The Illumination

What could Ryan say? That he apologized? That he understood? It was Judy who had always been the diehard, the true believer, praying that it would not snow on her birthday, that Wheaton College would pluck her from its waiting list, that the cancer would not spread to her lungs and afterward, when it did, that her suffering would be bearable, but always and only if it be God’s will. Their shared childhood of bedtime prayers and family devotionals had carried Ryan to church nearly every Sunday of his life, but it had carried Judy much further, into a world of praise music, revival meetings, and mission work. She was a Christian by constitution, whereas Ryan was merely a Christian by inertia. Or he very nearly was, he would have been, if not for the occasional moment waiting at a stoplight or pushing a shopping cart with a floating front wheel through the supermarket when, despite the fact that everyone was in pain and everyone was dying and no one knew what they were or where they came from, an inexplicable sense that it would all be okay washed over him like a wave. It was the same feeling that Wittgenstein had found so curious, the one that had convinced him of the existence of God. A hint, a clue. Not a burning bush or a disembodied hand marking out letters in plaster, but the slight breeze He left as He brushed past the world.

  That evening, when Ryan got home, Judy was still sleeping. A new stain had appeared on her pillow, a spatter of blood, already dried to rust along the edges. He could hardly bear to see it there, grazing her lip like the plume of a long red feather.

  He cradled her head while he replaced the pillow, trying not to disturb her, but she woke anyway. She blinked and recognized him, gave a teetering smile. “Ryan,” she said, “you’re back.”

  “That’s right. Home again.”

  He pressed his hand to her cheek. This simple moment of ordinary respiration, with her breath warming the backs of his fingers—he knew that it would not last.

  She asked, “How were the leaflets today?” and when he groaned, she laughed, a thin puff of air she expelled through her nostrils to keep herself from coughing. The attempt did not work. It was as if she reserved all her energy for these explosive hacking noises that left her completely exhausted. Quietly, between coughs, she said, “Well, thank you for doing it anyway, going to all those houses for me.”

  “A promise is a promise.”

  “Oh, poor Rye-rye. Just look how it wears you out.”

  “It’s your life, I’m just keeping it warm for you.”

  This was how they spoke to each other these days, not like brother and sister but newlyweds pretending they had already grown old together. It was a beautiful service, wasn’t it, dear? The finest. You and your suit and me in my dress. Yes, you never looked lovelier than you did in that dress of yours. It had started when their parents died, their father barely a year after their mother, and settled into habit once Judy got sick. Soon, Ryan went to the kitchen to prepare some of the vegetable broth that was the only food she could stomach anymore. He fed her with one of the antique silver spoons they had inherited from the family. Afterward he cleaned her face and neck with a damp washcloth he heated in the microwave. She was already drifting back to sleep by the time he finished.

  “Hey, Judy?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Mr. Castillo, do you remember? The old guy who lived next door. What was his dog’s name?”

  She thought about it for a second and murmured, “Trinket.”

  That was the night he woke at two o’clock to the sound of retching. He rushed to Judy’s bedroom. She was coughing once more but with her lips closed this time, her cheeks bloating out again and again, as if she were blowing up a balloon, and when finally she opened her mouth, he saw that on her tongue she had produced something the size of a strawberry. Her face exhibited a look of astonishment and humiliation. Is this normal? she seemed to be asking. This can’t be normal. She spat the lump out of her mouth, and Ryan left to pack it in a bag of ice. For the rest of his life, whenever he remembered the night she died, he would wonder why he had believed he should preserve it. What befuddled reflex was he obeying? Why didn’t he phone the hospital first?

  The paramedics who arrived not ten minutes later kept calling Judy “the crit.” “We’re on scene with the crit,” they said into their radios. “The crit is not responding to verbal stimuli. The crit’s pupils are fixed, pulse slow and even.” They picked her up, harnessed her to a stretcher, and told Ryan he should follow them to Mercy General. No, he could not ride in the back of the ambulance. They were sorry. Regulations. So he grabbed his keys from the dresser and ran outside and started the car. The ambulance seemed to float through the streets like a toy, a die-cast racer propelled along a plastic track. Gradually he fell behind, watching the blue lights lend their flicker to more and more distant buildings, until, abruptly and inexplicably, at the corner of Burlington and Court, the driver began obeying the traffic laws. By the time the hospital came into view, Ryan was no more than half a minute behind them, but when he pulled into the emergency room’s entrance bay, the paramedics were already sitting on the ambulance’s back fender as if they had been there all night. One was scuffing the pavement with his shoe, the other upending a thermos into his mouth. When Ryan got out of his car, they met his eyes and shook their heads at him. And so the first part was over, and he could begin teaching himself not to remember.

  It was a year later that the light began.

  Ryan was scorekeeping for a youth basketball game at the church the night it started, operating the board from a table at mid-court. In the last seconds of the fourth quarter, one of Fellowship’s boys attempted to dunk the ball and dashed his hand against the rim, a blow so violent that the backboard clanged on its springs. The noise continued to reverberate even after the final buzzer sounded. Beneath the basket the boy was hunched over. Inquisitively, as if the pain had simply made him curious, he bent his wrist, and from inside, where the tendons fanned apart, it began to shine, a hard surge of light that turned his glasses into vacant white disks. He winced and said, “Aw, Christ.”

  At first Ryan assumed the glare from one of the lamps in the parking lot must be sliding through the stained-glass window, casting a peculiar incandescence over the boy, one that just happened to be concentrated on his injury, but the brightness followed him as he staggered across the floor to the sidelines, crumpling like an animal onto the bench. A few of the other players, Ryan noticed, had glowing white bruises on their arms and legs. The visiting team’s coach wore a circle of light around his left knee, the bad one, the knee with the wraparound brace. Ryan thought something must be wrong with his vision. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, opening them to see dozens of other people, in the bleachers and on the court, blinking and rubbing their own. What was going on?

  Driving home he passed a traffic accident on the highway. A car had flipped over onto its roof, and in the front two bodies were hanging from their safety belts, glowing like pillars of fire. The light was no illusion. Ryan stopped his MP3 player and dialed through the broadcast band. The first few channels were following their programming guidelines, airing music or commercials, sermons or station ID stingers, but eventually he found a community radio show that occupied the thin sliver of airspace between an oldies station and the local public radio affiliate. “And I’m sorry,” the host was saying, “but, you know, this is some weird business we’ve got going on here at the Reggae Hour. For those of you who’ve just tuned in, Tony, my engineer, has this toothache on it looks like—what?—his right incisor. Right incisor, Tony? His right incisor. And it’s shining like a lightbulb, a bite-size effing lightbulb. A Christmas light! I do not lie to you, ladies and gentlemen. I do not lie.”

  So Ryan was not crazy.

  At home, he immediately turned on the television and sat watching the news until he fell asleep, and then again when he woke up. He could hardly do anything else.

  The Illumination: who had coined the term, which pundit or editorial writer, no one knew, but soon enough—within hours, it seemed—that was what people were calling it. The same thing was
happening all over the world. In hospitals and prison yards, nursing homes and battered women’s shelters, wherever the sick and the injured were found, a light could be seen flowing from their bodies. Their wounds were filled with it, brimming. The cable news channels showed clip after clip to illustrate the phenomenon. There was the footage, endlessly rebroadcast, of the New York City mugging victim saying, “It hurts right here, and right here, and right here,” touching the three radiant marks on her neck, shoulder, and breastbone. There was the free-for-all at the hockey match, one lightning flash after another bursting from the cluster of sticks and uniforms. There was the fraternity party at which the pledges had taken turns punching through sheets of glass, leaving their hands sliced open with glittering, perfectly shaped gashes. And those were just the images Ryan could not shake, the ones that haunted him when he closed his eyes in the shower to wash the shampoo from his hair. Over and over again he watched soldiers burning out of their injuries, footballers flickering through their pads and jerseys. He watched children with sacklike bellies basking in a glow of hunger. Occasionally, the light seemed to arrive from a distinct direction, like the sun slanting through a gap in a curtain, but often it simply infused whatever aches or traumas afflicted people. At such times, it had the appearance of a strange luminescent paint layered directly over their skin. They might have been angels in an El Greco painting.

  That was the beginning. For a few months, church attendance spiked. Some of the seats at Fellowship Bible were taken by visitors, some by the Christmas-and-Easter set. It didn’t matter—each new face showed the guilt, fright, or confusion of someone confronted by a game whose rules had suddenly changed. After a while, though, when it became clear that the world was not ending, or not ending soon, and everyone began to accept that pain now came coupled together with light, the congregation diminished. Each Sunday, fewer and fewer people were required to sit in the folding chairs the ushers had arranged behind the pews, until finally the chairs were taken up and put away, wheeled into the closet on their long metal platforms. Again the church directory was crowded with photos of people who turned up only once or twice a year.

  Ryan wished he could permit himself to be one of them, but it was impossible. There was someone who was watching him, who needed him there in her stead, someone who whispered an almost imperceptible thank you each time he walked through the door, her voice no louder than a breath, scarcely strong enough to make a candle flicker. It was for her sake that he was still distributing the leaflets. He devoted a few hours a day to the job, circulating from one neighborhood to the next so that he walked down every block on his route at least once a month. The church paid him for it—not much but enough, or enough for now. Enough along with the insurance settlement. Enough along with his investments and the money he had saved during his brokerage days. “For the Lord God will illumine them,” the new leaflets read, from the final chapter of Revelation, singular, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, and he marched from house to house with a sheaf of them in his leather satchel. When no one was home, he would take a leaflet from the sorry-we-missed-you stack, scroll it shut, and tuck it into the doorjamb, next to the campaign flyers and the pizza offers. When someone answered, he would smile as if he understood why he was smiling and ask the question he always asked: “Tell me, have you heard the Good News?” He abided by business hours, which meant that there were always more sorry-we-missed-you houses than have-you-heard-the-Good-News? houses. In the summer it was mainly schoolkids he saw, in the winter retirees and homemakers. And there were the invalids, too, of course, a surprising number of cripples and terminal cases, as if on every block two or three houses had been seized in the jaws of some great machine and reduced to stone and timber. The old men with prostate conditions. The diabetes patients with ulcerated feet. The arthritis sufferers with swollen joints. All of them were illuminated with the telltale signs of their own infirmity. “Sorry about your heart,” Ryan wanted to say, or, “Sorry about your legs,” but he was still getting used to the etiquette of the situation. Was it discourteous to admit that you could see a person’s sickness playing out on the surface of his body? What if it was a form of sickness that had always previously been hidden?

  One afternoon, at a yellow brick house with a lopsided magnolia dropping its leaves in the yard, a boy who had clearly been beaten opened the door. The collar of his shirt was frayed, and a scab was beginning to heal on his chin. He wore his glasses too close to his eyes, which gave him the downcast look of a dog in a trench. Ryan had the impulse to pick him up and carry him away. No, no, this won’t do, he wanted to say. This won’t do at all, but instead he smiled at the boy and asked him if his parents were home. The boy held up a finger—just one second—and sprinted into the darkness of the house. A bruise with squared-off edges radiated through the seat of his pants.

  Ryan switched the satchel to his other shoulder and looked around as he stretched his muscles. A chain of roots arched across the lawn, appearing every so often as a ropey brown bulge in the overgrown grass. A patch of concrete was crumbling at the end of the porch. When the boy reappeared—alone—he handed Ryan a book. Ryan had never become a father, had never even done any babysitting, and talking to children, he always felt a strange and powerful foreignness emanating from their delicate little skulls, as if he were trying to communicate with someone who was secretly much cleverer and more intuitive than he was, attuned like the elephants to the hum of some mysterious subsonic tone. He riffled through the book’s pages.

  “What’s this you’ve got for me?”

  The boy waved him away.

  “Yes, this is a nice book. A nice book indeed. Here, you can have it back now.”

  The boy recoiled. Barely a second had passed before he slammed the door.

  When Ryan knocked, no one responded. It seemed to him that a choice had been made on his behalf. For some reason, the boy had given him the book; for some reason, he wanted Ryan to keep it. He put it in his satchel.

  Later, at home, skimming through the pages, he discovered a long sequence of tiny handwritten love notes, each one printed in the same slanting blue ink. I love watching you sit and crochet while I’m doing the bills or clearing the photo banks. I love those old yearbook pictures of you. I love it when you watch me shave and laugh at the faces I make. I love how, when we come home from a bar, you’ll hang the clothes you wore in the garage until the cigarette stink evaporates.

  Shaving and cigarettes and old yearbook photos—so obviously the notes had not been written by the boy himself. Maybe the journal belonged to his parents. Or maybe he had found it at a flea market or garage sale. One thing was certain: it had not been treated with any particular care. The cover was scuffed, the flyleaf spotted with coffee or Coca-Cola. There were scorch marks on a few of the pages, as if it had been plucked from a bed of embers just before it could ignite.

  I love sitting outside on a blanket with you, my bare foot brushing against yours. I love how embarrassing you find your middle name. I love your Free Cell addiction. I love how irritated you get at smiley face icons, or, as I know you love to call them, “emoticons.” I love the way you’ll hold a new book up to your face and fan through the pages to inhale the scent. I love wasting an afternoon tossing stones off the pier with you. I love seeing your body turn into a mosaic through the frosted glass of the hotel shower. I love the fact that you know all the lyrics to “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” I love it when you fall asleep while I’m driving, because it lets me feel like I’m protecting you. I love the way you’ll call me in the middle of the day to apologize for the littlest things.

  That was all there was to the book, page after page of I love you’s, yet something about it was curiously beguiling. It was like the yellow window of a house casting its glow into the darkness as Ryan took one of his two-in-the-morning insomnia walks, a mystery oriented around the simplest of questions. Who was that family moving around behind the glass? How long would they remain awake? Would their love for each othe
r ever sour into indifference, into hostility? And would anyone even notice if it did? How many times could you repeat the same three words before they tumbled over and began to mean the opposite of what they said?

  I love you.

  The Good News.

  Oh Heavenly Father.

  After Ryan finished reading the journal, he set it on the sideboard. He could always return the book to the boy’s house later, he thought, but somehow, as the months passed, he never did. He kept working for the church, knocking on doors with his satchel and his flyers. He would walk for blocks and blocks sometimes with the shadows of the clouds coasting over him as if he were an open pasture where a puddle pierced with grass had formed beside a leaning fencepost. The rhythm of his stride made it easy to lose himself in meditation. Over and over again he found himself waking from reveries whose course he could barely follow. He was thinking about how rarely his body had failed him, how different two lives could be. He had always been healthy, had never been accident-prone, and aside from a poison ivy rash when he was in Boy Scouts and an abscessed tooth when he was twenty-three, the debilitations of sickness and injury were something he barely knew. It was not until Judy got cancer that he came to understand how illness could diminish a person and reveal her as she truly was. Sometimes he would dream that she was dying again, that he had heard her choking, had run to her bedside and watched her bring up that horrible strawberry of blood, except that the Illumination had already begun this time and her body was washed in a pitiless white light. Her pain was intermittent, like the sun flaring through a stand of trees seen from the window of a moving car, and when he finally came back to himself, he was surprised to find that it was not a dazzling spring day when he was six and she was seven, and they were not buckled into their dad’s old Bronco as it whisked them down a wooded highway.

  One morning, he was collecting another batch of leaflets from the church when Pastor Bradley took him aside and suggested he think about volunteering for their next mission trip. “Hear me out,” he said. “Don’t dismiss the idea so quickly. You’re perfect for the job,” and then came the words that made Ryan feel as if he were tipping over inside himself, falling through the unbearable emptiness of his years. “A forty-five-year-old man. Never married. No kids, no parents, no siblings. It seems to me you have very little to lose.”