The Illumination_ A Novel Part 7

The Burkinabe 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, a.s.setou, 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 a.s.setou, 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 a.s.sist 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-cla.s.s 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 No, of course not, David Barro would answer, chuckling lightly, or, Yes, of course 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 ap.r.o.n, 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 rehea.r.s.e their names so he wouldn't forget them. Souleymane. a.s.setou. 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 r.e.t.a.r.dant foam, uncovering the table that Souleymane shared with David Barro, their bodies had already fallen dark and stopped moving. Only a.s.setou 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 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 pa.s.sing 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." 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 pa.s.sing 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-gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 America 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 b.u.t.tresses cracking. As soon as Ryan had regained his sight, he shouldered his way past a security guard, under a sign that read SECCIoN F1 A J12 SECCIoN 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ds 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... 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: and he would say to himself: No No. One word: No No. He did not believe-and who could?-in a G.o.d so hawk-eyed and brutal, a G.o.d 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 G.o.d's favor, then couldn't Ryan's own good fortune be a sign of G.o.d's hostility? Maybe the crippled, the bruised, the diseased, the damaged-maybe the reason their wounds shone in this world was because G.o.d was lending them His attention from the next, looking on with loving compa.s.sion or a cultivated interest in suffering. Compa.s.sion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Compa.s.sion. 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 G.o.d'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 y + z = a. Say, on the other hand, that G.o.d'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 y + a = z. One was the cause and the other the effect, one a a and the other and the other z z, though either way, our pain came first, our pain was inescapable, our pain was always y y. What frightened Ryan-horrified him-was not the possibility that G.o.d 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? Why is the sky blue? and, and, Why does the sun hurt? Why does the sun hurt?, and still they grew into their destructiveness, and still they learned whose hurt to a.s.suage 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 gra.s.s. 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 G.o.d, high on His throne, attending to the whole terrible procession of sorrows and traumas, corrosions and illnesses, with a cool, cerebral dispa.s.sion. 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 G.o.d, but only he who saw took off his shoes The Earth was crammed with Heaven, and every common bruise afire with G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d to sin? Or were G.o.d and sin the opposite poles of a binary system? Was sin whatever G.o.d was not-the cold to G.o.d's warmth, the darkness to G.o.d's light? Or was it stationary, absolute, and was G.o.d as capable of venturing into it as anyone else? Because it seemed to Ryan that if G.o.d 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 G.o.d had merely gone to sleep for a while and was not paying attention, that the gla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 b.a.l.l.s. 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 cla.s.s, 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-st.i.tched 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 him, Ryan thought, he 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. 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-gla.s.s 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 I LOVE THE HOUSE WHERE YOU LIVE, O LORD, THE PLACE WHERE YOUR GLORY DWELLS 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 a.s.siduously 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 a.r.s.enal, every body displayed its pain, the globe would catch fire in a Hiroshima of light. And maybe, from somewhere far away, G.o.d would notice it and return, and the cinders would receive Him like a hillside washed in the sun.

Nina Poggione"You quarrel with your sickness," Thomas said calmly. "Everyone has a sickness. It should be cared for but not cured.""What?" Pearl said dully. She wished that he would pour more wine. Thomas' way of talking made her dizzy."I said, each of us has a sickness. It is not something that should be cured. To eradicate the sickness would be to eradicate the self."-Joy Williams

She was in Seattle, at the bookstore across from the university, with the high windows and the wooden chairs and the microphone that lent a floating electric quality to her voice, and The Age of Girls and Boys The Age of Girls and Boys kept creaking as she flexed its spine, and her mouth was shedding a raw white light that sharpened to a knifepoint every time her lips came together, and she could see that she had wrested the audience's attention, their genuine attention, though whether they were listening to her or watching the light show was anyone's guess, and there in the second row, sitting with his tousled hair and his loose-necked posture, was the man who had approached her the night before, at the event in Bellingham, to sign a galley proof of kept creaking as she flexed its spine, and her mouth was shedding a raw white light that sharpened to a knifepoint every time her lips came together, and she could see that she had wrested the audience's attention, their genuine attention, though whether they were listening to her or watching the light show was anyone's guess, and there in the second row, sitting with his tousled hair and his loose-necked posture, was the man who had approached her the night before, at the event in Bellingham, to sign a galley proof of Off-Campus Apartments Off-Campus Apartments, her sad sunken ship of a first novel. She could hear him reacting to the story she was reading, making half-voiced subliminal noises of agreement or fascination, chuckling when she mentioned the widow's inexplicable accent, and nodding vigorously, gymnastically gymnastically, as if choosing sides in a debate, at "the world, the good and beautiful world, where people got married and had children and slowly grew old together." Was he experiencing his feelings or merely demonstrating them? She couldn't decide. Afterward, he made sure to claim the last spot in line, mothing away to investigate the new releases, when a woman with a tote bag fell into place behind him, then drifting back over to the procession. She had already autographed twenty or thirty books by the time he reached her.

He took a copy of Girls and Boys Girls and Boys from the stack and said, "Hi there again. I was at that thing you did last night. Remember? The guy who said you were his favorite writer?" from the stack and said, "Hi there again. I was at that thing you did last night. Remember? The guy who said you were his favorite writer?"

She tried her best to smile without using her mouth-to express express a smile-but even that was difficult. The ulcer on her lower lip was stinging, stinging terribly. She felt as if someone had taken the flesh, right there where her incisors met, and run it through a sewing machine: a smile-but even that was difficult. The ulcer on her lower lip was stinging, stinging terribly. She felt as if someone had taken the flesh, right there where her incisors met, and run it through a sewing machine: zt-zt-zt-zt-zt zt-zt-zt-zt-zt.

Before she could steel herself to answer, he hurried on: "Anyway, what I neglected to tell you yesterday is that I absolutely love this collection. Love. It. Especially 'Small Bitter Seeds.' That one's my favorite. I read it in the Pushcart Pushcart, and afterward I ordered all your books. Everything. Everything."

To talk meant to suffer, as it had for much of the last four years, and she had become practiced at finding the most efficient path through a conversation. Usually she could touch all the major landmarks so glancingly and yet so deftly that the average person failed to notice she was even taking a shortcut. "Thank you. I knew you looked familiar. That was actually the t.i.tle story until my editor told me no one would buy a book called Small Bitter Seeds Small Bitter Seeds. Now how would you like me to sign this?"

"Oh, this one's for my father. Write, 'To Jon Catau.' That's J-o- J-o-no h-n h-n, and then Ka-too: C-a-t-a-u. C-a-t-a-u."

After she finished the inscription and shut the book, she found him staring over her shoulder. The windows crowning the poetry shelves were filtering the light so that the trees outside, the lampposts, the buildings, all seemed to swim in blue Easter egg dye, but that wasn't what had caught his attention. He was examining his reflection in the gla.s.s, and specifically the incandescent bruise on his arm. Gaze too long at your wounds, she had discovered, and your eyes would fill with phantom colors, like a sunbather drowsing on a beach towel.

One of the booksellers was repeating her name. "Ms. Poggione? Excuse me. Ms. Poggione?"

"Mm-hmm?"

"We were hoping you would sign some stock before you leave. And also we have this guest alb.u.m with a page for all our authors. Would you mind writing something in it for us? Nothing fancy-just a few words will do."

He slid the books across the table one by one, like a line cook prepping burgers, marking each t.i.tle page with the jacket flap so that all she had to do was take a copy from his hand, cross through her name, and replace it with her signature. In the guest alb.u.m she wrote, "Thanks for hosting me on this, the final leg of the great spring Age of Girls and Boys Age of Girls and Boys tour." She added a doodle of a girl boosting a boy over her head like a circus strongman. The man with the bruise on his arm had withdrawn to the sanctuary of the employee recommendations shelf, but when she began gathering up her purse and jacket, he came loping back over to the table. With a sudden sweeping feeling of magnification she intuited that he was going to ask her to dinner, and in fact he did, forcing himself to meet her eye, then saying something that began, "I hope you don't mind," and ended, "a great little seafood place, the best in Seattle." He was certainly sweet enough-a sweet, brave kid, and starstruck, by tour." She added a doodle of a girl boosting a boy over her head like a circus strongman. The man with the bruise on his arm had withdrawn to the sanctuary of the employee recommendations shelf, but when she began gathering up her purse and jacket, he came loping back over to the table. With a sudden sweeping feeling of magnification she intuited that he was going to ask her to dinner, and in fact he did, forcing himself to meet her eye, then saying something that began, "I hope you don't mind," and ended, "a great little seafood place, the best in Seattle." He was certainly sweet enough-a sweet, brave kid, and starstruck, by her her, of all people-but the truth was that it hurt too much to talk, and she just wanted to return to her room and lie in bed with a mouthful of hydrogen peroxide foaming up over her gums.

"That's very nice, but I'm afraid I'm not feeling well."

"Oh. All right. I understand completely." Meekly he asked, "So at least can I give you a ride back to your hotel?" Maybe it was the way his voice seemed to slip through the center of itself and form a knot, so like Wallace's when he thought he had embarra.s.sed himself, but she realized all at once that she could not disappoint him again. She resigned herself to another ten minutes of conversation and nodded fine, okay.

"Great! I'm parked out back."

He led her down the staircase and across the ground floor, past circular racks stuffed with purple and gold sweatshirts, shelves stuffed with pennants and soda cozies, and out into the evening, which was not blue at all but a soft, waning pink. The floorboards of his car were littered with textbooks and old CD cases, the carpets gritty with road salt. As he drove her across the bay, he spun an excitable little monologue, telling her about the inlet they were pa.s.sing, where his friends Coop and Mia kept their catamaran, and the neighborhood off to the right, where his favorite coffee shop was located, and not far away, near the arboretum, was the unpainted furniture store where he had worked after high school for eighteen months, while he "decompressed," he said, "and figured the whole thing out," and there up ahead you could see the car wash with the elephant sign, a smiling neon behemoth hosing itself down with its trunk, which was his very favorite car wash-easily, no contest.

It took an effort of will to interrupt him. "You live in a wide world of favorites, don't you?"

"That's what Coop says. I guess I do."

"So how did you hurt your arm?"

He searched the sagging cloth of the ceiling for an answer. "You know, I honestly can't remember. b.u.mped into a doorway. Got punched."

He slid into the turning lane at a red light and leveled his gaze at her. "But that, that," he said, and he tugged his lip down to display the tissue, a healthy rose color, unlit by trauma or disease, "must hurt like all h.e.l.l."

Impulsively she grazed the ragged fringe of her sore with her tongue. It flashed the way a shard of gla.s.s does when it's struck by the sun. "Mm-hmm. Like all h.e.l.l."

"Yeah, I can totally tell. You know, I really respect you. My football coach-don't worry, I'm not one of those football guys. I quit when I was in eighth grade. But what my coach used to say is that you've got to play through the pain. And that's what you you do. It must be hard to get up in front of an audience and talk when your mouth is like it is." do. It must be hard to get up in front of an audience and talk when your mouth is like it is."

And that was her situation exactly. There were entire weeks when she did everything she could to avoid speaking to other people: letting her voice mail take her phone calls, using the self-service lane at the grocery store, waiting for the UPS truck to drive away before she collected her packages. The problem began shortly after the Illumination, when she punctured her soft palate with a tortilla chip. With fascination and disgust, she watched over the next few days as the mark sank into her skin and filled with a luminous fluid. It took nearly two weeks for it to heal, by which time she had generated another by jabbing her gums while brushing her teeth. After that the wounds came in cl.u.s.ters, appearing whenever she bit the inside of her mouth or ate something too salty or spicy, but just as often for no reason whatsoever, or at least none she could determine. At first she thought the problem was only temporary, but four years had pa.s.sed since then, and she had not gotten any better. Four years of withdrawing from her friends, her son, her parents, of declining to go on dates because she couldn't bear to pretend she was all right. Four years of pinp.r.i.c.k-size cavities on her lips and her gums, her cheeks and the roof of her mouth, on the tender border of her tongue, tiny inflamed holes that expanded slowly and clotted at their edges, then whitened, distended, and lost all form. Some of the sores grew as large as nickels, flooding her face with light even when her lips were clamped shut. No sooner did one vanish than another would appear. Often, when things were at their worst-when she came into morning thinking she might have healed while she slept and gave the spot where one of her ulcers had been an experimental tap and felt so ill with pain that her hands tightened and the wells beneath her eyes grew damp-she would find herself repeating, Why me, why do I have to be sick all the time, what possible purpose could it serve? And why Why me, why do I have to be sick all the time, what possible purpose could it serve? And why this this sickness, why sickness, why this this pain, why not some other? Take my eyes so that I cannot see. Take my legs so that I cannot run. Anything, anything, but my mouth so that I cannot speak, my mouth so that I cannot eat, my mouth so that I cannot kiss, my mouth so that I cannot smile. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Or at least make me better tomorrow than I am today, make me better next week than I've been this one pain, why not some other? Take my eyes so that I cannot see. Take my legs so that I cannot run. Anything, anything, but my mouth so that I cannot speak, my mouth so that I cannot eat, my mouth so that I cannot kiss, my mouth so that I cannot smile. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Or at least make me better tomorrow than I am today, make me better next week than I've been this one. This was the voice in her head, a veritable Niagara of words, pouring over one another in their own immense cloud of turbulence and spindrift, but trailing alongside it was her other voice, her speaking voice, the one her ulcers had forced her to adopt, which employed as little motion as possible, so that she wound up rejecting even the shortest words in favor of easier ones, saying mm-hmm mm-hmm for for yes yes and and mm-mmm mm-mmm for for no no, and obliged her to take great care with every sentence she uttered so that avoiding her lesions would not distort her p.r.o.nunciation. She was afraid that the voice she used in public would change the voice she used in the privacy of her thoughts, that fluid, unfearing voice with which she had once written her books. Presuming, of course, that it had not already. Your mind was not free of your body. That was the lesson.

"Well, this is it, Ms. Poggione," the boy said, and she realized they had reached the hotel.

"Thanks. What's your name now?"

"John Catau."

"I thought that was your father's name."

"It is. I'm a junior, or unofficially I am. My dad is Jon Catau: J-o- J-o-no h-n h-n. I'm John Catau: J-o- J-o-with an h-n. h-n."

"Well, John-with-an-h, you can call me Nina."

"Nina." He took her wrist, rubbing his thumb along the pulse point as if he were calming an injured animal, and she understood what she should have all along: that he was. .h.i.tting on her. His touch was warmer and more muscular than she had supposed it would be. "Are you sure I can't buy you a drink?" he said.

She risked stretching her mouth to smile at him. "Some other time." And she opened the door and went into the hotel.

Upstairs, standing at her bathroom mirror, she drew her lower lip cautiously away from her teeth. The flesh sent out a spike of pain, shimmering as she exposed it to the open air. She had ruptured some fragile seal over the sore, and blood came br.i.m.m.i.n.g from the threadlike crack, spilling into the pocket of her gums. Though the edges of the canker had softened, she knew from experience that it would get worse before it got better.

She sat on the ledge of the tub and made her ritual evening phone call. Wallace didn't answer, so she left him a message. Each time her lips came together or her teeth bit into a letter, she had that terrible sewing-needle sensation. She tried to conceal her discomfort, but the effort gave her voice an oddly convulsive sedative quality, as if her limbs were twitching while she slept: "Hey, honey. I know you have p play rehearsal tonight, b but I'm wi wiped out, and I'm going to slee going to sleep, so I'm calling early. Your calling early. Your m momma loves you. I hope you had a p perfect day. Don't b burn the house down. Remember, the Stegalls are right next door if you can't reach you can't reach m me and there's an emergency."

She hung up. For the thousandth time, she reflected that she should write a story that used no b b's, f's, m's, p p's, or v v's, one she could deliver without aggravating her mouth. "A Story to Combat the Pain," she would call it.

But what if it wasn't her lips that were ulcerated?

She would have to write a second story to avoid her hard palate, one without any c c's, d d's, g g's, h h's-oh so many letters.

And a third that would let the tip of her tongue lie still, a story that was all vowels and l.a.b.i.als, unspooling with a long underwater sound.

So then: "Three Stories to Combat the Pain." Stories to Combat the Pain."

She washed her face and brushed her teeth, all but the bottom incisors, then changed into her pajamas and slipped into bed. Four more days of readings, she thought. Four more airplanes to four more cities. She wondered how Wallace was doing without her. Had he remembered to lock the door? Was he eating the food she had Tupperwared? He was the kind of boy who would nibble at a hot dog, offering half of it to a stray animal, and consider himself fed for the day-but he was fourteen, and old enough now, they had decided, to stay home alone while she was on tour.

Fourteen! In another year, unless she recovered as mysteriously as she had fallen ill, she would have been this strange sick creature for fully one-third of his life.

She yawned, and her mouth flickered at the boundary of her vision, as if a distant ship were sending out signals in Morse code.

Once there was a country where no one addressed the dead except in writing. Whenever people felt the urge to speak to someone they had outlived, they would take a pen and set their thoughts down on paper: You should have seen the sun coloring the puddles this morning You should have seen the sun coloring the puddles this morning, or Things were so much easier when you were alive, so much happier Things were so much easier when you were alive, so much happier, or I wanted to tell you I got all A's on my report card, plus a C in algebra I wanted to tell you I got all A's on my report card, plus a C in algebra. Then they would place the message atop the others they had written, in a basket or a folder, until the summer arrived and they could be delivered.

In this country it rained for most of the year. The landscape was lush with the kinds of trees and ivies that flourish in wet weather, their leaves the closest green to black. The creeks and pools swam with armies of tiny brown frogs. Usually, though, in the first or second week of June, the clouds would thin from the air little by little, in hundreds of parallel threads, as if someone were sweeping the sky clean with a broom, and the drought would set in. This did not happen every summer, but most. Between the gla.s.sy river to the west of the country and the fold of hills to the east, the gra.s.s withered and vanished, the puddles dried up, and the earth separated into countless oddly shaped plates. Deep rifts formed in the dirt. It was through these rifts that people slipped the letters they had written. The dead were buried underground, and tradition held that they were waiting there to collect each sheet of paper, from the most heartfelt expression of grief to the most trivial piece of gossip: You won't believe it, but Ellie is finally leaving that boyfriend of hers.

What I want to know is whether you think I should take the teaching job.

The crazy thing is, when the phone rang last night, I was absolutely sure it was you.

Do you remember that time you dropped your earring in the pond and it surprised that fish?

I just don't know what I'm doing these days.

So it was that people surrendered the notes they had saved with a feeling of relief and accomplishment, letting them fall through the cracks one by one, then returned home, satisfied that they had been received.

This was the way it had always been, for who knows how long, with the dead turning their hands to the surface of the earth, and no orphans praying out loud to their parents, and no widows chitchatting with the ghosts of their husbands, and all the wish-it-weres and might-have-beens of the living oriented around a simple stack of paper and a cupful of pens. Then something very strange happened.

In Portland the bookstore was a labyrinth of aisles and staircases, with shelves that stretched to the rafters and let out the sugary smell of old paper, columns that shone with textured gold paint, and the floor was a worn industrial concrete that resembled a pond abounding with gray-green silt, and as she walked through the stacks she could see the vague form of her reflection pa.s.sing underneath her, vanishing and reemerging in the grit and gloss of the stone, and on the store's top level, where she gave her reading, the art books stood directly behind the audience in a long panorama of faces, so that Ms. Erin Colvin from Hillsdale and Mr. Jim Fristoe from the Pearl District seemed to sit alongside Andy Warhol and Mona Lisa and one of Modigliani's radiant, blank-eyed women, and when it came time for Nina to take questions and someone asked her how she developed her t.i.tles, she gave her usual answer, comparing the t.i.tle to a target toward which she shot the arrow of a story and confessing that she had never been able to write so much as the first sentence until she had taken careful aim. In the case of the story she had just presented, she said, a fairy tale of sorts, she had tried "A Fable Beginning with a Glimpse of Blue Sky," "A Fable Ending in a Thunderclap and a Rain Shower," and "A Fable Occurring Between Two Thunderstorms" before she hit upon "A Fable from the Living to the Dead," after which followed a dozen variations on that one idea-"A Fable to to the Dead," "A Fable the Dead," "A Fable for for the Dead," "A Fable the Dead," "A Fable for for the Living the Living from from the Dead," "A Fable the Dead," "A Fable from from the Dead the Dead to to the Living"-until at last she settled upon "A Fable for the Living." the Living"-until at last she settled upon "A Fable for the Living."

A Fable.

A fable.

A f fable.

Her ulcer had begun p.u.s.s.ing out, which meant that it was healing, but meant, too, that if she kept her lips closed for even half a second, the discharge would glue them together and pulling them apart would transfix her jaw with light. It was shameful, her pain, appalling. She hated to exhibit it, hated the attention it brought her. And yet she couldn't stop thinking about it, couldn't stop trying to justify or understand it. Most of the people who gathered to collect her signature were too young and fit to display more than a few minor sports injuries and shaving rashes, along with the occasional gleaming cincture of a hangover headache, but there were others in line, too, the sick and the insulted, her her people. The teenage girl confined to a wheelchair by cancer or arthritis, hip dysplasia or osteonecrosis, her pelvis a shining cameo of bones. The old man whose heart was failing, pulsing the way a star pulses. The woman nursing a glowing thyroid, surrept.i.tiously pressing a hand to her neck. The doctor in her hospital scrubs, who seemed so healthy as she stood facing Nina but turned to hobble away with her spine iridescing through her shirt like a string of frightful pearls. Nina looked at them, and something softened inside her. She wondered if her face showed what she was thinking: people. The teenage girl confined to a wheelchair by cancer or arthritis, hip dysplasia or osteonecrosis, her pelvis a shining cameo of bones. The old man whose heart was failing, pulsing the way a star pulses. The woman nursing a glowing thyroid, surrept.i.tiously pressing a hand to her neck. The doctor in her hospital scrubs, who seemed so healthy as she stood facing Nina but turned to hobble away with her spine iridescing through her shirt like a string of frightful pearls. Nina looked at them, and something softened inside her. She wondered if her face showed what she was thinking: Yes. That's it. I understand. You don't have to tell me Yes. That's it. I understand. You don't have to tell me.

Capping off the procession was a college student who wanted Nina to "sign this note" certifying that he had "gone to this reading." As soon as she scratched her name on the page, he whisked it away from her, zipping it into his backpack as if it were some wild creature trying to buck its way out of his grasp.

Now it was only Nina and one of the booksellers. She fell silent as she autographed the remaining stock, fifteen copies of her new collection and twice that many of her most recent novel, Twin Souls Twin Souls, a sort of parable in the guise of a love story, about a world in which there were two of everybody and it was forbidden to interact with your other self-the first book of hers that had sold well enough, miracle of miracles, to earn out its advance. Her signature slowly changed beneath her fingers, rearranging itself, purifying purifying itself, plunge by plunge and bend by bend until it was no longer a set of letters at all but a curious abstract design. It was like the pattern she had once watched a moth draw with its wings in the condensation on her bathroom mirror. She remembered switching off the lights and opening the window so that it would fly away and then, when it did, calling Wallace in to see the strange hieroglyph of sweeps and flickers it had left behind. itself, plunge by plunge and bend by bend until it was no longer a set of letters at all but a curious abstract design. It was like the pattern she had once watched a moth draw with its wings in the condensation on her bathroom mirror. She remembered switching off the lights and opening the window so that it would fly away and then, when it did, calling Wallace in to see the strange hieroglyph of sweeps and flickers it had left behind.

"I bet it was trying to communicate with you," he mused. "Maybe it was my dad, reincarnated as a moth, and the only way he knew how to get in touch with us was to write something with his wings." He looked more carefully at the mark. "Except he's illiterate."

Wallace, her wonderful, brilliant Wallace, was the product of a fling she had allowed herself one night when she was drunk and twenty-two with a man whose name and face had abandoned her the moment he put on his clothing. Nearly five years pa.s.sed before she found his business card behind her dresser and in a flash remembered who he was-his fingernails with their clean white crescents, a banker's nails, and the way he bathed her thighs with kisses, stopping just short of her pubic mound as though he had encountered a brick wall. How, she wondered, would she ever work up the courage to tell the man what their one sodden hour of s.e.x had engendered? The question, as it turned out, was academic, since a Web search informed her that not long after Wallace was born his father had been killed in a speedboat accident, "age 28, survived by his wife and childhood sweetheart, Tammy." Wallace knew little more than that his father had died a long time ago and the two of them had never married.

When the last book was signed and the "Thank you so much, Ms. Poggione" came, Nina said good-bye with a handshake and collected her possessions. It wasn't until she was on her way to the staircase that she noticed him standing at the first-editions shelf, John-with-an-h Catau, running his fingers over the covers as if he were fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by the various Gail G.o.dwins and Curtis Sittenfelds in their clear plastic sleeves. Catau, running his fingers over the covers as if he were fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by the various Gail G.o.dwins and Curtis Sittenfelds in their clear plastic sleeves.

She stopped short. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"Why, of all the places to run into each other," he joked. Clearly he had been rehearsing what to say, but he made it only midway through the sentence before his voice tightened in a plexus of timidity and self-doubt, the same slipknot effect she had noticed the day before. "I'm sorry," he continued. "Is this too much? This is too much, isn't it? It's not a long drive from Seattle to Portland. Two and a half hours. It was just that you said 'some other time,' so I thought maybe...well...tonight."