The Illumination_ A Novel Part 6

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 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 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? Is this normal? she seemed to be asking. she seemed to be asking. This can't be normal 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 gla.s.ses into vacant white disks. He winced and said, "Aw, Christ."

At first Ryan a.s.sumed the glare from one of the lamps in the parking lot must be sliding through the stained-gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 airs.p.a.ce 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, br.i.m.m.i.n.g. The cable news channels showed clip after clip to ill.u.s.trate 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 cl.u.s.ter of sticks and uniforms. There was the fraternity party at which the pledges had taken turns punching through sheets of gla.s.s, 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. 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, br.i.m.m.i.n.g. The cable news channels showed clip after clip to ill.u.s.trate 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 cl.u.s.ter of sticks and uniforms. There was the fraternity party at which the pledges had taken turns punching through sheets of gla.s.s, 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 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 G.o.d will illumine them," the new leaflets read, from the final chapter of Revelation, singular, 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 G.o.d will illumine them," the new leaflets read, from the final chapter of Revelation, singular, The Revelation of St. John the Divine 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 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 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 sorry-we-missed-you houses than houses than have-you-heard-the-Good-News? 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? 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 gla.s.ses 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 No, no, this won't do, he wanted to say. This won't do at all 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 gra.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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 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 embarra.s.sing 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 gla.s.s 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 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 gla.s.s? 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 pa.s.sed, 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 gra.s.s 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-p.r.o.ne, 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."

"Mmmhmm, 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 overb.u.t.tered 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 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. 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 a.s.signed 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 STORE, the other a restaurant with a sign that read RESTAURANT 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 pa.s.sed 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 voila: a lesson in scripture. His true gift, it turned out, was for t.i.tles. One night he happened to hear a discussion on public radio about great works of literature and their failed early t.i.tles, and though he was listening with only half an ear, he caught the speaker saying how poorly Gone With the Wind Gone With the Wind would have been received if Margaret Mitch.e.l.l had allowed it to remain would have been received if Margaret Mitch.e.l.l had allowed it to remain Tote the Weary Load Tote the Weary Load, or A Farewell to Arms A Farewell to Arms if Hemingway had persisted in calling it if Hemingway had persisted in calling it They Who Get Shot 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 "G.o.d'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 Other Cheek." And then there was "Salvation: The 5 Most Asked Questions," which, after some thought, he recast as "Go to h.e.l.l! (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. Cheek." And then there was "Salvation: The 5 Most Asked Questions," which, after some thought, he recast as "Go to h.e.l.l! (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 sc.r.a.p 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 a.s.sortment, 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 gra.s.s 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 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 V's of stab wounds, while at any country fair, any minor-league baseball game, you would find skin cancer pocks like small cl.u.s.ters of stars, sprained knees like forks of lightning, dislocated shoulders like the torchlit rooms of ancient houses. People in the city exhibited the sickly l.u.s.ter 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 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 said Felon- Felon-thia. Black girl working at the Superstop so I've gotta be a felon 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 embarra.s.sment. "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 c.o.ke machine made their ocean-in-a-seash.e.l.l 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 gla.s.s, 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 I see how it is. Black girl says excuse me, and the white man won't even answer." 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, p.r.o.nounced fuh-lin fuh-lin, not felon 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. "Touche. 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 skysc.r.a.per. 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 pa.s.s. 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.senger 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 CLOSED DUE TO VANDALISM, ROBBERY, AND THE "CROOKS!!" "CROOKS!!" AT PATTERSON INSURANCE 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 gla.s.s 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 cla.s.sroom, 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 G.o.d 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. 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 pa.s.sed, he found himself considering their implications. What was Heaven, he wondered, and what were its varieties? He envisioned a system of countless Heavens, each a.s.sembled according to the desires of the person to whom G.o.d graced it. A Heaven of immaculate brushed metal planes. A Heaven of cheeseburgers and big-breasted redheads.