The Illumination (20 page)

The next summer, in Costa Rica, he agreed to take a quartet of visiting Spanish missionaries to the final match of the Copa América series, the first major event the stadium had held since its remodeling. Ryan was at the outer ring buying souvenir programs for his guests, listening to the crowd do its stomp-stomp-clap routine, when the midfield stands collapsed. A tide of brown dust went pouring through the entrance bays, temporarily blinding him. The air was filled with moans and screams, electronic feedback, the occasional gunlike reports of wooden buttresses cracking. As soon as Ryan had regained his sight, he shouldered his way past a security guard, under a sign that read
SECCIÓN F1 A J12
. The walkway ended at a set of twisted handrails extending over a twenty-foot chasm, a man-made canyon of folding chairs and cinder blocks. A woman in a loose
black dress had been thrown against the wall while she was leaving. Not since his weeks in Brinkley, Arkansas, had Ryan seen someone whose bones shone so fiercely through her clothing. The stacked blocks of her vertebrae. The strangely shaped elephant’s ears of her pelvis. The jumbled gravel piles of her wrists. All around him voices were shouting, “Doctor, doctor.” He was surprised to realize his own was doing the same.

It was September of the next year when he finally returned to the United States. He began serving from a small church between a Laundromat and a cashew chicken restaurant in Springfield, Missouri. The Ozarks passed through a beautiful warm autumn, then an icy winter, then a gray and moody spring. The dogwoods blossomed with tiny singed-looking flowers that came down all at once after a single weekend. Ryan was handing out New Testaments from a little knoll on the university’s commons one day when a strange light seeped into the sky and the sirens began to wail. He took shelter with several hundred college students in the campus bookstore, crouching in the social sciences aisle and listening to the speakers rustle with white noise. The tornado touched down over them once, for only a few seconds, as fastidiously as a finger pressing an ant into the dirt, and destroyed the building. Ryan covered his head as the textbooks opened their spines and whirled around him, smacking into the walls and floor like birds who had lost control of their wings. All he could hear was the freight-train sound of the wind racing through its circles. Then, in the darkness and silence, he opened his eyes. The two blocks of shelves he was kneeling between had listed into each other, forming a gablelike roof over his head. He crawled into the ruins of the bookstore and rose to his feet. Everywhere there were bodies, radiating from their hands and legs, chests and genitals, faces and stomachs. Their flesh presented a star-map of wounds, glorious and incomprehensible. He felt like a
man from some ancient tribal legend who had angered the gods and been doomed to walk the constellations.

Sometimes, late at night, he would find himself reminiscing about the disasters he had lived through, the tornado and the earthquake, the tsunami and the nitroglycerine bomb, and a voice in his head would insist,
The Lord must be looking out for you. Sixty-four years and never a major illness. Sixty-eight years and still going strong. Seventy years and seventy-one and seventy-two and seventy-three …
and he would say to himself:
No
. One word:
No
. He did not believe—and who could?—in a God so hawk-eyed and brutal, a God who bestowed a cancer here, a deformity there, for you a septic embolism and for you a compound fracture, selecting one person for grief and another for happiness like a painter experimenting with degrees of light and shadow. And which was the light, he wondered, and which the shadow? If the trials of Job could be a sign of God’s favor, then couldn’t Ryan’s own good fortune be a sign of God’s hostility? Maybe the crippled, the bruised, the diseased, the damaged—maybe the reason their wounds shone in this world was because God was lending them His attention from the next, looking on with loving compassion or a cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Those were the possibilities that played across Ryan’s mind as he lay in bed watching the darkness conduct its usual late-night scintillations. He listened to the legs of an insect ticking across the floor of his bedroom. Say that God’s attention was a product of His sympathy: well, then our pain came first, and it brought His gaze, and from His gaze arose the luminosity of our suffering:
y + z = a
. Say, on the other hand, that God’s attention was a product of His esteem for certain forms of afflicted beauty:
then our pain came first, and it brought with it the luminosity of our suffering, which summoned His gaze:
y + a = z
. One was the cause and the other the effect, one
a
and the other
z
, though either way, our pain came first, our pain was inescapable, our pain was always
y
. What frightened Ryan—horrified him—was not the possibility that God did not love us but that He did love us and His love was merely decorative. Aesthetic rather than unconditional. That He loved us because we suffered, and our suffering was pleasing to His eyes. The Illumination had overturned all the old categories of thought. For a while Ryan had believed, along with the crystal healers and the televangelists, that the light that had come to their injuries would herald a new age of reconciliation and earthly brotherhood. You would think that taking the pain of every human being and making it so starkly visible—every drunken headache and frayed cuticle, every punctured lung and bowel pocked with cancer—would inspire waves of fellow feeling all over the world, or at least ripples of pity, and for a while maybe it had, but now there were children who had come of age knowing nothing else, running to their mothers to have a Band-Aid put on their flickers, asking,
Why is the sky blue?
and,
Why does the sun hurt?
, and still they grew into their destructiveness, and still they learned whose hurt to assuage and whose to disregard, and still there were soldiers enough for all the armies of the world. And every war left behind the shrapnel scars and shattered limbs of a hundred thousand ruined bodies. And every earthquake and every hurricane produced a holocaust of light. And when his sister died she had looked at him with the panic of someone who had no idea what was coming next. And when his friends in Burkina Faso died their wounds seemed to flood the sky. And the gun shops and munitions factories were as plentiful as blades of grass. And the emergency rooms were as full as they had ever been. And there were towns in the great open middle of
the country where the cemeteries outnumbered the churches. And in the hockey stands and the boxing arenas, a cheer went up with every split lip, every burst capillary. And in the video games the schoolkids played, the aliens erupted in geysers of blood and golden tinsel. And in the tent cities and domestic violence shelters, the poor and the beaten huddled over their sores and bruises, cradling them like fussy children. And Ryan felt that he had spent his life in a darkened room, groping for meaning or at least consolation. And so, it seemed to him, had everyone else. And their bodies were aging and one day they would fail altogether. And every heart would be soaked in brightness. And every brain would burn out like an ember. And there was God, high on His throne, attending to the whole terrible procession of sorrows and traumas, corrosions and illnesses, with a cool, cerebral dispassion. He took His notes. He never uttered a syllable. He had the whole world, all the little children, you and me, brother, in His hands. And it seemed to Ryan that He viewed their bodies as a doctor would—so many sorry aging structures of blood and tissue, each displaying its own particular debility. Their wounds were majestic to Him, their tumors and lacerations. And perhaps it had always been that way. Perhaps the light He had brought to their injuries, or allowed the world to bring, was simply a new kind of ornamentation. The jewelry with which He decorated His lovers. The oil with which He anointed His sons.
The Earth was crammed with Heaven, and every common bruise afire with God, but only he who saw took off his shoes
. And if that was the case, Ryan thought, if it was our suffering that made us beautiful to God, and if that was why He allowed it to continue, then how dare He, how dare He, and why, why, why, why, why? He loved us, or so He said, but what did His love mean? What was it good for? It didn’t change anything, it didn’t improve anything, it only lingered in the distance, fluttering like a bird around the margins
of their wretchedness. It was a sad little robin of a word, His “love.” It fled at the first sign of cold weather. Its bones were hollow and filled with air. Anyone could see how feeble it was, how insubstantial. How wrong. And here was the question that kept Ryan awake at night: Was it possible for God to sin? Or were God and sin the opposite poles of a binary system? Was sin whatever God was not—the cold to God’s warmth, the darkness to God’s light? Or was it stationary, absolute, and was God as capable of venturing into it as anyone else? Because it seemed to Ryan that if God could sin, and if their suffering was as needless as it appeared, and if He had permitted or even abetted it, then His love had soured into hatred, and He should take to His knees and repent. Never mind the foundations of the earth. Never mind the morning stars singing together. Never mind the sea shut up with doors. He had formed His children, endowed them with the breath of life, and set them free in a world of poison and fire. Of endless diseases and natural disasters. Floods and landslides. Volcanic eruptions. A world of spinal meningitis. Of cerebral palsy. Of neurochemical imbalances that made the weakest among people hate having to exist. Of genetic disorders that blanketed their skin in ulcers. Could He see them in their pain? Was He awake at all behind the lit windows of Heaven? For this was the hope that Ryan found himself nursing—that God had merely gone to sleep for a while and was not paying attention, that the glass of Heaven was dark, and the curtains were drawn, and the suffering of humankind was like the sunlight that gradually suffused the sky in the morning. And maybe, Ryan thought, that was all there was to it. Maybe the hour was still too early. Maybe they hadn’t yet suffered enough to rouse Him from His bed. A little more pain, a little more light, a few more blows and afflictions, and God would stretch His limbs and waken to the grand celestial daybreak.
And the Earth would experience its restoration. And everything would be changed. The older Ryan became, the more the notion preoccupied him. He lay beneath his sheets watching the dim plane of the ceiling. Inside it he could see the same hallucination he had seen ever since he was a child forcing his eyes to make sense of the darkness, a thousand lambent spots that leaped and circled around one another like the static on an ancient television. And he knew that if he stared at them long enough they would come together as they always had, in a single overlapping field of Catherine wheels and carousels.

In the fourth decade of the Illumination, shortly after Ryan’s eighty-first birthday, he was selecting an orange from a display at the supermarket when a whistle rang in his ears, beginning with a greaselike sizzle, then rising slowly and leveling off. Suddenly the floor was cool against his cheek. Dozens of oranges were rolling around him like billiard balls. He did not remember lying down, but he must have. The woman hovering over him said, “Are you all right? Took a little spill there, didn’t you, sir?” and though he could see the arthritis shining in her fingers like a string of pearls, she gripped his hand to help him stand up.

Maybe that was when it started, or maybe it was a few days earlier, when he lost track of himself while taking his afternoon walk and regained his thoughts wandering through the lobby of an office building several blocks away, but soon Ryan realized that something had happened to his mind. It became difficult for him to distinguish the past from the present. He could no longer be sure he knew where he was. One minute he might be an old man waiting in line at the bank to make a cash withdrawal, and the next he would be nine years old and in Miss Fitzgerald’s music
class, sitting crisscross applesauce between Jeffrey Campbell and Jessica Easto, angry that the instrument box had been nearly empty by the time it reached him, which meant that he had gotten stuck—again!—with the rhythm sticks instead of the hand drums. He might be jimmying a spoon under the lid of a jar and look up to see the sun shining on a snowcapped Russian mountain, or clouds breaking over the Gulf of Mexico, or the moon wavering in the bug-stitched mirror of the lake where his college girlfriend kept her cabin. He could never tell. Or perhaps he would be watching the palm trees streak past his windshield, flinching at their trunks as the wave spun his car in circle after circle, then find himself attending an air-conditioned Midwestern church service where someone he could not recollect having met, a pastor with the pliant, swaying voice of a yoga instructor, was offering a sermon in celebration of his retirement from the mission. That was where he seemed to be right now: the church.

“We are here today not only to worship the Lord,” the pastor said, “but to pay tribute to a man who has dedicated his life to His service, Brother Ryan Shifrin,” and that was
him
, Ryan thought,
he
was Brother Ryan Shifrin. And his sister was Sister Judy Shifrin, and his father was Father Donald Shifrin, and his mother was Mother Sarah Beth Shifrin, and his dog was Scamper Shifrin—Scamp for short—and there she came bounding across the lawn with her tongue lolling over her lips, the tag on her collar jingling like a sleigh bell.

“Scamp! Scamper! Here, girl!”

Either she did not hear him, or Ryan merely imagined he had called out, because she disappeared beneath the pulpit, and when she reemerged, she was not his dog but Mr. Castillo’s, Max—no, Trinket—barking and lunging at the pastor’s vestments. And then there was no dog in the church at all. The stained-glass window was casting its tinted shapes onto the carpet. The communion
rail was riddled with plum-size holes. The banner on the pulpit read,
I LOVE THE HOUSE WHERE YOU LIVE
, O LORD,
THE PLACE WHERE YOUR GLORY DWELLS
, and for the first time in years, Ryan thought of the beaten journal of love notes the boy with the bruised backside had given him a few days ago.