As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship. Like every apprenticeship, it requires time and effort. He who has reached the end of his training realizes that the differences between things or between events are no more important than those recognized by someone who knows how to read, when he has before him the same sentence, reproduced several times, written in red ink and blue, and printed in this, that, or the other kind of lettering. He who does not know how to read only sees the differences. For him who knows how to read, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. This does not mean that he will not suffer. Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other.
Judy was coughing up blood again. He held a tissue to her mouth, watched it darken, then replaced it with another. For a moment, as her stomach rose and fell beneath the covers, everything was quiet. From out of the lull she asked, “Is it May already?” and then, “Who brought the garden inside?” and in a sunburst of intuition he realized that she saw the seven stained tissues on her bedside table as roses, the same lustrous red as the apothecaries their mother used to cultivate when they were kids. It was another five minutes, another handful of roses, before one of the tissues came out speckled a watery pink. At last she was able to close her eyes and rest. He left her to her garden dreams, slipping out into the daylight.
A half hour later, distributing his leaflets, he came to a house where a dog began to bark, its chest concussing against a frosted glass door. For an instant he was eight years old again and Judy nine, facing the old bull mastiff that used to lunge at them from behind Mr. Castillo’s chain-link fence, listening as he called out, “Max! Leave those children alone! Heel!” Except that Mr. Castillo’s dog’s name was not Max, it was Duke, maybe, or Buster.
Was there anyone else who had been there and might remember, anyone but him and Judy?
He backed away and continued down the block.
Every day was the same: young parents and vacationing students, the elderly and the unemployed, all answering their doors to him with open stances and quizzical eyes, as if he might be delivering something they would only then realize they had always secretly desired. Then he would ask them if they had heard the Good News, and their postures would stiffen, their features grow hard. God was a word that embarrassed people. He knew missionaries who were able to use it without sounding pushy or insincere, letting it shine in their voices like some small, familiar object, not the sun but a nail head, a key ring, a strand of silk—something that reflected its light rather than generated it. But he was not one of them. He had seen too many people retreat behind their faces as he spoke, and now he found it nearly impossible to open his mouth without steeling himself for rejection. God—his timidity had stripped all the grace from the word. So instead it was Good News he said. And he smiled like he thought a man filled with peace might smile. And though most of the people he met were polite enough to accept a leaflet from him, he had learned not to expect anything more.
Only twice that day did someone actually engage him in conversation. The first was a woman who saw the Bible he was carrying and asked, “Jehovah’s Witness?” and when he shook his head asked, “Mormon?” and when he shook his head again asked, “Methodist?” When he told her the name of his church, Fellowship Bible, she pointed to herself and repeated, “Methodist,” shutting the door. The second was a man who took a flyer and read it out loud: “ ‘1 John 1:5: This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’ ” He was one of those people who did not fold or crumple the page but laid it gently on a table, as if he were attempting to balance a coin on the surface of a puddle.
“What’s your name, son?” the man asked.
“Ryan Shifrin, sir.”
“Ryan Shifrin. I want you to promise me something. Can you do that?”
“I think so.”
“I want you to promise me that you’ll never darken my door again. And I want you to promise me that you’ll tell your buddies to stay away, too.”
It was not the promise Ryan had been hoping for, and at the end of a long day of no thank you’s and not interested’s, he had just enough billy-goat tenacity to ask why.
“Because you’re making a grand mystery out of total horse-shit,” the man answered, “and don’t get me wrong, that’s your constitutional right as an American, but I resent you bringing it into my home.”
What could Ryan say? That he apologized? That he understood? It was Judy who had always been the diehard, the true believer, praying that it would not snow on her birthday, that Wheaton College would pluck her from its waiting list, that the cancer would not spread to her lungs and afterward, when it did, that her suffering would be bearable, but always and only if it be God’s will. Their shared childhood of bedtime prayers and family devotionals had carried Ryan to church nearly every Sunday of his life, but it had carried Judy much further, into a world of praise music, revival meetings, and mission work. She was a Christian by constitution, whereas Ryan was merely a Christian by inertia. Or he very nearly was, he would have been, if not for the occasional moment waiting at a stoplight or pushing a shopping cart with a floating front wheel through the supermarket when, despite the fact that everyone was in pain and everyone was dying and no one knew what they were or where they came from, an inexplicable sense that it would all be okay washed over him like a wave. It was the same feeling that Wittgenstein had found so curious, the one that had convinced him of the existence of God. A hint, a clue. Not a burning bush or a disembodied hand marking out letters in plaster, but the slight breeze He left as He brushed past the world.
That evening, when Ryan got home, Judy was still sleeping. A new stain had appeared on her pillow, a spatter of blood, already dried to rust along the edges. He could hardly bear to see it there, grazing her lip like the plume of a long red feather.
He cradled her head while he replaced the pillow, trying not to disturb her, but she woke anyway. She blinked and recognized him, gave a teetering smile. “Ryan,” she said, “you’re back.”
“That’s right. Home again.”
He pressed his hand to her cheek. This simple moment of ordinary respiration, with her breath warming the backs of his fingers—he knew that it would not last.
She asked, “How were the leaflets today?” and when he groaned, she laughed, a thin puff of air she expelled through her nostrils to keep herself from coughing. The attempt did not work. It was as if she reserved all her energy for these explosive hacking noises that left her completely exhausted. Quietly, between coughs, she said, “Well, thank you for doing it anyway, going to all those houses for me.”
“A promise is a promise.”
“Oh, poor Rye-rye. Just look how it wears you out.”
“It’s your life, I’m just keeping it warm for you.”
This was how they spoke to each other these days, not like brother and sister but newlyweds pretending they had already grown old together. It was a beautiful service, wasn’t it, dear? The finest. You and your suit and me in my dress. Yes, you never looked lovelier than you did in that dress of yours. It had started when their parents died, their father barely a year after their mother, and settled into habit once Judy got sick. Soon, Ryan went to the kitchen to prepare some of the vegetable broth that was the only food she could stomach anymore. He fed her with one of the antique silver spoons they had inherited from the family. Afterward he cleaned her face and neck with a damp washcloth he heated in the microwave. She was already drifting back to sleep by the time he finished.
“Hey, Judy?”
“Mmm?”
“Mr. Castillo, do you remember? The old guy who lived next door. What was his dog’s name?”
She thought about it for a second and murmured, “Trinket.”
That was the night he woke at two o’clock to the sound of retching. He rushed to Judy’s bedroom. She was coughing once more but with her lips closed this time, her cheeks bloating out again and again, as if she were blowing up a balloon, and when finally she opened her mouth, he saw that on her tongue she had produced something the size of a strawberry. Her face exhibited a look of astonishment and humiliation. Is this normal? she seemed to be asking. This can’t be normal. She spat the lump out of her mouth, and Ryan left to pack it in a bag of ice. For the rest of his life, whenever he remembered the night she died, he would wonder why he had believed he should preserve it. What befuddled reflex was he obeying? Why didn’t he phone the hospital first?
The paramedics who arrived not ten minutes later kept calling Judy “the crit.” “We’re on scene with the crit,” they said into their radios. “The crit is not responding to verbal stimuli. The crit’s pupils are fixed, pulse slow and even.” They picked her up, harnessed her to a stretcher, and told Ryan he should follow them to Mercy General. No, he could not ride in the back of the ambulance. They were sorry. Regulations. So he grabbed his keys from the dresser and ran outside and started the car. The ambulance seemed to float through the streets like a toy, a die-cast racer propelled along a plastic track. Gradually he fell behind, watching the blue lights lend their flicker to more and more distant buildings, until, abruptly and inexplicably, at the corner of Burlington and Court, the driver began obeying the traffic laws. By the time the hospital came into view, Ryan was no more than half a minute behind them, but when he pulled into the emergency room’s entrance bay, the paramedics were already sitting on the ambulance’s back fender as if they had been there all night. One was scuffing the pavement with his shoe, the other upending a thermos into his mouth. When Ryan got out of his car, they met his eyes and shook their heads at him. And so the first part was over, and he could begin teaching himself not to remember.
It was a year later that the light began.
Ryan was scorekeeping for a youth basketball game at the church the night it started, operating the board from a table at mid-court. In the last seconds of the fourth quarter, one of Fellowship’s boys attempted to dunk the ball and dashed his hand against the rim, a blow so violent that the backboard clanged on its springs. The noise continued to reverberate even after the final buzzer sounded. Beneath the basket the boy was hunched over. Inquisitively, as if the pain had simply made him curious, he bent his wrist, and from inside, where the tendons fanned apart, it began to shine, a hard surge of light that turned his glasses into vacant white disks. He winced and said, “Aw, Christ.”
At first Ryan assumed the glare from one of the lamps in the parking lot must be sliding through the stained-glass window, casting a peculiar incandescence over the boy, one that just happened to be concentrated on his injury, but the brightness followed him as he staggered across the floor to the sidelines, crumpling like an animal onto the bench. A few of the other players, Ryan noticed, had glowing white bruises on their arms and legs. The visiting team’s coach wore a circle of light around his left knee, the bad one, the knee with the wraparound brace. Ryan thought something must be wrong with his vision. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, opening them to see dozens of other people, in the bleachers and on the court, blinking and rubbing their own. What was going on?
Driving home he passed a traffic accident on the highway. A car had flipped over onto its roof, and in the front two bodies were hanging from their safety belts, glowing like pillars of fire. The light was no illusion. Ryan stopped his MP3 player and dialed through the broadcast band. The first few channels were following their programming guidelines, airing music or commercials, sermons or station ID stingers, but eventually he found a community radio show that occupied the thin sliver of airspace between an oldies station and the local public radio affiliate. “And I’m sorry,” the host was saying, “but, you know, this is some weird business we’ve got going on here at the Reggae Hour. For those of you who’ve just tuned in, Tony, my engineer, has this toothache on it looks like—what?—his right incisor. Right incisor, Tony? His right incisor. And it’s shining like a lightbulb, a bite-size effing lightbulb. A Christmas light! I do not lie to you, ladies and gentlemen. I do not lie.”
So Ryan was not crazy.
At home, he immediately turned on the television and sat watching the news until he fell asleep, and then again when he woke up. He could hardly do anything else.
The Illumination: who had coined the term, which pundit or editorial writer, no one knew, but soon enough—within hours, it seemed—that was what people were calling it. The same thing was happening all over the world. In hospitals and prison yards, nursing homes and battered women’s shelters, wherever the sick and the injured were found, a light could be seen flowing from their bodies. Their wounds were filled with it, brimming. The cable news channels showed clip after clip to illustrate the phenomenon. There was the footage, endlessly rebroadcast, of the New York City mugging victim saying, “It hurts right here, and right here, and right here,” touching the three radiant marks on her neck, shoulder, and breastbone. There was the free-for-all at the hockey match, one lightning flash after another bursting from the cluster of sticks and uniforms. There was the fraternity party at which the pledges had taken turns punching through sheets of glass, leaving their hands sliced open with glittering, perfectly shaped gashes. And those were just the images Ryan could not shake, the ones that haunted him when he closed his eyes in the shower to wash the shampoo from his hair. Over and over again he watched soldiers burning out of their injuries, footballers flickering through their pads and jerseys. He watched children with sacklike bellies basking in a glow of hunger. Occasionally, the light seemed to arrive from a distinct direction, like the sun slanting through a gap in a curtain, but often it simply infused whatever aches or traumas afflicted people. At such times, it had the appearance of a strange luminescent paint layered directly over their skin. They might have been angels in an El Greco painting.
That was the beginning. For a few months, church attendance spiked. Some of the seats at Fellowship Bible were taken by visitors, some by the Christmas-and-Easter set. It didn’t matter—each new face showed the guilt, fright, or confusion of someone confronted by a game whose rules had suddenly changed. After a while, though, when it became clear that the world was not ending, or not ending soon, and everyone began to accept that pain now came coupled together with light, the congregation diminished. Each Sunday, fewer and fewer people were required to sit in the folding chairs the ushers had arranged behind the pews, until finally the chairs were taken up and put away, wheeled into the closet on their long metal platforms. Again the church directory was crowded with photos of people who turned up only once or twice a year.
Ryan wished he could permit himself to be one of them, but it was impossible. There was someone who was watching him, who needed him there in her stead, someone who whispered an almost imperceptible thank you each time he walked through the door, her voice no louder than a breath, scarcely strong enough to make a candle flicker. It was for her sake that he was still distributing the leaflets. He devoted a few hours a day to the job, circulating from one neighborhood to the next so that he walked down every block on his route at least once a month. The church paid him for it—not much but enough, or enough for now. Enough along with the insurance settlement. Enough along with his investments and the money he had saved during his brokerage days. “For the Lord God will illumine them,” the new leaflets read, from the final chapter of Revelation, singular, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, and he marched from house to house with a sheaf of them in his leather satchel. When no one was home, he would take a leaflet from the sorry-we-missed-you stack, scroll it shut, and tuck it into the doorjamb, next to the campaign flyers and the pizza offers. When someone answered, he would smile as if he understood why he was smiling and ask the question he always asked: “Tell me, have you heard the Good News?” He abided by business hours, which meant that there were always more sorry-we-missed-you houses than have-you-heard-the-Good-News? houses. In the summer it was mainly schoolkids he saw, in the winter retirees and homemakers. And there were the invalids, too, of course, a surprising number of cripples and terminal cases, as if on every block two or three houses had been seized in the jaws of some great machine and reduced to stone and timber. The old men with prostate conditions. The diabetes patients with ulcerated feet. The arthritis sufferers with swollen joints. All of them were illuminated with the telltale signs of their own infirmity. “Sorry about your heart,” Ryan wanted to say, or, “Sorry about your legs,” but he was still getting used to the etiquette of the situation. Was it discourteous to admit that you could see a person’s sickness playing out on the surface of his body? What if it was a form of sickness that had always previously been hidden?
One afternoon, at a yellow brick house with a lopsided magnolia dropping its leaves in the yard, a boy who had clearly been beaten opened the door. The collar of his shirt was frayed, and a scab was beginning to heal on his chin. He wore his glasses too close to his eyes, which gave him the downcast look of a dog in a trench. Ryan had the impulse to pick him up and carry him away. No, no, this won’t do, he wanted to say. This won’t do at all, but instead he smiled at the boy and asked him if his parents were home. The boy held up a finger—just one second—and sprinted into the darkness of the house. A bruise with squared-off edges radiated through the seat of his pants.
Ryan switched the satchel to his other shoulder and looked around as he stretched his muscles. A chain of roots arched across the lawn, appearing every so often as a ropey brown bulge in the overgrown grass. A patch of concrete was crumbling at the end of the porch. When the boy reappeared—alone—he handed Ryan a book. Ryan had never become a father, had never even done any babysitting, and talking to children, he always felt a strange and powerful foreignness emanating from their delicate little skulls, as if he were trying to communicate with someone who was secretly much cleverer and more intuitive than he was, attuned like the elephants to the hum of some mysterious subsonic tone. He riffled through the book’s pages.
“What’s this you’ve got for me?”
The boy waved him away.
“Yes, this is a nice book. A nice book indeed. Here, you can have it back now.”
The boy recoiled. Barely a second had passed before he slammed the door.
When Ryan knocked, no one responded. It seemed to him that a choice had been made on his behalf. For some reason, the boy had given him the book; for some reason, he wanted Ryan to keep it. He put it in his satchel.
Later, at home, skimming through the pages, he discovered a long sequence of tiny handwritten love notes, each one printed in the same slanting blue ink. I love watching you sit and crochet while I’m doing the bills or clearing the photo banks. I love those old yearbook pictures of you. I love it when you watch me shave and laugh at the faces I make. I love how, when we come home from a bar, you’ll hang the clothes you wore in the garage until the cigarette stink evaporates.
Shaving and cigarettes and old yearbook photos—so obviously the notes had not been written by the boy himself. Maybe the journal belonged to his parents. Or maybe he had found it at a flea market or garage sale. One thing was certain: it had not been treated with any particular care. The cover was scuffed, the flyleaf spotted with coffee or Coca-Cola. There were scorch marks on a few of the pages, as if it had been plucked from a bed of embers just before it could ignite.
I love sitting outside on a blanket with you, my bare foot brushing against yours. I love how embarrassing you find your middle name. I love your Free Cell addiction. I love how irritated you get at smiley face icons, or, as I know you love to call them, “emoticons.” I love the way you’ll hold a new book up to your face and fan through the pages to inhale the scent. I love wasting an afternoon tossing stones off the pier with you. I love seeing your body turn into a mosaic through the frosted glass of the hotel shower. I love the fact that you know all the lyrics to “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” I love it when you fall asleep while I’m driving, because it lets me feel like I’m protecting you. I love the way you’ll call me in the middle of the day to apologize for the littlest things.
That was all there was to the book, page after page of I love you’s, yet something about it was curiously beguiling. It was like the yellow window of a house casting its glow into the darkness as Ryan took one of his two-in-the-morning insomnia walks, a mystery oriented around the simplest of questions. Who was that family moving around behind the glass? How long would they remain awake? Would their love for each other ever sour into indifference, into hostility? And would anyone even notice if it did? How many times could you repeat the same three words before they tumbled over and began to mean the opposite of what they said?
I love you.
The Good News.
Oh Heavenly Father.
After Ryan finished reading the journal, he set it on the sideboard. He could always return the book to the boy’s house later, he thought, but somehow, as the months passed, he never did. He kept working for the church, knocking on doors with his satchel and his flyers. He would walk for blocks and blocks sometimes with the shadows of the clouds coasting over him as if he were an open pasture where a puddle pierced with grass had formed beside a leaning fencepost. The rhythm of his stride made it easy to lose himself in meditation. Over and over again he found himself waking from reveries whose course he could barely follow. He was thinking about how rarely his body had failed him, how different two lives could be. He had always been healthy, had never been accident-prone, and aside from a poison ivy rash when he was in Boy Scouts and an abscessed tooth when he was twenty-three, the debilitations of sickness and injury were something he barely knew. It was not until Judy got cancer that he came to understand how illness could diminish a person and reveal her as she truly was. Sometimes he would dream that she was dying again, that he had heard her choking, had run to her bedside and watched her bring up that horrible strawberry of blood, except that the Illumination had already begun this time and her body was washed in a pitiless white light. Her pain was intermittent, like the sun flaring through a stand of trees seen from the window of a moving car, and when he finally came back to himself, he was surprised to find that it was not a dazzling spring day when he was six and she was seven, and they were not buckled into their dad’s old Bronco as it whisked them down a wooded highway.
One morning, he was collecting another batch of leaflets from the church when Pastor Bradley took him aside and suggested he think about volunteering for their next mission trip. “Hear me out,” he said. “Don’t dismiss the idea so quickly. You’re perfect for the job,” and then came the words that made Ryan feel as if he were tipping over inside himself, falling through the unbearable emptiness of his years. “A forty-five-year-old man. Never married. No kids, no parents, no siblings. It seems to me you have very little to lose.”
There he stood with the heat rising slowly to his face. “I’m forty-two.”
“Mmm–hmm, mmm-hmm,” the pastor said, and he rested a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Tell me, don’t you think it’s time you gave your life over to something bigger than yourself?”
At first, Ryan found mission work difficult. The hotel rooms with their loamy beds and broken thermostats. The hospitality houses with their pet dander and overbuttered food. The forced camaraderie and the lack of solitude. After a few years, though, he grew accustomed to the food and the company, if never to the hotel rooms, and began to take pleasure in his duties. Gradually he developed a reputation for his thoroughgoing nature, his quiet sense of responsibility. The other missionaries noticed his reluctance to testify during prayer meetings but attributed it to the modesty of his character and the hushed power of his faith. They failed to see the truth, which was that he had—or seemed to have—the religious instinct but not the religious mind-set: his intuition told him that everything mattered, everything was significant, and yet nothing was so clear to him as that life presented a riddle to which no one knew the answer. But ultimately, to his surprise, evangelism was a job like so many others, where it did not matter what you believed, only what you did. A good thing, since he had never been exactly sure what he believed. He believed in holding on. He believed in keeping up. He believed in causing as little trouble as possible, which meant, he supposed, that he believed in squeaking by. He believed in English Breakfast tea and egg-white omelettes. He believed in pocket watches and comfortable shoes. He believed in going to bed at a reasonable hour. He believed in exercising three times a week. He believed there was a mystery at the center of the great big why-is-there-anything called the universe, and that it did not speak to us, or not in any language we could understand, and that it was an insult to the mystery to pretend that it did. He believed nevertheless that his sister was watching him from somewhere just out of sight, that even if her affection for him had died along with her body, her attention—her interest—had not. He believed that his life would make sense to him one day. He believed there was more light, more pain, in the world than ever before. He believed that the past was better than the future would be.
For his rookie post he had been sent to Seattle, the kind of safe, prosperous city, with a healthy network of ministries and outreach programs, to which the church assigned people who needed to be eased into the work. From there he moved on to Chicago, and then to New Swanzy, Michigan. After that, every six months or so, he would find himself being transferred yet again, sometimes to the most blighted area of a large city—East St. Louis, North Philadelphia, Hunters Point in San Francisco—sometimes to a fading farm town in the Plains or the Mississippi Delta, some small cluster of fields and houses strung together by a single-pump gas station and a couple of local businesses, one a grocery store with a sign that read STORE, the other a restaurant with a sign that read RESTAURANT.
The pastor would call him aside and say, “Shifrin, you know where we could use a man of your skills?”
“Where’s that?”
Seeley Lake, Montana. Or the Vine City neighborhood of Atlanta. Or Barlow, Mississippi.
And off Ryan would go, packing his bags and leaving his forwarding address with the secretary at Fellowship Bible. He knew evangelists who liked to talk about their feeling of backward homesickness, that overpowering sense of estrangement that alienated them from their friends and families and drove them into the world to spread the Gospel. Maybe, Ryan thought, he had developed his own variation of the disorder. No, he was not troubled by homesickness, of either the backward or the forward sort. He had grown used to the itinerant life, though, and no longer missed his old rootedness. What was home to him? What did it have to offer? If he had a home at all anymore, it was not a where but a when. Home was thirty-five years ago, when his parents and his sister were alive, and his bedroom walls were plastered with football posters, and his days were marked by triumph or defeat according to whether or not Becca Yeager had spoken to him at school.
He sensed that the church was grooming him for something. Seven years had passed since Pastor Bradley coaxed him into volunteering. Seven years of reflection, seven years of wandering. Seven years of trying to look through the sickness he could see in people’s bodies to the sickness the Bible said lay in their souls. Every few months he was posted to a new city where his colleagues would ask him to try his hand at a different brand of missionary work. The radio ministry, the literature ministry, the church-planting ministry. It was obvious to everyone where his talents lay—he was suited to literature, not to church-planting, and certainly not to radio. No matter how chancy the neighborhood, he could walk its streets with a stack of pamphlets and spend the day safely emptying them from his hands. He could explain the messages they contained in words that were, if not convincing, then at least clear and precisely shaded. And when they had fallen out-of-date, he could rewrite them, a task he found intimidating until he realized that preparing a religious pamphlet was simply a form of collage—splice a few Bible verses together with a story or two of sin and salvation and voilà: a lesson in scripture. His true gift, it turned out, was for titles. One night he happened to hear a discussion on public radio about great works of literature and their failed early titles, and though he was listening with only half an ear, he caught the speaker saying how poorly Gone With the Wind would have been received if Margaret Mitchell had allowed it to remain Tote the Weary Load, or A Farewell to Arms if Hemingway had persisted in calling it They Who Get Shot. He examined the pamphlets that were cataloged on the church computer. The first one to meet his eye was “The Power of Prayer.” Not bad, he thought, but what if it were “God’s Line Is Always Open”? Next came “You Can Be Free from the Bondage to Offenses,” which was—let’s face it—awful. He changed it to “Which Cheek? The Other Cheek.” And then there was “Salvation: The 5 Most Asked Questions,” which, after some thought, he recast as “Go to Hell! (and How Not To).” He had done enough tampering for one night, he decided. He printed fifty copies of each pamphlet and added them the next morning to the church’s literature stand.
That Wednesday, after the evening service, he discovered that the pamphlets were all gone, every last one of them. This was in Miami, at a busy Cuban church housed in the back of a thrift shop. It seemed possible that someone had simply stolen them for scrap paper. But the next day a team of missionaries took a boxful to distribute in the Art Deco district and returned to Ryan’s room in less than an hour. They had already given out the entire assortment, they reported, and afterward, walking home, had found fewer than half of them in the trash cans lining Ocean Drive. “What we’ve got here is the milk chocolate—no, the crack cocaine—of religious tracts,” someone said to Ryan. “I’m telling you, man, you should have gone into advertising.”
For the next three weeks, until another call came and he was appointed to Boxholm, Iowa, everyone called him the Ad Man.
He had traveled the entire country during his seven years of service. He had visited tiny clapboard houses exiled at the ends of wooded roads. He had picked his way through hivelike clusters of bars and apartment buildings. He had driven through the countless nameless suburbs that went snowflaking out from big Midwestern cities, giant recurring patterns of green grass and smooth black asphalt. He must have been witness to tens of thousands of people, and over time he had formed an interest in the varieties of injury they displayed. He could have put together a book sorting their traumas into two separate lists on the basis of where they lived, one for the city and one for the country. A Comparative Taxonomy of Wounds. On any city street you could spot the pulse flares of impacted heels, in any city hospital the elongated V’s of stab wounds, while at any country fair, any minor-league baseball game, you would find skin cancer pocks like small clusters of stars, sprained knees like forks of lightning, dislocated shoulders like the torchlit rooms of ancient houses. People in the city exhibited the sickly luster of pollution rashes and the silver sparks of carpal tunnel syndrome, while in the country they wore the shimmering waves of home tattoo infections, the glowing white zippers of ligature abrasions. In the city you had your lungs and your stomach to distress you, in the country your skin and your liver, and everywhere, everywhere, there were the agonies of your head and your heart.
And yet somehow Ryan had escaped with barely a scratch.
He was convinced he had seen every disease imaginable, but one day he was in Brinkley, Arkansas, buying a bottle of water from a convenience store, when the girl at the cash register closed her eyes, planting her palms on the counter, and the entire armature of her skeleton showed blazing through her skin. Her lips shaped the numbers one, two, three, to the count of seventeen, until the pain had run its course and the light diminished.
She let the air out of her lungs and finished scanning his water bottle. Her eyes had the clarity of ice thawing in a silver tray. Nonchalantly she said, “That’ll be a dollar seventeen.”
Ryan was shaken. “Are you all right? Give me just a second—” The girl’s full name was printed on her badge: Felenthia Lipkins. “Give me just a second, Felenthia, and I’ll call the hospital.”
“It’s Fuh-lin-thia. Like Cynthia.”
“Fuh-lin-thia. Would you like me to call a doctor?”
“You said Felon-thia. Black girl working at the Superstop so I’ve gotta be a felon. Is that it?”
Her voice was salted with the cheerful testiness of someone who was merely pretending to be angry, and though he was relieved that she was feeling well enough to badger him, he never knew how to react in such situations. It was as if the claim that he had offended someone, no matter how spurious, tripped a set of switches in his head. Even if he realized he was being teased and that the appropriate response was to do some teasing of his own, he could only answer squarely, with gravity and embarrassment. “Look. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply… or to infer… to suggest that—”
“Relax, man. I’m just funnin’ with you.”
“Oh. Oh, all right then.”
The hot dogs revolved in their metal carousel. The drums of the frozen Coke machine made their ocean-in-a-seashell noise. Everything was spinning.
Ryan collected his water and headed for the door.
“Hey, what about that dollar seventeen?” Felenthia Lipkins called after him, and when he did an about-face she added, “Who’s the felon now?”
A week or so later, he was distributing leaflets in the parking lot of a cafeteria, watching the windshield wipers snap into place like flyswatters and fix the papers to the glass, when from behind him a voice said, “Excuse me.” He presumed the remark was addressed to someone else. As a rule, people avoided him while he was working. Some overburdened mother could walk outside with an armload of leftovers and three crying children at her legs, and still, if she spotted him near her car, she would linger by the building until he had moved on.
“Oh, I see how it is. Black girl says excuse me, and the white man won’t even answer.”
He swung around. It was her, Felenthia Lipkins, pronounced fuh-lin, not felon, the girl whose bones showed through her skin. She was standing with a little boy, no older than two, rubbing the luminescent blotch at the corner of his eye and repeating, “Yo, yo, what’s up?” to himself, as if he had just learned the phrase and didn’t want to forget it.
Felenthia cut her eyes at Ryan. “You’re the guy who thought he could leave without paying for his water, aren’t you?”
“And you’re the girl who hates white people.”
She nodded, impressed. “Touché. What are you doing with the flyers?” He handed her one from his satchel, and she read the verse printed at the top. “ ‘Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. Ecclesiastes 11:7.’ Well, that’s fine and all,” Felenthia said, “but you’re forgetting Ecclesiastes 11:8: ‘If a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all, but let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. All that comes is vanity.’ ”
“Wow. You know your scripture.”
“Preacher’s daughter,” Felenthia admitted, and she gave the kind of speedy little dilatory curtsey that could not be mistaken for anything but a joke. “You, though, I wouldn’t have guessed for a Christian type. Tan slacks, aftershave, gray hair in a side-cut. I was thinking businessman.”
“Well, in an earlier life, I was a stockbroker.”
“Uh-huh. And you made a billion dollars and stashed it away in the Cayman Islands and realized the hollowness of money so you resigned to devote yourself to—”
Which was when it happened again. She gasped, shutting her eyes, and her bones lit up. He could see them throbbing through her clothing, growing brighter with each pulse, every rib presenting itself to be counted. Her skull peered out from in back of her face. When she raised her hands to her cheeks, he saw her finger bones stacked on top of one another like the sunstruck windows of a skyscraper. Somehow she managed to support herself, though it must have been agonizing. The boy who was with her said, “Auntie Fen,” then turned it into a question, “Auntie Fen?” and tugged at her skirt.
Her knees pivoted and buckled. Ryan caught her just before she fell, holding her up by the arms. Together they waited for the episode to pass. He could not read his watch, so he measured time by the signal-circuit of a traffic light: two reds and a green, and then her pain surmounted some sort of peak and the brightness faded, lingering in a last flush of milky white. A hard sweat had broken out on her face. The boy was saying, “Auntie Fen, Auntie Fen, yo, yo, what’s up?” and a car was honking at the end of the aisle, and she tried to lift herself out of Ryan’s arms, but in the late-July heat that made the pavement ripple like a reflection in a pool of water, her legs kept keeling out from under her.
He waited until he was sure she had gained her footing before he let go. His work with the church had taken him to a thousand hospitals and nursing homes, so many that he frequently imagined the world was nothing but patients—there were recovering patients, and there were worsening patients, and there were patients whose time had not yet come. He had witnessed the effects of tuberculosis, anthrax, and malaria, of cystic fibrosis and viral pneumonia, Huntington’s and multiple sclerosis, lymphoma and dysentery. He had seen cancer after cancer, infection after infection, diseases that filled the body with bales of fluttering light and diseases that brushed lightly over the skin like snowflakes. Never before, though, had he witnessed something like this, a disease that confined itself so tightly to one system and filled it so uniformly, that blazed with such radiance and then vanished so completely. It was as if a firework had detonated in the shape of her skeleton. He could still see the afterimage on his retina. What was wrong with her, he wondered, what was she undergoing, and this time he could not stop himself from asking.
“A little indigestion,” she said.
“No, seriously, what just happened to you?”
“A touch of the flu.”
Clearly she wasn’t going to give him an honest answer. “Do you and your son need some help getting home?”
“Nephew. And I think we’ll manage.”
She pointed to the one-way street that ran past the cafeteria, where an apartment building was separated from the interstate by a spinney of pine trees. On either side of the walkway, rising from the grass, stood a pair of fluted concrete pillars, their lines meant to carry the eye to heaven, but the cement had fallen loose from them in chunks, exposing veins of black rebar that absorbed the sunlight and directed the eye inward rather than upward.
“That over there,” Felenthia said. “That’s us.”
Ryan watched her cross the road with her nephew, his great big steps and her tiny baby steps, until they reached the apartment building and disappeared behind a screen door. Then he returned to his satchel and his flyers.
That was the afternoon the pastor called him aside to tell him he was being transferred again. “Detroit. August first. Pack your bags, Brother Shifrin.” The first of August was only eight days away, and Ryan presumed he would not meet the girl again, but as it happened, he saw her once more before he left town.
He was riding with one of the other missionaries through Wheatley, a small agricultural community a few miles down the highway from their hotel, when they came to a stop sign across from a swimming pool. The sky was thick with tea-colored clouds, the kind that had a yellowing effect on the landscape. The trees and bushes stood motionless to the smallest leaf. Though it was barely noon, the insects were already intoning their night songs. The pool was not crowded, and Ryan was surprised to see Felenthia sitting at the end of the diving board, reading a magazine with her elbows on her knees. She looked wholly at ease, as if she had never suffered so much as a hangnail. The boy treading water beneath her had a glittering infection in his right eye. The other boy, who did a cannonball into the deep end while Ryan sat watching from the passenger seat, wore a fresh puncture mark, a luminous crater high on the shoulder plane of his back. Felenthia swatted at the air with her magazine. She might have been shooing mosquitoes. “Y’all fools quit splashing,” she said.
Ryan lost sight of her as his car pulled away. The next day, alone, he swung into the Superstop where she worked and found the gas pumps disconnected. Someone had nailed a sheet of plywood over the door, writing across it in big handpainted letters, CLOSED DUE TO VANDALISM, ROBBERY, AND THE “CROOKS!!” AT PATTERSON INSURANCE. He went over to the window and peered inside. The damage was considerable. Most of the shelves had been overturned. The microwave was missing its door. The cash register was lying busted in a pool of blank lottery tickets. The soda dispenser had been torn from its cords and hoses, staining the wall with plumes of dark brown syrup. The road maps and potato chips, Starlite mints and charcoal briquettes, had all been swept into a reef beneath the shattered glass of the freezers. Suddenly it seemed to Ryan that he had looked out over this same vista a million times before, as if he were a rich man and these broken machines every morning were the city that greeted him as he stood at his penthouse window. He found the feeling hard to shake.
Gradually he would forget nearly everything about Brinkley, Arkansas, just as he had forgotten nearly everything about the dozens of other small towns he had visited over the years, but for the rest of his life, every time he saw a skeleton chandeliering its way down a stand in a biology classroom, he would think of the girl whose bones fluoresced with pain. He never did find out what was wrong with her.
In the unseasonably warm October that followed Ryan’s fifty-sixth birthday, he received a letter from the Greater Council of Evangelical Churches thanking him for his fourteen years of service and asking him to give some thought to accepting a post in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, right in the middle of the 10/40 Window. He would be working in the literature ministry, the letter said, consulting with a team of African Christians who were translating the Bible into a local trading language called Dioula. “May God continue to bless you, Brother Shifrin,” the last paragraph read, “and may we ask that you give this matter your timely and most prayerful consideration.”
Prayerful consideration: that was the phrase that did it. It was one of his sister’s pet expressions, and no matter how often he heard it, it always seemed to ring with the sound of her voice.
Dear Lord, we come to You with prayerful consideration.
Well, I’ve given it some prayerful consideration, and I have to disagree with you there, Ryan.
Look, it failed the first time around, and the second time, too, so let me ask you, Dr. Bragg, with all prayerful consideration, why on earth would I put myself through chemotherapy again?
And so, because Ryan was willing to indulge the idea that there was a path laid out for him and it would be a mistake not to follow it, and because he knew what Judy would have done, he accepted the church’s invitation.
On his first day in Ouagadougou, he took a taxi from the airport to the hospitality house. The driver’s English was heavily accented, his words popping and rounding in on themselves like water pouring through a concrete pipe. Ryan’s brain lagged a few seconds behind in deciphering them, as when he asked what Ryan was doing in Burkina Faso. “Ah fume first of all?”
“Pardon?”
“The film festival, yeah?”
“Ah. No. I’m here on business. With the church.”
“The church. Christian, yeah? Not Muslim.”
“That’s right. Christian, not Muslim.”
The driver fell silent as a squadron of polished red and green motorbikes buzzed past him. Soon he pulled to a stop and said something about “the varieties of Heaven.” After a moment, Ryan was able to remodel the remark into, “The ride is over, sir.” His own misheard version of the words lingered with him, though, and as the months passed, he found himself considering their implications. What was Heaven, he wondered, and what were its varieties? He envisioned a system of countless Heavens, each assembled according to the desires of the person to whom God graced it. A Heaven of immaculate brushed metal planes. A Heaven of cheeseburgers and big-breasted redheads.
The Burkinabè were developing a new, more colloquial translation of the Bible, modeled after the Contemporary Living Version that had become so popular recently in America. Ryan’s colleagues worked with a swift good humor, completing ten to twelve pages a day. There was Souleymane Ouedraogo, a small, courtly man with the gentle speaking cadences and arched hairline of an economics professor; his wife, Assetou, who carried herself like a lamppost, with the rigid back and flexile neck of a woman who was so eager to articulate her thoughts that her body had evolved into nothing more than a structure to prop up her head; and then there was David Barro, barely out of his teens, an amiably bedraggled boy who always had crumbs on his shirt and smelled of the French bakery above which he kept his room. For Souleymane, Ryan imagined a Heaven of ocean waves the texture of long-haired mink. For Assetou, he imagined a Heaven of polite conversations in candlelit restaurants. David Barro, he was sure, would choose the Heaven he had already been given, a Heaven of good looks and youthful well-being and the aroma of bread baking forever in stone ovens.
Ryan was there to assist the three of them with the nuances of conversational English. Often his efforts to clarify some detail of the American vernacular amused them for reasons he did not understand, as when he attempted to explain a verse from the Song of Solomon with the words “making out, you know, heavy petting,” and they exchanged stares with one another, struggling to keep their lips twisted shut, then burst into spirited laughter. Little by little he forged a real friendship with them. The Christianity they practiced was colored by the animism that was their cultural heritage, just as his own Christianity, he was sure, was colored by his middle-class Western heritage, a heritage of—what? Good taste. Christmas gifts. Summer barbeques. But he was curious about their beliefs, and for the first time in his decade and a half of mission work, he did not reproach himself for adopting an anthropologist’s stance toward the subtleties of their faith. Often, after they had finished the day’s pages, he would join them for a drink, following them around the corner to a posh little bar with casement windows and shea-wood tables. Ryan would quiz them: Did the people of Burkina Faso believe that animals had souls? What about plants, stones, rivers, houses? And if they did have souls, were they capable of suffering? Could the Earth itself suffer? If we wounded it gravely enough, would it burst into light? No, of course not, David Barro would answer, chuckling lightly, or, Yes, of course, Souleymane would say, shaking his head at Ryan’s credulousness, and in return they would ask him various questions about America—how many guns he owned or what his local theme park was named. Every so often, the waiter whose job it was to collect the bottles from the tables would come by and slip their empties into the large front pocket of his apron, striding away with a heavy clinking sound.
For the first time since he was a teenager, Ryan felt the joy and surprise of discovering a whole new set of friends. He looked back fondly on the days when he had to force himself to rehearse their names so he wouldn’t forget them. Souleymane. Assetou. David Barro.
The three of them were working on the final chapters of Ezekiel the day the bomb propelled a thousand spurs of metal through their bodies. Ryan was returning from a coffee run when it happened. He stood across the street from the building they all shared, waiting for a gap in the stream of cars and bicycles, and a heavy percussive boom washed over him, and he flinched. At first, he imagined the sound was a lightning strike. The blast was so loud that it temporarily interrupted his hearing—only slowly did the din of horns and engines filter back into the silence. When he lifted his head, he saw a black, almost liquid smoke billowing from the windows of his office. Horrified, he rushed into the street, thinking that he could rescue the others if only he made it to them in time, but a dozen of the city’s ubiquitous red and green motorbikes suddenly sped past and forced him to return to the curb.
It wouldn’t have made any difference. The building was too hot to enter. By the time the rescue workers extinguished the fire and made their way through the pool of retardant foam, uncovering the table that Souleymane shared with David Barro, their bodies had already fallen dark and stopped moving. Only Assetou remained alive. Ryan watched as they carried her outside on a spinal board, a cataract of light pouring out of the hole where her knee had been. She died a few moments after the sun touched her skin.
What had happened? Slowly, over the next few weeks, the local paper Le Pays revealed the story. Unknown agents had apparently loaded a coffee can with thumbtacks, aluminum powder, and liquid nitroglycerine and placed it on a shelf along the front wall of the office. No timer was recovered, no trembler. The investigators’ working hypothesis was that the mixture had exploded when someone removed the lid to inspect the can’s contents, though it might just as easily have detonated when a shaft of sunlight struck it and raised the temperature, or even when the shelf was jostled by a passing lorry. Much was made of the fact that the office had housed a group of evangelical Christians. A police spokesperson speculated that the bomb had been planted, as similar devices had been, by the small anti-Christian wing of the country’s Muslim majority, “ailing and impoverished,” the reporter wrote, “visible in increasing numbers, wearing the familiar red and green of Burkina’s national colors.”
The incident faded quickly from the headlines. The few articles that mentioned Ryan neglected to provide his name, referring to him instead as “the surviving American.” And that was how he began to think of himself.
The Surviving American was reluctant to leave his bed in the morning.
The Surviving American lived on a diet of breakfast cereal and millet beer.
The Surviving American spent his nights waking at the slightest sound—a door slamming, an engine coughing—and his days feeling guilty that he had somehow let his friends down by failing to die with them.
The work they had completed was gone, lost in the blaze. The computers and flash drives. The boxes and boxes of notebooks. The ten thousand ink-stained pages where they had put the verses so painstakingly through their variations. And the faces of the dead could be forgotten so quickly. And it was autumn and life was going by. And why should he ever bother to learn a person’s name again?
When the church offered to send him to Tunisia, he accepted. He neglected to visit the doctor for his inoculations or to pick up the pills that had been recommended to him. Let what would take him take him, he thought, and six months later, in the city of Sfax, he was walking along a tiled avenue lined with fragrant olive trees when the earth seemed to tilt out of his reach. He reached for an iron post and stumbled to his knees. He was sure he had taken ill, contracted typhoid or malaria or one of the hundred other North African diseases the guidebooks had warned him against. Schistosomiasis. Dengue fever. Then he noticed all the others who had fallen down, a cityful of men and women waiting on all fours as the ground lurched and trembled. All around him the plate-glass windows of the shops and restaurants burst. The street tiles in their neat rows of yellow and red separated and fell clattering on top of one another. Several of the craft vendors’ carts went rolling and galloping across the sidewalk, crushing their broad linen umbrellas as they canted over. He heard buildings cracking along their foundations—it was a sound he recognized, but how? The roof of a nearby school lifted and resettled, a first time and then a second, and finally collapsed in a cloud of white dust that burgeoned into the air and rained down over the street like chalk, turning to paste in his mouth. There was a series of crashes, and he turned to see the luxury hotel at the corner dropping chunks of masonry. One of the chunks crushed a fruit display. Another snapped a power line, which went snaking over the rooftops of the cars, throwing off sparks. Then the entire side wall of the hotel tipped outward in a single piece and smashed against the pavement like a ceramic plate. He glimpsed what he thought was a woman clinging to a set of curtains as it toppled. As suddenly as it had started, the earthquake ceased, its dying tremors dislodging the last few icicles of glass from the window of a pastry shop. The people around him were slow to gain their feet. Ryan could hear them cursing in French and Arabic, could see the light from their broken bones, but aside from a coruscating blood bruise that had emerged on one of his knees, he himself was uninjured.
Two years later, in Indonesia, he was driving through a strip of shanties along the coast of Sumatra when a block of water surged over the lowlands, sweeping them flat like an arm clearing a table. The wave took his car, spun it around, and delivered it upright onto the shoulder of a nearby hill. He held tight to the steering wheel while the water drained from his floorboards. As soon as he was certain the ground beneath him was not going to rise up and carry him away, he pressed the ignition button on his dashboard, but the motor wouldn’t start. He stepped out of the car onto a mat of rattan canes and walked slowly back toward the ocean, picking his way through the wreckage of the countryside: television aerials with drenched flags of clothing wrapped around them, uprooted palms turning their pedestals of earth to the sky. The shanties alongside the road had been reduced to rubble. Through the stones and the sheets of corrugated tin he saw the scraps of a hundred bodies, their lesions and gashes piercing the air with the precise iridescent silver of a mirror catching a headlamp. A few dozen people were limping through the debris, throwing tree branches, baking pans, and strips of plywood off the piles, trying to dig free the buried. Ryan attempted to help them. Some of the lights beneath his hands kept glowing, while others flared out suddenly. Where were they going? To a Heaven of clean white bathrooms with hot and cold running water. A Heaven of knowing, just for a while, how it felt to be rich and healthy.
The next summer, in Costa Rica, he agreed to take a quartet of visiting Spanish missionaries to the final match of the Copa América series, the first major event the stadium had held since its remodeling. Ryan was at the outer ring buying souvenir programs for his guests, listening to the crowd do its stomp-stomp-clap routine, when the midfield stands collapsed. A tide of brown dust went pouring through the entrance bays, temporarily blinding him. The air was filled with moans and screams, electronic feedback, the occasional gunlike reports of wooden buttresses cracking. As soon as Ryan had regained his sight, he shouldered his way past a security guard, under a sign that read SECCIÓN F1 A J12. The walkway ended at a set of twisted handrails extending over a twenty-foot chasm, a man-made canyon of folding chairs and cinder blocks. A woman in a loose black dress had been thrown against the wall while she was leaving. Not since his weeks in Brinkley, Arkansas, had Ryan seen someone whose bones shone so fiercely through her clothing. The stacked blocks of her vertebrae. The strangely shaped elephant’s ears of her pelvis. The jumbled gravel piles of her wrists. All around him voices were shouting, “Doctor, doctor.” He was surprised to realize his own was doing the same.
It was September of the next year when he finally returned to the United States. He began serving from a small church between a Laundromat and a cashew chicken restaurant in Springfield, Missouri. The Ozarks passed through a beautiful warm autumn, then an icy winter, then a gray and moody spring. The dogwoods blossomed with tiny singed-looking flowers that came down all at once after a single weekend. Ryan was handing out New Testaments from a little knoll on the university’s commons one day when a strange light seeped into the sky and the sirens began to wail. He took shelter with several hundred college students in the campus bookstore, crouching in the social sciences aisle and listening to the speakers rustle with white noise. The tornado touched down over them once, for only a few seconds, as fastidiously as a finger pressing an ant into the dirt, and destroyed the building. Ryan covered his head as the textbooks opened their spines and whirled around him, smacking into the walls and floor like birds who had lost control of their wings. All he could hear was the freight-train sound of the wind racing through its circles. Then, in the darkness and silence, he opened his eyes. The two blocks of shelves he was kneeling between had listed into each other, forming a gablelike roof over his head. He crawled into the ruins of the bookstore and rose to his feet. Everywhere there were bodies, radiating from their hands and legs, chests and genitals, faces and stomachs. Their flesh presented a star-map of wounds, glorious and incomprehensible. He felt like a man from some ancient tribal legend who had angered the gods and been doomed to walk the constellations.
Sometimes, late at night, he would find himself reminiscing about the disasters he had lived through, the tornado and the earthquake, the tsunami and the nitroglycerine bomb, and a voice in his head would insist, The Lord must be looking out for you. Sixty-four years and never a major illness. Sixty-eight years and still going strong. Seventy years and seventy-one and seventy-two and seventy-three … and he would say to himself: No. One word: No. He did not believe—and who could?—in a God so hawk-eyed and brutal, a God who bestowed a cancer here, a deformity there, for you a septic embolism and for you a compound fracture, selecting one person for grief and another for happiness like a painter experimenting with degrees of light and shadow. And which was the light, he wondered, and which the shadow? If the trials of Job could be a sign of God’s favor, then couldn’t Ryan’s own good fortune be a sign of God’s hostility? Maybe the crippled, the bruised, the diseased, the damaged—maybe the reason their wounds shone in this world was because God was lending them His attention from the next, looking on with loving compassion or a cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Those were the possibilities that played across Ryan’s mind as he lay in bed watching the darkness conduct its usual late-night scintillations. He listened to the legs of an insect ticking across the floor of his bedroom. Say that God’s attention was a product of His sympathy: well, then our pain came first, and it brought His gaze, and from His gaze arose the luminosity of our suffering: y + z = a. Say, on the other hand, that God’s attention was a product of His esteem for certain forms of afflicted beauty: then our pain came first, and it brought with it the luminosity of our suffering, which summoned His gaze: y + a = z. One was the cause and the other the effect, one a and the other z, though either way, our pain came first, our pain was inescapable, our pain was always y. What frightened Ryan—horrified him—was not the possibility that God did not love us but that He did love us and His love was merely decorative. Aesthetic rather than unconditional. That He loved us because we suffered, and our suffering was pleasing to His eyes. The Illumination had overturned all the old categories of thought. For a while Ryan had believed, along with the crystal healers and the televangelists, that the light that had come to their injuries would herald a new age of reconciliation and earthly brotherhood. You would think that taking the pain of every human being and making it so starkly visible—every drunken headache and frayed cuticle, every punctured lung and bowel pocked with cancer—would inspire waves of fellow feeling all over the world, or at least ripples of pity, and for a while maybe it had, but now there were children who had come of age knowing nothing else, running to their mothers to have a Band-Aid put on their flickers, asking, Why is the sky blue? and, Why does the sun hurt?, and still they grew into their destructiveness, and still they learned whose hurt to assuage and whose to disregard, and still there were soldiers enough for all the armies of the world. And every war left behind the shrapnel scars and shattered limbs of a hundred thousand ruined bodies. And every earthquake and every hurricane produced a holocaust of light. And when his sister died she had looked at him with the panic of someone who had no idea what was coming next. And when his friends in Burkina Faso died their wounds seemed to flood the sky. And the gun shops and munitions factories were as plentiful as blades of grass. And the emergency rooms were as full as they had ever been. And there were towns in the great open middle of the country where the cemeteries outnumbered the churches. And in the hockey stands and the boxing arenas, a cheer went up with every split lip, every burst capillary. And in the video games the schoolkids played, the aliens erupted in geysers of blood and golden tinsel. And in the tent cities and domestic violence shelters, the poor and the beaten huddled over their sores and bruises, cradling them like fussy children. And Ryan felt that he had spent his life in a darkened room, groping for meaning or at least consolation. And so, it seemed to him, had everyone else. And their bodies were aging and one day they would fail altogether. And every heart would be soaked in brightness. And every brain would burn out like an ember. And there was God, high on His throne, attending to the whole terrible procession of sorrows and traumas, corrosions and illnesses, with a cool, cerebral dispassion. He took His notes. He never uttered a syllable. He had the whole world, all the little children, you and me, brother, in His hands. And it seemed to Ryan that He viewed their bodies as a doctor would—so many sorry aging structures of blood and tissue, each displaying its own particular debility. Their wounds were majestic to Him, their tumors and lacerations. And perhaps it had always been that way. Perhaps the light He had brought to their injuries, or allowed the world to bring, was simply a new kind of ornamentation. The jewelry with which He decorated His lovers. The oil with which He anointed His sons. The Earth was crammed with Heaven, and every common bruise afire with God, but only he who saw took off his shoes. And if that was the case, Ryan thought, if it was our suffering that made us beautiful to God, and if that was why He allowed it to continue, then how dare He, how dare He, and why, why, why, why, why? He loved us, or so He said, but what did His love mean? What was it good for? It didn’t change anything, it didn’t improve anything, it only lingered in the distance, fluttering like a bird around the margins of their wretchedness. It was a sad little robin of a word, His “love.” It fled at the first sign of cold weather. Its bones were hollow and filled with air. Anyone could see how feeble it was, how insubstantial. How wrong. And here was the question that kept Ryan awake at night: Was it possible for God to sin? Or were God and sin the opposite poles of a binary system? Was sin whatever God was not—the cold to God’s warmth, the darkness to God’s light? Or was it stationary, absolute, and was God as capable of venturing into it as anyone else? Because it seemed to Ryan that if God could sin, and if their suffering was as needless as it appeared, and if He had permitted or even abetted it, then His love had soured into hatred, and He should take to His knees and repent. Never mind the foundations of the earth. Never mind the morning stars singing together. Never mind the sea shut up with doors. He had formed His children, endowed them with the breath of life, and set them free in a world of poison and fire. Of endless diseases and natural disasters. Floods and landslides. Volcanic eruptions. A world of spinal meningitis. Of cerebral palsy. Of neurochemical imbalances that made the weakest among people hate having to exist. Of genetic disorders that blanketed their skin in ulcers. Could He see them in their pain? Was He awake at all behind the lit windows of Heaven? For this was the hope that Ryan found himself nursing—that God had merely gone to sleep for a while and was not paying attention, that the glass of Heaven was dark, and the curtains were drawn, and the suffering of humankind was like the sunlight that gradually suffused the sky in the morning. And maybe, Ryan thought, that was all there was to it. Maybe the hour was still too early. Maybe they hadn’t yet suffered enough to rouse Him from His bed. A little more pain, a little more light, a few more blows and afflictions, and God would stretch His limbs and waken to the grand celestial daybreak. And the Earth would experience its restoration. And everything would be changed. The older Ryan became, the more the notion preoccupied him. He lay beneath his sheets watching the dim plane of the ceiling. Inside it he could see the same hallucination he had seen ever since he was a child forcing his eyes to make sense of the darkness, a thousand lambent spots that leaped and circled around one another like the static on an ancient television. And he knew that if he stared at them long enough they would come together as they always had, in a single overlapping field of Catherine wheels and carousels.
In the fourth decade of the Illumination, shortly after Ryan’s eighty-first birthday, he was selecting an orange from a display at the supermarket when a whistle rang in his ears, beginning with a greaselike sizzle, then rising slowly and leveling off. Suddenly the floor was cool against his cheek. Dozens of oranges were rolling around him like billiard balls. He did not remember lying down, but he must have. The woman hovering over him said, “Are you all right? Took a little spill there, didn’t you, sir?” and though he could see the arthritis shining in her fingers like a string of pearls, she gripped his hand to help him stand up.
Maybe that was when it started, or maybe it was a few days earlier, when he lost track of himself while taking his afternoon walk and regained his thoughts wandering through the lobby of an office building several blocks away, but soon Ryan realized that something had happened to his mind. It became difficult for him to distinguish the past from the present. He could no longer be sure he knew where he was. One minute he might be an old man waiting in line at the bank to make a cash withdrawal, and the next he would be nine years old and in Miss Fitzgerald’s music class, sitting crisscross applesauce between Jeffrey Campbell and Jessica Easto, angry that the instrument box had been nearly empty by the time it reached him, which meant that he had gotten stuck—again!—with the rhythm sticks instead of the hand drums. He might be jimmying a spoon under the lid of a jar and look up to see the sun shining on a snowcapped Russian mountain, or clouds breaking over the Gulf of Mexico, or the moon wavering in the bug-stitched mirror of the lake where his college girlfriend kept her cabin. He could never tell. Or perhaps he would be watching the palm trees streak past his windshield, flinching at their trunks as the wave spun his car in circle after circle, then find himself attending an air-conditioned Midwestern church service where someone he could not recollect having met, a pastor with the pliant, swaying voice of a yoga instructor, was offering a sermon in celebration of his retirement from the mission. That was where he seemed to be right now: the church.
“We are here today not only to worship the Lord,” the pastor said, “but to pay tribute to a man who has dedicated his life to His service, Brother Ryan Shifrin,” and that was him, Ryan thought, he was Brother Ryan Shifrin. And his sister was Sister Judy Shifrin, and his father was Father Donald Shifrin, and his mother was Mother Sarah Beth Shifrin, and his dog was Scamper Shifrin—Scamp for short—and there she came bounding across the lawn with her tongue lolling over her lips, the tag on her collar jingling like a sleigh bell.
“Scamp! Scamper! Here, girl!”
Either she did not hear him, or Ryan merely imagined he had called out, because she disappeared beneath the pulpit, and when she reemerged, she was not his dog but Mr. Castillo’s, Max—no, Trinket—barking and lunging at the pastor’s vestments. And then there was no dog in the church at all. The stained-glass window was casting its tinted shapes onto the carpet. The communion rail was riddled with plum-size holes. The banner on the pulpit read, I LOVE THE HOUSE WHERE YOU LIVE, O LORD, THE PLACE WHERE YOUR GLORY DWELLS, and for the first time in years, Ryan thought of the beaten journal of love notes the boy with the bruised backside had given him a few days ago.
I love driving to the bluff and drinking cheap red wine out of paper cups with you.
I love how beautifully you sing when you think no one is listening.
I love it when the computer freezes up or we get stuck in a traffic jam and you lean back and pull out your old “Ahhh! This is the life!” routine.
When had he lost it, he wondered, where had he left it behind?
“Now, some of you may not know this,” the pastor was saying, “but Brother Shifrin has been working for the church in one capacity or another for more than forty years. Kids, that’s longer than some of your parents have been alive. You may not believe it”—he patted his chest—“but that’s longer than old Pastor Wallace himself has been alive.”
Ryan was sitting at the outside corner of the left front pew, directly beneath the giant black box speaker on its crossed metal stilts. The altar was lined with Easter lilies. He couldn’t wait to start high school next fall, and his hip was aching with a soft lucidity, and his hands were stained with liver spots and petechial hemorrhages, but that did not keep him from catching the Frisbee his scoutmaster was throwing through the crisp November air, nor from knocking on a hundred doors each afternoon with his satchel and his leaflets, though he confessed he found it hard these days to tie his shoelaces and operate his telephone, and he had been away from home now for such a long time.
It seemed to him that he had grown old not in the usual way, day by day, but in a series of sudden jerks. His sister died, and ten years fell on his shoulders. The flames burst from the building in Ouagadougou, and down came another twenty. The street tiles cracked, the stadium collapsed, the shanties were flattened, and the years fell over him like rain.
Why had he never married or fathered children?
He wanted a Heaven of starting over, a Heaven of trying again.
The pastor was speaking gently into the microphone. “And when you listen to the testimonials I’ve received, I am sure you will say to yourself, as I have, Truly, this is a man whose work has been blessed by the Lord. For what better life can we imagine than a life of Christian service, a life of waiting upon the Creator and His beloved children? Before I read the first of these letters to you, though, I’d like to ask that you all please rise and join me in a song that exemplifies the spirit with which Brother Shifrin has dedicated himself to the church, number two hundred fifteen in our hymnal, ‘Teach Me Lord to Wait.’ ”
As the organ resounded and the benches creaked, Ryan thought of his sister: how she had loved to sing, and how young she had been when she relinquished her life, and how assiduously he had taken it up and lived it.
What do you think, Judy? What do you make of that? Did I keep it warm enough for you?
Now the worshippers were on their feet, performing a hymn he knew by heart, their voices flowing just alongside the melody, as if tracing the banks of a stream. And if a bomb were to land on them as they sang so humbly and sincerely, the splendor of their bodies would bathe the town in silver. And if every bomb flew from its arsenal, every body displayed its pain, the globe would catch fire in a Hiroshima of light. And maybe, from somewhere far away, God would notice it and return, and the cinders would receive Him like a hillside washed in the sun.