Why Call Them Back from Heaven

37

The man sat beside the road and stared into distance, but his eyes, one knew, saw nothing, and yet they were not empty eyes.

He wore only a pair of trousers, cut off well above the knees. His hair was long and hung down about his face. His beard was tangled and was full of sand. He was gaunt and his skin burned black by the sun.

Mona Campbell stopped her car and got out of it and stood, for a moment, watching him. There was no sign that he was aware of her and her heart welled up with pity at the sight of him, for there was about him a lostness and an emptiness that robbed existence of all meaning.

"Is there anything," she asked, "that I can do for you?"

His eyes changed at the sound of her voice. His head moved slightly and the eyes stared out at her.

"What is wrong?" she asked.

"What is wrong?" he asked, his voice rising sharply on the question. "What is right? Can you tell what's wrong or right?"

"Sometimes," she said. "Not always. The line is often fine."

"If I had stayed," he said. "If I had prayed a little harder. If I had dug the deep hole and put up the cross. But it was no use…"

His voice trailed off into nothingness and his eyes once again stared off into a distance where there was nothing one might see.

She noticed then, for the first time, the sack that lay on the ground beside him, apparently made out of material he'd ripped off his trouser legs. It lay half open and inside it she saw the jumbled figures of the carven jade.

"Are you hungry?" she asked. "Are you ill? You're quite sure there's nothing I can do?"

It was insane, she thought, that she should have stopped, that she should be standing in this road talking to this lost and empty man.

He stirred slightly. His lips began to open, as if he meant to speak, then pressed tight again.

"If there's nothing I can do," she said, Til be moving on."

She turned back to the car.

"Wait," he said.

She turned back.

The stricken eyes were staring at her.

"Tell me," asked the man, "is there such a thing as truth?"

It was not an idle question. She sensed that it was not.

"I think there is," she said. "There's truth in mathematics."

"I asked for truth," he said, "and all I got were these."

His foot thrust out and kicked the bag. The jade lay scattered on the grass.

"Is that the way it always is?" he asked. "You hunt for truth and you get a booby prize. You find something that is not the truth, but take it because it is better than finding nothing."

She backed away. The man was plainly mad.

"That jade," she said. "There was another man who was hunting for the jade."

"You don't understand," he said.

She shook her head, anxious to be off.

"You said there was truth in mathematics. Is God a page of math?"

"I wouldn't know," she said. "I only stopped to see if I could help you."

"You can't," he said. "You can't help yourself. We had it once—that help of which all of us stand in need— and we lost it somewhere. There's no way to get it back. I know, because I tried."

"There may be a way," she told him softly. "There is an equation from a long forgotten planet…"

He half rose and his voice cracked and shrieked. "No way, I tell you. No wayl There was never more than one way and now it doesn't work."

She turned and fled. At the car she stopped and turned back toward him. He had slumped down again, but his eyes still stared at her, with a terrible horror in them.

She tried to speak, but the words clogged in her throat.

And across the space between them, he whispered at her, as if it may have been a secret that he meant to tell her.

"We have been abandoned," the ghastly whisper said. "God has turned His back on us."