Love Without Borders
Chapter Twelve
The grey has not changed, and I have not changed, and the argument between us has settled into the kind of standoff that can last for centuries if both parties are patient enough to hold their ground.
I am patient enough. I have been patient since April of the year June died, which is fourteen years now, or was fourteen years when I was alive, and is some other quantity of time in this place where time does not appear to keep a calendar. The grey offers no days and no nights. It offers no clock, no shadow moving across a floor, no sun rising or setting to indicate the passage of one unit into the next. It offers only itself, which is to say it offers nothing, and the nothing continues, and I stand inside the nothing with my arms folded and my case intact and the knowledge that I can wait longer than God can, because God has an eternity to fill and I have only a position to hold, and holding a position requires less energy than filling an eternity, and energy, in any contest of wills, is what determines the outcome.
This is what I tell myself. This is what I have been telling myself since the grey closed around me and the light receded and the strange, quiet country of the dead became my address. I tell myself that the waiting is a contest, and that contests are won by the party with the clearest terms and the steadiest nerve, and my terms are clear and my nerve is steady and the case I carry is the same case I have carried since I was sixteen years old, standing in a hospital parking lot in April, holding up my father while the dogwoods bloomed overhead and the sky said nothing and God, if He was anywhere, said nothing either.
The case is this. I will state it plainly, because plainness is what the case deserves, and because I have spent too many years watching people decorate the question with piety when the question, undecorated, is devastating enough.
A God who is both good and all-powerful would not permit a child to die of cancer at sixteen while her family prayed for her healing every single day for eighteen months.
A God who permits that is either not good or not all-powerful.
A God who is not good is not worthy of worship.
A God who is not all-powerful is not capable of earning the title.
In either case, the correct response is the one I gave: no. A clear, considered, evidence-based no, delivered not in anger and not in haste but in the cold certainty of a man who has examined the premises, tested the logic, and found the conclusion inescapable. June died. God did nothing. I will not worship the God who did nothing. This is not a feeling. This is a finding.
I fold my arms tighter. The grey sits around me like a room without furniture, without purpose, without even the dignity of a door. Somewhere in this formless country the others are carrying on with their own versions of refusal. I cannot see them. I have not seen them since the waking, since the moment I opened my eyes in the grey and found myself alone with the argument and the nearness I keep at my back. Reed is out there somewhere, solving. Naomi is out there somewhere, burning. Quinn is out there somewhere, running. Sloane is out there somewhere, armored. Each of them has their own shape of no, their own posture, their own way of facing away from whatever it is that waits at the edge of this place.
My shape is this: arms folded, weight back, eyes open. Not running, like Quinn. Not managing, like Reed. Not burning, like Naomi. Not armored, like Sloane. Standing still. Looking directly at the terms of the situation and refusing to blink.
Because this is what I do. This is what a copy editor does when the text is wrong. You do not pretend the error is not there. You do not run past it hoping it will resolve itself. You put your finger on the line where the logic fails, you mark it in the margin, and you send it back. The text of the universe has an error in it, and the error is a dead girl, and I have been marking it in the margin for fourteen years, and I will go on marking it until someone answers for it or until there is no margin left.
June was not a premise. She was not an abstraction. She was a girl, and she was my sister, and the fact that I must say this, that I must remind myself of the concrete, particular, irreducible person behind the argument I built on her death, is itself a kind of grief, because grief has a way of turning the beloved into evidence, and evidence has a way of losing its warmth.
I will not let her lose her warmth. Not here, in this place that has no warmth of its own. Not in the grey, where everything flattens and fades and the dead, if that is what we are, risk becoming nothing more than the propositions they carry.
So. June.
She was two years younger than me and approximately ten years more alive. This was the essential asymmetry of our childhood: I was the careful one, the reader, the boy who preferred the porch to the yard and the paragraph to the game, and June was the one who ran. She ran everywhere. Down the stairs, across the lawn, through the sprinkler in July with her arms flung wide and her mouth open, catching water the way other children catch fireflies, as though the running were its own sufficient purpose and the catching were a bonus. She played soccer in the fall and basketball in the winter and ran track in the spring, and in the summer she swam, and I sat on the edge of the pool with a book and watched her cut the water in that clean, efficient way she had, every stroke purposeful, every lap a small argument against standing still.
She talked too much. I say this with love, and with the particular love of an older brother who spent half his childhood asking her to please be quiet, and I would give everything I have ever had, including the argument, including the case, including the fourteen years of principled refusal, to hear her talk too much again. She talked about her friends and her teachers and the boy in her math class who had nice handwriting, which I thought was a strange criterion for attraction and which she defended with the same fierce, unembarrassed logic she brought to everything: If someone takes the time to make their sevens pretty, Micah, they are paying attention to things. Paying attention is the whole point.
Paying attention. She was right about that. Paying attention is the whole point, and she paid it with a generosity I have never been able to match, a willingness to look at things closely and find them worth looking at. She found beetles interesting. She found clouds interesting. She found the neighbor’s cat, a fat orange tabby named General who sat on the porch railing and watched the street with the bored authority of a customs official, endlessly, endlessly interesting, and she would sit beside General for an hour, scratching behind his ears and narrating his inner monologue in a voice that was half documentary and half comedy, and the narration was always precise, always attentive, always kinder than the cat deserved.
I am sitting in the grey, in the nowhere, in the featureless country of the dead, and I am thinking about a fat orange cat on a porch railing, and the thinking is doing what the thinking always does, which is to open a door I do not want opened, behind which is the room where June is still alive and still talking and still paying attention to things I was too careful to notice.
The door opens. The door always opens. It opened in the hospital when the breathing stopped. It opened at the funeral when my mother collapsed against my father in the front pew and I sat beside them and did not cry, not because I did not want to but because the part of me that cries had been taken apart and reassembled into the part of me that argues, and the reassembly was already underway, already building the case, already taking the raw material of grief and turning it into the structural thing I carry now, the load-bearing wall, the argument that will not move.
I let the door stay open. I have no choice. In this place, in the grey, there is no noise to close it with, no work to distract from it, no late-night edit to pull the attention back to a manageable focus. There is only the grey and the silence and the memory of a girl who ran, and the memory is as sharp as it was the day she died, fourteen years of carrying it having done nothing to dull the edges, which is, I suppose, another piece of evidence for the prosecution: a universe that dims everything except the things you cannot bear to look at.
She was fourteen when the word entered our house. The word was lymphoma, and it arrived the way a verdict arrives, not as a question but as a fact that rearranges the furniture, and within a week our house, which had been a place where children ran and cats lounged and mornings started with cereal and the sound of June arguing with Mom about the volume of her music, became a different kind of house. A medical house. A house with pamphlets on the kitchen counter and appointments written on the calendar in my mother’s careful hand, each date circled in red, as though the circling could contain whatever was coming.
My parents prayed. Of course they prayed. They were people of faith, genuine faith, the kind that has no performance in it, the kind that wakes at six in the morning and kneels beside a bed and speaks to the ceiling with the unselfconscious sincerity of a child asking for water. They had prayed before June was sick, every morning and every evening, and the praying was as natural to them as breathing, and when the word arrived the praying did not change its character so much as its intensity. It became concentrated. It became a siege. My father, who was a quiet man, a carpenter who measured twice and cut once and brought the same precision to his faith that he brought to a mortise joint, would kneel beside the bed and pray with such ferocity that I could hear the strain in his voice from the hallway, the effort of a man who believes he is addressing the creator of the universe and who needs that creator to do one thing, one specific, measurable, verifiable thing: heal his daughter.
My mother prayed differently. She prayed in motion, in the kitchen, her hands busy with something (a dish, a rag, the edge of a towel) while her lips moved in a murmur I could not quite catch, a constant, low-frequency conversation with the God she served, and the conversation, as far as I could tell, was not a petition so much as a negotiation, a deal being worked out in the space between the stovetop and the ceiling, the terms of which involved everything she had. She would have given anything. I do not say this as a figure of speech. She would have traded places with June on the hospital bed without a second of hesitation, and the God she prayed to knew this, and the God she prayed to did not take the trade.
I watched them pray. I was fifteen. I was old enough to understand the biology of what was happening inside my sister’s body (the cells gone wrong, the mutiny of the system, the body turning on itself in the most intimate and particular form of betrayal) and young enough to hope, despite the understanding, that something outside the biology might intervene. I did not believe, not the way my parents believed, not with the kneeling and the murmuring and the certainty that the ceiling was a gateway rather than a surface. But I hoped. Hoping is cheaper than believing. Hoping does not require a theology. Hoping is simply the state of a fifteen-year-old boy who loves his sister and does not want her to die and is willing, in the privacy of his own mind, to address the possibility that someone might be listening.
I addressed the possibility. I will not call it prayer because prayer implies a relationship, and I did not have a relationship with the God my parents served. I had an awareness, a hypothesis, a conditional: If you are there, and if you are good, and if you can do something, then do it. She is fourteen. She has done nothing wrong. She runs and she laughs and she talks too much and she finds beetles interesting and she deserves to be alive, and if you have any power at all, use it now. Use it for her.
I made this conditional once. I made it kneeling on my bedroom floor with the door closed, and I am not ashamed of having made it, and I will not pretend the making was anything other than what it was: a boy trying the last available option in a situation where the available options had narrowed to the point of vanishing. I made it and then I waited, the way you wait after putting a letter in a mailbox, knowing the delivery is out of your hands and the reply, if it comes, will come on someone else’s schedule.
The reply did not come. The treatment continued. June lost her hair and then her appetite and then the particular light behind her eyes that had made her the kind of person who found beetles interesting, and the losing happened in stages, each stage worse than the last, each stage removing another piece of the girl I had grown up beside, and the removal was so gradual and so complete that by the end I could not tell whether the person in the hospital bed was still my sister or whether my sister had already left and what remained was only the body that had carried her, emptied now, running on the fumes of a system that had been betrayed from within and was shutting down one function at a time.
My parents prayed. The church prayed. The prayer chain at Grace Covenant extended to three hundred names, and my mother kept the list on the refrigerator, and the list grew and the prayers multiplied and the aggregate weight of three hundred people asking the same God for the same thing, the life of a child, should have been enough to move a mountain, or at least a tumor, and it moved neither.
She finished the first round of treatment. She came home. For three months she was almost herself again, thinner, slower, the hair growing back in a different texture, but laughing, talking, sitting on the porch with General the cat, and those three months were the cruelest part of the whole ordeal because they offered the possibility that the prayers had worked, that the biology had relented, that the conditional I had addressed to the ceiling had been received and answered, and the possibility was a lie. The cancer came back. The cells had not relented. They had only regrouped, and the regrouping was efficient, and the second round was worse than the first, and by December of the second year I had stopped kneeling and stopped hoping and started building the argument, because the argument was the only structure strong enough to hold the weight of what was happening, and I needed something to hold the weight, and faith was not holding it, and hope was not holding it, and the silence from the ceiling was total.
She died on a Tuesday afternoon in April. I have said this before. I will say it again, because the repetition is not repetition but rehearsal, the necessary rehearsal of a fact that refuses to become familiar no matter how many times I state it.
A Tuesday afternoon. April. The dogwoods were blooming outside the window. The room faced a parking lot. The light was the particular soft, directionless light of early spring in the Northeast, the kind that comes through a hospital window and lands on everything with the same gentle, non-committal weight, not warm and not cold, not bright and not dim, just there, just present, just filling the room the way water fills a glass, from the bottom up, without effort.
Our mother was holding June’s right hand. Our father was holding her left. I was standing at the foot of the bed. I was holding nothing, because there was nothing left to hold, and the holding of nothing has become the central posture of my life, the posture I carry into the grey, the posture I fold my arms to approximate: the stance of a man who arrived at the most important moment too late and too empty-handed and too old, at sixteen, to believe that the ceiling would answer.
She was breathing, and then she was not breathing, and the difference between those two states was so small, so impossibly narrow, that I could not locate the seam. There should have been a seam. There should have been a visible line between alive and not-alive, a border you could point to and say there, that is where it happened, that is the instant the universe changed, but there was no line. There was only a breath that came and then a breath that did not come and then the silence, and the silence was louder than any sound I had ever heard, and in the silence my father, who had not cried once in eighteen months of watching his daughter be consumed, stood up from the bedside and walked to the window and looked at the parking lot and broke apart.
I say he broke apart because there is no other verb. He did not weep. He did not sob. He made a sound I had never heard a human being make, a sound that had no category, no place in the taxonomy of grief I had assembled from books and movies and the careful observation of other people’s pain. The sound came from somewhere below his voice, below his lungs, from the part of him that had held steady for eighteen months through prayer and chemo and the slow, terrible arithmetic of a father watching his daughter’s blood counts drop, and the holding-steady ended, and the sound was what the ending sounded like, and I crossed the room and caught him because he was falling, and I held him up, and I was sixteen years old and holding up my father in a hospital room where my sister’s body lay with its eyes closed and its chest still and the dogwoods blooming outside the window like a decoration at a party that should have been canceled.
My mother did not let go of June’s hand. She sat in the chair beside the bed and held the hand that was no longer a hand in any way that mattered and said nothing, and the silence from her was a different kind of silence from the silence from June, because June’s silence was the silence of absence, of departure, of a person no longer inhabiting the room, and my mother’s silence was the silence of a woman whose prayers had been heard and refused, and the refusal was total, and the hearing, if there had been hearing, had produced no result, and the God who heard and refused was the God she would go on kneeling to every morning for the rest of her life, and I could not understand this, and I still cannot understand it, and the not-understanding is one of the bricks in the wall of the argument.
I stood in that room and held my father and watched my mother hold my dead sister’s hand and addressed the ceiling one last time. Not as a conditional. Not as a hypothesis. As a verdict.
You heard them. You watched. You could have acted. You chose not to. I will not forgive that choice. Not today. Not ever. Not if you offer me a thousand afterlives and a grey room without walls and the patient, pursuing nearness of a presence that will not leave me alone. I will not forgive the silence that lasted eighteen months and ended in the loudest sound my father ever made. I will hold this against you. I will fold my arms and hold this against you until one of us is finished, and I am not finished yet.
That was fourteen years ago. I am not finished yet.
The grey does not answer. The grey has never answered, because the grey is not a person and does not have a voice, and the fact that I keep addressing it as though it were a party to the argument is a habit of the dead, I suppose, a way of filling the formlessness with something that resembles a conversation.
But the nearness answers. Or the nearness responds, which is not the same thing. It does not speak. It does not argue. It does not offer the platitudes I have collected and catalogued and filed away like exhibits for the prosecution. It simply remains, at the edge of the grey, at the periphery of my awareness, a warmth so faint I could almost mistake it for a feature of the place itself, except that the place has no features, and the warmth has a quality to it that features do not have, a quality of attention, of directed, particular, patient regard.
I know what this is. I am not a man who fails to identify what is in front of him. The nearness is the same presence I met in the dying, the light that came for me when the car hit whatever it hit and my body failed and the long, dilated second opened and the ceiling, for the first time in fourteen years, was not a surface but a gateway. The presence knew me in the dying. It knew the argument and the grief and the dead sister and the ink on my fingertips and the Pilot G-2 pen in my shirt pocket and every margin note I had ever made, and it held all of it, every piece, without flinching and without explaining, and the holding was so complete and so particular that I could not mistake it for anything other than what it was: a personal, directed, specific love.
And I refused it. I refused it because love without explanation is not enough, and because a God who loves without explaining is a God who permits the suffering of children and then shows up at the bedside afterward with flowers, and the flowers do not undo the suffering, and the love does not justify the silence, and the personal, directed, specific attention of a being who could have intervened and chose not to is not comfort but insult.
I said this in the dying. I said it without words, in the language of posture and refusal and the folded arms that are my native tongue. The presence heard me. The presence registered the refusal. And the presence did not argue, and the presence did not withdraw, and the not-arguing and the not-withdrawing are the two things about it that I cannot account for, the two data points that do not fit the model, the misplaced comma that keeps catching my eye.
I noticed the comma in the dying. I noticed it again in the waking. I notice it now, in the long, measureless stretch of time that this place offers instead of days, the comma sitting in the text of the situation like a proofreader’s nightmare, small and persistent and wrong in a way that suggests either carelessness or a grammar I do not yet understand.
The comma is the scars.
The presence, in the dying, carried the quality of someone who has suffered. Not abstractly. Not as a concept. Not as a theologian carries the doctrine of divine impassibility, which is the fancy word for the claim that God does not suffer, a claim I have always found both convenient and obscene, convenient because it gets God off the hook and obscene because it means the hook is only for the rest of us. The presence suffered the way a body suffers, from the inside, with the particular, unshared, incommunicable intimacy of a wound still held. The suffering was not theoretical. The suffering was borne. And the bearing had left marks.
This does not fit. I need to be clear about the degree to which this does not fit. My argument, the argument I have carried for fourteen years, the argument that has held me upright through a grief that would otherwise have dissolved me, rests on a specific and non-negotiable premise: that God stands off from suffering. That God watches from a distance. That God, if God exists, occupies the position of an observer who has the power to intervene and chooses not to, and the choosing-not-to is the crime, and the distance is the evidence of the crime, and the suffering of June is the exhibit that proves the crime was committed.
A God who suffers does not fit this premise. A God who bears wounds does not occupy the position of the distant observer. A God who carries the quality of suffering-from-the-inside is a God who has, in some way I cannot yet articulate and do not want to articulate, entered the territory I hold against Him.
I set this aside. I have been setting it aside since the dying, and the setting-aside is getting harder, and the getting-harder is irritating, and the irritation is the irritation of a copy editor who finds the same error in every pass of the proof, no matter how many times he marks it, because the error is not an error in the text. The error is in the reading. The reader (the editor, the man with the folded arms, myself) is missing something, and the missing is not a failure of attention but a failure of category, a place where the grammar he knows does not cover the grammar in front of him.
I do not pursue this. Pursuing it would mean opening the argument to revision, and the argument is not open to revision, because the argument is the only thing standing between me and the grief, and the grief, unstructured, would be annihilating.
People have tried to answer the argument. In life, I mean. In the world where I still had a body and a desk and a red pen and a job that paid me to find errors in other people’s reasoning. People heard about June and felt compelled to offer their answers, the way people feel compelled to offer directions to a man who is not lost, and the answers came in a limited number of varieties, and I have catalogued them the way a lepidopterist catalogues butterflies: by type, by frequency, and by the degree to which they fail to address the specimen on the table.
Variety one: God’s plan. The suggestion that June’s death was part of a larger design, a stitch in a cosmic quilt too vast for human comprehension, and that the suffering, while real, served a purpose we cannot see. This is the most popular answer and the worst. It turns a dead child into an instrument, a tool in the hands of a deity who uses suffering the way a carpenter uses a nail, to hold something together, and the something being held together is not the child, because the child is dead, but the plan, and the plan, whatever it is, has been purchased with the coin of a sixteen-year-old girl’s last breath, and the purchase price is too high, and the customer who paid it is not the one who bore the cost.
Variety two: Free will. The suggestion that God permits suffering because to prevent it would require overriding human freedom, and freedom is the prerequisite of love, and love is the point. This answer has a certain structural elegance that I can appreciate from a distance, the way one appreciates a well-constructed argument in a bad paper. The problem is that June’s cancer was not a product of anyone’s free will. No one chose it. No human action caused it. The cells in her body mutinied on their own, without instruction, without permission, and the mutiny was a biological event, not a moral one, and the free-will defense does not cover biological events unless you are prepared to argue that God granted free will to cancer cells, which is a position I have not yet seen anyone willing to defend in writing.
Variety three: Soul-making. The suggestion that suffering exists to build character, to refine the soul, to forge through fire a person who could not have been forged otherwise. This is the answer that makes me angriest, because it was offered to my parents by their pastor in the week after June died, offered gently, with the best of intentions, by a man who believed it and who meant no harm, and my father, my broken, rebuilt, morning-kneeling father, nodded and accepted it, and I watched him accept it, and I wanted to stand up in the pastor’s office and ask: Whose character? Whose soul? June’s? She is dead. She does not have a character to refine anymore. She has a coffin and a headstone and a closet full of running shoes that no one has moved in three months because moving them would mean admitting she is not coming back. So whose soul is being made here? Mine? My father’s? Are you telling me that God killed a child to build character in the adults who loved her? Is that the ratio? One dead girl per unit of spiritual growth?
I did not say this. I sat in the pastor’s office and I folded my arms and I said nothing, because I was sixteen and the argument was not yet built, and the not-yet-built argument sat inside me like a blueprint waiting for a foundation, and the foundation was being poured even then, in the silence of the pastor’s office, in the acceptance on my father’s face, in the gentle, well-meaning, catastrophically inadequate answer that was being offered as comfort and was landing, in me, as the final exhibit.
Variety four: Mystery. The suggestion that we cannot know why God permits suffering, that the answer lies beyond human understanding, that faith means trusting in the dark. This is the honest answer. I will give it that. It does not pretend to have an explanation. It simply says: I do not know, but I trust anyway. And I respect this answer more than the others because it does not lie, and it does not turn June into a tool, and it does not claim that her death served a purpose I am too small to see. It simply admits the gap and leaps across it.
I cannot make the leap. Not because I lack the capacity for trust. Not because I am constitutionally unable to hold an open question. I cannot make the leap because the gap is a girl, and the girl is my sister, and she died in a room with a window facing a parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon in April, and the gap is not an abstraction but a body, and I will not leap over a body. I will stand at the edge of the gap and look into it and say her name and refuse to move, because moving would mean accepting the gap as a feature of the design, and I will not accept it, because accepting it would mean the design includes the death of children, and a design that includes the death of children is a design I refuse to admire, and a designer who draws it is a designer I refuse to worship.
This is the argument. Undecorated. Unrevised. Carrying in its structure the weight of a girl who ran and a family who prayed and a silence that lasted eighteen months and a parking lot where a father broke and a son held him up and a ceiling that offered nothing but plaster and paint.
I carry it in the grey. I carry it the way my father carries his faith: as a load-bearing wall. If the wall comes down, the house comes down, and I do not know what I am without the house, and I am not ready to find out, and I suspect I will never be ready, and the not-being-ready is not weakness. The not-being-ready is the honest recognition that some structures cannot be removed without destroying the building they hold up, and the building, in this case, is me.
Time passes, or something that is not time behaves in a way that resembles passing. The grey shifts in quality without changing in appearance: sometimes it is heavier, sometimes lighter, sometimes closer, sometimes receding, as though the room I cannot see were breathing, the walls I cannot find contracting and expanding with the rhythm of something alive.
I do not like this. I do not like the suggestion that the grey is alive, that the place itself has a pulse, that the formlessness is not random but directed, because the direction implies a director, and the director, if there is one, is the same God I am refusing, and the refusal does not extend only to the offer in the dying but to the ongoing, persistent, insufferably patient presence of a being who will not leave me alone in the grey I chose.
Because I did choose it. I am not a man who pretends his choices were made for him. At the Threshold, in the long dilated second of the dying, the light offered me something, and I refused it, and the refusing was not a reflex but a decision, a considered, principled, fully voluntary decision to stand on the argument and hold the line and not bow before a power I hold responsible for the death of a child, regardless of how warm the power felt and how specifically it seemed to know me and how strangely, confusingly, inexplicably it carried the quality of suffering.
I chose the grey. The grey is the consequence of my choice, and I accept the consequence, because the consequence is what integrity looks like when integrity costs something, and if the cost of holding my ground is an eternity in a formless, featureless, temperature-neutral waiting room with a faint, persistent, maddeningly patient nearness at the edge of every moment, then I accept the cost. The alternative is capitulation, and capitulation is the thing I will not do, not for warmth and not for light and not for the promise of whatever lies on the other side of the door I closed.
I think about Naomi. I think about Quinn. I do not know how they are, or where they are, or whether they are still here. Naomi was in the passenger seat. Quinn was in the back. I was driving. The Accord hit something, or was hit by something, and the last thing I remember before the light was the steering wheel pressing into my chest with a force that was not negotiable, and the cold, and Quinn making a sound that was not a word but was the shape of a word, a single syllable of surprise that was cut off by the noise, and then the noise was cut off by the silence, and then the silence was cut off by the light, and then the light was cut off by my refusal, and then the grey.
They were my housemates. They were my people. Naomi with her fury and her wound, Quinn with her running and her numbness, the two of them and me, three doors down the upstairs hall at 412 Garfield Street, a house held together by cheap rent and mutual damage and the particular, precious, hard-won ease of three people who had each, in their own way, been broken by the world and had found, in each other, the rare grace of being broken together without being required to fix anything.
I loved them. I love them. The tense is uncertain in a place with no time, but the fact is not uncertain. I love Naomi, who knows about June and never once tried to answer the argument but simply sat with it, the way you sit with a friend who is in pain, without offering solutions, without offering remedies, without offering anything except the radical, undecorated, non-theological gift of presence. And I love Quinn, who does not know the details but knows the shape, the hole in the floor, the depth she does not need to measure, and who fills the space around the hole not with explanations but with music turned up too loud and laughter that is half performance and half real and always, always welcome.
They are somewhere in the grey. I cannot reach them. The grey does not appear to allow for company, or if it allows for company, it does not provide directions, and I have no sense of where they are or how far away they are or whether far away is even a concept that applies in a place without distance. I am alone. The aloneness is not unfamiliar. I have been alone with the argument for fourteen years, carrying it in rooms full of people, carrying it at dinners and at work and at the kitchen table in the house on Garfield Street while Naomi cooked and Quinn played something loud on the speaker and the evening passed in the normal, unremarkable way that evenings pass when you are alive and among people you love and the argument is merely the thing you carry rather than the thing you are.
Here, in the grey, the argument is the thing I am. There is nothing else. No house. No housemates. No desk. No red pen. No manuscripts with errors in the margins. No morning coffee in the mug with the chipped handle. No late-night conversations on the porch when Naomi cannot sleep and I cannot sleep and we sit in the cold and say nothing and the nothing we say is better than any conversation I have had with a person who tries to answer the argument. There is only the argument, and the grey, and the nearness, and the memory of June, and the memory of June is the fuel that keeps the argument burning, and the argument is the structure that keeps the memory from collapsing into unstructured grief, and the whole system, the argument and the grief and the memory and the refusal, is a closed loop, a perpetual motion machine powered by the energy of a dead girl and maintained by the discipline of a living man (or a dead man, or whatever I am now) who will not let the machine stop.
If the machine stops, the grief comes. The grief is what I built the machine to contain. The grief is the thing that lives behind the argument, beneath the argument, inside the argument, the way water lives behind a dam: held, pressured, massive, patient, waiting for the smallest crack. The argument is the dam. The argument has held for fourteen years. The argument will hold here, in the grey, in the timeless, featureless, endlessly patient country of the dead, because I built it to hold, and I maintain it with the same care I bring to a manuscript, checking every joint, tightening every connection, making sure the logic is sound and the premises are solid and the conclusion follows with the inevitability of a sentence that has been revised until every word is load-bearing.
The grief waits behind the dam. The grief is patient too. The grief and the nearness have this in common: they both wait, they both remain, they both occupy the edge of the territory I patrol, and I keep them both at the perimeter, and the keeping costs me everything, and I pay the cost, because the cost of letting either one in would be the dissolution of the structure I have built, and the structure is the only thing between me and the parking lot, the only thing between me and my father’s sound, the only thing between me and the moment when the breathing stopped and the silence came and the world changed its terms without consulting me.
The nearness presses. It does not push. Pushing I could resist. Pushing is a force applied to a surface, and surfaces I understand, and forces I can calculate, and the calculation would give me a number, and the number would tell me how much resistance to apply, and the resistance would be clean and measurable and satisfying in the way that all clean, measurable, satisfying things are satisfying: by being containable.
The nearness does not push. The nearness simply is. It is there, at the edge, behind me, around me, underneath the surface I cannot feel, threaded through the grey like a scent in a room you cannot locate, present and sourceless and impossible to manage because you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and I cannot measure it, and the inability to measure it is the thing that separates this from every other problem I have ever faced.
Every other problem I have faced has had edges. The cancer had edges. The grief had edges (I drew them myself, with the argument). The death had edges (there is a date on the headstone, a line between alive and not-alive, however invisible the line felt in the moment). Even the silence from God had edges, because the silence was bounded by the prayers that preceded it and the funeral that followed it, and the boundaries made the silence a thing I could hold and examine and place in the evidence box alongside the other exhibits.
The nearness has no edges. The nearness begins at the periphery and extends in every direction without offering a boundary I can mark or a limit I can measure or a point at which it becomes something other than itself. It is not closer today than it was yesterday (if yesterday exists, if today exists, if the words have any purchase in a place without clocks). It is not farther. It is simply present, the way a climate is present, the way the temperature of a room is present, everywhere and nowhere, ambient and specific, as though the room itself were paying attention and the attention were warm.
I turn to face it. Not to receive it. To confront it.
This is the difference between me and the others, if the others are doing what I suspect they are doing based on who they are. Reed is trying to manage the nearness. Naomi is trying to fight it. Quinn is trying to outrun it. Sloane is trying to armor against it. I am trying to argue with it. I am the man at the negotiating table, the man who sits across from the opposing counsel and says: Present your case. Justify your actions. Explain, in terms that do not rely on mystery or faith or the invocation of a plan I cannot see, why you allowed a sixteen-year-old girl to die in a hospital room while three hundred people prayed for her life.
I face the nearness. I unfold my arms briefly, because the facing requires a different posture, the posture of a man who is not simply refusing but demanding, the posture of a prosecutor who has waited fourteen years for the defendant to take the stand.
You were there. I do not speak this aloud. I do not know whether speech works in the grey, and it does not matter, because the communication, if it is communication, happens in a space below speech, in the place where posture becomes language and intention becomes address. You were there in the hospital room. You were there when she was diagnosed. You were there during the treatment. You were there when the hair fell out and the appetite went and the light behind her eyes dimmed and the cells, the treasonous, mutinous cells, regrouped and attacked again. You were there when she died. You were there when my father broke. You were there for eighteen months of prayer, three hundred names on a refrigerator list, a carpenter kneeling beside a bed with the cords in his neck standing out, a mother murmuring at the stovetop, a boy on his bedroom floor trying the last available option. You were there, and you did nothing.
The nearness does not respond. The nearness absorbs the accusation the way the grey absorbs everything: without comment, without reaction, without the faintest indication that the accusation has been heard or registered or weighed. This is infuriating. This is the most infuriating feature of a situation that is comprehensively infuriating: the silence. The silence that lasted eighteen months in life and continues now, in death, in the grey, in the place where the defendant has unlimited time to respond and chooses, still, to say nothing.
Except.
The nearness does something. Not a response, not a reply, not an argument or a justification or a rebuttal. Something smaller and stranger and more difficult to classify. The nearness, in the space after my accusation, shifts in quality. It does not move closer. It does not intensify. It changes the way a face changes when a person hears something that they recognize, something that touches a place in them that has been touched before, and the change is not dramatic but is unmistakable, a deepening, a settling, as though the nearness has heard the accusation and heard it not as news but as something it already knew, something it carries, something it has carried for longer than I have carried it.
The scarred quality. The suffering-from-the-inside quality. The quality I noticed in the dying and filed for later analysis and have been carefully, deliberately, systematically ignoring ever since, because the quality does not fit the model, and the model is the argument, and the argument is the dam, and the dam must hold.
The quality deepens in the moment after my accusation, as though the accusation itself, the raw, grieving, furious charge of a man who watched his sister die, has activated something in the nearness, has touched the scar, has pressed the wound. And the wound, if it is a wound, responds not with pain but with something I do not have a word for, a resonance, a sympathy so exact it is almost recognition, as though the nearness were saying (without saying, without words, without any form of speech I can classify): I know. I know what that looks like. I know what the silence sounds like. I know what the parking lot feels like. I have been in the room. I have been in the bed. I have been where she was.
This is the misplaced comma. This is the error in the text that will not resolve. A God who stands off from suffering is a God I can refuse. A God who has been in the bed is a God I do not know what to do with. The argument does not account for a God who suffers. The argument was built to prosecute a God who watches, a God who permits, a God who sits in the gallery while the verdict is delivered and the child dies and the father breaks. The argument was not built to prosecute a God who enters the bed and lies down in it and bears the weight of the cells that mutiny and the body that fails and the breathing that stops. That God is a different defendant. That God requires a different case. And I do not have a different case. I have only this one, the one I built on a Tuesday afternoon in April when the dogwoods bloomed and the parking lot held a man who was falling and a boy who was catching him and a ceiling that said nothing.
I fold my arms again. The quality recedes, or I turn from it, which may be the same thing. The nearness settles back to its ambient level, faint and persistent and warm at the edge, and the edge is everywhere, and I face away from it, and I hold the argument, and the argument holds, and the comma sits in the proof like a question I am not ready to answer.
I think about my parents. I think about them the way I think about June, with a love that has been threaded through grief until the two are inseparable, a single rope braided from two different fibers, each one pulling in a direction the other resists.
They went on believing. This is the fact I cannot account for, the fact that sits beside the argument and does not support it and does not contradict it and simply exists, stubbornly, irreducibly, like a piece of furniture that does not match the room but cannot be removed because the floor underneath it has warped around it.
They went on kneeling every morning at six. They went on reading the Bible in the evenings, my father in the recliner with the reading lamp angled over his shoulder, my mother on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and her reading glasses perched on her nose, both of them quiet, both of them steady, both of them engaged in the daily practice of a faith that had been tested in the worst possible way and had held, and the holding was either the most courageous thing I had ever witnessed or the most tragic, and I have never been able to determine which.
My mother bakes. She bakes for the church. She bakes for the neighbors. She bakes for the family of every person in the county who loses someone, and the baking is her theology, if theology can take the form of banana bread and casseroles and the particular, wordless, hands-in-the-flour ministry of a woman who has been where you are and knows that what you need is not an explanation but a meal. She showed up at doors with foil-covered dishes and she did not say God has a plan and she did not say she’s in a better place and she did not say any of the things the pastor said in his office the week after June died. She said: I brought food. The dish is mine, bring it back whenever. And she left, and the leaving was as graceful as the arriving, and the grace was not the grace of a woman who has figured out the answer but the grace of a woman who has stopped needing one.
I do not understand this. I do not understand how a person can lose a child and go on kneeling. I do not understand how a person can pray for eighteen months and receive silence and go on praying. I do not understand how my father, who broke in a parking lot, who made a sound that erased the taxonomy of grief, who was held upright by a sixteen-year-old boy because the God he served did not hold him upright, can wake at six every morning and kneel beside the bed he shares with my mother and address the same ceiling that said nothing, and the addressing is not performance and not habit and not the mechanical repetition of a ritual that has lost its meaning. The addressing is real. The faith is real. The kneeling is real. And the reality of it is the one thing in the world that makes me doubt, not the argument, but my right to make it.
Because if the argument is sound, then my parents are fools. And my parents are not fools. My father can build a staircase that will last a century. My mother can read a room the way I read a manuscript, finding the errors, the tensions, the places where the logic of human interaction has gone soft. They are intelligent, capable, observant people who have looked at the same evidence I have looked at and drawn a different conclusion, and the different conclusion is not the product of stupidity or denial but of something else, something I do not have access to, something that lives in the space between the gap and the leap and the landing, the space I cannot enter because entering it would mean letting go of the argument, and the argument is the only thing I have, and I will not let it go.
Not even here. Not even in the grey. Not even in the timeless, featureless, relentlessly patient waiting room of the dead, where the nearness presses and the comma catches my eye and the memory of June is as sharp as the day she stopped breathing and the question, the enormous, load-bearing, structure-defining question of whether the ceiling is a surface or a gateway, remains open, and I will not close it, and I will not answer it, and I will not leap.
I will stand at the edge and hold my ground and fold my arms and wait for the answer I was promised by every theology I have ever examined and none of them has delivered: the answer that accounts for the dead girl, that makes room for the suffering, that does not turn June into a tool or a lesson or a necessary casualty of some cosmic plan I am too small to comprehend. The answer that takes the suffering seriously. The answer that does not flinch.
I have been waiting for that answer for fourteen years. I am good at waiting. The grey will learn this about me. The nearness will learn this about me. Whatever sits at the edge of this place, patient and warm and scarred and silent, will learn that I am more patient and more silent and more committed to the ground I stand on than any amount of ambient attention can outlast.
There is a memory I carry that I have not told anyone. Not Naomi, who knows almost everything. Not Quinn, who knows the shape. Not my parents, who were there but who experienced it differently, from a different angle, with different eyes.
Three weeks before June died, on a Saturday morning, I went to the hospital alone. My parents were at home; my mother was on the phone with the insurance company (which was its own form of prayer, a negotiation with a different kind of deity, one that spoke in the language of co-pays and pre-authorizations and the particular, bureaucratic cruelty of a system that makes a family fight for the treatment that is killing their daughter more slowly than the disease). My father was in his workshop, building something, I do not remember what, and the building was his way of praying and his way of not-praying, the saw and the sandpaper and the smell of fresh-cut pine standing in for the words he could no longer find.
I drove to the hospital in the Accord. The Accord that is now wherever wrecked cars go when the driver has been deposited in the grey. I parked in the lot, the same lot where my father would break three weeks later, and I walked through the lobby and took the elevator to the fourth floor and turned left at the nurses’ station and walked to the room at the end of the hall, the room with the window facing the parking lot, the room that smelled of antiseptic and something else, something floral that the nurses used to mask the other smells, the lavender air freshener on the windowsill that June hated because she said it smelled like a grandmother’s bathroom and she was sixteen and not a grandmother and her room should not smell like one.
She was awake. She was thin. She was so thin that the hospital gown hung on her like a curtain on a rod, and the rod was not sturdy, and the curtain was too much, and the whole image was wrong, because June was a runner, June was the girl who cut the water in clean, efficient strokes, June was the girl whose body had been a vehicle for motion and laughter and the particular, exuberant, full-bodied engagement with the physical world that is the birthright of a fourteen-year-old who has not yet learned that the physical world can turn on you.
She looked at me and she smiled, and the smile was the worst thing I have ever seen, because the smile was real. It was not brave. It was not performing. It was the genuine, unforced, un-requested smile of a girl who was glad to see her brother, and the gladness was not complicated by the wires in her arm or the bag on the stand or the numbers on the monitor or the fact that the cells in her body were winning a war she had not started and could not end. She was glad to see me the way she had always been glad to see me, with the simple, direct, unprotected warmth of a person who does not know how to be glad in a qualified way.
Hey, Micah.
Hey, June.
I sat in the chair beside the bed. She asked about the cat. General. The fat orange tabby. She wanted to know if General was still sitting on the porch railing, and I said he was, and she asked if he had caught anything lately, and I said he had not, and she said that was because General was a thinker, not a doer, and thinkers do not catch things, they observe things, and the observing is its own kind of catching, and I laughed, and the laugh was real and painful and sat in my chest like a stone dropped into water, and the water closed over it, and the stone is still there, at the bottom, where the water is cold and dark and the laughing cannot reach.
She told me about a nurse named Deb who did crossword puzzles during the night shift and who left the puzzles half-finished on the table by the window, and June had been finishing them, and Deb had noticed, and now it was a competition, and June was winning. She told me this with the particular glee of a person who has found, in the middle of catastrophe, a small, contained, manageable game, and the game was keeping her alive in a way the treatment was not, and I understood this, because I am a person who also survives by finding small, contained, manageable things to hold onto when the large things are failing, and the argument is my crossword puzzle, and I have been filling in the squares for fourteen years.
Then she said something I have never told anyone.
She said: Micah, I think it’s okay.
I asked what she meant.
She said: I think if I die, it’s okay. Not like it doesn’t matter. It matters. But I don’t think it’s the end of things. I think there’s something after, and I think the something is good, and I don’t know why I think that but I do.
I did not answer. I sat in the chair and held her words the way I would later hold my father in the parking lot, carefully, with the full weight of my body, as though the holding could keep the thing from falling. And the thing fell anyway, three weeks later, on a Tuesday, in April, with the dogwoods.
I have carried those words for fourteen years. I have carried them alongside the argument, and the two do not fit together, and the not-fitting is its own kind of evidence, though I am not sure for which side. June, who had every reason to be furious, who had every right to shake her fist at the ceiling and demand the explanation I have spent my life demanding, said it was okay. She said the something-after was good. She said this three weeks before she died, in a hospital room that smelled of lavender and antiseptic, with a half-finished crossword puzzle on the windowsill and a smile on her face that was not brave but was something worse than brave, which is to say it was genuine.
I do not know what to do with this. I have never known. It sits beside the argument like a footnote that complicates the text without clarifying it, a piece of information that the editor in me wants to query, to flag with a marginal note: Source? Evidence? Can this claim be verified? And the answer is no, the claim cannot be verified, because the source is dead, and the dead do not provide citations, and the words she said in the hospital room are the words of a sixteen-year-old girl who was running out of time and who found, in the running-out, a peace I have never been able to find, a peace that did not require the argument or the dam or the folded arms or the cold, clear-eyed refusal to bow.
I carry the words. I carry the argument. I carry both. They pull in opposite directions, and the pulling is the condition of my existence, the permanent tension of a man who is held together by two forces that cannot be reconciled: the grief that demands a case and the memory of a girl who said it was okay.
In the grey, with no distraction, the tension is worse. The argument says: She was dying. The peace was a symptom, a neurological event, the brain’s last kindness, a flood of chemicals designed to ease the passage. The memory says: She was not confused. She was not delirious. She was doing a crossword puzzle. She was winning a competition with a night-shift nurse named Deb. She was lucid and specific and she looked at you with those eyes, those clear, undimmed, not-yet-dead eyes, and she said it was okay, and the okay was not a hope. It was a report.
I fold my arms around both of them, the argument and the memory, the case and the footnote, the load-bearing wall and the crack in the wall, and I hold, and I hold, and the grey goes on, and the nearness remains, and the scarred quality presses at the edge of my attention with the patience of something that has been waiting longer than I have, which should not be possible, because I have been waiting since April, and April is the oldest month in my calendar, the month where time began its long, slow, permanent distortion.
I stand in the grey and I restate the case.
Not because it needs restating. Not because the nearness has answered and I need to rebut. The nearness has not answered. The nearness has done what it has done since the dying: remained, and pressed, and carried its scarred quality like a wound it cannot put down, and the carrying is not an argument but it is not nothing either, and the not-nothing is the thing I am restating the case against, because the not-nothing is the only thing in this place that approaches the territory of the argument, and if I do not restate, the not-nothing will sit in the silence and grow, and I cannot afford for it to grow, because growth means change, and change means revision, and revision means the dam might need repair, and the dam cannot be repaired without being opened, and the opening would let the water through.
So I restate.
June was fourteen when she was diagnosed. She was a runner. She played soccer and basketball and track. She swam in the summer. She talked too much. She found beetles interesting. She completed crossword puzzles left by night-shift nurses. She smiled at me three weeks before she died with a smile that was not brave but genuine. She was a person, a full, specific, unrepeatable, irreplaceable person, and she was consumed, over eighteen months, by her own cells, while three hundred people prayed and a father knelt and a mother murmured and a boy on a bedroom floor addressed the ceiling with the last conditional he would ever issue.
You did nothing. You could have. You chose not to. The choice is the crime. The silence is the evidence. The dead girl is the exhibit. The case is closed.
The case is closed, and the closing is the only power I have, the only authority I can exercise in a place that has taken everything else, the desk and the pen and the manuscripts and the mug and the porch and the housemates and the body that held all of it. The case is the last thing I own. The case is the house I live in now, the walls and the roof and the foundation, and I will not leave it, and I will not open the door, and I will not revise the closing paragraph, and I will stand inside the argument and fold my arms and wait.
The nearness does not respond. The nearness does the thing it did before, the small, unclassifiable shift in quality, the deepening, the settling, the resonance that is almost recognition. The scar activated. The wound pressed. The suffering-from-the-inside quality rising to meet my accusation the way a tuning fork rises to meet a note, not with a counter-argument but with a vibration, a sympathetic frequency, as though the nearness is saying, in its wordless, infuriating, non-propositional way: I know. I was there. I am not the God you think I am.
And I answer, in my wordless, structural, load-bearing way: Then who are you? If you are not the God who stood off and watched, then who are you? If you are the God who entered the bed and bore the weight and carried the scar, then where were you when she was dying? Where was the entering? Where was the bearing? She died alone in a room with a window facing a parking lot, and the entering, if there was entering, did not save her, and the bearing, if there was bearing, did not keep her alive, and the scars, if they are scars, are your scars, not hers, and she is the one who deserved to be scarless, and she is the one who is dead.
The nearness holds. The nearness carries. The nearness does not answer, and the not-answering is the loudest thing in the grey, louder than the silence in the hospital room, louder than the sound my father made, louder than anything I have ever heard, because the not-answering is not the silence of absence but the silence of presence, the silence of a witness who is not testifying because the testimony, when it comes, will not be words.
I do not know what the testimony will be. I do not know if there is testimony. I know only that the nearness is not doing what the God of the argument should do: defending, explaining, justifying, presenting the counter-evidence, making the case for the plan. The nearness is doing something else, something that has no place in the courtroom I have built in my head, something that is closer to sitting beside the bed and holding the hand than to standing at the podium and delivering the closing statement.
And this, more than the grey and more than the silence and more than the formless, featureless, endlessly patient country of the dead, is the thing I cannot bear. Because if the nearness is sitting beside the bed, then the nearness was there. And if the nearness was there, then the God who did nothing was not doing nothing. The God who did nothing was doing something else, something I do not have a word for, something that does not fit in the evidence box and does not belong in the closing argument and does not answer the question I have been asking for fourteen years but instead asks a question of its own, a question I can feel at the edge of my awareness the way I can feel the warmth at the edge of the grey, faint and persistent and shaped like a comma in a sentence I have read a thousand times without understanding the pause it creates.
The comma. The pause. The space in the argument where the breath goes, where the reader hesitates, where the logic holds but the rhythm stumbles, because the comma is in the wrong place, or the comma is in the right place and the sentence around it is wrong, or the sentence is right and the grammar is one I have never learned, a grammar in which suffering is not the evidence of absence but the evidence of something else, something I cannot name, something I will not name, something that smells like lavender and antiseptic and crossword puzzles and the smile of a girl who said it was okay.
I will not name it. Naming it would mean the argument is incomplete. The argument is not incomplete. The argument is the most complete thing I have ever built, more complete than any manuscript I have ever edited, more precise than any proof I have ever corrected, and the fact that there is a comma in it that I cannot resolve does not mean the argument is wrong. It means the comma is misplaced. It means the text needs one more pass. It means I need to sit with it longer, in the grey, in the silence, in the patient, pressing, scar-carrying nearness, until the comma resolves itself or until I find the rule that explains its placement.
I fold my arms. The arms are my margin marks. The arms are my correction. The arms are my response to the text of the universe, which contains an error I have identified and which I will not stop marking until the author addresses it or until the text is retired.
The nearness remains. The comma remains. The argument remains. The grey remains.
I remain.
June is dead, and the dogwoods bloomed, and my father broke, and my mother went on kneeling, and I went on folding my arms, and the ceiling, or the light, or the scarred thing behind the light, went on not answering, and the not-answering is the condition of my existence and the fuel of my refusal and the only honest response to a God who asks for worship and cannot account for a girl who ran and is now still.
I will hold this ground. I will hold it here, in the grey, in the country of the turned-away, in the long, measureless waiting that stretches ahead like a manuscript with no final page. I will hold it because the holding is the only prayer I have left, the only address to the ceiling that is not a capitulation, the only way I know to say what I have been saying since April, which is: You owe her. You owe us. And until you pay, I will not move.
Arms folded. Weight back. Eyes open.
The misplaced comma catches my eye, and I ignore it, and I hold my ground, and the ground holds me, and the grey continues, and the nearness continues, and the long refusal, the principled, grieving, clear-eyed, undefeated refusal of a man who loved his sister and will not bow to the power that let her die, begins its long, patient, unwavering hold.
The case is mine. The ground is mine. The folded arms are mine.
The comma is not mine. The comma belongs to the nearness, to the scar, to the grammar I do not yet understand. And the not-yet is the only crack, the only sliver, the only hairline fracture in the dam, and I do not look at it, and I do not touch it, and I hold my arms tighter, and the dam holds, and June is dead, and the argument stands, and the grey, and the silence, and the waiting.
The waiting.
I can wait longer than God.
I intend to prove it.