Connections Between the Novels:
APPEARING LIVE AT THE FINAL TEST and UPSURGE
By John Teton
Upsurge tells of near-mortal anguish suffered by 15-year-old Leanna Fox as she has disappeared from her family the week between Christmas and New Year’s and fallen into what appears to be the center of the Earth, from where she can see lights in an inner sky reflecting the energy of communication between people on the planet’s surface.
Appearing Live at The Final Test tells of the fate of a first, prior universe in which four friends travel to that universe’s center on the night their world suffers a nuclear war. The friends are Msongo, a middle-aged Black news stand vendor who narrates the story; Nopali, an airline stewardess and aspiring singer, and Lyon, a marine radio mechanic (two younger people who are potentially lovers); and Nopali’s troubled 18-year-old friend Arielle. Near the end of the book, after the Creator causes the entire universe to collapse under the weight of the suffering caused by the warmongering waged by intelligent life, the principal characters pray for another world in which they hope intelligent life will have a better chance at survival.
In the present universe, some of the reincarnated souls who have achieved angel status take on responsibility for relating the story of the previous universe to those on the verge of birth, seeding the unconscious memories of each human being in the womb with that tale as a caution and beacon to alert souls to the need to work for peace and justice during their embodied lives. (The notion of an embryo learning the world’s wisdom goes back at least eighteen centuries and is referred to in the Babylonian Talmud and later re-told in the Humphrey Bogart film Key Largo. The same legend serves as the basis for John Teton’s animated film B’raesheet.)
The two novels are structured so that the reader will discover intricate connections between them only after completing the second book, regardless of the order in which they are read. Clues to the interconnections are seeded in the books’ endings, so that, while each will feel complete on its own, reading both will trigger a recognition of the additional dimension in which they are integrated.
The interweaving results from the four main characters from Appearing Live having been reincarnated in the present universe as the four main characters featured in Upsurge. Lyon and Nopali become Ty and Gwen, and the soul who had been Arielle becomes their daughter Leanna. Msongo was reborn as Leanna’s best friend Candace.
Like all of us, these characters have no conscious memory of what they experienced in the womb; however, in dreaming that can change. Throughout the week of Leanna’s ordeal, Candace finds herself needing to go to sleep. She doesn’t understand this intermittent compulsion, but once asleep, she regains consciousness of her and Leanna’s previous identities, and in their shared dreaming, she recounts to Leanna again the story of the first universe, as she had done in the persona of the angel Msongo when Leanna was in utero almost sixteen years earlier. She relates the story, chapter by chapter, throughout the week, hoping to turn Leanna around and to enable her to be reborn from her spiritual limbo.
Msongo/Candace knows that the world, jeopardized by the destructive actions of some human beings, can only be saved from itself by the positive actions of others—not all others, but enough to swing the balance in favor of peace and justice—and that therefore the action of single individuals can have tremendous importance.
When Leanna’s father, Tyler, finds himself feeling like he’s rising above the earth while attempting to contact Leanna telepathically, he is drawn toward the spirit of Msongo/Candace, who at that moment was nearing the end of the week-long telling of the story of the first universe to Arielle/Leanna. Msongo/Candace counsels Ty as to how to locate his daughter’s soul, and subsequently bids Leanna good-bye, advising her to listen to Ty when he finds her, and to do everything in her power to overcome her despair and return because her help as well as her presence will be sorely needed for many reasons. Thus an angel employs the power of the memory of the first creation to help spark the salvation of the second, to transcend the zombied paralysis of resignation and to become fully alive in this final test.