself by trying to appease a god who behaves in this way. The only thing left for you to do is to take Jackson himself, and he’d probably be better off. Better to die than to live in the world that you’ve built for him.

That I’ve built for him. 

Maybe it all really is my fault. Maybe I want to keep believing in God to have someone to blame.

Or maybe hope is not so easily relinquished. If I must be honest, and I must, then I have not the strength to lose him. He is all I have left. And I am all he has left. And so, for his sake, I must be faithful. For his sake, I must show hope. 

Because without faith, without hope, what could I, an aging woman well past my prime, a failed mother of his mother — what could I possibly give him? What gifts but those? What example but that?

Right now, those are all just words. I have to go tell him his best friend is dead. And I have to make sure he understands that it’s not his fault. 

That, at least, is without the least tang of falsehood. No, it surely is not his fault. 

It’s God’s fault.

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I didn’t cry when they told me my mother was gone. I cried sometimes later, missing her, back when I still believed she would come back for me. But I’d been so young. By the time I had a better idea of what happened, the wound was too old to summon tears. 

I cried once after Grandpa Thomas died, during the funeral. I was watching Nali, feeling so bad for her. Crying seemed like the loyal thing to do. Like a service, like respect. Like I was making Grandpa proud.

This was different. This was an aching, burning pain that wouldn’t let up. I cried a lot, but it didn’t make a difference. It never felt like I was done. I’d just dry up, or fall asleep, then start all over again. I wouldn’t leave the house, would barely leave my room. It was like the air outside hurt my skin. I couldn’t stand the sight of the sun. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the dark. 

Nali gave me space, but she also insisted on sitting with me at least once a day. We’d watch TV, or play cards. She made me shower, which I hated, because it’s hard to get away from your thoughts in the shower. It’s hard to get away from the howling, hollowing pain.

I tried obsessively to solve the problem of what I could have done differently to save Andre’s life. I could have packed freeze-dried antivenin instead of the fresh vials. I could have jogged the whole way home, trusting God to keep me alive. I could have fallen down differently, to keep the vials from breaking. I could have kept better watch for snakes. I could have tried to suck the venom out. I could have paid better attention to where we were going all morning, so that I wouldn’t have gotten off track on the way home. 

If I could just work out the solution, if I could just figure out exactly what I should have done differently, somehow that would stop the pain. This feverish conviction consumed me.

And then of course I thought about the expression on Sean’s face when he told us we could go home if we ran. I thought about the sound of that truck as it revved its engine to scare us and drive us like wild hares. I thought about the way it felt when that BB hit me in the wrist, and the way it felt to be hunted, and helpless. And thinking about those things would lead me right back to helping Andre lay down in that sliver of shade, and leaving him there.

There was a fierce competition raging inside him about who to hate — those boys in the truck, or myself. It was a tight race. There was no favorite.

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What happened next is that Nali got a letter from Rita.

Rebecca,

I so hope this letter finds you well. It’s been quite some time since that memorable evening in the small kitchen you shared with Thomas. I’ve thought about it often. I’ve thought about you often, and wondered what’s become of you. 

After having let so many years pass in silence, I fear that to say more would be to presume too much, and if I have learned anything in my life, it is to presume as little as possible.

As for myself, I have kept busy much as I did when you knew me, buried in the past, searching for solutions to the problems of the future. Increasingly, I am convinced that the only hope is us — truth-seekers seeking truth-seekers, and sharing what we find. 

And so, my dear friend, I hope that you will write to tell me what you’ve found. Whatever it is. Whether it was what you expected, or not. Perhaps especially if not. 

- Rita

You can imagine how a letter like that landed for Nali. 

The memory of her conversation with Rita came rushing back with vivid clarity, irreconcilable with her current reality. What had she found? She’d found pain, and loss. She’d found divine betrayal, and the fruits of contempt. She’d found desperation and heartache. 

She’d found a boy, lost in the desert. Her own blood, tied into the sand, withering away in the hot winds of fate.

But in that despondency, in the wake of fresh tragedy, the letter kindled a hope. Nali had never met anyone like Rita before or since. She thought there must be at least some chance that she could offer a perspective on this blight of loss that she couldn’t reach on her own. Self-isolated as she was in this desert place, and fruitless as her efforts had been to connect with its people, she had lived so much of her life in her mind. But her mind had become a toxic environment for thinking. 

Maybe God had sent Rita to help her find a way out. 

She wanted not to hope, she wanted not to let her faith test the firmness of this new totem, but old habits die hard. She was a faithful woman. That Rita’s sudden reappearance after thirty years had the benevolent hand of God in it was an irresistable notion.

In the letter, Rita had left her email address, “in case the tedium of handwritten letters fails to excite you.” 

Nali used it. 

When she started to peck the clattering keys of the now-ancient desktop, she intended to be succinct. To rattle off the highlights, and leave an open-ended question at the end — something  like, “So, what do you think?”

But as she typed, the words would not be restrained. She wrote about her daughter, the joy of her life, and her husband, its foundation. She explained as best she could why the people of Wind Valley had decided to hate her before even meeting her, and why they held onto that hatred even now. She talked about me. I had become her second child, her son. She knew, as she wrote, that any anguish she felt for herself only masked the intolerable pain of not knowing how to protect me from continual suffering. 

That was the darkness in her mind. That was the monster that threatened to devour everything, and fulfill itself by obliterating her, the last soul on Earth who could even hope to take care of the child so dear to her. 

And so, eventually, that was the help she asked. 

For his sake, help me make the meaning that can alchemize all this horror into beauty. 

Before she could shrink in second-guessing paralysis, she hit send. 

Rita arrived three days later. Nali had suggested they all meet in Flagstaff, maybe stay at a hotel, but Rita insisted that she wanted to see the place her friend had called home for nearly thirty years. So Nali drove four hours out to the Flagstaff’s tiny airport to pick her up.

The first thing Nali noticed as she pulled up to the curb where Rita was waiting was that the woman hadn’t aged. Rita said something about good genes and luck, which didn’t go even halfway to explaining the phenomenon, but in the end, there were plenty of other things to talk about on the drive back.

“I still believe in God,” Nali told her. “I still believe He has a plan for me, and for my family, for Jackson. It’s just…it’s hard to believe He cares at all for this old woman’s suffering.”

Rita took a long, slow breath.

“Well, first of all, you’re not an old woman,” she said. “If you died today, I would say you died young.”

“That’s an encouraging thought.”

“You’re not wrong to keep your faith. You know that, of course, but perhaps it helps to hear it from someone who doesn’t live in your head. From someone, also, who has studied the histories of many disparate cultures. There is, I have found, an undeniable commonality in the societies that thrive versus those that languish. And it is faith. People, all people, need faith.”

“I appreciate that, but it sort of sounds like it doesn’t really matter what I believe, so long as I believe in something, which is perilously close to the kind of relativism I’ve been squaring off against my entire life.”

“I’m not saying that at all,” Rita asserted. “On the extreme contrary, WHAT people put their faith in may be the single greatest determining factor of their lives. As far as I have understood you, your faith is well-placed.”

“Did you go and convert to Mormonism sometime in the last 30 years? Because that would be news.”

Rita smiled. “Be careful of false dichotomies, my friend.”

Nali shook her head. “So I’ve chosen a good story to base my life on.”

“All we have are stories,” Rita said.

“You’re a historian! You should know better than anyone that there’s such a thing as truth, and such a thing as lies. Some things actually happen, and some things don’t, regardless of what people say, for whatever reasons they say them. I believe that Jesus died on the cross, and then was resurrected to save us all from annihilation. I believe that God exists, a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother, and that we matter to Them. That I matter to Them. Those are big truth claims, not just some trivial stories.”

Rita took some time before answering.

“There are no good answers for the pain you’ve suffered. No clean explanations. If you weren’t angry about it, you wouldn’t be human. So I understand why you’re resisting something I think you already know. But the only way through is to stop resisting, and embrace the fact that our entire reality is constructed of the stories we tell about it. We cannot experience anything but by our narratives. And so, yes, Jesus is a story. God is a story. Your Mormonism is a story. And so is our friendship. So are the deaths of Sarah, and Thomas, and Andre. All of these things would be meaningless without the stories they belong to. Without the story that you are writing, and rewriting, about them. 

“The hardest thing to accept about life is that our stories are up to us. You can let someone else write your life, or you can write it yourself. You want to believe that God is a coauthor. Or, better, that God will write your story for you. But that isn’t how life works, and you know it. You can choose whether you keep your faith in God, or whether to write it out of your life. All I will say, all I CAN say with any integrity, is that I believe that to write your faith out of your life would be a terrible mistake. From everything I’ve seen, from all the stories I’ve read, and most especially based on the story I’ve written for my own life, I believe that you are telling a good story. There is nothing trivial about that, Rebecca Sayer.”

---

When they got back, Nali made sandwiches and kept talking. I was awake and watching TV, but I overheard them talking about me. Rita’s voice was soft, too quiet for me to hear through the thin walls. But I heard Nali explain that Sarah, my mother, had been ambitious before meeting Jacob. Nali encouraged her to study hard and dream big, and she’d taken the same approach with me, and I seemed to be taking to it before Andre died. Now, of course, she worried.

“I’ll go see if I can get Jackson to come out. He’s been….” She didn’t finish the sentence, but I probably could have. “I’ll be right back.”

When she knocked quietly and told me she had someone she’d like me to meet, I realized that was the last thing I wanted. But I wasn’t defiant by nature, and it didn’t occur to me to refuse, so I steeled myself and followed her out into the living room.

As soon as I saw Rita, my self-consciousness transformed into something else entirely. Her presence was overwhelming. First off, I’d met few (if any) Black people in real life, and Rita was very dark skinned. Beyond that, though, her demeanor was otherworldly — I swear that was the word in my head at the time. She seemed totally at ease in a way I’d never seen.

She stood and crossed to me, holding out her hand. “Hi Jackson, I’m Rita. I’m an old friend of your grandmother’s. It’s very good to meet you.”

I swallowed and forced myself to meet her eyes as I took her outstretched hand for a polite shake. 

Then she sat back down, and I lowered myself into the seat across from her, as Nali brought sandwiches over. I couldn’t imagine eating anything in front of this woman. But I picked one up and looked at it for the sake of giving my hands something to do.

“Rita and I were friends back in college,” Nali said as she took a seat.

I stole another look at Rita and blinked. She looked decades younger than Nali. My first assumption was that I must not know much about how people age. 

“Did you go to Harvard?”

“I still do. I’ve maintained a fellowship there for a long time now. But I like to travel, so I don’t spend a lot of time in Cambridge.”

“What kind of places have you been?” It was easy to talk to her.

“All kinds of places. The world is very large, and very full of stories.” She shared a look with Nali, then changed the subject. “Nali tells me you’re something of a prodigy in the field of astronomy.”

I blushed. “I just think stars are really amazing. I like to look at them and learn about them.”

“This is a good place for that,” Rita said.

“We bought him a telescope a few years ago,” Nali said. “He’s put it to good use.”

“Would you mind showing me how it works after the sun goes down?”

I could only say, “OK.” I hadn’t been outside to look at the stars since the night I was with Andre. But it felt rude to say no.

“Tell me,” Rita said. “What is it about the night sky that so captivates you?”

She sat in one of the two chairs we had set up not too far from the trailer, as I worked to calibrate my little Celestron in the waning twilight. The first stars were becoming visible along the eastern horizon. 

I had to think about her question. The first stars were becoming visible along the eastern horizon.

“I guess…” I started, then tried again. “I think it’s pretty amazing that the only thing between me and the rest of the Universe is some air.” I waved my hand back and forth in front of my face. “And air is like…nothing. So it’s like there’s basically nothing between me and the stars. Like if I thought about it the right way, I could just jump out into them.”

Rita smiled. “I remember when I was about your age looking up into the sky and thinking I would give anything to be able to jump high enough to touch them. It was a lot easier to go out and just look at them back then, but I didn’t know as much as you do. I didn’t really understand what stars are. I just thought they were beautiful.”

“They are! Did you know that most of them burn for literally billions of years?”

“I did know that. Did you know that when stars die, they give birth to new stars?”

“What do you mean?”

“A dying star sends a shockwave through the galaxy. The energy of that wave agitates local clouds of gas to coalesce into new stars.”

“Yeah, I think I read that.”

“You know what else? The gravitational wave caused by a supernova ripples outward and causes the core of every star it touches to burn a little bit hotter, for just a moment, which makes the star pulse, just once, like the death of its neighbor is reminding it to be grateful to be alive.”

I stared deep into the night. “I didn’t know that. Is that why some stars look like they’re flickering?”

“No,” Rita explained. “That’s all that air you were talking about. It doesn’t look like much when it’s just the little bit in front of your face, but a few miles of atmosphere is like a big blanket the light has to get through. So it flickers on the way.”

I was quiet for a while. The sky was clear and dark and bright. 

“My mom loved it out here,” I said.

“I can understand why.”

“I used to think she’d figured out how to…I don’t know. Go out there. Or something. When she left. I thought she escaped, and I thought she would come back for me.”

Rita didn’t say anything.

“That was pretty stupid, though,” I said, trying to push down what was coming up.

“No,” Rita answered. “It wasn’t.”

“Yes it was. She’s not coming back. She’s dead. She walked out into the desert and died.”

Rita let that sit in the open for a few moments. Then she said, “The whole point of growing up isn’t to give up hope. The point is to get better at aiming it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hope is vital. You can’t live for very long without it. But we have to learn what to hope for, and it’s trial and error. So you’re older now, and you’ve learned that hoping for your mom to come back was the wrong thing to hope for. So. What will you hope for instead?”

I shifted uncomfortably, warding off the old familiar sadness. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Can I make a suggestion?”

I looked at her.

“Keep your eyes on the stars. Because there will always be suffering, but there will also, always, be stars.”

What she said made sense in a way I couldn’t explain. 

“You can’t think your way out of suffering, and you can’t feel your way out, either. Your mind and your heart have to work together to solve for it. And in the end, the purpose, the meaning of suffering might just be that it forces us to do this work, to learn how to make our minds and our hearts work together. Which is how our suffering makes us whole.”

I didn’t understand all that, but then, I also wasn’t sure if it was still me she was talking to. Until suddenly, she looked over at me, smiled, and came back from wherever she’d been. 

“Keep your eyes on the stars. They won’t tell you what to do, but they’ll give you light to see by. They’ll get your heart and mind working together better than anything else I know of.”

Maybe so. But in that moment, my mind struggled to keep up with my heart, which was racing, racing upward.

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Any and all feedback is earnestly welcome. My goal is to finish this book next year. Please help me make it better: