Chapter Thirteen A: Lovers

As Aaron drove from Warren Memorial Home to Pol’s house in the country, the two rode in silence. It had been a wild and stressful 24 hours bringing them back to where they started after their Saturday night date.

First, they had stayed in the office the rest of the night arranging the transfer of the location information of the mercury canister to Homeland Security. Pol chose to conduct the transfer from her office. They worked out the story carefully so that no one was specifically implicated. They indicated that certain sources were still investigating on behalf of the Congresswoman and they would report to Homeland Security as soon as they could make contact.

At the staff meeting at 8:00 in the morning, a subdued Nina conducted the meeting with little to add to their weekend work other than to watch for any sign that the Great Lakes Bill would come out of committee as a result of the news stories of the weekend. Then she announced that she would be taking a few days off for a funeral.

She apologized to Pol for her sudden break-in the night before and explained that a friend had just died and she was not thinking straight. She asked for time to go to the funeral and be with the family which Pol quickly granted, explaining her own news to Nina. Though subdued, Nina seemed to be quite normal when she left to meet the family at the hospital. Aaron and Pol headed straight for the airport after the morning roll call and caught the next flight back to Indianapolis where Aaron had left his car the night before. They were both so exhausted that they slept in the seats next to each other all the way to Indianapolis. Aaron was troubled by indistinct dreams that left him feeling as though he had scarcely slept at all. He got a large cup of strong coffee before they left the airport and headed to the Warren Home. Again, Pol was pretty much silent, dozing in the passenger seat.

At the home Aaron stood by while Pol made arrangements for the transfer of Aunt Hattie’s body to the Twelve Oaks for burial. Aaron saw several people he knew who stopped to fawn over him and tell him how much he had meant to Hattie in her last weeks. He was surprised that Pol was equally well-known at the Home and that she had apparently been a frequent visitor and benefactor. He was also surprised to find that Pol intended for Hattie’s body to lie in the church over night the following night. There would, she said, be a short memorial service and then she would be buried in the family plot at Twelve Oaks. She made several calls, but came up with only one person who could be pressed into service as a pall bearer on Wednesday morning. She turned to Aaron and asked if he could get a couple of his friends to volunteer and if he would mind helping. He agreed and immediately called Jack.

While Pol completed the arrangements with the funeral director who wondered if she would mind if they held a little service in the chapel at the home so Hattie’s friends could say farewell that evening, Aaron talked to Jack on his cell phone. Pol agreed to the memorial, but asked that she be excused from attending as she had had no sleep the night before. Jack agreed to assemble the investigative crew so that they could brief Pol and the architect when that meeting took place. The researchers would function as pall bearers and an honor guard for the passing of Mad Aunt Hattie who had, in her way, gotten them all involved in this escapade.

Now, Aaron was ready to drop Pol off at her farmhouse and get some sleep himself. All trace of the snow that had kept them in on Saturday was gone already, typical of Indiana’s rapidly changing spring weather. Aaron splashed through the mud in the drive and stopped in front of Pol’s door. She looked up at him and smiled.

“You might as well pull up and park in the barn again,” she said. “I’m not planning to let you go anywhere else tonight.” Aaron was surprised since they had neither mentioned nor alluded to any further romantic contact since Nina’s visit surprised them the night before. Nonetheless, he gladly pulled up to the barn and pulled inside after Pol opened the door. They walked quietly to the house and Aaron hung his coat on the peg inside the back door entryway to the kitchen. Pol continued through the house to deposit her coat and bag in her room. Aaron turned to put a kettle of water on the stove for tea.

She surprised him when he turned around. She folded into his embrace and raised searching lips to his own. When the long kiss gradually ended, Pol reached over and turned off the teakettle.

“We’ll worry about that later,” she said. “Right now I want you.”

“Pol,” Aaron said, hardly believing what he was hearing. “Do you think this is the right time?”

“There is neither time better nor worse than now,” she said cryptically. “What is important is that now is the time we have, and my dear, I have grown to love you in such a short period of time, I cannot help but think I should pluck this fruit while it is ripe and not wait any longer. Come.”

What followed was the sweet, slow discovery of two older adults who know themselves and are willing to share that knowledge with one another. They were unrushed, seeming at times to drift into sleep and back out as they moved with each other. They explored, rested, and renewed their passion, and at last, locked in each other’s arms, they slept.

This time, Aaron’s dreams were vivid, like the guided visualization that Pol had taken him on at the Dunes. He recognized that he was dreaming, but had the lucid exploration of a fantasy land that allowed him to direct his steps through the dream and discover at his own pace.

Not surprisingly, the dream was filled with images of Pol and himself—things they had experienced together freely mixed with ways that he could imagine they might grow in their relationship. As he went through his index of memories of her in this dreamscape where nothing seemed to matter except how they moved together, he came inevitably to that first night. He started as he relived the impact that had started him on this strange journey and struggled to the church at the top of the hill. He pushed the door open and as in his first dream so long ago seemed to enter a huge cathedral, much bigger on the inside than on the outside, crowded with people singing and chanting.

The journey to the front of the chancel was much quicker this time as Aaron realized that he was no longer injured, but was looking back on the scene from his present vantage. He looked up at the window and surely did see the stained glass window with its images. This time, however, it was only Pol who stood in the window and turned to beckon him to join her. He approached the window, not knowing how to cross the threshold from the church into the window. She reached out her hand and he found himself sucked out of the sanctuary and into the world of the stained glass window, his hand firmly held by hers. In this new reality, things seemed to be much more vivid, much as they had been in his visualization of the plates beneath the Lake. When he saw a rock, he could see it breathing. Each tree had a personality. Indeed, the objects which he chose to name rock and tree were less like the artifacts of earth than they were new lifeforms that he could not name and so associated with the closest things that they reminded him of. He supposed that must be how it must be to experience something far beyond ones realm of experience. One simply had to call an object by a familiar name, even though one knew that the object was not the same as that which he knew. The name became a kind of allegory that allowed his mind to comprehend what he saw around him.

In this new reality, Aaron realized that he and Pol were walking through a greenhouse. And though there were no spoken words, they were conversing about the things that were being grown in the greenhouse. This, Pol said, is where we grow the worlds. It is more like a nursery than a greenhouse. Each world is an infant growing into a mature being. Each world is at a different stage of its growth. You might say that the earth, our physical world, is an adolescent awash with hormones, loving and passionate in one minute and angry and petulant in another. But she will get through this stage as she did infancy and childhood. She will blossom into the great being that she is destined to become. Aaron looked through cases in the greenhouse seeing other worlds, imagining them as infants, children, adolescents, young adults, and mature beings, engaged in daily communion with others like themselves, while on their surface beings like himself went about their daily tasks oblivious of the greater being of which they were apart.

This must, Aaron thought, be what it is like to be a cell in a body. Whatever life we have it is just one of billions that make up the larger organisms. He walked on through the greenhouse in comfortable companionship with Pol.

We should never forget, however, she said to him, that even an individual cell can influence the well-being of the body. And groups of cells may mutate, become cancerous, or otherwise dangerous to the body if untended to. That is why we are here.

Where are we? Aaron thought.

We are at the center of the architects’ garden, she said in his mind. This is where we, the architects, watch and tend to the planets in our care. In order to affect them, we take on the form of the cells we wish to influence and guide.

A great benign and benevolent entity that watched over this and other worlds, Aaron thought to himself. No wonder religions get started. How else are you supposed to describe what is so far beyond your daily perception? They continued to travel deeper and deeper into the denizens of this architects’ garden. And as they wandered they became aware of many more beings who seemed to tend and take care of the flowering worlds in the greenhouse. But there was a coldness in one portion of the greenhouse—a feeling that not all the beings here were benign or benevolent.

There is always some amount of dissention within any project, Pol was explaining. There are those who believe we should take a more active role in the child’s development, surgically removing undesirable parts and ruling the planet with an iron hand. The prevailing operative is to lead, guide, and inspire, but that is not enough for some. They would rather command, punish, and regulate. It rather reminds one of the government, she laughed in his mind.

For what seemed like hours they wandered through this huge greenhouse which Aaron became more and more aware must comprise the entirety of planetoid development in the universe. The more he wandered, the more he became aware of the staggering size of this task and the number of beings that must be employed to manage it. It was no wonder that there were dark elements; even if they were only a small percentage they would be a huge number.

As they moved through the greenhouse, Aaron could see the window ahead of him again and the journey he would take back into his sleeping body. But before he woke from this dream, he had to ask a question that had begun to burn within him.

Is this heaven? Is this where true believers come after they have left their earthly bodies behind? Will I see you here when we’ve finished our work on earth?

The expression that Pol turned to him was sad and wistful.

You can only see what you can perceive. There is so much more to this existence that I can’t explain. It is like experiencing another dimension. If you do not have that dimension, you will only know those dimensions that exist in your reality. Some cross into this greater existence, but I don’t think they ever become fully a part of it. They are tethered to the dimensions of their home worlds. There is no other way.

She turned sadly toward the window. When we become part of your world, we give up the dimensions that separate us from you. When we shuffle off the part that binds us to your world, we re-enter our full life experience again. If you came to join me, you would still only know that part of me that coincides with your reality.

Even that part, Aaron thought, would be better than any eternity that did not include you at all.

He stepped back through the world window and the chapel was just that: a simple and plain chapel of one room and one door, and one exquisite stained glass window.

Next

Previous

Table of Contents