The End: A Story of Love and War in the Afterlife

By Paul Bryan Roach

U.S. Marine Captain Francis Xavier O'Rourke has a big problem: He is dying. Afghanistan, gunfire, and a helicopter crash have left him in pieces. Hospitalized and in critical condition, there appears a bright light at the end of a long tunnel…. When Francis visits the afterlife the concepts of heaven, hell, angels and demons initially seem confusing and at least fifteen degrees off of what he expected. Far from it being a beatific, peaceful, and dull plane of existence, he sees that life after death does not after all represent the end of the tumult and intrigue of the material world. There still are people to meet, choices to make, battles to fight, and the possibility of annihilation all over again. If anything, the ethereal world seems to be more intense than life in the material one. Francis falls in with his father who asks him to leave heaven and infiltrate hell as a double-agent; he attaches to a special forces unit; he is intrigued and courted by demons and others, and he meets a bold and lovely young woman named Deirdre who helps him understand and define who he wants to be, and why.

While on the surface The End is an action/adventure thriller with military and medical elements, underneath the surface it is a philosophical story, exploring questions unique to our species such as what might be the nature of death and suffering, the purpose of human endeavor, and the value or the meaning of life? Metaphysical, it fractures traditional Catholic dogma to abstract a novel perspective and presentation of God and the Devil, good and evil, heaven and hell, and of messiahs. It is a love story, as well, of God and man, parent and child, man and woman, and the kinship and bonds between comrades-in-arms.

Adventurous, raw, thought-provoking, and inspirational, The End weaves several story lines and multiple literary genres into one exciting ride which will surprise you and keep the pages turning until the story is complete. When it's over you'll miss the characters and perhaps you will think about some ordinary events in new, extraordinary ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781624885273

Book preview

Chapter 1 The Accidental Spirits

God and the Devil

Samael was flummoxed. I cannot fathom why you are giving up.

I’m not, Adonai replied. I am accepting our limits. Look, he added, I am not comfortable about the situation, either, but let’s face it, we simply cannot engineer our way out of this one. From here on out we only set the conditions. After a sigh and a pensive pause Adonai added, In the end it will be up to them.

Up to them. This was not what Samael wanted to hear. This was not it at all and it was, in fact, the crux of the problem between Samael and Adonai at this precise, historical moment. Up to them?! he shouted. Then softly he repeated the question, almost vulnerably, Up to them? That day, as the co-conspirators walked along the shores of what someday later would be named the Island of Mauritius, they strove to sort out an impasse more profound than any they’d ever faced.

The area teemed with vitality. As the saltwater gently lapped upon the sand, beetles, dragonflies, crabs, and birds kept busy on the shoreline. A fresh, warm ocean breeze caressed them. The inland’s verdant foliage breathed in the rich air and absorbed abundant tropical sunlight. Time passed.

Reluctantly, after a final, weighty consideration of a great many issues and their ramifications, Samael issued his famous condemnation, But they can’t do it.

Adonai respected Samael’s position but he countered it anyway, And neither can we.

Ultimately Samael may have been powerless to change Adonai’s mind, but he was quite determined to try to intercede. He felt the near-despair of a second-in-command, convinced of errancy in his superior’s thinking. What has gotten into you? Samael asked. "In all these millennia I have never heard such a depressed, defeatist attitude! We are so close! And you’re quitting now? Adonai, we nearly lost our heads petitioning to get Earth. Then it took us eons to invent biology. Eons!! Aagh! I was so frustrated; we were so frustrated! Do you remember how long it took us just to make DNA repair mechanisms? Do you remember that? We thought we were out of business back then. For the thousandth time we were almost certain we were at a dead-end. Crap, Adonai. But we got over it like we got over everything, and we developed it all. And it’s amazing! Look at our planet. Would you just look at it? Give up now… and for what; for what?"

Agitation overtook them. The gorgeous landscape offered no psychological comfort whatsoever. The exasperated Samael concluded his fervent response. Unbelievable, I cannot even believe I’m hearing this. This is so unbelievable.

Samael had moved beyond flummoxed to being severely pissed. Over the billions of years of their collaboration, this sort of argument between the two would crop up from time to time. Typically it would be over creative differences regarding this or that technicality. Of the two, Adonai was always the more intuitive, innovative, out-of-the-box thinker, whereas Samael was the real muscle behind the project–he carried out all of the tedious, laborious experimentation, maintained meticulous records, and over and over and over again he kept them on track and on schedule. They needed each other as do pistils and stamen, they loved one another like family, and they were both inwardly and most deeply disturbed about this current disagreement of theirs which, on the surface, may not have been much different than some of the ones of the past, but underneath, because of the intransigence of their respective positions this time, it was far more perilous.

Despite Samael’s incontrovertible logic — he has ever been a very convincing arguer — and despite the fact that Adonai couldn’t exactly articulate how he knew — a frustrating characteristic of his, belying an uncanny ability to sniff his way toward success — Adonai was by this point flatly convinced he had to do this, even if it jeopardized his best and only friendship in the universe. He was willing to make the bitter sacrifice because with respect to his own creative instincts, sooner or later everything in the world either had to be incorporated into the big picture, or get out of the way. Everything.

This whole experiment was Adonai’s idea originally. He’d awakened one night and noticed that neither he nor the other gods ever did anything — for as long as Time had been, or, perhaps Time was not even a useful concept, yet. But for as long as the gods had been together in space, nothing ever happened and there was no memory, anywhere, of things being different than they were at that very moment. This was of course ridiculous because somehow they had to have become whom they were, but no one could or cared to recall how things came to be so. For Adonai, once he identified it, the emptiness became increasingly disquieting. He brought his concerns up with the others and of them all, only Samael listened to him and agreed.

Only Samael believed in Adonai or Adonai’s ideas enough to get himself ostracized from the others for supporting those radical thoughts and plans. Adonai and Samael alone shared the peculiar awareness of the emptiness about themselves, and decided to do something about it. Only Samael thought that what Adonai was proposing — to create Life — could possibly be done. Only Samael spent the next four billion years working day and night to help Adonai call it all into existence.

Samael added, Where did you get this notion about the sapiens, anyway? What makes you think there is any basis for it to work? And, my friend, why would you bet everything on such a long-shot? Samael then corrected himself, In fact it’s a none-shot. I’d say that these Homo sapiens of ours do not have any chance of making this work.

Samael continued his argument, "We have made elements and minerals, molds, fungi, viruses, bacteria, plants, and animals. We made every kind of animal we could possibly think of: bigger, smaller, migratory, stationary; amphibians, reptiles, mollusks and mammals. We’ve made things that swim, things that fly, that do both, that do neither; herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, and who-knows what else. Patiently and meticulously, we’ve made scores of ecologies for these animals, and Adonai, we keep getting better at this. And, I’ll admit it, we thought with these hominids we might have been onto something; for instance, Australopithecus was really great, better still even was Ardipithecus — so gentle and sweet. But unfortunately that’s where it ended. After that they got mean.

Even though the sapiens’ he almost spit or hissed as he said it, frontal lobes are more developed and adroit, I am still convinced we’re barking up the wrong tree with them. Frontal lobes aren’t everything, you know. The whole lot are vicious and unstable; even the name for those ‘sapiens’ is a joke: While the breed is exceptionally clever — I’ll grant you that — far deeper than their cleverness, they are wild and emotional, and, I simply don’t trust them. They will never master themselves, Adonai; they’ll never become better than what they are right now. I can’t say it more clearly to you, brother, we are wasting our time with them!

Excellent points, Sama, like always, Adonai replied, just a bit exasperated because he’d suffered through this reasoning with Samael before. Only this time he was ready with a response to it, one that he delivered in an escalating voice, and you just might be right, but then again, try to answer this; answer me this, my fine fellow! We’ve stripped those humans of everything: All their fur, claws, and fangs; we’ve cut back on their eyesight, constitutions and physical strength, we left them with barely enough instinct to walk themselves in, out of a pouring rain. They’re puny, soft, and easily wounded. Every one of them takes forever and a day to gestate, their birth requires a perilous parturition, their children require a veritable age to raise, and the kids require massive amounts of instruction, guidance, and protection just to survive. I get it. They are indeed just as you say a phenomenally inefficient, volatile, vulnerable group, a group that we meant to serve as nothing more than a baseline species in order to help us clarify things. So absolutely yes, they should be dying out, right? But no, they are not. Why? I’ll tell you why. I’ve been watching them ve-ery carefully and now I finally understand. In his excitement Adonai shouted this, and even almost knocked himself off the point he was starting to make.

"Not only are the humans not dying out, in fact, they’re expanding and migrating all over the globe. It just doesn’t matter that they’re not built for anything specific, not for heat or cold, jungle or desert, mountain or plain, land or sea… and, Sama, it’s amazing, you know they’re living in all these places now! Thin-skinned and delicate, they’re somehow doing it. It is impressive. Yes, they are foolish and argumentative — and of all the other species on the planet the sapiens are the worst about it; but despite it, or perhaps through it, they learn how to cope with the world and how to live with one another. In fact that’s the type of problem that occupies them the most: learning how to coexist. I’ve witnessed some elaborate schemes they’ve established in order to do it, and in learning that trick they figure everything else out, too. Because of their abilities to cooperate, the sapiens in particular are accomplishing feats that none of the others ever came close to doing. They’re so inventive; I see their tools and the projects they undertake with them, I see their art and hear their music and the elaborate stories they tell just to entertain one another and to inspire their little ones. Of all the creatures we’ve made, Samael, this unlikely group is the one that spends the most time looking up into the stars or down into the soil, out into the sea or into one another’s eyes. This unlikely species, Samael, can create!

"I’ve wondered how that came to be, how does this group succeed? And what I’ve concluded is that by stripping them bare of all the usual features, they were then left to survive with nothing more than their principal essence — which I’ll call their ‘espiritus’ — and these ‘spirits’ that they’ve got are proving to be something stronger, more nimble, and more influential than anything else we’ve ever built. Their powers, their human powers, are something beyond biology, Sama. They involve peculiar sets of motivations like ‘love,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘faith,’ which define and drive them more profoundly than the standard ones that all the other animal species obey, like hunger, cold, and sickness.

"I know you really don’t believe it, but even if we are not certain of how we made them it is clear to me that these spirits are the most potent things we’ve ever made. Samael I tell you, that’s what we’ve been working toward all along, and that’s the true value of the sapiens! You may say I’ve become defeatist, but quite to the contrary my friend, in all our struggles I’ve never been this optimistic. The sapiens are a clever bunch and they know, they know their own value. Some of them even recognize that they’ve got this spirit and have an idea of just what they were built for."

Adonai had one more thing to say. Nevertheless, close as I believe we may be, I think we’ve got to take a step back now. I think — despite the risks and drawbacks of adopting a posture of restraint — I think we have to give them their own chance.

Ah, that’s crap, Samael retorted. We have, we do give them chances, but the Homo sapiens blow them! As often as not, their precious little ‘spirits’ simply twist. You get a few good humans up and running and they’re promptly ruined or snuffed out by the majority type. They do create, Adonai, but they destroy too! And watch out when they collaborate for the purpose of destruction. You cannot simply ignore this about the sapiens. Adonai, if you look only at the bright side you are not just being unscientific, in fact you’re deceiving yourself — and that’s not good. No offense, but the nasty, anxious, spiteful little imps are fundamentally flawed and doomed to fail; and worse than that, much worse even than that, mark my words they will bring down the rest of the Earth with them. We need to wipe them out while we still have the chance, because someday these little blips that can survive anywhere and kill anything will become a cancer upon our Earth; they will consume or destroy every single thing that you and I have worked so very hard, and for so very long, to create.

Samael saw the hurtful impact his biting response had upon Adonai, and even though he was very angry and somewhat frightened by the discussion, he capitulated a bit to his dearest and only friend, and he ventured: But Ado, if you really want to move further in this direction, if you simply must insist upon being so moon-eyed over these misfits, we can keep tinkering. But, we really better give those humans some modifications; they cannot handle so much freedom. Please, forget about this ‘free will’ stipulation of yours and let’s give their spirits some structure.

Sensing the conciliation and restraint of Samael’s response but still entirely convinced of his own reasoning and not in any mood at this point to be distracted from his intent, Adonai rejected the gesture — a point-blank rejection that was a first of its kind between them. No, Adonai explained, "that’s exactly the problem, Sama, we cannot. Haven’t we learned something profound through all the other experiments? We cannot do any more for them or else whatever help we try to give will become their new limits, just as it has for all the other things we’ve made thus far. We start futzing with their spirits and the same sorts of limitations will appear as before: When we gave animals feathers or fins, tusks or fur, it defined and ultimately, constrained them. We’ve been tinkering with the hominids for a while now, and this species, the animal that we stripped down the most and essentially left completely alone, has paradoxically proven itself to be the most able.

"It’s scary, but the project relies not on us anymore or on Earth’s majesty, plants or animals, but with its spirits. And of all the species on Earth, the fragile, anxious, headstrong and volatile sapiens quite frankly have the most potent spirits by far. Like it or not, Samael, this is where we have got to bank our efforts. And furthermore, we now have to change our approach: The sapiens’ spirits must be left alone and must remain, for better or worse, as products of their own creation, not ours."

Samael had been struck speechless; initially by Adonai’s uncharacteristic inflexibility, and subsequently by this novel twist in the argument that he’d not encountered before. To this last bit he gave a strained, quizzical look — so Adonai sped up to amplify that point. "As hard to accept as it may be, Samael, our Earth is not the end-game anymore. The point of Earth now is to serve as a place where humans can learn, interact, and ultimately, grow their spirits. Earth is to be a womb for their spirits. Just like mammals gestate their little fetus’s bodies, and out of only a single cell implanted into the womb they create an entire, formed organism, Earth must take the humans’ incipient spirits and do likewise with them, growing and developing them until they’ve grown into something nimble, agile, graceful and strong.

"In this process, the physical weaknesses and the character flaws you despise in the sapiens, the hardships they face, the very adversities which they must perennially overcome, these will actually be their greatest assets because confronting and overcoming their problems will serve to make their spirits stronger. And in some ways, the more difficulties, the better."

Fortunately for Adonai, Samael had no comeback for any of this and just stared at him, his mouth agape. So Adonai took this opportunity to continue unopposed onto the conclusion he’d been formulating for a long while but until now had not amassed the temerity to introduce. So, at this point, I believe what we need to do is to make a separate reality to capture these spirits, after they’ve ‘gestated’ — after their bodies fail, in other words — where the spirits can continue to exist and develop kind of like they are used to. We’ll superimpose this separate reality on Earth but it will be distinct from that material world: It will be an alternate, parallel, ethereal one. This should be a reality in which the spirits can continue to face adversities, and through them continue to grow even stronger and more capable; and from this separate existence, ultimately, they will be able to transcend completely and become like you and me. Then they’ll repopulate the heavens and carry on our work unto the farthest of universes. Adonai spit this all out as if it were rehearsed, as of course it had been many times over during numerous quiet, ponderous, solitary walks in preparation for this awkward moment, which he knew would someday come.

And just like we’ve planned, Samael, and just what we’ve worked towards for billions of years, our Earth will be the paradigm that generates innumerable Earths, and you and I can get old, retire, and at last someday lay ourselves to rest knowing that we have secured the future of life.

There followed an awkward pause which Adonai could poorly tolerate, so he carried on, "You and I cannot go on like this forever, making habitats one by one; you know we need to build something or someone that can carry the torch for us, that can make our processes self-sustaining, and in turn convert our one Earth into hundreds of thousands of them. Look at what happened with Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s Europa — we gave them incomplete efforts and got almost nowhere with them. My natural inclination, like yours, is to keep on developing; but I’ve had this epiphany and as scary as it is to let go, as scary as it is to trust all of our almost endless work to this curious race and to their accidental spirits, we have to do it, Samael. We have nowhere else to go with animals. We have come full circle. Have you noticed how similar these sapiens are to you and me? We have to have faith in what we have accomplished thus far; I believe if we do, they will take on the summum bonem and save our dreams."

Samael took all this in most carefully; he did so and his world’s construct seemed to crumble with it. It was obvious to him — after the initial shock — that Adonai was both thoroughly convinced of, and thoroughly committed to, drastically changing their entire approach. He could see it in the stony resolve of Adonai’s facial expression, and hear it in the adamant tenor of his voice: There would be no compromise on this issue. And, Samael was utterly convinced that his dear friend Adonai was screwing it all up.

The lines in Samael’s face deepened, and his eyes expressed an infinite despondency emerging from an equal and opposite conviction that the species in question was simply too imperfect, too labile to ever amount to a proper solution; that it would self-destruct and in so doing eliminate a lot more than just themselves, perhaps take down even the entire Earth — which he loved more dearly than any human could ever imagine. With this conversation, Samael began to experience a bitter sense of billions of years of effort and discovery lost. He tried to countenance the downstream consequences of failure — a universe without Life — a consequence which was simply too profound to fathom. It was horrible. Nausea overtook him. He stooped to vomit.

He then stared at Adonai for a long, long time. With his voice shaking from a despair deeper than any other despair experienced in the universe either before or since, he expressed his studied opposition to Adonai’s sanguine hopes and predictions. Samael replied, No, my dear friend, they will not. With the heaviest of hearts, and tears streaming down his cheeks he added, And I won’t be joining you in this madness.

Adonai looked severely pained, and Samael continued. "Your obstinacy and lack of respect for the facts as they are can be scientifically problematic and may even at times be a genuine nuisance, but your willingness to abandon our work — and to abandon me — hurts infinitely more than any honest failure ever has. You have broken my heart with your misguided optimism, Adonai, and I believe you’ve broken my spirit as well. This project is as much mine as yours, Adonai, and I will not let Life perish simply because an errant, seductive species has caught your eye. I will join you in your alternate reality, but it will be in the margins and in the shadows where I will wait. I will wait for the meaningless humans to manifest their true colors, and for you to come to your senses, so that some day we may find another approach and resume our work. But I warn you do not take forever, as these humans will wreck it all if you delay, and there are limits to everything, there are limits to the Earth’s resiliency, there are limits even to my patience. And we are getting older, brother; we do not have forever to complete this.

"Perhaps I may come to a solution first, Adonai, and if I do I will invite you back. But know that my solution will not come through the unbinding of these rotten sapiens of yours, or of their fickle spirits, and the sooner you rid yourself of such mistaken notions as you’ve expressed tonight, the better!"

With this they sadly parted. The brilliant, sparkling, fecund ocean continued to present wave after wave upon the shore, while the lush and burgeoning forest alongside teemed with activity and with creatures of every stripe, all of them — in the water, the air, on the land — engaged in the life which the brothers had provided for them, fully gifted in the joys and sorrows, but unaware of the extent of their own uniqueness or significance. Samael laid himself upon the beach and wept bitterly for many years. Adonai changed neither his mind nor position, but struck out on his own.

Chapter 2 Reunion

Messiah’s Pub

The pub should never have been aboard a warship. Fran ambled into it, neither believing his eyes nor able to conceive of an explanation that might unify the recent events. Nothing today made sense. As a starting point, though, he thought it just might do.

This pub, like so many others, was dark and smoky enough that upon entering and until one’s eyes had adjusted a person could barely make out its chairs, tables, and even its dimensions. That which Fran could immediately discern was a fairly narrow room with a bar and barstools on his right, small tables in front, and wooden booths on the left, a juke box playing an album he faintly recognized, "The Buena Vista Social Club," short ceiling fans spinning languidly, and another set of booths and tables beyond the far reach of the bar.

Fran did feel like a complete stranger, but felt also as if somehow he had landed into a sympathetic kind of place. He was unsure if his entry into the bar went completely unnoticed, or alternatively if it were quietly registered by every person there. For their part, the patrons seemed to carry on unperturbed. It was flight ops topside, and so every few minutes the pub’s calm ambiance was shattered by an incredibly loud and penetrating clanking and spinning of the aircraft catapult which was located directly overhead; the massive noise of it transmitted efficiently through the metal decks and bulkheads of the ship, as the teams of people just above launched fighter planes off its steel flight deck into the blue sky, and recovered them from it.

Fran took notice of what was on tap. Beyond that, he saw flickering yellow candles on the tables with more of them spaced periodically about the wooden paneled walls, and at the far end, punctuating the atmosphere, he saw a crackling fireplace with a couch and chairs. Wait a minute — A fireplace! he said to himself. He proceeded slowly through the comfortable obscurity to find an empty seat located at the corner of the bar. Guinness, he ordered, and he leaned forward to whisper, but I’ve no idea how to pay for it.

Ah no worries, Sir, the bartender replied. This one’s on the house.

Behind the bartender and above the ancient mirror Fran saw a maroon wooden shield with a golden border and what looked like a timber wolf painted on the center, and beneath it were some words written in golden paint on an oaken board, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.

Thank you.

You’re welcome, the bartender said with a wink. With the wink Fran suspected his arrival was no surprise, at a minimum, to the man behind the bar. As people often initially do, Fran had faced toward the bar and away from the room, sitting with ears wide open and casting furtive glances to left and right. Once there was a beer in hand and some of it down his throat he surreptitiously did an about-face, the better to take in his surroundings.

By that time his eyes had adjusted. He saw there were about a dozen booths and perhaps ten more tables throughout the bar; all of them had at least someone in them, and most were fairly full. Somewhere there must have been a kitchen as about half of the people were busy eating. The bar spanned between a third and half the length of the room. The fireplace was about fifty feet away from the front door and located at the far end of the space, and to the left of the fireplace was an empty screen still on its tripod, probably used for projectors and presentations. Most of the people in the place were male, but not all. There were a few women who looked like WWII British Auxiliary Air Force, and two others who looked like U.S. Army nurses from a Korean War Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH. Everyone was dressed in uniform, but none seemed alike; in fact, on closer inspection, almost no two uniforms seemed to be the same. At the table next to him sat a most curious bunch of characters, judging by how they looked and because of the strange things they said.

Ah now, zat was a good one he overheard one of the characters say, I wish I could have kicked ze bucket in a manner like zat!

Like what, precisely? asked another.

"Like my brother! Although my own exit as you know was très galant, still I admire that of mon frère." he replied.

It was hard to tell if he’d gotten himself a bit tipsy, or if he was simply a gentleman of an exuberant nature. Or perhaps both. Fran surmised it was both. The man speaking was in his early fifties but still obviously physically vigorous and quite handsome in a fifties sort of way. He was carefully groomed, to be sure, with eyebrows and a mustache as precise and sharp as if it were absolutely necessary they should be so. His uniform was one Fran had not seen before. He dressed in black boots, grey slacks with a blue sash and a grey belt, and a white shirt laden with medals. He wore a legion of honor, which was red; and a Criox de Guerre, which consisted of a square cross with two crossed swords hanging from a ribbon of red and white, inlaid with a palm of silver. The assemblage was completed by a green and black patch in the shape of a shield on his left upper sleeve, green shoulder boards and red epaulettes. He comported himself with the panache of someone who owns most any audience he chooses, and he expressed his thoughts with an obviously French accent.

"My soeur and he were on vacation from our home in Lyon. They were walking along a parkway beside Mont St. Michel, she with her new baby in her arms. Such a lovely day it was. The church was nearing to close when some tourists — Americans, big, obnoxious Americans — when they come dashing past to see their precious destination before ze tides should roll in. Well, one of the oafs knocked my sister as he ran past… hit her so hard my soeur fell headlong into the low barricade, knocking the baby right out of her arms. It was going to fall to its death onto the rocks below! Mon frère, who had no children of his own, he saw what was happening as it transpired in front of us and quickly he jumped over to catch the baby which he did, and held it above himself as they fell, crashing onto the rocks. The baby it was saved, but my brother, mon frère, he suffered mortal wounds from ze impact."

The little audience wasn’t sure what to say to that; the amazing story held them speechless. One person there seemed insistent upon not being impressed. Well they wouldn’t have been ‘mortal’ wounds if he’d been treated at an American hospital --this was opined by the man next to the French one, who was sharing the cheese, hard salami, and crackers as he spoke. He was an American Marine smartly dressed in his Alphas: Khaki shirt and tie, olive green pants with an Eisenhower blazer and a khaki belt around the waist, and a chest full of campaign ribbons, probably from the WWII era. You Frogs —

Bah! the Legionnaire replied, you are jealous. You died of the gout.

The gout?! I did not. You do not die from ‘the gout’ the American protested. No one dies from ‘the gout.’ I mean, unless perhaps they’re in France. I died a normal, respectable death I’ll have you know. I was shoveling snow when —

You’re jealous Jacques announced quite flatly. Admit eet!

I am not jealous.

"You are! You are. How can you not be? It ees obvious! I would too be so jealous of my familee, of my frère, of my own heroic stories which are well known to all — my days as a first class Legionnaire, my tours as Capitaine in Algiers, in Laos, and of course my final and finest moments, in the Thirteenth Demi-Brigade of the First Foreign Paratroopers in Dienbienphu."

Ok, Jacques, I’ll admit it; my dying story isn’t so dramatic as your darling brother’s, or as yours but… But hey, where is your brother anyway? Why have we never met him?

This question wasn’t intended to change the mood but it did. He is not on our side, the Legionnaire sadly expressed. He is not on our side; not yet. He is on no one’s. He suffers from ze ennui."

An awkward pause abruptly seized the conversation, and Fran gradually tuned it out after that. It seems Jacque’s brother was one of those pesky atheists, one who would rather die a thousand deaths than admit to anything otherwise. He probably read too much Sartre, the Marine conceded in all seriousness, and with a bit of sympathy. Their table broke apart a bit afterward as everyone had seemed to be ready to move on, anyway.

After his first drink Fran shuffled through toward the back, passing patrons who were dressed in a variety of uniforms and flight suits and clearly engaged in their own matters; out of a nonspecific curiosity he moseyed toward the fireplace (of all things to have on a ship!) at the far end of the room. There he saw a small couch and two leather chairs facing a crackling hearth. On one chair, legs crossed, sat a sophisticated-looking gentleman dressed in faded, olive-green fatigues and dusty black boots dating back to the Korean War, who was casually engaged in a conversation with our French Foreign Legion officer of a few minutes ago. The Legionnaire was now reclining on the couch. The Frenchman seemed to be instructing the other gentleman on Dominic-Jean Larrey’s invention of the ambulance volante during the Napoleonic wars. At some point the sound of the other gentleman’s voice caught Fran’s ear, and it was strangely familiar to him. The very last notion on Fran’s mind at this point was that he should recognize anybody, anywhere, or that he could be the remotest bit connected with any detail to be found in this ship or on this sea. Hearing a voice he possibly knew took him completely unawares; half a second after that, when he realized to whom the voice belonged, he almost spit up.

His father!! It had to be his father’s voice! Fran snapped his neck and moved closer to the voice in order to look at its source. To his eternal wonderment he saw his Dad sitting there, by the fire, in a pub, on an aircraft carrier, rocking on the ocean. Impossible! He thought. Impossible!! He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Then again, he reasoned, all of this was impossible.

What an incredible rush it all was. By what seemed like the most random of events ever, Fran was standing in front of his Dad for the first time in many years. Since getting shot down in Afghanistan, Fran’s spirit had been impelled by a succession of events, rushed along as if caught in a current that was going to bring him wherever it was going to bring him, like it or not. Later he would try to better characterize that sensation; it was as if he were floating down a rapids, with some effort he might be able to keep his head out of water and his feet up, and by splashing his arms maneuver himself a little from side to side, but nothing, nothing was going to stop the underlying movement.

Recognizing his father was not difficult. Despite the years and the changes he still looked exactly himself, which was a lot like Fran’s own self, only with darker hair slightly peppered with grey, and with a frame that was just a bit more beefy. Oddly, he looked even a bit younger than Fran remembered him. Fran didn’t shout — he more or less erupted, Dad! And as the startled man stood up and responded Fran! the surprised son wrapped his father in an embrace, an embrace which he had not expected ever to be giving again.

It was the bookend to an earlier embrace, the first one given on that fateful, awful day when his dad originally delivered to the family the harsh news of his lung cancer. At that time, Fran clutched his father tightly while the terrible