Love Without Borders
Chapter Twenty-Five
I open my mouth and the fire fills it.
Not the way fire fills a furnace or a building or a mouth in a metaphor about destruction. The fire fills my mouth the way air fills the lungs of a newborn: total, shocking, undeniable, the first breath of a thing that has been held inside for so long that the holding has become indistinguishable from the self, and the releasing feels like a kind of death, which is fitting, because I have already died, and the dying did not release it, and the grey did not release it, and the summons did not release it, and only this, the fire of the full presence of the face that will not turn away, only this has created the pressure sufficient to crack the seal.
I am going to say it. Here. Now. In the fire. Before the face. Into the presence that has pursued me since the dying and through the grey and past the summons and into this blazing, unendurable, inescapable nearness that sees everything and flinches from nothing. I am going to say what I have been preparing to say for fourteen years, what I rehearsed on the floor of my bedroom and at the foot of June’s hospital bed and in the lecture halls where I sat among other students who believed in other things and none of them believed in the argument the way I believed in the argument, because the argument was not a belief for me but a fact, hard and cold and load-bearing, and the fact is this:
You let her die.
I do not say it softly. I do not say it the way a man speaks in a library or a confessional or a lawyer’s office, in measured tones, with appropriate pauses, with the professional cadence of a person who has practiced his opening statement until it is smooth. I say it the way it was always meant to be said, the way it was meant to be said on the bedroom floor and in the hospital hallway and at the graveside and in every room I have entered and exited in the years since April, the way the truth is always meant to be said, which is raw, which is loud, which is the sound of a man standing in fire and refusing to let the fire silence him, because the fire is the defendant and the defendant does not get to control the proceedings.
You let her die.
The fire hears. The fire does not flinch. The fire does not contract or expand or flicker or do any of the things that a fire does when an unexpected force is applied. The fire goes on being the fire, which is to say the fire goes on being the love, which is to say the love goes on pressing against every surface of the restored body with the same total, patient, unbearable intensity it had before I spoke, and the not-changing is the most infuriating thing about it, because a defendant who does not react to the opening charge is a defendant who is either guilty and knows it, or innocent in a way the accuser has not accounted for, and I have accounted for everything, I have accounted for every possible defense and found them all wanting, and the not-reacting is not in my case file, and its absence is a fact I do not know where to put.
I put it aside. I continue. The case has waited fourteen years and all the measureless time of the grey. It will not be derailed by the defendant’s composure.
The facts of the case are these. I have them in order. I have always had them in order, because order is what I do, because order is what a copy editor does, because the trained eye that catches the misplaced comma and the dangling modifier and the unsupported claim is the same trained eye that looked at the facts of June’s illness and death and arranged them into a charge that no amount of pastoral comfort or philosophical gymnastics has ever been able to answer.
Fact one. June was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in the February of her fourteenth year. The tumor was in her left femur, near the knee. It was caught early enough that the oncologist used the word optimistic in the first consultation, and our mother wrote the word in her prayer journal, and our father repeated it to the elders of the church, and the elders repeated it to the congregation, and the congregation took the word and turned it into a campaign, a mobilization, a full-spectrum effort of prayer and fasting and laying-on of hands that transformed June’s cancer from a medical event into a spiritual test, a referendum on the power of God, a case study in whether or not the Almighty would intervene in the biological fate of a fourteen-year-old girl who had done nothing wrong and who believed, with the calm, uncomplicated faith of a child who had been raised in the presence of morning prayers and evening Bible readings and the Sunday rituals of a family that treated the existence of God the way other families treated the existence of gravity — as a fact too basic to require discussion.
June believed. This is important. This is the part of the case that makes the rest of it unbearable, because if she had not believed, if she had been a skeptic or a rebel or a teenager who rolled her eyes at the prayers and the elders and the hands that pressed against her forehead while she sat in the metal folding chair in the fellowship hall, then the case would be different, the charge would be softer, the indictment would carry less weight. But June believed. June believed with the specific, concrete, operational faith of a girl who had been taught that God hears prayers and answers them and that healing is within His power and that He is good, which means His power is not arbitrary but directed, not random but intentional, not indifferent but loving, and the loving is the word that detonates the whole thing, because if the power is loving then the use of the power should reflect the love, and the death of a believing child does not reflect the love, and the non-reflection is the charge, and the charge has never been answered.
I say this into the fire. I say it into the face. I say it into the presence that knows all of this already, that was there, according to its own claims, in the fellowship hall and the hospital room and the Tuesday afternoon in April and the parking lot where the dogwoods bloomed, and the being-there is either the cruelest fact in the case or the most important, and I do not yet know which, and the not-knowing is the thread I keep pulling, the thread I have pulled for fourteen years, and the thread has never broken but it has never led anywhere either, and I am tired of pulling it in the dark, and I am pulling it now in the fire, in the light, in the total exposure of the presence that sees me pulling and does not stop me and does not answer and does not look away.
Fact two. The treatment worked. The initial treatment worked. The chemotherapy shrank the tumor, and the surgery removed the affected bone, and the prosthesis was fitted, and June walked with a limp for three months and then without a limp, and she went back to school in September, and she rejoined the track team as an assistant, because running was behind her but she could not bear to be away from the track, from the chalked lines and the starting blocks and the sound of spikes on the rubber surface, and she stood on the infield with a clipboard and a whistle and timed the sprinters with a stopwatch her coach gave her, and she was happy. I want to stress this. She was happy. The cancer was beaten, the prayers were answered, the congregation celebrated, my parents wept with gratitude on their knees beside the bed at six in the morning, and the case, the case that would become my life’s work, did not yet exist, because there was nothing to charge, nothing to protest, nothing to hold against the defendant, because the defendant had, apparently, come through.
This is important because it establishes the pattern. The pattern is: hope given and then taken. The pattern is: the door opened and then shut. The pattern is: the child healed and then unhealed, the prayer answered and then unanswered, the optimistic used as a setup for the devastating, and the devastating is the charge, and the setup makes the charge worse, because a God who heals and then lets the cancer come back is not a God who was absent from the beginning but a God who was present and then withdrew, and the withdrawal is worse than the absence, the way a parent who shows up and then leaves again is worse than a parent who never showed up at all, because the showing-up creates the expectation, and the expectation creates the trust, and the trust is what breaks when the leaving happens, and the breaking of a trust that was built on a healing is the specific, particular, unrepeatable cruelty at the center of my case.
Fact three. It came back. The cancer returned in the October of her fifteenth year, fifteen months after the surgery, in the left lung this time, three small nodules that the scan revealed with the clinical precision of a technology that does not care what it finds, and the oncologist did not use the word optimistic this time, and the prayer journal did not record a new campaign, and the elders came to the house but their hands were quieter, and the congregation prayed but the praying had a different quality, a hedged quality, a quality that I recognized even at fifteen as the quality of people who are beginning to prepare for a loss they have not yet admitted they expect, and the preparing was honest, which is the best thing I can say about it, and the honesty was the first crack in the structure, the first indication that the structure was not as solid as the morning prayers and the evening Bible readings had led us to believe.
I say all of this into the fire, and the fire listens, and the listening has the quality of total attention, which is the quality the fire has had from the beginning, from the moment the grey broke and the presence unveiled itself and the argument I brought into the dim country was carried, by the summons and the resurrection and the approaching of the Throne, into the full light of the face that will not turn away. The listening is total. The attention is complete. I have the defendant’s ear. I have the courtroom. I have the floor. I have been given, at last, the thing every prosecutor dreams of and most prosecutors never receive, which is the defendant’s undivided presence, the defendant sitting in the chair, not behind a lawyer, not behind a wall, not behind a veil of smoke or a cloud of witnesses, but here, face to face, exposed, present, and the present is the fire, and the fire is the love, and the love does not defend itself.
This should be a victory. The defendant who does not defend himself is the defendant who has no defense. This is what I have been arguing for fourteen years: that there is no defense, that the case is unanswerable, that the evidence is conclusive, that the verdict is guilty, that a God who lets a child die while a family prays is a God who is either not good or not powerful or not real, and the trilemma is airtight, and the logic is sound, and the facts are on my side, and the silence of the defendant is the confession.
But the silence does not feel like a confession. The silence feels like something else, something I do not have a category for, something the case did not prepare me for, because the case prepared me for an opponent and the silence is not the silence of an opponent, the silence is the silence of someone who is hearing every word and receiving every charge and taking every blow and not defending because the defense is not an argument, and the not-argument is the thing I cannot process, the variable my equation has no place for, the factor that sits outside the trilemma and watches it with a patience that is older than the argument and will outlast the argument and is not impressed by the argument, not because the argument is wrong but because the argument is aimed at the wrong thing, aimed at an absence when the reality is a presence, aimed at a distance when the reality is a nearness, aimed at an indifference when the reality is the scars.
The scars. I keep seeing them. Through the fire, through the face, through the total knowing that the presence turns on me with the intensity of a love that will not dim and will not turn and will not give me the courtesy of looking away while I make my case. The scars are in the looking. The scars are in the listening. The scars are in the quality of the attention, which is not the attention of a judge hearing a case but the attention of someone who already knows every word I am going to say because the someone was there when the words were formed, was there in the hospital room and the parking lot and the bedroom floor and the grey, and the being-there is either the guilt or the answer, and I will not let it be the answer, not yet, not here, because the case is not finished and the evidence is not complete and the prosecution has more to say.
Fact four. June died on a Tuesday in April. She was sixteen years and three months old. She weighed seventy-one pounds, which is a number I should not know but do know because I saw the chart on the table beside her bed when the nurse left the room to get more morphine, and the number was written in blue ink in a hand that was steady and clinical and did not tremble the way my hand trembles when I write the number now, in the fire, in the presence, in the total recall of a moment that I have carried the way some people carry photographs, except that photographs fade and this does not fade, will never fade, has been sharpened by the grey and the fire into a clarity that is more vivid than the original moment, as if the dying and the grey and the summons and the Throne have conspired to make the memory not dimmer but brighter, not gentler but more precise, not softer but harder, and the harder is the case, and the case is the memory, and the memory is the fire.
She died in a room with a window that faced a parking lot. The window was closed. The blinds were half-drawn, because our mother could not decide whether June would want the light or not, and the indecision was its own kind of grief, the grief of a woman who had spent sixteen years knowing exactly what her daughter wanted and was now discovering that the knowing was ending, that the preferences were becoming irrelevant, that the light or the absence of light would soon make no difference to a girl whose eyes were closing for the last time, and the last time is the fact that detonates everything, because there should not have been a last time, because the prayers should have prevented a last time, because the God who healed her once should have healed her twice, and the should is the charge, and the charge is what I am laying before the fire.
Our father was holding her right hand. Our mother was holding her left. I was standing at the foot of the bed, holding nothing, which is the detail that has haunted me more than any other detail, more than the weight or the window or the half-drawn blinds, because the holding-nothing was the beginning of the folded arms, the first draft of the posture that would become my architecture, the prototype of the stance I have carried through fourteen years and into the dark and up to the Throne. I was holding nothing because there was nothing left to hold. The prayers were spent. The faith was collapsing. The hope that had been given and then taken was gone, and in its place was the first terrible clarity of a boy who was watching the evidence accumulate and was drawing a conclusion that his parents would never draw and that the church would never endorse and that the ceiling of his bedroom would confirm, three days later, with its absolute, comprehensive, devastating silence.
She breathed and then she did not breathe. The space between the two states was the width of a moment, a fraction of a second, a gap so small that a comma could fill it, and the comma is her voice, and her voice said I think the something-after is good, and the good was spoken into the gap, spoken into the space between the breathing and the not-breathing, spoken by a girl of sixteen who had more faith in her thin hands than I have had in my whole body and my whole life and my whole death, and the faith was either the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed or the most tragic, and the difference between the two depends on whether the something-after was real, and the something-after is real, I am standing in it, I am burning in it, and the burning does not tell me whether the good was right, because the burning is ambiguous, because the burning is the fire and the fire is the love and the love is the agony and the agony does not resolve the question, the agony deepens it.
I say this into the face. I say it precisely, with the full force of a man who has spent his life correcting other people’s arguments and who has now arrived at the argument he has been building toward since he was fifteen, the argument he constructed beam by beam and evidence by evidence and fact by fact through fourteen years of living and all the measureless time of the grey, and the argument is not a tantrum, and the argument is not a child throwing a fit because the candy was taken away. The argument is a serious, principled, morally weighted charge against the architect of a universe in which a sixteen-year-old girl can be given cancer and given healing and then given the cancer back, and the giving-back is the cruelty, and the cruelty is the charge, and the charge demands an answer.
I demand the answer. I demand it the way a man in a courtroom demands it, with the authority of the evidence behind him and the weight of the facts beneath him and the force of the grief inside him. I say: Answer. Defend yourself. Explain. Give me the reason. Give me the theodicy. Give me the clause in the contract that justifies the death of a believing child in a room with half-drawn blinds while her parents held her hands and I held nothing. Give me one reason, one argument, one defense that makes the seventy-one pounds and the thin hands and the blue ink and the parking lot and the dogwoods make sense. Give me what the pastors tried to give my father and failed. Give me what the philosophers tried to build and could not. Give me the answer.
The fire gives me no answer.
The fire gives me the fire. The fire gives me the looking-at, the total, comprehensive, unflinching attention of a presence that is hearing every word and absorbing every charge and taking every blow and not defending, not arguing, not producing from behind the bench a document or a precedent or a brief that would settle the case and send the prosecutor home. The fire gives me the face. And the face is not the face of a defendant who has been caught and has nothing to say. The face is the face of someone who has everything to say and is choosing not to say it in the language I am demanding, and the choosing is the thing I cannot bear, because I want the argument, I need the argument, I have built my entire self on the expectation of the argument, and the absence of the argument is not the silence of guilt but the silence of something else, something deeper, something that operates on a register my case does not reach, and the not-reaching is the agony, and the agony is the fire.
I try the defenses myself. I have tried them before, in the dark, in the grey, in the measured time of the living and the unmeasured time of the dead. I have tried them because a good prosecutor does not merely present his case; a good prosecutor anticipates the defense, dismantles it preemptively, removes every escape route before the defendant can reach it. I have been dismantling defenses since I was sixteen.
The free-will defense. The argument that suffering exists because God granted human beings freedom, and freedom includes the freedom to do harm, and the doing of harm generates the suffering, and the suffering is the price of the freedom, which is worth the price because a world with free beings who can choose love is better than a world of puppets who cannot. I know this defense. I studied it in the grey, turning it over the way a curator turns over a forged painting, looking for the brushstroke that reveals the fraud. The brushstroke is this: June’s cancer was not the product of a human choice. No one chose to give her osteosarcoma. No one exercised free will to place a tumor in her femur. The cells mutinied on their own, without instruction, without moral agency, and the free-will defense does not cover cellular rebellion unless one is prepared to grant moral standing to metastatic tissue, which I am not, and which no serious thinker has ever been.
I say this into the fire. The fire does not produce a rebuttal. The fire does not say: You have misunderstood the free-will defense; let me clarify. The fire does not clarify. The fire listens.
The soul-making defense. The argument that suffering is the forge, the crucible, the refining fire — and here the metaphor collides with the reality, because I am standing in the fire, and the fire is not making my soul, the fire is burning my soul, or the fire is doing something to my soul that might be making but feels like burning, and the distinction between making and burning is the distinction between the reconciled and the refusing, and I am the refusing, and the refusing feels the fire as fire and not as forge. But the defense. The defense says: suffering builds character, tempers the spirit, produces in the sufferer a depth and a resilience that could not have been produced by a life without pain, and the production is the justification, and the justification covers even the worst suffering because even the worst suffering serves the purpose of the making.
I dismantle this with the number. Seventy-one pounds. Whose character was being built by the reduction of a sixteen-year-old girl to seventy-one pounds? Whose spirit was being tempered by the thin hands and the morphine and the chart in blue ink? June’s? She is dead. She has no character left to build. The soul-making stopped when the breathing stopped, which means the making was unfinished, which means either the forge was defective or the forger miscalculated, and a forger who miscalculates is a forger whose competence is in question, and a competence in question is a hole in the defense.
Or mine. Was my character being built? Was the purpose of June’s cancer the improvement of Micah? Is that the economy? One dead sister per unit of spiritual growth in the surviving brother? I asked this question in the pastor’s office when I was sixteen, not out loud but in the silence of my folded arms, and I have been asking it ever since, and the asking has never produced an answer that does not make the God it defends into a monster, because a God who kills children to build character in adults is a God whose methods are indistinguishable from those of an abuser, and the indistinguishability is the charge.
I say this into the fire. I say it with the precision of a man who has spent his professional life identifying exactly where an argument goes soft, and the argument for soul-making goes soft at the point where it requires the suffering of one person for the benefit of another, because this is not mercy and it is not justice and it is not love, it is instrumentalization, it is the use of a person as a means to an end, and a God who uses persons as means is a God who does not see persons as ends, and a God who does not see persons as ends is not the God the church advertises.
The fire does not rebut. The fire does not say: You have constructed a caricature; the real defense is more nuanced. The fire listens, and the listening burns, and the burning is not the burning of refutation but the burning of being heard, completely, without interruption, without the dismissal I expected, without the gavel I braced for, and the not-dismissing is worse than the dismissing would have been, because the dismissing would have proved my case and the not-dismissing leaves it open, leaves me standing in the fire with my prosecution spread across the bench and no judge to rule on it and no verdict to carry home and no sentence to point to and say: See? The system failed. The defendant was acquitted. The fix was in from the beginning.
The greater-good defense. The argument that suffering, even terrible suffering, even the suffering of children, is justified by its contribution to a larger pattern, a cosmic tapestry in which every thread, even the darkest, serves the beauty of the whole, and the beauty of the whole is the justification, and the justification is sufficient because the whole is vast and the thread is small and the perspective from which the beauty can be seen is a perspective no human being possesses, which means the defense rests on a claim that cannot be verified, which means the defense is unfalsifiable, which means the defense is not a defense but an appeal to mystery wrapped in aesthetic language.
I have a particular contempt for this one. I have had a particular contempt for it since the Sunday after June’s funeral, when a woman from the church — a kind woman, a woman who meant well, a woman whose casserole was among the seventeen casseroles that filled our refrigerator in the week after the death — took my mother’s hands in the fellowship hall and said, with the absolute sincerity of a person who believes what she is saying, It’s all part of God’s beautiful plan.
I was standing three feet away. I heard it. I watched my mother’s face receive the words, watched the muscles around her mouth do the particular thing they did when she was absorbing something that hurt but that she would not permit herself to reject because the rejecting would mean questioning the plan and questioning the plan would mean questioning God and questioning God was not an option for a woman who knelt every morning beside a man who also knelt and who also believed and who also trusted that the plan, however opaque, however cruel, however incompatible with any human definition of beauty, was beautiful.
My mother smiled. She thanked the woman. She held the hands. She was gracious and calm and unbroken, or she appeared unbroken, which is a different thing, the way a building that is standing appears unbroken until you look at the foundation and see the cracks, and the cracks were there, I saw them, I have always seen them, because the cracks are what a copy editor sees, the fissures in the text, the places where the argument shows strain, and my mother’s argument was showing strain, and the strain was in the corners of her smile, and the corners of her smile have never fully recovered, and the not-recovering is another charge, another exhibit, another piece of evidence in the case I am laying before the fire.
I say: A plan that requires the death of a sixteen-year-old girl is not a beautiful plan. A tapestry that requires a dark thread is not improved by the darkness of the thread. A cosmic good that is purchased at the price of a particular evil is not good; it is the greater-good defense offered by every tyrant and every utilitarian and every architect of atrocity who has ever stood in a courtroom and said: the ends justified the means. And You — You, the One whose face I am standing before, You whose fire is pressing against me, You whose scars are in the looking and whose grief is in the listening — You are either the tyrant or You are not, and if You are not, then the plan was not a plan, and if the plan was not a plan, then June’s death was not part of a design, and if it was not part of a design, then it was a failure, and if it was a failure, then the power failed or the goodness failed or the love failed, and the failing is the charge, and the charge is the case, and the case demands an answer.
The fire gives me no answer. The fire gives me the face. And the face is not failing and is not tyrannical and is not the face of a designer who sacrificed a child for a pattern. The face is something else. The face is the thing I cannot fit into the case, the evidence that does not belong in my evidence box, the exhibit that refuses to sit on the shelf beside the other exhibits because it is too large for the shelf, too heavy for the box, too alive for the filing system I have been using since I was fifteen.
The face is looking at me. And the looking has wounds.
I am not finished. The case is not finished. The face can look all it wants. The wounds can be wherever the wounds are. I have more to say and the saying has waited fourteen years and the fourteen years have earned the saying and I will not stop because the defendant’s face is doing something unexpected.
The mystery defense. The last of the four, the honest one, the one I respect more than the others because it does not pretend. The mystery defense says: I do not know. I cannot explain. The suffering is real and the questions are valid and the answers are beyond me, and all I have is trust, and the trust is a leap, and the leap is made in the dark, and the dark is where faith lives.
I respect this because it does not lie. It does not turn June into a lesson or a tool or a dark thread in a beautiful tapestry. It simply says: I do not understand, but I believe. And the believing is real. I watched my parents make this leap every morning at six, kneeling beside their bed, and the kneeling was not a performance and the trust was not a pose and the believing was not a transaction but a climate, a condition, a way of breathing, and they breathed it, my mother and my father, for thirty-four years before June died and for every year after, and the breathing did not stop when June stopped breathing, and the not-stopping is either the most courageous thing I have ever witnessed or the most heartbreaking, and the difference depends on whether the dark they leaped into is actually empty or actually occupied, and the occupied is the question, and the question is the case.
I cannot make the leap. I have said this before. In the grey, in the dark, in the measureless time of the dead. I cannot make the leap because the leap requires me to trust the One who let her die, and the trusting of the One who let her die is not a leap but a betrayal, a betrayal of June, a turning of my back on the girl in the hospital bed, a shrug of the shoulders that says: It happened. It was terrible. I trust anyway. And the I trust anyway feels like the closing of a file, the stamping of a case dismissed, the acceptance of a verdict that was never rendered, and the acceptance would mean that June’s death is absorbed into a system that I have been refusing to join for fourteen years, and the joining would mean the end of the refusal, and the end of the refusal would mean the arms coming down, and the arms coming down would mean standing here in the fire with nothing between me and the face, and the nothing is the thing I am most afraid of, because the nothing would mean being known, and being known would mean the argument is not my identity, and the argument not being my identity would mean that Micah exists apart from the case, and the Micah who exists apart from the case is the boy who stood at the foot of the bed and held nothing, and the holding-nothing is the grief, and the grief is the real thing, and the real thing has been hiding behind the argument since April.
I know this. Somewhere beneath the case, in the place where the comma lives, in the place where June’s voice presses between the something-after and is good, I know that the argument is not the thing. The argument is the structure I built around the thing, the legal architecture I erected to contain and channel and professionalize the thing, and the thing is simpler than the argument and older than the argument and more powerful than the argument, and the thing is: I miss her. I miss her with a force that has outlasted the logic and the evidence and the philosophical framework and the trilemma and the four varieties of inadequate defense, a force that is not intellectual but animal, cellular, the force of a body that remembers another body and cannot stop remembering, the force of a brother who sat on his sister’s hospital bed and did the crossword and laughed at her handwriting and loved her and lost her and has not stopped losing her, because the losing is not an event but a condition, not a moment but a state, and the state is the grey I carried into the grey, and the grey of the grief and the grey of the afterlife are the same grey, and the same grey is the fire now, and the fire is burning the grey away, and the burning-away is the exposure, and the exposure is the real case, the case beneath the case, the case I have never spoken because speaking it would require removing the arms and the removing of the arms would mean standing bare before the face with nothing but the grief and the missing and the love, and the love for a dead sister is not an argument, and if it is not an argument then the arms have nothing to hold.
But I hold anyway. I hold because holding is what I have done, is what I do, is who I am, and the who-I-am is the argument, and the argument is the arms, and the arms are the architecture, and the architecture is the man, and the man will not fall because the man is well-built and the building is sound and the foundation is solid, except that the foundation is a dead girl, and the dead girl’s voice said the something-after was good, and the good is pressing against the foundation with the force of a truth that the foundation was not designed to bear.
I change my approach. The direct demand for a defense has produced no defense. Very well. The prosecution will enter its remaining evidence and let the record speak.
I say: The prayers. Let the record reflect the prayers.
Because the prayers are their own category. The prayers are not simply words spoken into a ceiling. The prayers were an act of faith, a deployment of the specific, concrete, operational trust that the church had installed in my parents the way an electrician installs wiring, the faith that said: God hears. God acts. God intervenes in the physical world on behalf of those who ask. And my parents asked. They asked with their knees on the bedroom floor at six every morning. They asked with their hands on June’s forehead in the fellowship hall. They asked with their voices lifted in the sanctuary on Sundays, with their eyes closed and their arms raised and their faces turned upward in the particular posture of people who believe that the upward is occupied, that the ceiling is not the ceiling but a membrane through which the asking passes into the hearing and the hearing produces the acting and the acting takes the form of healing, which is what they asked for, specifically, repeatedly, desperately, faithfully, for two years, from the February of the diagnosis to the April of the death.
Two years of prayer. I calculate this sometimes, in the grey, in the fire, because calculation is what I do when the grief is too large for the grief and the only way to contain it is to quantify it. Two years is seven hundred and thirty days. Seven hundred and thirty mornings on the floor. Seven hundred and thirty episodes of asking. Let us say each morning prayer lasted twenty minutes, which is conservative, which does not account for the nights when the prayer went longer because the reports were worse or the scan was bad or June was in pain and the pain was the fuel that extended the prayer past the twenty minutes into the half-hour and sometimes the hour, my father’s voice breaking and my mother’s voice breaking and the breaking of the voices being its own kind of prayer, the prayer of bodies that had nothing left to say and said it anyway.
Seven hundred and thirty times twenty minutes is fourteen thousand six hundred minutes. Fourteen thousand six hundred minutes of asking. Two hundred and forty-three hours. Ten full days, if the days ran without pause, of a father and a mother on their knees asking the ceiling to save their daughter.
The ceiling said nothing. The ceiling says nothing still. The ceiling was as silent as the grey, and the grey was as silent as the fire is now, and the fire’s silence is the same silence, the same comprehensive, devastating, inexcusable absence of response that met the fourteen thousand six hundred minutes and that meets me now, standing in the fire with my case spread open and my evidence on the table and my demand for an answer ringing in the heat.
Except that the silence is not the same. I can feel the difference and I do not want to feel the difference but I cannot prevent myself from feeling it because the fire does not permit unfelt things, the fire exposes everything including the prosecutor’s own perception, and my perception is that the silence here, in the fire, in the face, is not the silence of the ceiling. The ceiling’s silence was empty. The fire’s silence is full. The ceiling’s silence was the silence of a room with no one in it. The fire’s silence is the silence of a room with someone in it who is choosing not to speak, and the choosing is not evasion and is not guilt but is something else, something I do not have a name for, something that sits in the category of responses that are not arguments and not defenses and not rebuttals but are real, are present, are doing something that the argument has no apparatus to process.
The silence is listening. The silence is receiving. The silence is taking every charge and every fact and every exhibit and every number — the seventy-one, the fourteen thousand six hundred, the sixteen years and three months, the two years of prayer, the half-drawn blinds, the parking lot, the dogwoods, the April, the Tuesday, the comma — and holding them, carrying them, bearing the weight of them without setting them down and without deflecting them and without producing a justification that would make them lighter. The silence is carrying what I carried.
And the carrying has a quality. The carrying has the quality of the grief I felt in the grey, the matching grief, the strange, unplaceable, un-arguable sense that the nearness had felt what I felt, had carried what I carried, had stood where I stood, and the standing was not a metaphor but a fact, not a spiritual empathy but an actual, historical, bodily experience of the suffering I was charging it with ignoring. The quality is in the scars. The quality is in the wounds. The quality is in the face that is looking at me and has been looking at me and will not stop looking at me, and the looking is not the looking of a judge or a tyrant or an architect of beautiful plans, the looking is the looking of someone who lost something too.
No. I will not let this in. Not yet. The case is not finished.
I say: Let the record reflect what happened after.
Because the death is not the whole case. The death is the center, but the center has an aftermath, and the aftermath is the damage, and the damage is its own charge, and the charge is this: the death did not stop killing when June stopped breathing. The death went on killing. The death killed things in my mother and in my father and in me, things that were alive before April and have been dead since April, things that the God who let the cancer return should have known would die when June died, because a God who is omniscient is a God who sees the dominoes, who knows which ones will fall when the first one falls, and the first one was the tumor and the second one was the body and the third one was the family and the fourth one was the faith and the fifth one was the boy standing at the foot of the bed, holding nothing, watching the dominoes fall and reaching for none of them because the reaching would require believing that the reaching could stop the falling and the believing had already died, had died in the October when the scan came back and the oncologist did not say optimistic and the prayer journal went quiet.
My mother. Let the record reflect my mother. My mother, who knelt seven hundred and thirty mornings and asked for healing and received, for a time, what she believed was healing, and then watched the healing unravel, watched the healed girl become the dying girl become the dead girl, and who responded to the unraveling not with protest, not with fury, not with the folded arms of her son, but with a deeper kneeling, a more desperate trust, a faith that reached past the failure and into the mystery and found there, in the mystery, enough to go on, and the going-on is either heroism or delusion, and the difference is the case.
She knelt the morning after the funeral. I know this because I heard it. I was lying in my bed in the room across the hall, staring at the ceiling, and I heard the thud of her knees hitting the carpet, and I heard my father’s knees beside hers, and I heard the murmur of the prayer, and the murmur was different this time, the murmur was the sound of people who are praying not for a specific thing but for the endurance to survive the absence of the specific thing, and the praying for endurance was the bravest and the saddest sound I have ever heard, and the brave and the sad are the same word in my mother’s voice, and her voice has carried that frequency ever since, a harmonic of loss that rides beneath every sentence she speaks, even the cheerful ones, even the ordinary ones, even the ones about groceries and weather and whether Micah has remembered to eat, and the harmonic is the damage, and the damage is the charge.
My father. Let the record reflect my father. My father, who broke in the parking lot while the dogwoods bloomed, who stood beside his car with the keys in his hand and the April sunlight on his face and the sound of ordinary traffic on the road behind him, and who broke, silently, without drama, the way a bridge breaks when the load finally exceeds the capacity, not with a noise but with a settling, a subsiding, a quiet rearrangement of the internal structure into a configuration that can bear less than the original design, and my father has borne less ever since. He is a smaller man. Not physically. Physically he is the same height and the same weight and the same face. But he is smaller in the way that matters, smaller in the part of him that was large before June died, the part that laughed without checking first to see if the laughing was appropriate, the part that sang in the car without worrying that the singing might be too loud, the part that carried his daughter on his shoulders when she was small and let her pull his hair and called her Captain and meant it, because she was the captain of his joy, and the captain is dead, and the joy is smaller, and the smaller is the damage, and the damage is the dominoes, and the dominoes are the charge.
And me. Let the record reflect me. Micah. Twenty-nine. Copy editor. Carrier of folded arms and dead sisters and arguments constructed on bedroom floors. Let the record reflect that I was a boy before I was an argument. Let the record reflect that I had a sister and the sister was alive and the being-alive was the condition under which I grew up, the climate in which I learned to read and to think and to laugh and to notice when things did not hold up, and the climate was warm because the sister was warm, and the climate turned cold when the sister turned cold, and the turning is the damage, and the damage is the charge, and the charge is this: I was made into this. The argument was not a choice. The folded arms were not a philosophical position adopted after careful consideration of the available alternatives. The folded arms were a survival response, the posture of a boy whose world was broken by a fact he could not reconcile with the world his parents had given him, the fact that God is good and powerful and lets children die, and the fact is a contradiction, and the contradiction is the case, and the case is the only thing I have had to hold since the holding-nothing at the foot of the bed.
I say: You made this. You made the argument by making the conditions under which the argument became necessary. You made the arms by breaking the boy. You made the prosecutor by killing the witness. And now You stand here, in the fire, with Your scars and Your silence and Your face that will not turn away, and You give me nothing. No defense. No explanation. No answer. Just the fire and the face and the looking and the carrying and the scars, and the scars are not a defense, and the carrying is not an argument, and the looking is not a rebuttal. I asked for a trial. I got a stare.
The stare does not blink. The stare does not flinch. The stare absorbs the charge and carries the charge and holds the charge the way I held the grief, with the particular patience of a bearer who has been bearing for longer than the thing being borne, and the longer-than is the thing I keep tripping over, the fact that will not fit in the case, the evidence that does not belong on my shelf but that keeps appearing there anyway, placed by hands that I cannot see and cannot stop and cannot argue with because the hands are not arguing, the hands are carrying, and the carrying is not an argument.
The fire burns hotter. Not in temperature. Not in the way a furnace burns hotter when the fuel is increased or the damper is opened. The fire burns hotter in proximity, in intimacy, in the quality of the knowing that the face turns on me, the quality that has been increasing since the grey broke and the Throne was revealed and I stepped into the presence of the One I have been accusing for fourteen years. The knowing is closer now. The face is closer. The distance that the grey maintained, the merciful vagueness that allowed me to keep my back to the nearness and call it a general phenomenon rather than a specific person, that distance is gone, has been gone since the Throne, but the goneness is deepening, the way a diver goes deeper and the water pressure increases and the body must adjust or be crushed, and the body is adjusting, and the adjusting is the fire, and the fire is the agony of being known at a depth I did not know I had.
I am being known beneath the argument. The fire is reaching past the case, past the evidence, past the exhibits and the precedents and the trilemma and the four inadequate defenses, and the reaching is touching something that the argument has been protecting, the way armor protects a wound, the way the folded arms protect the chest, the way the architecture of a man built on principle protects the boy who built the architecture because he did not know what else to do with the breaking.
The fire is touching the boy.
The boy is fifteen. The boy is standing on the bedroom floor. The boy has just come home from the hospital, from the room with the window and the parking lot and the half-drawn blinds, and the boy’s sister is dead, and the boy’s parents are kneeling, and the boy cannot kneel because the kneeling would mean joining the system that let her die, and the not-joining is the beginning, the first fold of the arms, the first line of the case, the first word of the argument that will become the architecture that will become the man.
The boy looks at the ceiling and says: If You are there, You owe me an explanation. If You are not there, You owe me nothing, and the nothing is the answer, and the answer is the case.
The ceiling said nothing. The boy took the nothing as the answer. The boy was wrong about what the nothing was. The boy could not have known he was wrong because the boy was fifteen and the knowing comes later and the later is the fire and the fire is now.
I am not ready to know this. I am not ready to revise the original reading. I am not ready to consider the possibility that the ceiling’s silence was not the silence of emptiness but the silence of something else, something that was in the room and could not reach me because the reaching required my willingness to be reached and the willingness died when June died and the died-willingness is the arms and the arms are the case and the case is the man and the man is standing in the fire and the fire is reaching past the man to the boy and the boy is afraid.
The boy is afraid because if the ceiling was not empty then the prayer was not unanswered. And if the prayer was not unanswered then the answer was not the nothing. And if the answer was not the nothing then the answer was something, and the something was not the healing I asked for, which means the something was something else, and the something else is the thing I have spent fourteen years refusing to consider because considering it would mean the case is flawed and the flaw is not in the evidence but in the conclusion, and a flawed conclusion in a case built by a copy editor is a professional failure and a personal catastrophe and an identity collapse, because if the argument falls, Micah falls, and if Micah falls, who stands in his place?
The boy. The boy stands in his place. The boy who loved his sister. The boy who held nothing. The boy who was broken by a death he did not deserve to witness and who built an argument to hold the breaking and who carried the argument into the dark and through the grey and up to the Throne and into the fire, and the fire is doing the thing the boy always feared the fire would do, which is to reach past the argument and find the boy and hold the boy and say to the boy, in the language that is not an argument: I know.
I know.
The fire says I know the way the scars say I was there, not as a statement but as a fact, not as a claim but as a wound, not as a defense but as something that predates the case and postdates the case and surrounds the case and sits beneath the case with the patience of a bedrock that the foundation was built on without knowing it, and the not-knowing is the flaw, and the flaw is not in the evidence but in the framing, and the framing is the arms, and the arms are tired.
The arms are so tired.
I will not yield. I need to say this. I need to say it now, in the fire, in the fullest awareness that the fire is doing something to the architecture and the something is not destruction but renovation, and the renovation is the thing I am resisting because the renovation would mean the building is not sound, and the building has been my home for fourteen years, and the home is the argument, and the argument is the only place I have lived since June died.
I will not yield because yielding would mean the case was wrong. And the case was not wrong. The suffering was real. The cancer was real. The seventy-one pounds were real. The thin hands were real. The prayers were real and the silence was real and the death was real and the damage was real, and no amount of fire and no quality of face and no depth of knowing and no presence of scars can make the real things unreal. The facts remain. The evidence stands. The charge holds.
I say this into the fire and the fire receives it and the receiving is the carrying and the carrying has the scars and the scars are the thing I keep seeing and cannot stop seeing and do not want to see because the seeing is doing something to the case that the case cannot survive, which is to say the seeing is introducing a new piece of evidence, a piece I did not file, a piece I did not discover in my research, a piece that arrived unbidden and unasked-for and unwelcome, the way the cancer arrived in June’s femur, the way the death arrived in the hospital room, the way the truth arrives in any life, without permission, without consideration of whether the recipient is ready to receive it.
The new evidence is the wounds.
The wounds are in the face. They have always been in the face, since the first moment of the Throne, since the grey broke and the presence unveiled itself and I stepped into the fire with my arms folded and my case prepared and my argument polished and my trilemma arranged. The wounds were there before I opened my mouth. The wounds were there before the first charge was spoken. The wounds were there before the evidence was entered and the defenses were dismantled and the silence was established and the carrying was observed. The wounds have been there from the beginning of the fire, and the from-the-beginning is the thing that is shifting the ground, because wounds that are present from the beginning are not a response to the case, they are prior to the case, they are older than the case, they are facts that existed before the case was built, and the before-the-case is a category the case has no room for, because the case was built on the assumption that the defendant was unwounded.
The case was built on the assumption that the defendant stood at a distance. The case was built on the assumption that the suffering was experienced by one party and ignored by another. The case was built on the assumption that June lay in the hospital bed and the defendant was elsewhere, was absent, was the empty ceiling and the silent sky and the unresponsive God who received fourteen thousand six hundred minutes of prayer and produced, in response, nothing.
But the wounds. But the scars. But the face that carries in its looking not the blankness of an absentee but the depth of someone who was there, who was in it, who knows the suffering not from the outside but from the inside, who carries the marks of a passage through something that left permanent damage, and the permanent is the fact, and the fact is new, and the new fact does not fit in the old case.
I try to make it fit. I am a copy editor. I make things fit. I take sentences that are broken and I mend them. I take arguments that are loose and I tighten them. I take evidence that is misplaced and I rearrange it until the text is clean and the logic is sound and the conclusion follows from the premises. I try to make the wounds fit into the case the way I would make a recalcitrant clause fit into a sentence: by cutting, by trimming, by finding the place where the extra material can be inserted without disrupting the flow.
The wounds do not fit. The wounds do not trim. The wounds are not an extra clause that can be inserted into the sentence of my argument without changing the meaning. The wounds change the meaning. The wounds are a revision of the text at the level of premise, not conclusion, a revision that does not alter what happened — June still died, the prayers still went unanswered, the cancer still won, the seventy-one pounds are still the seventy-one pounds — but a revision that alters the character of the defendant, the nature of the defendant, the identity of the defendant, because the defendant I aimed my case at was the absent God and the defendant I am standing before is not absent, the defendant I am standing before is wounded, and the wound changes everything and I do not want the everything to change because the everything is the arms and the arms are the only thing between me and the boy on the bedroom floor, and the boy is afraid.
The face looks at me. The face carries the wounds. The face does not argue. The face does not defend. The face does not produce a document or a brief or a precedent or a philosophical treatise on the compatibility of divine goodness and human suffering. The face does something that is not any of these things and is more devastating than all of them combined.
The face shows me its wounds.
Not as evidence for the defense. Not as a rebuttal to the prosecution. Not as a counter-argument or a justification or a tu quoque or a legal maneuver of any kind. The face shows me the wounds the way a person shows another person a scar: not to win a debate, but to say I was there. I know what it costs. I have been through something too.
And the too is the word that shifts the ground. The too is the word the case has no room for. The too is the variable my equation never included, because my equation had two parties — the sufferer and the One who allowed the suffering — and the too collapses them, or does not collapse them but connects them, bridges them, places them in a relationship that the case did not account for, a relationship in which the One who allowed the suffering also underwent the suffering, also bore the weight, also paid the cost, and the also is the new fact, and the new fact is the wounds, and the wounds are in the face, and the face is in the fire, and the fire is the love.
I do not understand this. I cannot process this. The argument has no apparatus for this. The folded arms have no posture for this. The case has no exhibit for this. The boy on the bedroom floor has no prayer for this. The man at the Throne has no response for this except the one response that is not a response but a reaction, a physical, involuntary, pre-rational sensation that bypasses the argument and the arms and the architecture and reaches the place where June’s voice lives, the comma, the is good, and the reaching says:
The defendant suffered too.
And the suffering of the defendant is not a defense. And the wounds of the defendant are not an argument. And the scars in the face are not a rebuttal to the charge that June died while the ceiling was silent. But the suffering and the wounds and the scars are something, and the something is not nothing, and the not-nothing is the crack, and the crack is widening, and through the crack something is coming into view that I am not ready to see and cannot stop seeing and do not know how to fit into the case because the case was built for a different defendant, a defendant who stood at a distance, and the defendant before me did not stand at a distance, the defendant before me stood somewhere else, somewhere I have not looked, somewhere the argument did not point its light because the argument assumed the defendant was behind the bench and the defendant was not behind the bench.
The defendant was in the room.
The defendant was in the hospital room with the half-drawn blinds and the parking lot and the thin hands and the seventy-one pounds and the crossword and the pencil and the comma and the breath and the not-breath, and the being-in-the-room is the fact I have never allowed into the case, and the never-allowing is the flaw, and the flaw is not in the evidence but in the framing, and the framing is falling, and the falling is the fire, and the fire is the love.
I hold. The arms hold. The case holds, or the case tries to hold, but the case is holding against a weight it was not designed to bear, and the weight is the wounds, and the wounds are the fact, and the fact is coming into view.
The view is not complete. I cannot see all of it. The fire is too close, the face is too near, the knowing is too deep, and the depth is the problem, because at this depth the argument cannot function the way it functions at the surface, the way it functioned in the grey where the vagueness gave it room to maneuver and the distance gave it space to hold its shape, and down here, in the fire, in the total presence, the argument has no room and no space and no distance, and the no-distance is the exposure, and the exposure is the seeing, and the seeing is partial, like the first light through a gap in a heavy curtain, enough to establish that there is something behind the curtain but not enough to identify what the something is.
I see the wounds. I have said this. The wounds are in the face and the face is in the fire and the fire is the love and the love is the agony and the agony is the difference between me and the reconciled, the five who found the glory, the housemates and the stranger and the girl with the glad eyes and the man who was Sloane’s brother, all of them home, all of them in the presence without burning, all of them bathing in what I am scorching against, and the scorching is the arms, and the arms are the case, and the case is the thing between me and the warmth.
But the wounds. The wounds are not behind the curtain. The wounds are in front of it, visible, present, undeniable, and the undeniable is doing something to the arms that the argument cannot prevent, a softening at the edges, a loosening at the joints, a fatigue in the muscles that have been clenched for fourteen years and all the measureless time of the grey and the summons and the Throne, a fatigue that is not defeat but is the forerunner of something, the first sign of something, the early motion of a thing that has not yet happened but is approaching the way dawn approaches, not all at once but in increments, in degrees, in the slow turning of a dark toward a light that the dark cannot prevent.
I say: I am not done. The case is not closed. The evidence stands. The charge holds. The suffering was real and the prayers were real and the death was real and the damage was real. I will not pretend they were not real because the defendant has wounds. Wounds are not a defense. Wounds do not undo the dead girl. Wounds do not give back the seventeen casseroles or the parking lot or the kneeling or the morning prayers or the boy on the floor or the arms that folded because there was nothing left to hold.
And the fire says nothing. And the silence is the carrying. And the carrying has the wounds. And the wounds have the quality of a suffering that is not in competition with mine but is alongside mine, not a rebuttal but a companion, not a counter-argument but a co-bearing, and the co-bearing is the thing I cannot process because my case was built for a courtroom and a courtroom has two sides and the two sides are adversarial, and the adversarial is the structure, and the structure is the arms, and the arms assume an opponent, and the face before me is not an opponent.
The face before me is a co-sufferer. And the co-suffering is not an argument. And the co-suffering is not a defense. And the co-suffering does not explain why June died or why the prayers went unanswered or why the ceiling was silent.
But the co-suffering is something.
It is something I have not had before. It is something no defense has offered and no pastor has provided and no philosopher has constructed and no friend has attempted, because every person who has tried to address my grief has tried to address it with a reason, a justification, an explanation, a why, and the why has always been insufficient because the why always required June’s death to be the servant of something else, the means to an end, the dark thread in the tapestry, and the servant-of-something-else made her death less than it was, smaller than it was, more manageable than it was, and the making-manageable was the insult, and the insult was the fuel, and the fuel was the fire of the argument, and the fire of the argument has been burning for fourteen years.
The face is not offering a why. The face is offering a with. And the with is not an explanation, but it is something, and the something is not nothing, and the not-nothing is pressing against the arms with a force that is different from the force of the fire, a force that is not heat but weight, the weight of a fact I did not include in my case, the weight of a presence I did not account for in my evidence, the weight of wounds in a face that was in the room.
The arms are tired. The case is spoken. The charge is laid. The defense has not come. The argument has not been rebutted. The verdict has not been rendered. The silence has not been broken. The face has not turned away.
And something is coming into view.
I cannot see it clearly. I can see its edges, its outline, the first suggestion of a shape that is forming in the fire the way an image forms on paper left in developing fluid, emerging slowly, a shadow becoming a shape becoming a figure becoming a person, and the person is not a person in the way that persons are persons, the person is something more, something that carries wounds and wears scars and has a face that absorbs charges and bears the weight and does not defend and does not explain and does not argue but simply looks, looks and looks and looks with the endless, patient, devastated, loving, wounded, undimmed, unbroken attention of someone who lost something too.
Who lost something too.
The too is the crack. The too is the new fact. The too is the evidence I did not file and cannot dismiss and do not know how to hold because the arms were designed for the case and the case did not include a defendant who lost something too.
I hold. The arms hold. The case lies spoken in the fire, every word of it, every fact, every charge, every exhibit, every number, every prayer, every minute of the fourteen thousand six hundred, every pound of the seventy-one, every year of the fourteen, every inch of the folded arms, every breath of a girl who stopped breathing on a Tuesday in April while the dogwoods bloomed and the parking lot held the light and the ceiling kept its silence and a boy held nothing.
The case is laid. The defense has not come. The answer has not been given.
But something is coming into view. Something in the wounds. Something in the scars. Something in the face of the One I accused of standing off from suffering, who is looking at me now with a looking that has the quality not of distance but of nearness, not of indifference but of intimate knowledge, not of a God who watched from behind a bench but of a God who was in the room, who was in the suffering, who was in the dying, who was in the silence, who was in the ceiling, who was in the April, who was in the Tuesday, who was in the dogwoods, who was in the prayers, and the being-in is the fact, and the fact has wounds, and the wounds are the answer I did not ask for and cannot yet receive and am beginning, against every fiber of the argument and every fold of the arms and every principle of the case, to see.
I see. I am beginning to see. I am not ready to say what I see. The seeing is too new and the fire is too hot and the arms are too tired and the boy is too afraid and the case is too heavy and the wounds are too real and the face is too close and the love is too large and the something-after is too much.
But June said it was good.
And the good is in the wounds. And the wounds are in the face. And the face is in the fire. And the fire is the love.
And the love has scars.
And the scars are beginning to speak.
And the speaking is not an argument.
And I am not ready.
But the speaking does not require my readiness. The speaking requires only my presence, which the fire has ensured. The speaking requires only my hearing, which the fire has opened. The speaking requires only the moment, which is this moment, the moment at the end of all the moments, the moment after the case and before the answer, the moment between the charge and the truth, the moment that is the fire and the face and the love and the wounds and the scars and the looking and the carrying and the with and the too and the I was there and the something coming into view that I cannot yet see and cannot yet say and cannot yet hold but that the arms, the tired arms, the aching arms, the fourteen-year arms, are beginning, against everything I have built and everything I have held and everything I have been, to make room for.
The arms do not open. Not yet. Not here.
But the arms are making room.
And the room is the first room that is not the argument. And the first-room-that-is-not-the-argument is the beginning. And the beginning is the fire. And the fire is the love. And the love has wounds. And the wounds are speaking.
And I am listening.