Once upon a time, you weren't here. Now you have never been anywhere else. You are the Lord's story. Now it is nearing its end. It has been a good one.
Calm yourself, you tell your wife without using words. This is how we will return to God. Others find other ways. This will be ours.
You want to reach out. You want to touch her face one more time in this world, but know you will have to wait. A few minutes, less, and then you will be standing together again.
All this thinking, all this practice, and the instant finally happens around you and through you like a heavy wind.
You take her hands without taking her hands. You tell her you love her without telling her you love her. She looks at you. She looks at you.
And then she turns and is walking away from you, moving toward the library.
You are watching her diminishing.
You are where you are, collecting yourself. You can't do this, you decide. You can't possibly do this. You inhale. Something is there when you exhale. It revolves you toward the door. It impels you through.
As you enter, you see and you do not see.
You feel and you do not feel.
The lush red carpets. The marble floors. The central chandelier.
The vast dome above you covered with intricate abstract mosaics.
Head whirring, you remove your shoes, leave them with the others, focus on each step, will yourself to appear composed, weave your way through this crowd of infidels kneeling, rumps raised. Iphi is with you. Your mother is with you. Your church brothers and sisters. All across London, people just like you are doing what they have been asked to do. They are stepping onto subway cars packed with the unclean, onto buses, into bookstores, clinics, corner markets, the foyers of housing projects.
All across London, a complex mesh of compassion expanding.
You are here and you are somewhere else.
You are Clayton in the cab of his pickup, Iphi leaning into you, reaching for her knee, making believe you're not doing what you're doing. You are Iphi's brother Mike pushing another beer across the counter to another patron at the Buckhorn Bar, wondering how long now until your shift is done. You are the feral neighbor children surrounding your woodpile the second before they shove it into confusion. You are your mother beneath the rubble, dazed, waiting for something that will not arrive. You are yourself, only younger, strolling beside your wife who isn't your wife on your way back to her tent at the retreat. You are yourself, only a boy, helping your mother scrub the bathroom tiles in a motel room on the outskirts of town. You are yourself, only unspeakably tired, your cheek bobbing against your father's shoulder as he carries you to bed.
You blink and see yourself kneeling with these others around you, lowering your forehead toward the earth.
You blink and feel forgiveness shimmering the air.
You blink and see the white ceiling tiles above your bed, your father's unshaven face swooping in to fill your sight, his broken-toothed smile, his rough hands floating down.
Sweet dreams, sweet-pea, he is saying.
He is saying: Don't let the bedbugs bite…
What should we do if we cannot remember the number of our sins?
We should count the sins of others.
How should we count them?
By palming the trigger.
How should we make the sign of the invisible cross as we do so? By putting our invisible right hand to our invisible forehead, then to our invisible breast, and then to our invisible left and right shoulders, saying: Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help us with the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Why do we make the sign of the invisible cross?
To convince ourselves that in the end the story will never really be the end.
Which is the prayer most recommended to us?
This is the prayer most recommended to us: May the Lord who frees us from sin save us and raise us up.
Are there others?
Yes: May the Lord curse our enemies, blind them, let the streets flow with their blood, for they have soiled the house of the Lord.
How will Christ judge us?
He will make us live with ourselves.
When will Christ judge us?
Every second we are alive. Every second we are dead.
What is heaven?
The instant before the click.
What is heaven?
The instant after.
What is heaven?
Hearing the words we have waited so long to hear: Welcome home.
With the next blink, you feel the room around you rethink itself.
You feel the black butterfly of your soul shudder inside your chest.
It isn't you who changes your mind.
It is your thigh muscles, the nerves along the back of your neck.
You lean onto your heels, rise, your ankles crackling beneath you. You simply stand there. You simply revolve. You simply steer your way among the murmurings toward those double brass doors.
You have just enough time to step through them before the yellow-orange radiance rushes up the hallway at you.
The stunning crack.
The flutter of hectic wings.
And next you are lying on a bed of shattered glass, covered with ash, bits of someone else's flesh stuck to your coat.
Before you can move again, the dusty ghosts begin stumbling from the darkness at the end of the corridor, blood spattered across their slack faces, their white shirts, their shredded pants and burqas. Their mouths are open. Some must be screaming, some moaning, but the only sound inside your head is a long loud shrillness. A human-sized moth flutters past you. The security guard. Bitter powder fills your nose, covers your tongue, makes it difficult to breathe. It looks like a delicate snow has fallen across the marble floor, a commotion of shoe prints through it pointing the way toward the street.
You lie there. You lie there. And then, scrupulously, you roll onto your side. Scrupulously, you lift yourself onto your knees. Hoist yourself up.
Following those prints, joining the exodus, you pass an old man lying on his side. He appears to have given up ten feet short of the doors. You pass a teenage girl leaning back against the wall, rocking noiselessly, face in her hands.
Outside, men and women huddling in groups.
Some punching numbers on their cell phones, some wandering, calling out names, staring into space as if they are trying to remember a word that just slipped their minds.
The first rescue vehicles are pulling up to the curb, blue-uniformed policemen and firemen wearing surgical masks hopping out, jogging by as you stroll into the astonishing afternoon, because—
Because—
Because you can feel how Jesus has taken her into his delicate arms and made her flawless.
Because there is a voice whispering into your ear as you walk, as you glance up into the sky empty as expectation, heart slamming.
Because that voice is saying the same thing over and over again.
Because it is saying I, I, I, I, I
December
~ ~ ~
ached for myself as Aleyt licked brownie off her thumb tip, rose, walked around the coffee table separating us, and gave me another hug, this one blunt and lingering. She smelled of cheap Allure, which for some reason struck me as very sad. For some reason everything struck me as very sad. The elderly man in the baby blue parka two sizes too big for him shuffling out the door. The last wintry lemon light silhouetting him. One of the cute college coeds, ponytail the color of a cardboard box, packing up her computer all by herself, chums departed. The way she had rubbed too much rouge on her right cheek without knowing it, thereby becoming lopsided, silly as a rag doll.