Love Without Borders
Chapter Eight
I open my eyes and there is nothing to see.
Not darkness. Darkness has edges. Darkness is the absence of light in a definite space, and I have been in dark rooms before and always known, even with my eyes closed, the shape of the room around me. This is not that. This is a blankness that does not commit to being black or white or any color I can name, a flatness that extends in every direction without offering a wall or a floor or a ceiling or anything else I can take a measurement against. I am lying on something, or standing on something, or floating in something. I cannot tell. The surface, if it is a surface, has the texture of nothing at all.
I try to sit up. The motion works, or something like it works. My body responds, or the memory of a body responds, and I am upright now in the grey, and the grey looks the same from this angle as it did from the last, which is to say it does not look like anything. It has no horizon. It has no far wall. It gives me nothing to orient by.
All right.
I take inventory. This is what I do. This is what I have always done when I walk into a room and the room does not make sense: I check the variables, sort the data, find the edges. Name of location: unknown. Time: unknown. Temperature: I cannot tell. There is no warmth and no cold, or there is something that sits exactly between the two, a neutrality so complete it refuses to register on whatever scale I am using to measure it. My body is here. My hands are here. I look at them, and they are my hands, square and blunt and capable, the same hands that changed the wiper fluid and fixed the damper and held the wheel at ten and two on a wet highway in November.
The highway.
It comes back in a single compressed instant, not as a memory but as a physical event replaying in my chest: the ice, the sickening lurch of the rear tires losing traction, Lena’s hand on my arm, the world rotating on an axis the car was not built for, and then noise, and then no noise, and then something else.
The something else is the part I do not want to look at.
Because after the noise stopped, after the metal stopped screaming and the glass stopped falling and the cold air came in through places the cold air should not have been able to enter, there was light. Not headlights and not the grey dusk light of the highway and not the blue flash of emergency vehicles. A different kind. A light that was warm and close and personal in a way that light has no business being, as though the light itself were paying attention to me, as though the light had a face, and the face knew my name, and the knowing was not the knowing of a database or a file or a record but the knowing of someone who had been watching for a long time and had finally, at the exact worst moment, stepped into the room.
The light offered me something. I cannot say what it offered because the offering was not made in words, or not in words alone, but in the quality of the presence itself, a quality of total, unhurried, specific welcome that I did not ask for and did not want. It was as though someone were holding open a door and waiting for me to walk through, and the door opened onto something vast and warm and entirely outside my control, and the warmth was the problem, because the warmth was not a thing I could manage, and the door was not a thing I could close behind me and organize, and the presence was not a variable I could account for in any inventory I had ever kept.
I said no.
I did not say the word. I do not think I was capable of speech at that point, if speech is even the right frame for what was happening in the dying, in the long, stretched-out second when the body I had maintained so carefully was failing and the light was pressing in from every direction. But the refusal was as clear as any sentence I have ever spoken. It was the refusal of a man who has handled every problem he has ever encountered with his own two hands, who has never called for help because help was never needed, who stood in the presence of something unbearably kind and unbearably total and said, with every atom of the self he had spent twenty-eight years building: I do not need this. I do not need You. I can handle this too.
The light did not argue. The light did not insist. The light stayed, and stayed, and I turned away from it, and the turning was not punished, and the staying was not withdrawn, and then something shifted and the light was behind me and the grey was ahead of me and I was falling, or sinking, or settling into this place the way sediment settles to the bottom of a glass of water, and now I am here, wherever here is, and the light is gone.
Except it is not gone.
That is the first thing I notice that I do not want to notice. The light is not here, not in the way it was in the dying, not as a face and a warmth and a door. But there is something at the edge of this place, at the edge of whatever grey room I am in, a kind of pressure or hum or warmth held at a distance, like hearing music through a wall so thick you cannot make out the melody but you know it is playing. It is behind me, or above me, or underneath the surface I cannot feel, and it is not pushing and it is not insisting and it is not doing anything at all except being there, and the being-there has a quality of attention that I recognize because I just turned away from it.
I do not turn toward it. I face forward, into the grey, and I begin to assess.
There must be rules here. Every system has rules. The cabin had a stuck damper. The highway had a speed limit and a coefficient of friction and a weather forecast I had accounted for. This place, whatever it is, however strange its properties, has structure, because everything has structure, and structure can be mapped, and a map is the first step toward a plan, and a plan is the first step toward solving the problem, and the problem is this: I am here. I should not be here. There is a way out. I will find it.
I start walking. The walking is strange. My feet, or the memory of my feet, meet the surface, or the memory of a surface, and there is traction of a kind but no sound, no impact, no friction. I walk for what feels like a long time and the grey does not change. It does not thin. It does not thicken. It gives me no landmark and no feedback and no indication that walking is accomplishing anything at all, which is infuriating, because walking has always accomplished something, has always been motion from one known point toward another, and here there are no points and no direction and the accomplishing is the thing that is missing.
I stop. I recalibrate. I think about the variables I have and the variables I need. What I have: consciousness, a body or something like one, the ability to move, the ability to think. What I need: information. Direction. A way to determine whether this place has geography, whether it has time, whether it has an exit. I need data, and the data is not presenting itself, so I will have to generate it.
I try shouting. My voice works, or it seems to. The sound goes out into the grey and dies. No echo. No reverberation. No wall close enough to bounce it back. The grey absorbs the sound the way it absorbs everything else, with that absolute, colorless neutrality that gives nothing back.
All right. Different approach. I kneel, if kneeling is the right word for lowering myself toward a surface I cannot confirm exists, and I press my palm flat against the ground, if this is the ground. There is something under my hand. Not warm, not cold. Not hard, not soft. Present, but only barely, the way a thought is present before you think it, hovering at the threshold of existence without quite committing to being real.
And behind me, or beside me, or somewhere in the fabric of this place, the nearness waits. The almost-warmth. The not-quite-sound of something alive and attentive that is not going anywhere.
I ignore it. I stand. I keep working.
Lena is not here. This is the thought I am not permitting myself to have, so of course it arrives anyway, pushing past the inventory and the assessment and the problem-solving like water through a crack in a foundation. Lena is not here. She was in the car and the car was spinning and her hand was on my arm and then the light came and now she is not here and I do not know where she is and this is the one variable I cannot account for, the one piece of the inventory I cannot check, and the not-knowing sits in me like a stone I cannot lift and cannot set down and do not know what to do with because I have never not known how to find her. I always know where she is. I track her phone. I know her schedule. I know the route she takes to work and the one she takes home and the name of the barista at the coffee shop where she goes on Thursday mornings. I keep the world around her in order so that nothing can get to her without passing through me first, and now the world is this, this grey nothing, this featureless blank, and I cannot find her in it.
I push the thought away. Later. File it. There is work to do and the work will not do itself and I am, if nothing else, a man who does the work.
The nearness at the edge of everything does not move. It does not press harder. It simply remains, the way a pilot light remains in a furnace when the heat is off, and I walk deeper into the grey, and I do not look back.
Naomi
I know exactly where I am.
The knowing arrives before anything else, before the opening of whatever passes for eyes in this place, before the first breath or the first attempt at breath, before the grey registers as grey or the silence registers as silence or the absence of ground registers as the absence of ground. I know. I have been warned about this. I spent years being warned about this, every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening and youth group Friday and vacation Bible school summer, warned by people who stood at the front of rooms and held their Bibles like weapons and told me in voices that shook with their own authority what happens to the ones who walk away from God.
This is what happens.
This is the place they warned me about, the outer darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the country of the turned-away, and I am here because I turned away, and I turned away because the god they taught me deserved nothing less than my back.
Except.
The memory comes hot and unwanted, a flash of the dying moment that I have been trying not to look at since I opened my eyes in this grey nothing, and the memory is this: the light that came for me in the wreck was not what they warned me about. It was not the gavel. It was not the shaming. It was not Pastor Gerald standing at the front of the sanctuary in his pressed shirt, pointing his finger at the congregation, telling us that God sees everything we do and writes it down and the ledger is always open and the accounting is always in progress and the day is coming when the books are read aloud and every hidden thing is brought to light and the light will be punishment, the light will be exposure, the light will be the searing, stripping, merciless gaze of a God whose love is conditional on behavior and whose behavior is cruelty dressed up in Sunday clothes.
The light that came for me in the dying was not that god.
The light was warm. The light was gentle. The light knew me, knew me all the way down to the root of the fury and the root of the hurt and the root of the walking-away, and it did not flinch from any of it and it did not condemn any of it and it held the whole ugly inventory of my damage with a tenderness so absolute that I felt my chest crack open for a second before I slammed it shut.
I slammed it shut because I know this trick. I have seen this trick before. I have stood in pews and felt the warmth of a room full of people singing and the closeness of something that seemed good and seemed safe and seemed like it might, if I let it, be the love they promised. And then the song ended and the warmth drained and Pastor Gerald stood up and the love turned to surveillance and the safety turned to shame and the God who was supposed to hold me held me accountable instead, for the skirt that was too short and the question that was too sharp and the doubt that was too honest and the anger that was too real, and I learned, in the pew, in the singing, in the cracking-open and the slamming-shut, that the warmth is always bait.
So when the light came for me and the light was warm and the light was kind and the light was so unlike the god of Pastor Gerald that I could not reconcile the two, I did what I have trained myself to do since I was seventeen years old and walked out of that church for the last time. I pulled my arms across my chest and turned my back and said, with the full weight of my informed, furious, wounded refusal: I know You. I know what You are. You are the god who shames, the god who watches, the god who pretends to love and then punishes. You will not do this to me again.
And the light did not argue. And the light did not insist. And the light stayed, the way it had no right to stay, the way the god of Pastor Gerald would never have stayed, because Pastor Gerald’s god withdrew his love when you disobeyed and this light was not withdrawing, was not punishing, was not doing anything but remaining, and the remaining was worse than the punishment because I knew how to fight punishment and I did not know how to fight patience.
And then I was here. The grey. The country of the turned-away.
I sit with this for what might be a long time. There is no way to measure. The grey does not change. It does not brighten and it does not darken and it does not offer me a clock or a shadow or a sun or any of the things that divide time into the manageable portions that allow a person to know where they are in a day. There is only the grey, and the silence, and my own breathing, if I am breathing, and the slow, boiling fury that has been the furnace at the center of me for nine years, which is burning now the way it always burns, hot and bright and righteous.
I was right to leave. I was right to leave the church and the god and the pews and the shaming and the whole broken system of conditional love that calls itself grace and means control. I was right, and being right is the only shelter I have ever built for myself that did not collapse when I needed it most, and I am standing in that shelter now, in the grey, in the silence, in whatever this place is, and the rightness holds.
But.
The light was not what I expected. The light in the dying, the presence that came for me in the wreck, was not the god of the pew and the ledger and the pointed finger. It was something else, something I have never met before, something that looked at the whole of me, the fury and the wound and the walking-away, with a quality of attention that I can only describe, and I hate myself for describing it this way, as tender. Not soft. Not indulgent. Not the weak, watery kindness of someone who does not take you seriously enough to hold you accountable. Tender the way a surgeon is tender, precise and serious and wholly on your side even as the blade goes in.
I do not trust it. I will not trust it. I have trusted warmth before, and warmth became a furnace, and the furnace burned me, and I will not put my hand in the fire again, not for any god, not even for a god who looks nothing like the one I fled.
And yet.
There is something here, at the edge of the grey, at the periphery of wherever I am. Not the light itself, not the face and the warmth and the terrible gentleness I turned away from. Something quieter. A nearness. A waiting. As though the thing I refused is still in the room, sitting in the far corner, not approaching, not insisting, just present, the way a person is present who has come a long distance and is willing to wait a long time and does not intend to leave even if you will not look at them.
I will not look.
The fury burns. The shelter holds. I am Naomi, twenty-seven years old, survivor of a God who was never God at all but only a man at a podium with a microphone and a Bible and a particular gift for making children believe they were not enough. I carry the wound and the walking-away and the righteous, blazing, nine-year no, and I will carry them here, in the grey, in the waiting, for as long as the waiting lasts.
But the nearness in the corner does not flinch. The nearness in the corner, if a nearness can have a quality, has the quality of the light I turned away from, the same terrible gentleness, held at a distance I chose, respecting the distance I chose, not crossing it, not closing it, only remaining, and the remaining is the most unsettling thing about this place, more unsettling than the grey and the silence and the absence of time, because the god of Pastor Gerald never remained. The god of Pastor Gerald withdrew. The god of Pastor Gerald took his love and left the room when you failed, and the leaving was the punishment, and the punishment was the point.
This is not leaving. Whatever this is, whatever this presence is that sits at the edge of my awareness and will not go away and will not come closer, it is not leaving, and the not-leaving does not fit inside the only framework I have for understanding God, and the not-fitting is a crack in the shelter, and I feel the crack and I patch it with fury and the fury holds.
For now.
Quinn
Run.
The word arrives before I do, before the opening of eyes or the finding of a body or the first confused attempt at understanding where I am. Run. It is the oldest word in my vocabulary, the first instruction my nervous system ever learned to give itself, and it fires now the way it has always fired, not as a decision but as a reflex, a chemical, an animal directive so deep in the wiring that by the time the conscious mind catches up the legs are already moving.
Except the legs are not moving. The legs are here, or something like legs, and they work, or something like working, but the running does not happen because there is nowhere to run to. The grey is the same in every direction. I turn, and the grey is there. I turn again, and the grey is there. There is no door and no hallway and no exit sign and no street outside with a bar on the corner where the music is loud and the crowd is warm and no one asks your name or your history or what you are running from. There is only the grey, flat and featureless and so quiet that I can hear my own thinking, and my own thinking is the thing I have spent twenty-four years learning to drown out.
Okay. Okay. Think. No. Do not think. Find something. Find a distraction. Find the phone, find the music, find the flask, find the crowd, find the noise, find anything at all to fill the silence before the silence fills me, because the silence is where the thoughts live, and the thoughts are where the feelings live, and the feelings are the things I cannot afford to feel because feeling them would mean sitting still, and sitting still would mean being here, and being here would mean being me, the actual me, not the moving, laughing, drinking, dancing me but the one underneath, the one who has been crouching in the basement of my body since I was old enough to find the first way to make her shut up.
I reach for my pocket. There is no pocket. I reach for my bag. There is no bag. I reach for the phone and the flask and the earbuds and all the small portable tools of oblivion that I have carried with me every day of my adult life, the things that stand between me and the sound of my own interior, and none of them are here. Nothing is here. The grey has given me a body and nothing else, a body without pockets, without accessories, without a single surface to swipe or a single substance to swallow or a single beat to lose myself in.
The silence is enormous. It presses against me the way water presses against someone who has gone too deep, a weight on every side, not painful but total, and in the silence I can hear the one thing I have spent my whole life running from, which is my own heartbeat, steady and regular and horrifyingly real, the metronome of a life I have never wanted to sit down and listen to.
I walk. Walking is motion. Motion is not sitting still. I walk into the grey and the grey accepts me without resistance and gives me nothing back, and the walking feels like running in a dream, all effort and no distance, but it is better than standing still, because standing still is the one thing I cannot do, the one instruction my body has never learned to follow, the one command that, if I obeyed it, would leave me alone in a room with myself, and I have been avoiding that room since I was fourteen years old.
The dying comes back to me in flashes, not as a sequence but as a collection of images shuffled out of order: the backseat of Micah’s car, the bass vibrating through the steering column, the sudden impossible sound of something larger than a car happening to a car, the cold, the pain, the white moment when the pain ended and something else began. And then the light.
I do not want to think about the light.
I think about the light.
It came the way sunrise comes through a window you forgot to curtain, sudden and absolute and impossible to pretend is not happening. It was everywhere and it was personal and it saw me, not the surface me, not the Quinn who dances and drinks and laughs too loud and leaves before anyone can ask where she is going, but the underneath me, the crouching one, the basement one, the one I have locked away so thoroughly that I sometimes forget she is there until four in the morning when the music stops and the flask is empty and the room is quiet and I lie in the dark and feel her breathing down there, slow and frightened, like a child hiding under a bed.
The light saw her. The light looked straight past every lock and every wall and every layer of noise I had built over her and found her, and the finding was not the finding of a search warrant or an accusation. The finding was the finding of someone who had been looking for a long time and was glad, glad in a way that made no sense, because no one has ever been glad to find the thing I keep hidden, not even me, especially not me.
And I ran. Of course I ran. What else do I do? The light opened its arms and I flinched. The light said I see you and I bolted. The light offered stillness and knowing and the one thing I cannot survive, which is to be fully, completely, nowhere-left-to-hide seen, and my body did what my body has always done when seeing is on the table: it turned and fled.
I fled into this. The grey. The quiet. The place with nowhere to go.
I try running here. The motion works, sort of. My body, or the memory of my body, goes through the motions of speed, and my legs pump and my arms swing and my breathing quickens, or seems to quicken, but the grey does not change around me, the scenery does not blur past, there is no wind on my face and no pavement under my feet and no sense of covering ground. I am running in place. I am running on a treadmill in an empty room in a country that has no exits, and the running is accomplishing exactly as much as it has always accomplished, which is nothing, which is the point of the running, which was never to get somewhere but to not be here.
And here is all there is.
I stop. My chest heaves with effort that produced no result. The grey settles around me, undisturbed. The silence, which the running did not dent, which the running did not even scratch, returns to its full, terrible volume, and in the silence I hear the heartbeat again, and under the heartbeat I hear the breathing of the girl in the basement, and under the breathing I hear the thing I always hear when the noise runs out, which is the question I have been running from since before I knew I was running, the question that lives at the bottom of every flask and at the end of every night and in the quiet space between one song and the next: What if someone really saw you? What if they saw all of it? What would they do?
I know the answer. The answer is that they would leave. They always leave. Everyone who has ever gotten close enough to see past the dancing, past the laughing, past the bright, manic, exhausting performance of a girl who is fun and easy and never in one place long enough to be a problem, has left. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just a slow backing-away, a cooling, the gradual retraction of a hand that reached in and felt something it did not want to touch.
The light did not back away. The light reached in and found the girl in the basement and was glad. And I could not survive the gladness, because the gladness meant the light was different from every other thing that had ever tried to see me, and if the light was different then maybe the answer was different, and if the answer was different then maybe I had been wrong about what happens when you are fully known, and being wrong about that would mean the running was for nothing, and the numbness was for nothing, and the whole exhausting architecture of my avoidance was a fortress I built against a love that was never going to hurt me, and I cannot bear that possibility, so I ran.
I walked away from the gladness. I chose the grey over the seeing. And now I am here, in the quiet, in the place with no music and no flask and no crowd, and the heartbeat goes on and the girl in the basement breathes and the grey does not offer me a single thing to hide behind.
There is something here though. At the edge. Not the light itself, not the seeing, not the face that was glad. Something softer. A nearness, like the warmth of a body standing close but not touching. It is everywhere and it is not chasing me. That is what undoes me most. It is not chasing me. Everything in my life that has ever wanted something from me has chased, has pressed, has demanded, and the demanding is what I run from, and this nearness is not demanding. It is only here. It is only waiting. It sits in the grey the way a candle sits in a dark room, not moving, not insisting, only burning, and the burning reaches me as a faint heat on the side of my face that I keep turning away from.
I turn away. I walk. The grey receives me without comment. The silence deepens. The girl in the basement is awake, and the running has not put her back to sleep, and there is nothing in this place to put her back to sleep, and for the first time in my life the noise is gone and the quiet is total and I am alone with the one person I have spent every day of my adulthood trying not to meet.
Myself.
Micah
I know what this is, and I am not impressed.
The grey opens around me like a bad set, a low-budget afterlife assembled from the cheapest materials available: fog, silence, the absence of detail. If someone were to design the intermediate state on a limited budget, this is what they would come up with. No fire. No brimstone. No eternal choir. Just a blank room with no walls and no ceiling and no schedule, and the vagueness of it strikes me as exactly the kind of thing you would expect from a God who has always been better at threatening than at follow-through.
I fold my arms. The gesture is not symbolic. The gesture is structural. It is the position I have held, in one form or another, since I was fifteen years old and standing at the foot of a hospital bed watching my sister die. Arms folded. Weight back. Eyes open and clear and undeceived. This is the posture of a man who has seen the evidence and drawn his conclusion and will not be moved from it by atmosphere or by loneliness or by the theological implications of finding himself conscious after the event that was supposed to end consciousness.
Because I did die. I know this the way I know the argument, with the same cold, calibrated certainty. Micah’s car (my car, the old Accord with the pine air freshener that stopped working in September) hit something or was hit by something and the impact was final. Naomi was in the passenger seat. Quinn was in the back. I do not know what happened to them. I do not know what happened to any of the other cars on the road. I know only that I died, and that I am here, and that the being-here presents a set of facts I was not expecting and will now have to account for.
Fact one: consciousness persists after death. This is unwelcome. I would have preferred oblivion. Oblivion is clean. Oblivion does not require a response. Consciousness requires a response, and the response I am being invited to give is the one I have refused to give since the April afternoon when June stopped breathing and the silence in the hospital room was louder than any sound I had ever heard.
Fact two: there was something in the dying. A light, a presence, a knowing. I will not pretend it did not happen. I am not a man who flinches from evidence. The light was there. The light was personal. The light knew me the way a page knows the writer who set the type, wholly, to every word, and the knowing was not the knowing of surveillance but of something else, something more intimate and more terrifying, a comprehension so complete that it included the argument I carry and the grief I carry and the dead sister I carry, and held all three without flinching.
And the light had scars. Or the presence behind the light had scars, or carried a quality that I can only render, for lack of better language, as the quality of someone who has suffered, who knows suffering from the inside, not as a concept or a doctrine but as a wound still carried. I noticed this. I filed it. I did not know what to do with it. I still do not know what to do with it, so I do what I always do with evidence that does not fit my model: I set it aside for later analysis and proceed with what I know.
What I know is this. A God who is both good and powerful would not have let June die at sixteen in a hospital room in April while the dogwoods bloomed outside the window and our parents knelt beside her bed and prayed with a ferocity that should have moved mountains, or at least tumors, and moved neither. A God who permits a child to waste away over eighteen months while a family begs for intervention is either not good or not powerful, and in either case is not worthy of worship, and I will not worship Him, not in a church, not in a dying moment, not in a grey room with no walls and no floor and no schedule.
The light came for me in the wreck and I met it with the argument. Not with words. The dying did not allow for rhetoric. But the argument was there, in the posture, in the folded arms, in the total, clear-eyed, grieving refusal to bow before a power that stood by while a girl who had done nothing wrong was eaten alive from the inside out by her own cells. I met the light, and the light was warm, and the light was kind, and the light was so relentlessly, specifically, personally present that I had to close my eyes against it, and behind my closed eyes I held June, the way I have always held June, the image of her at the end, the hollowed face and the thin arms and the breathing that was not quite breathing and the silence when the breathing stopped. I held her up to the light like an accusation, like a piece of evidence that the prosecution enters knowing it will end the trial, and I said (not in words, not in speech, but in the bone-deep language of refusal): Explain this. Justify this. Tell me why.
The light did not explain. The light did not justify. The light did not offer the answers I have heard a hundred times from well-meaning people at potlucks and funerals and in the awkward conversations that happen when someone learns your sister died young and feels compelled to provide a reason. No God’s plan. No she’s in a better place. No the Lord works in mysterious ways, which is the theological equivalent of a shrug, a non-answer dressed up in reverence, and I have collected these non-answers the way a prosecutor collects exhibits, and each one is evidence not of God’s wisdom but of humanity’s desperation to make meaning out of the meaningless.
The light simply remained. It did not argue back. It held no exhibit. It offered no closing statement. It was there, with its scarred quality, with its strange, deep familiarity with suffering, and it waited, and I refused, and the refusing was not difficult because the refusing is the thing I have practiced longest and best, and then the light was behind me and the grey was around me and I was here.
I unfold my arms briefly, look at my hands. They are my hands. Ink-stained at the fingertips from a pen that leaks, the mark of a copy editor who still makes notes in the margins with a Pilot G-2, analog in a digital world. The hands are mine. The hands held June’s hand in the hospital, held it when there was nothing else to hold and no prayer that would change anything and no God who was listening or, if listening, cared enough to act.
I fold my arms again.
The grey sits around me, patient and empty. I notice the temperature is not a temperature. I notice the light is not a light. I notice the silence is not quite silence, that there is a quality to it, a texture, like the difference between a room that is empty and a room that holds a person who is not speaking. The grey is not empty. Something is in it, or behind it, or threaded through it, a presence as faint and persistent as a pulse in a wrist you are pretending not to feel.
It has that quality again. The scarred quality. The suffering-from-the-inside quality. The quality I cannot read and cannot dismiss and cannot incorporate into the argument because the argument accounts for a God who stands off from suffering and watches, and this quality is the quality of a God who does not stand off, who has been inside it, who carries it. And the carrying does not fit the model. And the not-fitting is irritating the way a misplaced comma is irritating, a small error in an otherwise clean proof that keeps catching my eye no matter how many times I read past it.
I do not pursue the irritation. I do not examine the error. I let the misplaced comma sit and I hold my ground and I keep my arms folded and I wait, because waiting is what this place seems to require, and I can wait longer than it can. I have been waiting since April of the year June died, waiting for an explanation that never came, waiting for a rebuttal that was never offered, waiting for the God who let her die to show His face and defend His decision, and the waiting has made me patient, and the patience has made me hard, and the hardness is not cruelty. The hardness is conviction. The hardness is the only honest response to a universe that allows the suffering of children and then has the audacity to ask for worship.
So I wait. Arms folded. Case intact. The grey around me and the nearness behind me and June in the ground and the argument standing.
The misplaced comma catches my eye again, and I ignore it, and I settle in for the long refusal, and the refusal holds.
Sloane
So. This is what you get.
I open my eyes and the grey is exactly the nothing I expected. Not fire. Not clouds. Not the golden throne room that my parents described in the careful, reverent voices they reserved for the afterlife and for company, the voices that said we are the kind of people who take these things seriously and meant we are the kind of people who will punish you if you don’t. Just grey. A flat, featureless, infinite grey that does not warm and does not cool and does not do anything at all except exist, and the existence is boring, which is appropriate, because the God I grew up with was boring too, a God of ledgers and Sundays and God sees all on the church marquee and the particular, suffocating tedium of a household where joy was not forbidden but was never quite approved.
I sit up. I am intact, or something like intact. I have a body, or the shape of one. My jaw works. This is good. The jaw is the part of me that matters most, the hinge on which the armor swings. I set it. I feel the muscles tighten, the teeth press together, the familiar locked position that has been my resting face since I was nineteen years old and made the decision that would define every decision after: I would not be soft. I would not be open. I would not give anyone, not a person and not a god, the satisfaction of seeing me flinch.
The wreck comes back to me in pieces. Rain. Daniel’s hands on the wheel. The temperature dropping. The curve. And then noise so loud it erased itself, metal folding against metal like paper, the windshield becoming something other than a windshield, and the cold, the sudden terrible cold of December air pouring in where December air should not be, and Daniel saying my name, or trying to, the word cut short by whatever was happening to us both.
Daniel.
I think his name and the grey does something I do not expect. It does not change. It does not open or shift or reveal a hidden passage. But the name falls into it like a stone dropped into deep water, and the water is not water and the depth is not depth but something else, something that receives the name and holds it and gives me back, in exchange, a feeling I refuse to examine. My brother. My quiet, flinching, apologetic brother, who carried our parents’ god on his back like a pack he was afraid to set down, who left me in the house on Maple Drive when he was twenty-four and I was twenty, who packed his car on a Saturday morning and drove away and did not call for six weeks, and when he called his voice was careful and contrite and full of the particular shame of a man who knows he has done something unforgivable and cannot stop doing it, and I told him the call was fine and the leaving was fine and I was fine, and nothing was fine, and I have carried the not-fine the way he carries the shame: quietly, permanently, as a load-bearing wall in the structure of my refusal to trust anyone ever again.
Daniel is not here. I feel this the way I felt the grey, as knowledge that arrives without evidence. He is not here. He is somewhere else. He is in the other place, the warm place, the place the light tried to take me when the dying opened and the light came in.
Because the light did come. In the wreck, in the dying, in the long, dilated moment when my body was failing and the cold was pouring in and Daniel’s voice was being erased by something larger than his voice, the light arrived. And the light was what the light was in all the stories I was told and refused to believe and now cannot deny: personal, present, knowing, warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the quality of attention being paid, a quality so total and so specific that it felt less like being seen and more like being read, cover to cover, by someone who already knew every page.
Every page. Including the one I have kept hidden. The one that is written in the handwriting of my worst self, the self that did a thing I will not name, not here, not anywhere, not to Daniel and not to our parents and not to the god who supposedly sees all and writes it down. The thing I did to someone who trusted me, the betrayal that sits at the center of my armor like the nail at the center of a wheel, the fixed point around which everything else revolves. The light saw that page. The light read it. And the light did not recoil.
This is the part I cannot forgive. Not the seeing. I expected the seeing. The god of 414 Maple Drive was always watching, and the watching was always the prelude to the verdict, and I have been bracing for the verdict my whole adult life, carrying it inside me like a sentence already passed, and the bracing is part of the armor and the armor is part of the bracing and together they are the only structure I have. The thing I cannot forgive is that the light saw the worst page and did not recoil. The light stayed. The light looked at the thing I did, the thing that proved the god right about me, the thing that confirmed every suspicion Pastor Gerald and my mother and my father ever had about the kind of person I am, and the light did not turn away.
If the light had turned away I would have understood. If the light had condemned I would have known what to do. The armor is built for condemnation. The armor holds against judgment the way a seawall holds against a wave: by being harder than the thing that hits it. But the light did not hit. The light held. The light read the worst page and kept reading and the face behind the light, the face I could almost but not quite resolve, was not the face of a judge but of something else, something I do not have a word for because the word for it would require a vulnerability I have sworn off, and I sneered.
I sneered the way I have been sneering since I was nineteen. The sneer is the outermost layer of the armor, the first defense, the thing a person sees before they see anything else about me. The sneer says: I am not interested. You cannot reach me. Whatever you are offering, I have weighed it and found it insufficient. I turned the sneer on the light in the dying and the sneer held and the light did not dissolve it and the light did not break through it and the light just stayed there, behind the sneer, behind the armor, reading the pages I will never show anyone, and I sneered harder, and I turned away, and the turning deposited me here, in the grey, in the boring, featureless, disappointing nothing that is exactly what I deserve.
I set my jaw tighter. The grey sits around me like a waiting room with no magazines and no receptionist and no appointment. It is not hostile. It is not friendly. It is nothing, and the nothing is fine, because nothing is manageable, nothing is controlled, nothing asks nothing of me and I am good at giving nothing.
Except there is something here that is not nothing. The same thing the others must feel, if the others are here, if the others are anywhere, if the dying took all of us or only some. A presence at the edge. Not the light. Not the face. Not the terrible, unbearable, armor-dissolving quality of a love that will not recoil. Just a hint of it. A residue. The faintest possible trace of warmth in a place that is otherwise the temperature of nothing, and the warmth is not coming closer and the warmth is not going away and the warmth is, I realize with a fury so cold it does not register as fury, patient.
I hate patience. I have always hated patience, because patience is the weapon of people who can afford to wait, and the people who can afford to wait are the people who have already won, and the people who have already won are the people who hold the power, and the people who hold the power are the people who hurt you and then sit back and wait for you to come crawling, and I do not crawl. I have never crawled. I am Sloane, twenty-six, sister of a man who flinched his way out of the house and left me to carry the god alone, daughter of parents whose love was a ledger, perpetrator of a thing I will not name, wearer of an armor I will not remove, and I do not crawl to anyone.
Not to Daniel’s god. Not to our parents’ god. Not to the light in the dying that saw the worst page and stayed.
Especially not to the light that stayed. Because the staying is what I cannot fight. The staying is the one move against which the armor has no defense, the only weapon that does not bounce off the seawall but simply sits on the other side of it, rising, and the rising is slow and the rising is patient and the rising does not break the wall. The rising simply waits for the wall to realize it is standing in the ocean.
I set my jaw. I look into the grey. The grey looks back at me with no expression, and behind the grey the nearness waits, and behind the nearness is the thing I turned away from, and behind the thing I turned away from is the page I will not show anyone, and behind the page is the wound, and behind the wound is the vow, and behind the vow is the girl I was before the vow, the girl who trusted and was broken and swore, on the shattered pieces, never again.
Never again.
The grey receives the vow without comment. The nearness at the edge does not react. The patience continues, and I continue, and the armor holds, and the jaw is set, and somewhere, in a warm place I cannot see and will not enter, my brother rests in the hands of the God I refuse, and the refusing is the only freedom I have ever believed in, and I will hold it here, in the grey, in the silence, in the country of the turned-away, until there is nothing left to hold.
Five.
Five in the grey, each alone, each waking, each carrying the memory of a light they refused and a warmth they turned away from and a presence that did not withdraw when they withdrew from it. Five, in a place with no walls and no floor and no time, a place that is not punishment and not oblivion and not the fire the preachers warned about, but something stranger and quieter and more unsettling: a waiting room where the Waiter is already present and the waiting is their own.
Reed, walking, assessing, sorting the unsortable. Naomi, burning, armed against a god who is not the god she armed herself against. Quinn, running in a place with nowhere to run, the silence closing in. Micah, arms folded, case intact, the misplaced comma catching his eye. Sloane, jaw set, armor on, the patience rising on the other side of the wall.
Five who met the same Love and said no. Five who were offered the same door and chose the grey. Five who are not together, each in their own shape of refusal, each in their own version of the same dim, formless, timeless country, and at the edge of each version, held at the distance they chose, the same pursuing nearness, patient, present, not breaking in, not going away.
The grey does not explain itself. The nearness does not announce itself. The waiting begins without a signal, because there is no clock here and no bell and no authority to ring it. There is only the grey, and the five, and the presence they keep their backs to, and the long, measureless stretch of time that opens ahead of them like a road with no markings and no exit and no end, and the road is not empty, and the road is not dark, and the road is not punishment, and the ones on it do not yet understand what it is.
They will. In time. In the time that is not time. In the grey that is not empty. In the silence that is not silence but the sound of a love that will not stop speaking simply because no one is willing to listen.
The grey holds. The five refuse. The nearness remains.
The long waiting begins.