Deadline (17 page)

“At the heart of the mystery, etched forever in my mind is that incredible day,” Zyor’s voice lowered to an intense whisper, “when Elyon stepped through the portal of eternity and left our world for yours. Creation was a wonder, but not a miracle. It pales in comparison to the true miracle, that he would become…one of you. The Creator becoming the creature. It could not be. And yet it was. It could not happen. And yet it did.”

As he beheld the wonder in Zyor’s eyes, Finney realized the angel was unconsciously demonstrating the very concept he had earlier expressed—the joy of learning, and the marvel of pondering what he might never understand.

“For a long time, as earth’s history progressed, certain things seemed predictable. My comrades and I began to think we knew what would happen next, that we understood Elyon’s plan. Then, in a moment, our presumption lay shattered. We realized we knew nothing of the ways of God. We had not comprehended the unfolding drama of redemption. It was a terrible realization to learn how little we knew, even having been with him for so long. Terrible, yet,” and Finney saw a faint but distinct smile, “wonderful.

“He became one of you. Not merely like you as I myself have done, but one of you. Not for a moment, but for a lifetime…and for eternity. God became man. While Gabriel announced the miracle on earth, Michael announced it to us. I will never forget his words as he pointed through the portal and we gazed upon that teenage girl. You will meet her eventually, master Finney. She was lovely. She reminded me of your Angela.”

The angel’s fondness for Angela was unmistakable in the way he said her name. Finney was touched by the reminder Zyor had been there beside him when Angela was born and attended all her birthday parties and softball games. He’d been by her bed each night as Finney prayed with her. The valiant warrior, the loyal guardian, had come to love her. With sweet anticipation, Finney longed for the day he’d have the privilege of introducing Angie to Zyor.

In a voice that seemed to take on Michael’s texture and tone, Zyor proclaimed the archangel’s unforgettable words of old—“The unborn child now living in this Galilean peasant girl is the Creator of the universe.”

“When Michael saw the shock on our faces,” Zyor continued, “he added simply, ‘Elyon has become a human child. The Son of God is now the Son of Man.’”

Finney marveled not only at what Zyor was telling him, but that the angel had never ceased to wonder at an event millions on earth affirmed in their doctrinal statements with such little wonder at all, with hardly more than a second thought. To Zyor Christmas was not making a list and shopping at a mall. It was the heart and soul of the cosmos itself.

“And just when we thought Elyon could not surpass this greatest miracle with another, there came the greater one.” Zyor stood, and his voice trembled, not only with awe, but now with unmistakable anger.

“That little hill, where little men were permitted to do unspeakable things to Elyon’s Son. My comrades and I jammed against the portal, begging permission to break through and strike down the cowards, to unleash the relentless wrath of heaven’s army. We longed to raise our swords as one, to destroy every atom of the dark world. All that was in us thirsted for revenge. We ached to once and for all obliterate that cancer of rebellion against the Most High God.”

For the first time Finney saw in Zyor seething anger, fierce rage erupting to the surface. The angel paced back and forth like a caged lion, seeming suddenly much taller and more powerful, no longer the gentle teacher. Finney backed out of his way as Zyor metamorphosed, appearing as a towering oak tree blown in a storm of wind and lightning, casting a menacing shadow and whipping out wildly with its branches.

“Here were these puny men obsessed with the offenses of others against them, while themselves committing the ultimate offense of the universe, driving nails through the flesh of God. We longed to make them eat the dust of the ground and vomit clay. Any one of us could have struck them all down, and we yearned to do it. Millions of us, legion upon legion, crowded forward, from every corner of heaven, pressing and pushing, crying out and begging leave to destroy those who would dare to curse and mock and savage the holy Lamb of God!”

Zyor’s mighty voice echoed in Finney’s ears, and he couldn’t imagine there was anywhere in heaven outside its range. Zyor was completely lost in the memories of that day. Then suddenly it was over. The angel sat down, the anger subsiding as swiftly as it had materialized.

“But Michael would not permit us,” Zyor said softly. “For Elyon would not permit him.”

For a moment Finney thought he saw a tear in Zyor’s eye, but told himself angels did not cry. Did they? Yet now it was clear. Zyor was touched by emotion Finney had assumed him incapable of. And something else was happening. Zyor was becoming a blur. Finney’s own tears obscured his vision now. He too had gone back two thousand earth years, he had been there with Zyor, pushing against the portal, longing to go to earth to punish the enemies of God and rescue the Lamb. He too, in Zyor, had then fallen into a broken heap at the horrid realization that the Lamb must be left to suffer alone.

They both sat in silence now. Finney drew close to Zyor, with whom he now felt profoundly one. He realized worship came in many packages here, and this was yet another.

“We writhed in agony,” Zyor continued. “We had never thought such pain possible here in the perfect realm. And yet we grew to know—though not completely understand—that all this was necessary to meet the demands of Elyon’s justice and his love. He did not need us to rescue him. With a single word, with merely a thought, he could have unmade all men, destroyed the universe, purged all creation of the ugliness that nailed him to that cross. But he did not. He would not. He did not go there to be rescued. He went there to rescue.”

Zyor buried his face in his hands. Finney noticed for the first time how huge and hard and callused those hands looked, in stark contrast to the gentle softness of his face. Finney also realized in this quiet moment that the Bible’s promise of no more crying or pain was indeed for a day yet to come.

As wonderful as this place is
, Finney thought,
it cannot be everything that heaven will be until Elyon’s plan is completed on earth
.

“I can say the words which attempt to explain what happened on that day when Elyon’s Son died…” Zyor drew a deep breath. “But they are only words. I will never understand it. Yet I will never give up contemplating it. And I will never run out of time to do so, nor ever lack the company of those who share my quest and are eager to contemplate the wonder with me. And of all the adventures eternity will bring—most of which I can no more guess than you—the fact that Elyon was slain to buy the souls of men will overshadow everything. May his name be forever praised.”

Zyor wound down what was less a discourse than a drama. “These, Master Finney, are things you will never fully understand either—yet I sense that in some ways you already understand them better than I. You are, after all, among those created in his image. Among those for whom he died. You are the bride of Christ; I am merely the servant who attends the wedding and rejoices for both bride and Groom. You are among the privileged people those in the far reaches of the universe marvel at, and shall marvel at for all eternity.

“If I look at you sometimes in apparent awe, remember it is because I know your kind and what you are capable of. I know how all the offenses you chronicle others having done against you pale in comparison to your offenses against the Almighty. How all the rage your people direct against others, and a billion times over, should be directed against each of you by Elyon, and for eternity. When you were first closed out of the Garden of God, I thought he was done with you. You have seen many things here that cause you wonder, and you have barely begun to see. But for me, the greatest wonder is simply that you are here at all.

“For I knew what you were before Elyon captured you, and I knew your transgressions on earth even after he first laid hold of you. I marvel at your transformation, which began on earth, from darkness to light. I have never known darkness, though some of my closest comrades once chose that path, before your world was born.

“Twisted and marred beyond recognition, you were transformed by his grace and empowered by his Spirit to live as a light in the midst of the darkest world the universe has ever known, or ever will. And so you lived, master Finney, not perfectly, but faithfully. And this you see now is only the beginning of the glory still to come.”

Finney was at once warmed by the thought of his unspeakable privilege in being here, and chilled by the angel’s dark and morbid description of the world he’d once thought of, rather fondly, as his home.

CHAPTER NINE

J
ake sat at his newsroom desk, staring into his computer terminal, daring it to leave him columnless at deadline. Not once had it ever beat him. He’d been awake half the night thinking about the note and Ollie and the list. He had more distractions than ever to brush aside, but he knew he could do it, simply because he had to.

It was now 10:20. He had nearly an hour and a half left, which was still too much time to feel really pressured, though he honestly didn’t know his next move. Jake could type eighty words a minute, and the spell checker would catch his errors, which meant ten minutes would produce the necessary eight hundred words. There would be a column. The only question was the question that motivated him, that made work fun—
how good
will this column be?

All Jake’s columns informed readers, some deeply touched them, others challenged them, still others angered them. The only kind of column he considered a failure was the kind that didn’t move the reader at all. The kind that just sat there on the page, or left the reader uncertain of the columnist’s point. At the top of his terminal, lined with cracked yellow Scotch tape, was a note he’d seen ten years ago at the
Boston Globe
: “Better to offend a million readers than to confuse one.”

He could get away with an occasional “no brainer” column, a really-doesn’t-matter piece. This context of normalcy would accentuate the meteoric column, which might come every few weeks. These were the kind that got reprinted, photocopied, and posted on everything from refrigerators to faculty bulletin boards. But you couldn’t hit a home run every time. There was room for singles, doubles, and triples. These made the strikeouts tolerable. People were more patient when they knew the guy at the plate was capable of hitting it out of the park, even if he didn’t do it today.

Jake was a print celebrity, one of the
Trib’s
most popular columnists. In his first years as a columnist he’d done local issues. Five years ago he’d moved to less geographically tied subjects, more issues of national concern, to increase the likelihood of getting syndicated. It worked. Creators Features, a young and aggressive syndicate, had picked him up nearly four years ago. Two of his three weekly columns— he got to choose which two—would go out through Creators to forty newspapers in nine western states, usually making it to print within a week of his original in the
Trib.
The third he made local, or at least regional enough that Pacific Northwest readers would still consider him one of their own. Today’s column, whatever it was about, would be the local one. It took off some of the pressure knowing if he popped out, at least most of his fans wouldn’t see it.

Striving for excellence had served him well in school, athletics, and the military. It created its own pressure, but he’d become used to it. Janet said he’d become addicted to the deadline, to coming up with something worthwhile under the threat of damnation if he didn’t. He wondered now if life itself wasn’t much the same, an opportunity to get something done, with a deadline appropriately enough called “death.” Once the deadline arrived, there was no more chance to get it right. Come deadline, a column—perhaps even a life—was forever fixed, for better or for worse.

Jake resorted to a brief look at his file marked “Emergency,” in the back of the top file drawer that supported the right side of his desk. These were his columns on ice, none of them great or he would have used them already. Given thirty minutes polish they’d be passable. But they were Jake’s last resort, his insurance policy against coming up empty, and he didn’t ever want to cash them in. Most would never escape their manila prison. In the newspaper business, ideas were perishables, coming and going like dandelion wisps in the wind. If not served up today, they’d be stored in the front of the refrigerator, then crowded toward the back, and finally—neglected until too old to recognize and too rancid to digest—unceremoniously tossed in the trash.

Jake looked at the familiar cork board backdrop above his work area, hoping to find something new, just a trigger, an idea that would launch him from the starting gate and keep him going. There was a picture of Doc, Finney, and him on a fishing trip. Next to it a photo of a giant sea turtle he’d taken with his underwater camera while diving in Oahu, in Turtle Canyon, two years ago. A few of his journalism awards, the ones small enough to be displayed in a seven-foot-wide workspace. Jake picked off and discarded a half dozen outdated phone messages pinned to the cork. One was a three-week-old message from Mrs. Best, the program director at the Vista Manor, asking him for the third time to come speak to the “residents” about what it was like to be a reporter. He’d never had time to call her back.

Then there was a picture of Carly. Sandy happened to look over just at this moment and notice Jake’s sad-eyed, contemplative look. More than once she’d seen the same look as he gazed at the same picture.

Jake moved his eye from Carly to a letter next to her, dated five months earlier, in June. The writer was a woman deeply hurt by his column about a twenty-two-year-old boy who’d broken into a house and raped two girls. He’d suggested the boy was the product of poor parenting and societal neglect, that home and society alike bore responsibility for the poor self-esteem from which his crimes emerged. Of course, he’d not known the boy or his mother.

In this letter the mother assured him she’d done her best, and the pain of having a criminal son had beer hard enough without him humiliating her in public. She said, “After all the years of trying so hard with a son who went bad, after being assured by my three other grown children that I was a good mom to all of them, including Billy, it struck me as strange you would feel the freedom, knowing absolutely nothing of me or my family, to say I am to blame for Billy’s detestable actions. Most of my friends read your column. Fortunately, they know it was false. But my more casual acquaintances, those at work and in my apartment, they do not know, and they assume what you said was true, because ‘they read it in the paper.’ Please don’t forget, Mr. Woods, that when I misjudge someone, it probably won’t hurt them. When you misjudge you can hurt them irreparably. It’s too late for me now, but I felt I should write in the hope you will think carefully before hurting others as you have me.”

Jake had been disturbed and touched by the letter. He’d started to file it in his “keepers—bad” file, right behind his much larger “keepers—good” file. But then he decided to post it at his desk, to remind him not to be small, cruel, or flippant in his writing. It was a sort of self-imposed purgatory. It also served a remedial purpose—looking at it had prompted him to hold his tongue or make one more phone call to check the facts. He’d kept it up longer than he’d planned, partly because it impressed fellow reporters and visitors and bolstered his reputation as an honest, open-minded, soul-searching journalist who knew how to take criticism. More than once, when accused of bias and insensitivity, he referred to the letter on his wall, proving he wasn’t arrogant and was open to correction.

Next to that letter was another, written by hand, with mixed capital and lowercase letters, all slanted, showing signs of carelessness and hurry. “Dear Mr. Woods, I see you’re defending the filthy liberals again, faggots and all. Don’t get too smug, you godless Fascist commie. You’re going to Hell, and I for one am glad.” The letter lacked only a “Sincerely yours” and a signature and return address.

Though it was two years old now, Jake displayed it proudly, partly because if anyone that sick and hateful was against him, it had to mean he was on the right side. Partly too because when he took on the religious right, which he often did, it reminded him who he was dealing with, and why he shouldn’t hesitate to expose them for what they really were. It was maybe the most hateful letter he’d ever gotten, but he preferred its refreshingly forthright hatred to the pompous arrogant tripe other “conservative Christians” had sent him, cloaking their hatred and bigotry in words of “concern,” “compassion,” and “forgiveness.”

Jake scanned the newsroom looking for inspiration. He saw a sea of heads bobbing on telephones, hovering over terminals. Though he couldn’t see below shoulder level, he knew what lay beneath the horizon—hands busy on keyboards, reaching into file cabinets, digging through stacks of paper, bending paper clips, flipping through rolodexes. Besides the phone, the second most common fixture to rise above the horizon was the coffee cup. The few who despised coffee were inevitably tea or cola drinkers. One way or the other, caffeine fueled the newsroom. It fit the pressured, got-to-finish-by-deadline atmosphere, and helped explain why reporters and editors could sometimes be a testy and cranky lot. But the newsroom was full of more than its share of good-natured fun. Occasionally a hand would rise up to attempt a three-point bank shot at trash cans across the aisle. One reporter had his own Frisbee he occasionally let fly. More than a few desks contained dart guns and squirt guns. As Jake surveyed this self-contained world of the newsroom, smiles and frowns and rolled eyes and finger tapping dominated the landscape.

He looked down the aisle to Ray at city desk, whose job every morning was to punch in succession the twenty-three preprogrammed numbers on his telephone, one button for each department at the police station. “Good morning, Ray at the
Trib.
Anything new?” Good newspapers didn’t wait for news to come to them. They went after it. But this could be a strange business. He’d learned from Ray last month that he’d never been to the police station, only a few blocks away, never seen face to face a single one of the twenty-three voices he spoke to every morning.

The phones were their life lines, the air hoses that let them breathe in information. Breathe in info, breathe out articles. In the columnist’s case, breathe in info, breathe out opinion. Reporters once spent a lot of their time on the streets, at the scene. Today, thanks to the phone, many stories didn’t take them far from their desks. Three out of four reporters were on the phone in any ten minute period. Archie, the floor manager, told Jake the
Tribune
had over two hundred phone lines.

I’ve got to find out how big the phone bill is.
Jake realized how hard up he was for a column to be sitting there thinking about a stupid phone bill. Then he considered that wasn’t a bad idea—phones and journalism in the age of information. He jotted down a few words and stuffed a memo in his ideas file.

He saw Clarence Abernathy in the distance, maybe seventy feet away, headed to his desk in sports. Lois Sylman happened to walk by Clarence right at that moment, prompting Jake to laugh out loud. He could sense the animosity from here. Clarence was rough around the edges and not about to apologize for his gender. Lois was a feminist, the kind who believed if a man opened the door for her he was superior and condescending, and if he didn’t he was rude and insensitive. Every man was Atilla the Hun or the village idiot. Lois had no room for the opposite sex except those that heeled for her like a pooch fresh out of obedience school, and there were a surprising number of these at the
Trib.
Clarence called them “men doing penance for the sin of being men.” When Jake told him he should try smiling at Lois, he came back, “And get sued for sexual harassment?”

Though many of their views were different, the camaraderie he felt with Clarence was the closest thing to Doc or Finney he’d found in the newsroom. It was a grown up version of the all-male friendship he’d enjoyed since childhood. The childhood variety was replete with bold dares and great adventures, and in less exciting times, tossing rocks in the creek and sitting around the tree house making references to bodily secretions, excretions, odors, and sound effects. Come junior high, some of this was eclipsed by interest in girls, but no amount of Jade East or English Leather could change your genetic code. Dares and exploits led to crazy things like surfing on moving car bumpers and shooting arrows straight up, standing still, and seeing who flinched and who didn’t. Some of the stunts they’d egged each other into made the military seem almost safe in comparison. In short, the three of them had spent a great deal of time proving they weren’t women. Some male energy deep inside had pushed them to such things, and while sometimes exaggerated and often misdirected, it wasn’t in and of itself bad. To Clarence, maleness wasn’t a sin to be repented of, a curse to be revoked, or a disease to be cured. Jake liked that. He found it refreshing.

There were many coworkers here, both women and men, who believed men having a good time together was always at the expense of women. The only good men were the feminized ones. Clarence had captured ultra-feminist dogma beautifully one day after he and Jake had a run-in with Lois Sylman—“There’s nothing wrong with men that can’t be fixed by a good castration.”

Ironically, Jake noticed, the men women actually admired were not these modern feminized males, but the partial throwbacks—those men who weren’t total jerks but still showed the strength and toughness many dismissed as oppressive machismo. Like some of his colleagues, Jake found himself in the presence of
Trib
employees rolling his eyes at barbaric men who “just don’t get it,” then in his offhours, out of sight of the political correctness patrol, enjoying the company of that same sort of man. He’d considered writing a column on this subject, but only briefly, when he was ill or drunk, or both. When he came to his senses he’d realized too much was at stake. There were certain subjects you didn’t touch if you valued your reputation or your longevity.

Jake winced when he saw the big old-style clock, white faced with black numbers and rim, just like the ones he remembered from grade school. 10:48. He had less than an hour. Utter lack of focus and direction told Jake he wouldn’t come up with a column. Experience told him he would. The Pulitzer was not an issue here.
Play the hand you’re dealt.
It was time to ante up, even if it meant bluffing. He knew how to write with a poker face.