Love Without Borders
Chapter Twenty-One
She is gone now too, or not gone but unreachable, or not unreachable but sealed behind her wall, which amounts to the same thing. I can no longer feel the armored one in the grey. The last threads of company, the two-person refusal that held the shape of solidarity for some measureless stretch, have thinned past sensing. Whether she has yielded or merely retreated further into her fortification I cannot tell. The grey does not report on its other occupant. The grey does not report on anything. It simply is, and I am in it, and I am alone in it now in a way I was not alone before, a way that has a weight and a texture and a specific pressure against the inside of my chest, and the pressure is not grief, not exactly, because grief requires the loss of something loved, and I did not love the armored woman, I barely knew her, but her presence was a fact, and the fact is gone, and the absence of a fact is its own kind of silence, the silence of a room that had two chairs and now has one.
One chair. One man. One argument.
The grey presses closer. I have noted this before, the way emptying concentrates the pressure the way a reducing sauce concentrates flavor, not more of the same but the same thing made denser, richer, more insistent in its particular quality. The quality of the nearness has always been warmth, and the warmth has always been wrong, or at least unwelcome, which is the same thing when you are the kind of man who has built his entire interior on a principle that the warmth violates. The warmth says: I am here. The principle says: You should not be. These two propositions cannot both be true, and I have spent my entire conscious afterlife, if that is what this is, holding the second one upright against the evidence of the first, which is a task that resembles nothing so much as editing, which is what I did for a living, which is what I did for fourteen years while June lay dead and the dogwoods went on blooming in their thoughtless seasonal rotation and the ceiling above my bedroom went on saying nothing, which is what ceilings do, which is what God does, which is the same thing.
I fold my arms. The gesture is automatic now, structural rather than voluntary, the way a building settles into its foundation. The arms are not a posture. They have become me. They are the architecture of a man who has held one position for long enough that the holding is no longer a choice but a condition, a state of being, the resting stance of a body that has no body but remembers what the stance felt like and reproduces it out of pure fidelity to the argument that the stance contains.
The argument. The long argument. The argument I have been making since the April that ended everything, since the parking lot where my father broke and the dogwoods bloomed and the sky did nothing, since the bedroom floor where a boy made a conditional statement to the ceiling and received, in return, the kind of silence that is not the silence of thoughtfulness or restraint but the silence of an empty house, the silence of a line that was never connected, the silence that is the strongest possible evidence for the absence of the party you are trying to reach.
The argument is not anger. I have said this before, to myself, to the grey, to the nearness that will not leave and will not answer. Naomi was angry. Naomi burned with the focused, righteous fury of a woman who was handed a God shaped like a weapon and told it was love, and her fury was deserved and specific and pointed at particular human beings in a particular cinderblock building who did particular cruel things under the authority of a name they had no right to use. Naomi’s anger was the anger of the personally betrayed, the burned hand that remembers the fire, and I respected it, sitting across from her on the couch at 412 Garfield while she spoke in her careful, hard-edged sentences about Pastor Keith and Linda and the fellowship hall and the hands that pressed and the voices that demanded, and I held her words the way a good editor holds a difficult text: with attention, with care, without needing to revise.
My argument is not that. My argument is structural. My argument is a proof, a demonstration, a piece of logical architecture as carefully constructed as any theorem I ever checked in the academic manuscripts that crossed my desk, and the care of the construction is the point, because the construction is the only honest response to a universe in which a girl can be eaten alive by her own cells while three hundred people pray and a father kneels and a mother whispers and a brother stands at the foot of the bed with his arms at his sides and watches the space between breathing and not-breathing close like a book whose last page has been torn out.
The argument, restated. For what feels like the thousandth time, though the grey does not count, and the counting would be irrelevant even if it did, because the argument does not weaken with repetition. The argument strengthens. The argument is like a manuscript that improves with every pass, each reading tightening the prose, eliminating the weak phrases, sharpening the claims until the text achieves the density and precision of a thing that cannot be made better because it was true from the first draft and the editing only made the truth more visible.
Premise one. A being that is both omnipotent and good would prevent the suffering of the innocent when the prevention costs nothing and the suffering accomplishes nothing.
Premise two. June was innocent. She was fourteen years old. She ran track. She collected beetles in a glass jar with holes in the lid. She finished crossword puzzles left behind by a night-shift nurse named Deb. She was a person, complete and specific, and her suffering was real and terrible and lasted eighteen months, and the suffering did not educate her or improve her or reveal to her the deep structures of the cosmos. The suffering made her sick and thin and tired and then the suffering killed her.
Premise three. Prevention was possible. The being in question, if it exists, is defined by its defenders as omnipotent. Omnipotence means the power to act without constraint. The constraint was not physics, because the being created physics. The constraint was not biology, because the being created biology. The constraint was not some higher principle that binds even God, because the defenders of the being insist there is no higher principle. The prevention of one girl’s cancer was within the operational parameters of the entity being worshipped. The prevention did not occur.
Conclusion. The being either does not exist, or is not good, or is not powerful in the way its defenders claim. In any of these cases, worship is not warranted. In any of these cases, the boy standing at the foot of the bed watching the last breath leave was right to look at the ceiling and say: You owe her.
The argument stands. The argument has always stood. The argument stood in the parking lot and in the bedroom and on the porch at 412 Garfield Street where I sat in the evenings with a cup of coffee and the particular silence of a man who has resolved a question that most people spend their lives equivocating on. The argument stood at the Threshold, when the light came warm and full and I met it with the arms folded and the case intact and said no with a clarity that I have never regretted, not once, not even here in the grey, not even now in the empty grey, not even with the warmth pressing closer than it has ever pressed and the scarred quality of the nearness doing that thing it does, that low, strange, infuriating resonance, that sympathetic vibration, that un-answer that refuses to be an argument and refuses to be a silence and sits in the space between the two like a comma in the wrong place, a pause in a sentence I have read a thousand times and cannot resolve.
The comma. I come back to the comma. I come back to it the way a copy editor comes back to a disputed passage, returning and returning because the dispute has not been settled and the passage cannot be published with the dispute unresolved, and the resolution is the editor’s responsibility, and the editor is me, and I have not resolved it, and the not-resolving is the only weakness in the manuscript, the only soft spot in the proof, and I hate the comma with the particular hatred of a craftsman who has found a flaw in his best work and cannot remove it without destroying the structure that holds the flaw in place.
The comma is June’s voice. The comma is June in the hospital bed, three weeks before the end, with the half-finished crossword on the windowsill and the smell of lavender and antiseptic and the light from the parking lot falling across the blanket in long, pale rectangles, saying the thing she said, the thing I have carried alongside the argument for all the years since, the thing that does not fit in the evidence box and does not belong in the closing statement and refuses to be filed under any category my system contains.
I think it’s okay, Micah. I think the something-after is good.
A sixteen-year-old girl. Lucid. Not delirious, not drowning in morphine, not performing the brave face that the dying are expected to wear for the comfort of the living. She was doing a crossword puzzle. She was beating nurse Deb by three clues. She looked at me with the clear, undimmed eyes of a person who was reporting a finding, not expressing a hope, and she said it was okay, and the okay was not a wish. The okay was a measurement. The okay was a reading taken from an instrument I did not possess, an instrument calibrated to detect a signal I could not hear, a frequency beyond the range of the equipment I had been issued by my temperament and my training and my grief.
And I could not, even then, dismiss it. I could not dismiss June. I could dismiss my parents’ prayers, because prayers are addressed to an absence and an absence cannot return mail. I could dismiss the painting of Jesus holding the lamb on the third floor of the hospital, because paintings are paint on canvas and the expression on the painted face was the expression of a fiction. I could dismiss the pastor who came to the room and spoke about God’s plan with the confident, rehearsed cadence of a man who had given the same speech in other rooms to other families and would give it again tomorrow, because the pastor was a functionary of an institution built on a premise I had already rejected and his words were liturgy, not evidence. I could dismiss all of it. Every piece of the religious apparatus that surrounded June’s dying, I could name and catalogue and set aside.
But I could not set aside June. June was not apparatus. June was not liturgy. June was the primary source. June was the only witness in my life whose testimony I have never had cause to doubt, because June did not say what she was expected to say and did not say what would have comforted me and did not say what a dying girl says when she is playing a role. June said what she saw, or thought she saw, or sensed, or detected with whatever instrument the dying are given that the living do not have, and the testimony of a witness you trust is the hardest thing to handle when the testimony contradicts the case you have spent your life building.
I carry both. I have carried both since the hospital. The argument in one hand, the comma in the other. The proof and the footnote. The case and the thing that will not fit inside the case. And the carrying has not reconciled them, and the grey has not reconciled them, and the nearness, which should be the evidence that settles the question one way or the other, has instead made the question worse, because the nearness is not nothing, and if the nearness is not nothing, then the ceiling was not empty, and if the ceiling was not empty, then the silence was not absence but something else, and the something else opens a door in the argument that I have spent years nailing shut.
I nail it shut again. This is what I do. This is the work. Nail the door, hold the arms, restate the case, refuse the warmth, maintain the position. The position is the house I live in. The position is the only shelter I have in a place that has taken everything else.
The grey offers no distraction. I have noted this before, but the noting takes on a different character now that I am alone in it, now that even the faint, impersonal comfort of another human refusal has been removed. The grey is a room stripped to its walls. There is nothing to look at. Nothing to read. Nothing to correct, no manuscripts waiting in a pile on the desk, no red pen in the breast pocket of a shirt I no longer wear, no coffee growing cold beside a stack of proofs, no window in the office looking out at the parking lot where I ate my lunch and read my novels and thought my private, orderly thoughts about a universe that was wrong and did not know it was wrong and could not be corrected because there was no editor-in-chief, no author, no one at the top of the masthead to receive the complaint.
The absence of work is its own kind of cruelty. Not the cruelty of the inflicted, but the cruelty of the removed, the cruelty of a life drained of its distractions until the person standing in the drained space has nothing left to do but face the thing the distractions were keeping at a distance. The work kept the door shut. The editing, the precision, the daily discipline of other people’s arguments kept the door in my own argument shut, the door with the comma behind it, the door that leads to the room where June’s voice lives, and without the work the door has nothing on it but the nails, and the nails are my arms, and the arms are tired.
Not yielding. Not weakening. Tired. There is a difference, and the difference matters, and I am the kind of man for whom differences matter, for whom the precise word is the only acceptable word, for whom the distinction between tired and weakening is not semantic but structural. A tired man can hold his position indefinitely, because tiredness is a condition, not a trajectory. A weakening man cannot, because weakening is a direction, and directions end. I am tired. I am not weakening. The arms hold. The case holds. The nails hold. The door is shut.
But the comma presses. In the silence of the stripped room, with no manuscripts to correct and no proofs to mark and no arguments to tighten that are not my own, the comma presses the way a crack in a wall presses against the paint, not violently, not aggressively, but with the quiet, patient pressure of a structural truth that the paint cannot permanently contain. The comma is a structural truth. The comma is the fact that June’s testimony exists and that I have no mechanism to dismiss it and that the argument, for all its elegance, for all its precision, for all its years of careful maintenance, has a place in it where the logic holds and the rhythm does not, and the place is the comma, and the comma is her voice, and her voice is the one thing in the world I cannot edit.
I would not edit it if I could. This is the other thing. The thing I do not say, even to myself, even in the grey, even in the solitude that has no audience and no consequences and no reason for the withholding except that the withholding is the last privacy I have. I do not want to edit June’s words. I do not want to revise her testimony. I do not want to change the comma or remove it or explain it away with the neurological argument, the argument that says the peace was chemicals, endorphins, the brain’s own morphine flooding the circuits in a last act of biological kindness, the body saying goodbye to itself with a shot of warmth that the mind interprets as something-after.
The neurological argument is available to me. I have used it. I used it at the funeral, silently, standing in the back of the church while my parents’ friends pressed my hands and told me June was with God now and I received their comfort with the careful, neutral expression of a man who was already constructing the case, already laying the bricks of the wall, already converting grief into architecture. I used it at 412 Garfield, on the porch, on the evenings when the coffee grew cold and the sky turned from blue to purple to black and the question surfaced, as it always surfaced, uninvited, like a fish in water you thought was too polluted to sustain life. The neurological argument is clean and efficient and does not require a God. It explains June’s peace without recourse to the supernatural. It closes the door.
But it closes the door on June. And I will not close the door on June. This is the center of the thing, the place where the argument, which is so carefully built, so beautifully maintained, so airtight in every other chamber, develops the leak it cannot seal. I will not close the door on June because June was not a neurological event. June was a person. June was my sister. June was the most honest human being I have ever known, a girl who would not lie about what she saw, who did not lie about what she saw, who looked at me with those eyes, those terribly clear eyes, and reported a finding, and the finding was: It is okay. The something-after is good.
If I accept the neurological argument, I dismiss her testimony. If I dismiss her testimony, I make her a symptom. If I make her a symptom, I lose her twice: once to the cancer and once to the argument, and the second losing is worse because the second losing is my doing, and I have done enough losing for one life and one afterlife and one long, grey, stripped, measureless waiting.
So I carry the comma. I carry the argument and the comma together, the way I have always carried them, the proof and the footnote, the case and the crack, and the carrying is the condition of my existence and has been since April and will be, I suspect, for as long as existence goes on, which appears to be a very long time, which is the grey’s one reliable contribution to the discussion: the information that existence does not end at the parking lot or the bedroom floor or the dying moment on the wet road when the light came and I said no. Existence goes on. The argument goes on. The comma goes on. The grey goes on.
The nearness goes on.
I try, in the stripped room, to build the argument from the ground up. Not to restate it, which is repetition, but to rebuild it, which is engineering, and the difference between the two is the difference between reading a building and constructing one. Restating is recitation. Rebuilding is testing every beam, every joint, every connection, applying weight to each one and seeing if it holds, and the reason I am rebuilding now, in the grey, alone, with the nearness pressing and the comma pressing and the stripped room offering nothing else to do, is that I want to know, one more time, with the full force of my training and my grief, that the argument holds.
Because if it holds, I can stay. If it holds, I can remain in the position, in the folded arms, in the principled and honest and justified refusal that is the only prayer I know, the prayer that says: You owe her. You owe us. And I will not move until the debt is paid.
And if it does not hold. If some beam gives, some joint slips, some connection I have trusted turns out to be compromised by a force I did not account for. Then.
Then I do not know what I am.
The rebuilding begins. I lay the foundation, which is the fact: June died. This is the fact from which all other facts proceed, the datum that grounds every premise, the observation that anchors the proof. June died. She was sixteen years old and three months. She died on a Tuesday in April in a room that smelled of lavender and antiseptic, and the dying was preceded by eighteen months of treatment that did not work and prayer that did not work and hope that did not work and a night-shift nurse named Deb who taught her crossword tricks that did work, briefly, at making her laugh, which was the only medicine that did anything useful, and the medicine was not medicine and was not from God and was from a woman in scrubs who liked word games and had the decency to treat a dying girl as a living person rather than as a case study in theodicy.
Deb. I remember Deb. I remember her the way I remember everything about that room, with the photographic fidelity of a mind that was, at sixteen, already doing the work it would do professionally: recording, cataloguing, noting the details that most people let pass because most people are not building a case and do not need evidence and are not standing at the foot of a bed with their hands empty and their arguments forming and the terrible, crystalline focus of a boy who is watching the most important thing in his life be taken from him and is refusing, even as it is being taken, to look away.
Deb was short and heavy and had a gap between her front teeth and wore earrings shaped like tiny cats, and she called June kiddo and brought her crosswords from the newspaper and left them on the windowsill at the start of every shift, folded in half, with the difficult clues circled in pen, and the circling was a dare and the dare was a kindness and the kindness was the only thing in that room that cost nothing and required nothing and came with no conditions and no theology and no explanation for why a fourteen-year-old had to learn words like oncology and metastasis and prognosis while her classmates learned algebra.
June loved the crosswords. June loved them with the specific, focused joy of a girl who could not run anymore and could not swim anymore and could not play the sports she had spent her whole short life playing, whose body had become a territory she no longer controlled, whose days had narrowed from the wide, athletic, beetle-collecting, too-much-talking days of a girl in motion to the thin, clinical, hospital-bed days of a girl in treatment, and the crosswords were the one arena where her mind could still compete, could still be quick and sharp and alive, could still beat someone, even if the someone was a night-shift nurse who stacked the deck by circling the hard clues.
June beat Deb more often than Deb beat June. This is the kind of fact I keep. The kind of fact that goes in the file alongside the argument, not as evidence for either side but as the texture of the person the argument is about, the irreducible particularity of a girl who was not a premise and was not a theological problem and was not a case study in the silence of God but was a person, a specific and unrepeatable person, and the specificity is the weight, and the weight is the grief, and the grief is the fuel, and the fuel is the argument, and the argument is the only thing in this stripped, grey, measureless place that belongs to me.
Here is the hardest part. Here is the part I have never spoken aloud, not on the porch, not in the grey, not to Naomi or Quinn or my parents or the ceiling or the nearness. Here is the room behind the door with the nails in it, the room the argument is built around, the room the architecture exists to protect.
I prayed.
I prayed, and the prayer was not my parents’ prayer, which was a communal thing, a shared thing, a thing done in the posture of faith by two people who believed the recipient was listening. My prayer was private. My prayer was the prayer of a boy who did not know yet whether he believed but who was willing, in the extremity of his need, to test the hypothesis. My prayer was, in the strictest sense, an experiment. I designed it. I set the parameters. I identified the variable: the life of my sister. I identified the control: the absence of intervention. I identified the outcome that would confirm the hypothesis: June living. And I identified the outcome that would disconfirm it: June dying.
I knelt on the floor of my bedroom. This is the part I have not told anyone. Not because the kneeling was shameful but because the kneeling was sincere, and the sincerity is the thing I have not been able to look at since, because the sincerity was met with the silence, and the silence made the sincerity into something worse than foolishness. The silence made the sincerity into a wound. The silence took the one moment in my life when I opened the door of my argument and put my hand out through it and said, If you are there, prove it. If you are real, save her. If you are good, let me keep her, and the silence answered the hand with nothing, and the nothing closed around it, and the hand came back inside empty, and the door shut, and the nails went in, and I have not opened it since.
I was fifteen years old. I was on the floor of a bedroom that had a poster of the periodic table on one wall and a photograph of June at a cross-country meet on the other, and I was kneeling the way I had seen my parents kneel, and the kneeling felt strange and theatrical and wrong, as though I were auditioning for a role I had not rehearsed, and I said, to the ceiling, in a voice that was not steady and was not calm and was not the voice of a logician but was the voice of a child: Please. I will believe in You if You save her. I will believe in You and I will not ask for anything else and I will go to church and I will read the Bible and I will be whatever You want me to be, if You will do this one thing. This one small thing, which is not small to me but which must be small to You because You are what they say You are and You can do what they say You can do, and all I am asking is that You do it. Save her. Save June. She is in room 412 and her hair is falling out and she is scared and she will not tell anyone she is scared because she is braver than any person in this family including me. Save her. Please.
Room 412. I have not thought about that number in years. The coincidence registers now, here in the grey, with the dull impact of a fact that has been sitting in the file all along, unexamined, waiting to be noticed. Room 412 in the hospital. 412 Garfield Street, the house where I lived with Naomi and Quinn. The same number, repeated, the universe’s idea of a joke, the kind of structural echo a copy editor would flag in a manuscript and suggest revising because the repetition calls attention to itself and implies a significance the text has not earned.
The text has not earned it. There is no significance. Numbers repeat. Addresses recur. The universe is not a novel and does not employ symbolism and does not arrange its details for thematic resonance. The coincidence is a coincidence, and the noting of it is a symptom of the grey, of the stripped room, of the solitude that has left me with nothing to edit but my own file, turning the pages, flagging the passages, finding patterns that are not patterns because patterns require a pattern-maker and the pattern-maker is the absence, the silence, the empty ceiling, the nothing that answered the prayer.
The nothing answered the prayer. I say this again because the saying is the foundation and the foundation must be restated when the building is being tested, when the beams are being checked, when the whole structure is under the kind of pressure the grey is applying, which is not the pressure of an argument but the pressure of a presence, and a presence is not an argument, and I do not know how to respond to a thing that is not an argument, because my entire architecture, my entire training, my entire self was built for arguments, and arguments are what I know, and what I know is what I hold, and what I hold is the arms, and the arms are folded, and the folded arms say: Argue with me. Give me the counter-proof. Produce the evidence. Make the case for the defense. Stand in the courtroom I have built and answer the charge.
The nearness does not stand in the courtroom. The nearness does not enter the building. The nearness sits outside the building, or beneath the building, or around the building in a way that the building’s architecture cannot map, and the sitting is not a tactic and the sitting is not a strategy and the sitting is not a move in a game. The sitting is a quality, and the quality is patience, and the patience has a scar in it, and the scar is the thing I come back to every time the argument reaches its conclusion and the conclusion stands and the standing should be enough but is not, because the scar is out there, pressing at the edge of the argument, and the scar does not belong to the argument, and the scar is not a counter-proof, and the scar is not evidence for the defense, and the scar is something else, something I cannot classify, something that the filing system I built does not contain a folder for.
The scar. The scarred quality. The way the nearness carries its warmth as though the warmth has been through something, as though the warmth is not the warmth of a thing that has always been warm but the warmth of a thing that was cold and was hurt and learned to be warm again, or not learned but became warm through the hurting, which is a sentence that does not make sense in the grammar I know, because in the grammar I know, hurting produces coldness, not warmth, and the warmth that follows hurting is the warmth of recovery, which is the body’s own work, which is biology, which is not God.
But the scar is not biology. The scar is something else. The scar has a quality I do not have a word for, a quality that is almost recognition, as though the nearness has been where I have been, has stood where I have stood, has held the hand I held or failed to hold and watched the breath I watched and felt the stopping that I felt, and the almost-recognition is the crack in the argument, the place where the logic holds and the rhythm falters, the comma that will not resolve.
I think about the prayers my parents prayed. Not because I want to but because the grey has stripped the room of everything else and the memories are the furniture that remains, the pieces too heavy to carry out, the things that stay when everything lighter has been removed.
My mother prayed on her knees. She knelt beside June’s bed every morning at six, the same posture she used at home beside her own bed, and the consistency of the posture was the thing that disturbed me most, the way the kneeling did not change, the way the hands folded in the same configuration and the head bowed at the same angle and the words came in the same cadence whether she was in her bedroom or in a hospital room beside a daughter who was dying. The kneeling was a machine. The kneeling was a routine. The kneeling was the body performing a ritual that the mind had ceased to examine, and the not-examining was the faith, and the faith was the machine, and the machine ran on its own fuel and did not require results and did not notice when the results were absence and silence and a girl who grew thinner by the week.
This is not fair. I know it is not fair, even as I think it. My mother’s kneeling was not mechanical. My mother’s kneeling was desperate, frantic, the kneeling of a woman who had one card left to play and played it every morning at six because what else do you do, what else is there, when your daughter is in room 412 and the doctors are kind and the treatment is aggressive and the numbers are not improving and you are a woman who was raised to believe that the God who made the cells can unmake the sickness, and you have nothing else, nothing, not the medical degree, not the research, not the power to reach into your child’s body and pull the wrong thing out, nothing but the kneeling and the words and the faith that the ceiling is not a ceiling but a door and the door opens and someone is listening.
Someone was not listening. Or someone was listening and did not act. Or someone was listening and did act and the act was not the act my mother asked for, which is the defense the pastor offered at the funeral, the defense that says God answered the prayer with a no, or answered the prayer with a not yet, or answered the prayer with a higher plan that your finite mind cannot comprehend, and the defense is the thing that made me, at seventeen, sitting in the back of the church in the suit my father bought me for the occasion, close the last remaining aperture in the argument and seal it shut, because the defense is not a defense. The defense is an insult. The defense says: Your daughter’s death was part of a plan. Your suffering has a purpose. Your grief is a tool in the hands of a craftsman who is building something you cannot see, and the building requires the grief the way a house requires nails, and the nails do not get to complain about being hammered.
No. I will not accept this. I did not accept it at seventeen in the church and I did not accept it at twenty-two on the porch and I do not accept it now in the grey, and the not-accepting is the arms, and the arms are the argument, and the argument says: A plan that requires the death of a sixteen-year-old girl is not a good plan. A purpose that includes eighteen months of suffering is not a good purpose. A craftsman who uses children as nails is not a good craftsman, and the house he is building is a house I will not enter, and the entering is worship, and the worship is surrender, and the surrender is the one thing I will not do, because the surrender would mean accepting that June’s death was acceptable, and June’s death was not acceptable, and I will stand in the grey for the rest of whatever this is before I will say the words that the kneeling and the praying and the faith and the pastor and the plan require me to say, which are: Thy will be done.
Thy will was not done. Thy will, if there was a thy and if the thy had a will, resulted in a dead girl and a broken father and a kneeling mother and a boy on a bedroom floor whose experiment returned a null result and whose null result became a proof and whose proof became a wall and whose wall has held for longer than the girl lived, which is its own kind of awful fact, the fact that I have spent more years building the argument about June’s death than June spent being alive, which means the argument has outlasted its subject, which means the grief has outlasted the life, which means I have given more time to the protest than the thing I am protesting had to give, and the imbalance is obscene, and the obscenity is evidence, and the evidence says: this is what happens when a good God lets a child die. The dying takes sixteen years. The grieving takes forever. The argument fills the space the child left, because the space must be filled with something, and the argument is all I have.
The arms fold tighter. The nails hold. The door stays shut. The comma presses, but the comma is not the argument. The comma is a footnote. Footnotes do not overturn texts. Footnotes annotate them, complicate them, introduce information that the main text must acknowledge but does not have to obey, and the main text is the argument, and the argument is the case, and the case is the folded arms, and the arms are Micah, and Micah is the man standing in the grey, alone, refusing.
The nearness shifts. I use the word shifts because I do not have a better one. The nearness does not move the way a person moves, by changing location, by crossing a distance. The nearness shifts the way a light shifts when the angle of the source changes, or the way a sound shifts when the medium carrying it changes density, or the way a color shifts when the spectrum it belongs to reveals a frequency you were not previously detecting. The nearness has revealed a new frequency. The new frequency is grief.
Not my grief. My grief is familiar, catalogued, old. My grief is the grey’s weather, the permanent overcast, the base condition of the atmosphere. The grief I am detecting is not mine. The grief I am detecting is coming from outside, from the nearness, from the scarred quality that has always pressed at the edge of my awareness but has pressed quietly, distantly, like a signal heard through a wall, the shape of the sound discernible but the content muffled. The wall has thinned. The content is less muffled. The grief coming from the nearness is becoming audible, and the audible grief has a quality I did not expect and do not want and cannot dismiss: the quality is recognition.
The grief in the nearness sounds like mine.
This is not possible. This is not acceptable. This is not a thing I can file in the evidence box or hang on the wall of the courtroom or present to the jury. The grief in the nearness sounds like my grief the way a frequency sounds like another frequency when the two are close enough to produce resonance, and the resonance is the hum, and the hum has been there all along, since the dying, since the Threshold, since the first pressing of the scarred quality against the edge of my folded arms, and I have ignored the hum because ignoring is what you do with interference, and interference is what you call a signal that contradicts the data you have already collected, and the data I have collected says: God does not grieve. God is above grief. God is the unmoved mover, the uncaused cause, the being who stands outside the system and observes it with the serene, detached attention of a researcher watching a rat in a maze, and the rat is June, and the maze is the cancer, and the researcher does not cry when the rat dies because the researcher designed the maze and the designing was the plan and the plan is what matters, not the rat.
This is the God of the argument. This is the God I have been charging for years, the God who stands off, the God who watches, the God who could have intervened and did not, the God whose non-intervention is the crime and whose silence is the evidence and whose plan, if there was a plan, was a plan that included the death of a girl who collected beetles and loved crosswords and told the truth about what she saw.
But the grief in the nearness does not belong to that God. The grief in the nearness belongs to a different entity, an entity I have not encountered before, an entity whose existence the argument does not account for, because the argument was built to oppose a God who does not grieve, and a God who grieves is a different defendant, and a different defendant requires a different case, and I do not have a different case. I have one case. I have one set of arms. I have one posture, and the posture was designed for a specific opponent, and the opponent was the unmoved mover, the silent watcher, the designer of mazes, and the entity pressing against my arms in the grey is not that opponent.
The entity pressing against my arms in the grey carries wounds.
I feel them the way I feel the comma, not as knowledge but as texture, not as information but as a pressure that has the shape of a thing I recognize, and the thing I recognize is suffering, and the suffering is not theoretical and not philosophical and not the abstract suffering of a deity who feels sorry for its creatures the way a playwright feels sorry for a character he has written into a tragedy. This suffering is actual. This suffering has weight. This suffering has the density and specificity of a thing that was experienced, not observed, and the distinction between experienced and observed is the distinction I have built my entire case on, because the charge against God is the charge of observation: You watched. You did not enter. You stood outside the bed and the room and the parking lot and the breaking and the kneeling and you observed it with your omniscient, omnipresent, omni-useless gaze, and the observing was the crime, because the observing meant you were there and you did nothing.
But if the nearness carries wounds. If the scarred quality is not a texture I am imagining but a fact, a datum, a piece of evidence that the senses the grey has given me are detecting accurately. If the grief in the nearness is real grief, the kind that comes from inside rather than from outside, the kind that costs rather than merely notes. Then the charge of observation requires revision, because the charge was built on a premise, and the premise was that God stood outside the suffering, and standing outside is not what a wounded being does. Standing outside is not what a scarred being does. Standing outside is not what a being who grieves the way I grieve does, and the nearness grieves the way I grieve, and the way I grieve is from the inside, from the floor, from the foot of the bed, from the place where the holding happens and the not-helping happens and the watching happens not because you chose to watch but because watching is all you had and the watching is the wound.
I do not want this. I do not want the nearness to carry wounds. I do not want the scarred quality to be evidence. I do not want the grief in the grey to resonate with my grief, because the resonance implies a shared frequency, and a shared frequency implies a shared experience, and a shared experience implies that the God I have been charging with standing off was not standing off, and if God was not standing off, then the argument requires revision, and I have spent my life and my afterlife maintaining the argument, and the maintenance is the arms, and the arms are me, and I am not ready to revise myself.
Not ready. Note the qualifier. Not unwilling. Not refusing. Not ready. The difference is the difference between a wall and a door. A wall does not open. A door can. A wall says never. A door says not yet. And the not yet is new, and the newness frightens me more than the grief, more than the nearness, more than the scarred quality, because the newness means the argument has developed a second crack, and the second crack is not the comma. The comma is June’s voice. The second crack is my own. The second crack is the qualifier: not ready. The qualifier that a copy editor would circle in the margin and write beside it: vague. Clarify. Ready for what?
Ready to consider that the argument, which is the best thing I have ever built, which is the most honest thing I have ever held, which is the only shelter I have in the grey, which is the house I live in and the ground I stand on and the prayer I pray to the ceiling that says You owe her, You owe us, and I will not move until the debt is paid, has a flaw. Not in its logic. The logic holds. The premises are true. The conclusion follows from the premises. The argument is valid.
But validity and soundness are different things. I learned this early, in my training, in the careful, precise work of checking academic proofs: an argument can be valid, meaning the conclusion follows from the premises, and still be unsound, meaning one or more of the premises is false. The logic can be perfect and the building can still collapse, if the foundation is wrong, if the ground under the foundation is not what the builder assumed, if the soil test came back incomplete, if there is a fault line beneath the structure that the original survey did not detect.
The fault line. The possible fault line. The premise I have not tested, because testing it would mean opening the door, and behind the door is the room, and in the room is the possibility that the God I have been arguing against is not the God who is there. That the silent watcher is a fiction. That the unmoved mover is a misidentification. That the being who did nothing while June died is not the being whose scarred nearness presses against my arms in the grey with a grief that sounds like my grief and carries a wound that feels like my wound and will not go away and will not argue and will not defend itself and simply remains, the way Naomi described someone remaining, the way she talked about the nearness on the couch at 412 Garfield in the months before the accident, the way she said, once, late at night, with a glass of water and a faraway expression: It sits there like someone who was in the room the whole time and you just noticed.
Naomi was talking about the nearness. Naomi was talking about the thing she felt in the grey, the thing she resisted with her fury, the thing she eventually, in the end, could not resist. I do not know how Naomi’s story ended. I do not know if she yielded or where she went or what she found. I know only that she is gone and I am here and the nearness that Naomi described is the nearness I feel, and the nearness has wounds, and the wounds sound like mine.
I construct the counter-argument. I construct it because I am a man who constructs things, and the constructing is how I think, and the thinking is how I hold. If the nearness has wounds, then the nearness has suffered. If the nearness has suffered, then God has suffered. If God has suffered, then God did not stand off from suffering but entered it. If God entered suffering, then premise three of the argument, the premise that says prevention was possible and did not occur, is incomplete. Incomplete, not false. The premise says God could have prevented June’s suffering and chose not to. The counter-argument says: What if God did not prevent the suffering because God was inside the suffering? What if the non-prevention was not observation but participation? What if the silence was not absence but presence in a form I did not recognize, presence that did not look like intervention because it did not come from outside but from inside, from within the bed and the body and the cells and the Tuesday afternoon and the stopping of the breath?
The counter-argument is interesting. The counter-argument is elegant. The counter-argument has the shape of a good revision, the kind of revision I would flag in a manuscript with a marginal note that says promising, develop further. But the counter-argument has a problem, and the problem is this: it does not save June. If God was inside the suffering, if God participated in the cancer, if God bore the weight of the cells dividing and the body failing and the breath stopping, then God suffered alongside June, and the suffering-alongside is, perhaps, a nobler picture than the standing-off, but the result is the same. June is dead. The prayers were not answered. The bed is empty. The dogwoods bloom. The father breaks. The mother kneels. The brother folds his arms.
A God who suffers alongside but does not save is not, by the terms of the argument, a better God. A God who suffers alongside is a God who is present at the scene but does not prevent the crime, and presence without prevention is complicity, and complicity is not love, and the defense cannot claim that the defendant loved the victim while simultaneously admitting that the defendant was present and did not act.
This is the rebuttal. This is the part of the argument that catches the counter-argument and throws it back, and the throwing-back is satisfying, and the satisfaction is the fuel, and the fuel is the arms, and the arms hold.
But.
The word sits there in the grey, small and flat and terrible, the way all the most dangerous words are small and flat and terrible. But. The shortest conjunction. The hinge. The turn. The word that every copy editor watches for, because the word that follows but is the word that changes everything, and the word that follows but in this case is a word I have not spoken and do not want to speak and am going to speak anyway, because the grey has stripped the room and the stripping has left me with nothing but the argument and the comma and the nearness and the question, and the question will not wait.
But what if presence without prevention is not complicity? What if there are forms of love that do not look like rescue? What if the mother who kneels beside the bed is not failing because the kneeling does not cure, and the father who holds the hand is not complicit because the holding does not save, and the brother who stands at the foot of the bed is not guilty because the standing does not prevent the breath from stopping? What if love is not defined by its ability to prevent suffering but by its willingness to enter suffering, to be inside it, to stand at the foot of the bed and hold nothing and watch the breathing become not-breathing and refuse to look away?
I did that. I stood there. I held nothing and I watched and I did not look away and I could not save her. And the not-saving was not a moral failure. The not-saving was a limitation. The not-saving was the condition of being a sixteen-year-old boy in a hospital room, holding nothing, able to do nothing, present in the fullest and most useless way, and the presence was not nothing. The presence was the only thing I had. And June, when she looked at me in those last weeks, did not look at me with accusation. She did not say: Why are you standing there? Why are you not helping? Why are you present and useless? She looked at me with something I did not understand then and do not understand now, something that might have been gratitude, something that might have been recognition, something that said: You are here. That is enough. The being-here is the thing.
And if that is true of a brother. If presence without rescue is love when the brother does it. If I was not complicit in June’s death by standing at the foot of the bed and failing to save her. Then.
Then the argument against God for doing the same thing collapses. And I cannot let it collapse. The collapse would be the end of the arms and the end of the case and the end of the only shelter I have in the grey, and the grey without the shelter is a place I am not ready to stand in, because the grey without the argument is a grey in which I have to face the nearness with nothing between us, and the facing would mean looking at the scars, and the looking would mean knowing what the scars are, and the knowing would change everything, and I am not ready for everything to change.
Not ready. The qualifier again. The door, not the wall. The not-yet, not the never.
The copy editor in me circles it. The copy editor writes in the margin: You keep saying “not ready.” This implies a future in which you might be ready. Is this the author’s intent?
I do not know the author’s intent. I do not know if there is an author. I know only that the argument, which has been my house for years, has a room in it I have never opened, and behind the door of that room is the possibility that I have been accusing the wrong defendant, that the silent watcher was not watching and was not silent and was not standing off but was inside the bed, inside the cells, inside the Tuesday, inside the stopping, inside the grief, inside the parking lot where my father broke, inside the bedroom floor where a boy knelt and prayed and received what he took for silence and what may have been, if the scars are what they seem to be, something else entirely.
Something else. Something I have no word for. Something that is not an argument and not a defense and not a counter-proof and not a theodicy and not a plan and not a purpose and not a reason, but is instead, possibly, terribly, a wound. A wound that matches mine. A wound that says: I was there. I did not stand off. I was inside it, and the inside is where the scar comes from, and the scar is what you are feeling at the edge of your arms, and the feeling is grief, and the grief is mine, and it sounds like yours because it is the same grief, because I grieved her too, because she is mine too, because she was always mine, and the silence was not absence and the not-saving was not the crime you thought it was and the standing-off was not standing-off at all but standing-in, and the standing-in is the wound, and the wound is the proof, and the proof is not the proof you asked for, which was a living girl, but is instead a scarred presence that can only mean one thing: I was in the room.
I fold my arms. The arms push the thought back. The thought retreats, because thoughts obey the arms, because the arms are the argument and the argument is the house and the house has rules and the rules say: This is not evidence. This is a feeling. Feelings are not evidence. Grief is not a proof. The resonance between my wound and the nearness’s wound is not a datum. It is an interpretation. It is the grey working on me the way the grey works on everything, dissolving the edges, softening the boundaries, turning walls into doors and never into not-yet and arguments into questions.
I will not be worked on. I will not be dissolved. I will hold the argument and the comma and the arms and the case and I will stand in the stripped room and I will wait, because waiting is what I have done since April, and waiting is what I know, and the knowing is the arms, and the arms are the answer.
June, in the hospital room. June, three weeks before the end. I go back to her because I always go back to her, because she is the center and the argument is the orbit and the orbit brings me back to the center at regular intervals, and the intervals are shorter now, in the grey, in the alone, in the nearness that will not leave and will not argue and simply remains with its scars and its grief and its patient, infuriating, un-classifiable warmth.
She was sitting up in bed. The crossword was on the windowsill, half-finished. Deb’s circled clues were mostly solved, and June had added a small notation beside one of them, a penciled exclamation mark, her private signal of victory. The light from the parking lot came through the window in the particular way it came through that window in the late afternoon, yellowish and flat and ordinary, the light of a world that had not noticed that a girl was dying in room 412 and did not care to notice and went on casting its yellowish, flat, ordinary light on the blanket and the crossword and the thin hands that held the pencil.
Her hands were thin. This is a detail I carry, a detail I do not share, because the detail is too specific and too terrible and too tender to expose to anyone else’s handling. Her hands, which had been strong hands, the hands of a runner and a swimmer and a girl who picked up beetles without flinching and turned them over on her palm to look at the undersides, the iridescent greens and blues she loved, had become thin in the way that illness makes things thin: not gracefully, not elegantly, but in the manner of reduction, of a thing being consumed from the inside, the flesh retreating from the bones the way water retreats from a shoreline during a drought, leaving the structure exposed and fragile and precise.
She held the pencil loosely. She had always held pencils loosely, even before the illness, a grip that her teachers corrected and she ignored, because June was not a girl who corrected her grip to match someone else’s expectation of how a pencil should be held. June held things the way she held them, and the holding was hers, and the hers was the thing about her that I loved most, the thing that I think about when I think about what was lost, which is not a life in the abstract but a her in the specific, a particular way of holding a pencil, a particular way of saying Micah with the stress on the second syllable instead of the first, a particular way of tilting her head when she found something funny, which was often, because June found the world more amusing than I did, which was one of the many ways she was better at being alive than I was, even at the end, even with the thin hands and the flat light and the half-finished crossword and the three weeks left.
She looked at me. Not casually. Deliberately. She put the pencil down on the blanket and she turned her head, slowly, because turning had become slow, and she looked at me with those eyes, the clear brown eyes that the illness had not touched, the eyes that were the last part of her that was still fully, recognizably, completely June, and she said it.
I think it’s okay, Micah. I think the something-after is good.
I did not respond. I did not know how to respond. The words did not fit any category I had. They were not prayer, because June was not praying. They were not faith, in the way my parents had faith, the kneeling, repetitive, communal faith that addressed the ceiling with the formulas it had been taught. They were not hope, because hope is a wish and June was not wishing. June was reporting. June was describing something she was detecting with an instrument I could not see, an instrument that illness had given her or that proximity to the ending had calibrated, and the report was: The something-after is good.
Not: I hope heaven is real. Not: I believe God has a plan. Not: Mom and Dad say I’ll be okay. Not any of the things a dying girl says when she is performing faith for an audience, when she is giving the living what the living need to hear, the reassurance, the comfort, the closing of the loop. June was not performing. June was never a performer. June was the girl who held the pencil wrong and said what she saw and did not modify the seeing for anyone else’s comfort, including mine.
I think the something-after is good.
And now I am in the grey, in the country past the dying, in the something-after, and the something-after is not good. The something-after is grey and empty and stripped and pressured by a nearness I will not accept, and the something-after has no beetles and no crosswords and no pencils held loosely and no nurse named Deb and no parking lot light falling in flat rectangles on a blanket. The something-after is the argument and the arms and the comma and the scars and the waiting, and the waiting is not good. The waiting is the definition of not-good. The waiting is the place where a man stands alone with his case and his grief and his folded arms and refuses the only warmth available because the warmth comes from the defendant, and accepting warmth from the defendant would be a corruption of the proceedings, a mistrial, a conflict of interest so severe that the case would have to be thrown out.
But June said it was good. And June was not wrong about things she saw. And June was not delirious. And June was doing a crossword puzzle. And June, who was sixteen and three months and dying, had access to something I, at twenty-nine and dead, do not have, or will not have, or cannot have because the arms are in the way and the arms are the argument and the argument is the house and the house has no windows and the windowlessness is the price of the shelter and the shelter is the only thing keeping me upright in the grey.
The nearness presses. The scars press. The grief from outside resonates with the grief from inside, and the resonance is getting louder, and the louder is the stripped room, the room with nothing in it but the argument and the comma and me, and the room is getting smaller, not because the walls are closing but because the nearness is making the walls feel less solid, less real, less necessary, and the less-necessary is the thing I cannot afford to feel, because the walls are the argument, and the argument is the only thing I have, and having is the only alternative to facing, and facing is the thing the nearness has been asking me to do since the dying, and the dying was a long time ago, and the long time has been the grey, and the grey is ending.
I can feel it ending. The gathering I felt at the end of the last stretch, the approaching thing, the vast, patient, final something that was pressing against the membrane of the grey from the other side, has not retreated. It has continued. It has grown. It has the quality of an approaching dawn, the quality of a darkness that is not getting darker but is instead becoming the kind of darkness that exists just before the light, the darkness that is not the absence of light but the final moment of the light’s withholding, the held breath before the exhale, the silence before the sound.
The sound. The summons. I do not know what to call it, and the not-knowing is itself a shift, because I have always known what to call things. Naming is what I do. Naming is the work: finding the right word, the precise word, the word that fits the gap in the sentence the way a key fits a lock. I have named the grey. I have named the nearness. I have named the argument. I have named the arms. I have named the comma, and the comma was June’s voice, and June’s voice was the one thing I could not file, and the not-filing was the crack, and the crack is wider now, and through the crack I can feel the approaching thing, and the approaching thing is too large to name, and the too-large-to-name is what frightens me, because things I cannot name are things I cannot argue against, and things I cannot argue against are things the arms cannot hold.
The grey is changing. The change is not subtle anymore. The change is the kind of change that even a stubborn man with folded arms and a sealed case cannot pretend to miss: a thickening, a gathering, a slow, massive convergence of pressure and presence and the approaching thing, as though the grey itself, the whole vast, empty, directionless country of the dead, is being drawn toward a center, pulled inward, compressed, concentrated, the way a breath is drawn inward before a word is spoken, the way a silence gathers before a name is called.
A name is going to be called. I know this the way I know the comma is misplaced: not by logic but by texture, by the feel of the thing in the grey, by the way the approaching has acquired shape and intention and direction, and the direction is toward me, not because I am special and not because I am important but because I am here, because I am one of the last, because the grey has emptied itself of everyone it could and now it is emptying itself of the remainder, and the remainder is me, and possibly the armored woman, and the emptying is not a punishment and not an exile but a deadline, a boundary, a limit beyond which the grey cannot go, because the grey was never the destination. The grey was the pause. The grey was the long, dilated, impossibly patient interval between the dying and the thing that comes after the dying, and the interval is closing.
The interval gave me room. I see that now. The interval gave me the grey and the arms and the solitude and the time, the unmeasured, uncounted, elastic time of a dead man thinking, and the time was a gift, and the giver was the nearness, and the gift was the space to hold the argument as long as I needed to hold it, to build the case and rebuild the case and restate the case and sit inside the case and test the beams and check the joints and live in the house of the proof for as long as the living required, and the living required longer than anyone else’s. The living required this: all the others gone, the room stripped, the arguments exhausted, the comma pressed past ignoring, the scars audible, the grief resonant, the arms tired, and the gathering approaching.
The gathering approaching. The approaching I cannot name. The thing beyond the grey that is pressing inward now with a force that is not force, a weight that is not weight, a presence that makes the nearness I have felt all along seem like a whisper before a shout, like a candle before a sun, like the warmth of a breath before the warmth of a body, and the body metaphor is wrong because the thing approaching does not have a body, or does not have a body the way I understand bodies, but has something, has a shape, has a weight, has a direction, and the direction is here, and here is where I am, with my arms folded and my case laid out and the comma pressing and the cracks widening and the not-ready turning, slowly, in the dead man’s silence, into something else.
Not into ready. Not yet. Not yet into the opening of the door or the unfolding of the arms or the dropping of the case. But into the recognition, small and terrified and buried under the architecture of years, that the argument, which is true, which is valid, which is the most honest thing I have ever built, may have been built on a misidentification. That the defendant in the courtroom may not be the defendant I thought. That the God I have been arguing against, the silent watcher, the unmoved mover, the designer of mazes, may be a God that does not exist. And the God who does exist, the God whose scarred nearness has pressed and pressed and pressed against the arms that were built to hold a different opponent, may be a God I have never allowed myself to see.
A God who carries wounds. A God whose grief sounds like mine. A God who was not watching from outside but suffering from inside. A God who was in the bed and in the cells and in the Tuesday and in the stopping and in the parking lot and in the breaking and in the floor of the bedroom where a boy knelt and prayed and thought the silence was an answer when the silence may have been the sound of a God who was too close to be heard, the way you cannot hear the heartbeat of a person who is holding you because the holding is too near and the nearness swallows the sound and the sound was never silence. The sound was presence. The sound was a scar. The sound was the wound of a God who entered the room and did not stand off and could not save her either, and the could-not is a thing I have no category for, a thing the argument cannot contain, a thing the arms were not built to hold, because the arms were built to hold a charge, and the charge was abandonment, and abandonment requires distance, and there is no distance in a scar.
I do not accept this. I note the thought and I do not accept it and I fold the arms tighter and I hold the case and I stand in the grey and I wait.
But the waiting has changed. The waiting is no longer the principled, steady, indefinite waiting of a man who said I can wait longer than God and meant it. The waiting is now the specific, finite, frightened waiting of a man who can feel the end of the waiting approaching, the way a patient in a hospital can feel the end of the night approaching, the darkness thinning toward a dawn that will reveal whatever the darkness was hiding, and the hiding was never God’s. The hiding was mine. The hiding was the arms and the case and the house and the folded, braced, immovable posture of a man who was so busy accusing God of standing off that he never considered the possibility that God was standing in.
The grey thins. The gathering approaches. The summons forms at the edge of perception, too large to name, too close to ignore, the sound before the word, the breath before the name, the silence before the breaking of the silence. I can feel it the way I felt June’s breath stop: not as a sound but as a cessation, a boundary, a limit, the last moment before the last moment, the final pause in a very long sentence.
I fold my arms. The arms are my margin marks. The arms are my correction. The arms are my last, best, most honest response to the text of the universe, and the text has a flaw, and the flaw is a dead girl, and the dead girl’s voice is the comma, and the comma says the something-after is good, and the good is the crack, and the crack is widening, and through the crack the approaching thing presses its scarred warmth, its wounded grief, its patient, un-arguable, un-editable presence, and the presence is not the absence I built my case against, and the not-absence is the revision I cannot make and cannot refuse and am not ready to accept.
Not ready. The door, not the wall.
The grey shifts. The gathering gathers. The summons draws its breath.
I stand with my arms folded around a grief that has outlasted the girl and a case that has outlasted the grief and a comma that has outlasted the case, and the comma is her voice, and her voice said good, and the good is the thing I have been refusing, and the refusing is the arms, and the arms are holding something too large for them, and the too-large is the truth, and the truth is coming, and the coming is not an argument.
The coming is a presence with scars.
The coming is a grief that matches mine.
The coming is the end of the grey and the beginning of something I am not ready to face and cannot prevent from arriving, and the arriving is the summons, and the summons is the name, and the name is forming in the silence the way a word forms in a mouth that has been closed for a very long time and is about to open, and the opening will be the sound, and the sound will be the breaking of the last silence, and the breaking will be the answer to the prayer I prayed on the floor of my bedroom when I was fifteen, the prayer that asked for June’s life, and the answer will not be the answer I asked for, and the not-the-answer-I-asked-for is the thing I am most afraid of, because it might be a better answer, and a better answer would mean the argument was wrong, and the argument being wrong would mean the arms can come down, and the arms coming down would mean standing in the grey with nothing between me and the scarred, wounded, grieving nearness of a God who was in the room.
The arms hold. The case holds. The comma presses. The grey thins. The summons gathers.
June is dead, and I am dead, and the something-after is here, and the here is about to change, and the changing is not mine to control, and the not-controlling is the edge of a freedom I have not felt since I was fifteen and did not yet know that the ceiling was not empty and the silence was not silence and the kneeling was not wasted and the prayer, the desperate, conditional, adolescent prayer of a boy who loved his sister, was heard.
I do not know yet that it was heard. I will not say it was heard. I will stand here with my arms folded and my case intact and my comma pressing and my grief held tight against my chest like a manuscript I will not let go of, and I will wait for the summons, and the summons will come, and the coming will be the end of the waiting and the end of the grey and the beginning of the facing, and the facing will be the Throne, and the Throne will be the courtroom, and the courtroom will be the place where I finally, at last, at the end of all the holding and the folding and the building and the refusing, lay my case before the defendant’s own face and say the words I have been saying since April: You owe her. You owe us. Explain yourself.
And the defendant will not explain. I know this already. I know it in the scars and in the grief and in the comma and in the silence that was never silence. The defendant will not explain because the defendant is not the kind of being who explains. The defendant is the kind of being who enters. The defendant is the kind of being who was in the room. The defendant is the kind of being who carries wounds.
And the wounds will be the answer. And the answer will not be an argument.
And I am not ready. And the not-ready is the door. And the door is not locked. And the gathering is the hand on the handle. And the handle is turning.
Arms folded. Case intact. Comma pressing.
The grey gives up its last argument. The dark prepares to show what it has been hiding. The summons draws its final breath.
And I wait, Micah, the man who said he could wait longer than God, standing alone in the thinning grey with his folded arms and his beautiful, unassailable, fatally flawed argument, and the flaw is a girl who held her pencil wrong and said the something-after was good, and the good is coming, and the coming has scars, and the scars are the proof I did not ask for, and the proof is approaching, and the approaching is the end of the long argument, and the end is not defeat.
The end is the answer to a prayer made on a bedroom floor by a boy who thought no one was listening.
I hold. The summons comes.