“And do you want to be rid of it?”
This is a harder question to answer than one might think at first blush. Almost no one would think it’s correct to answer this question with a no, but the truth is that we men and women often hate to be rid of the familiar, and sometimes our darkness is the thing we know the best.
“Yes.”
Outside, owls began to flap and call out. Horned owls hooted. Screech owls trilled. The barn owls gave their metallic hiss. Barred owls meowed. Spectacled owls barked hollowly. Pygmy owls peeped. The elf owls laughed nervously. The noise escalated to cacophony as the air turned ever more miraculous.
Daniel opened his eyes again.
The darkness began to appear.
The owls ordinarily roosted once the miracle took place.
That night, they did not leave until the Saint told them to go.
The morning after a miracle is always bright.
This is because nearly every morning in Bicho Raro is bright. Colorado has long boasted that it enjoys three hundred days of sunshine a year, which is not actually true, but it is close enough to the truth to feel like it. The morning following Tony DiRisio’s miracle did nothing to disprove the claim. The sun had been climbing hand over foot through the dry Colorado blue for several hours, and Bicho Raro was beginning to warm.
Beatriz Soria had woken up before everyone else, despite the lateness of the previous night. Her mind was very active while she was awake and didn’t stop when she slept, so she usually did not spend much time doing the latter. That day, before dawn, she had used her retractable secret bridge to climb from her window without waking her mother in the room beside her. From there, she drifted across the silent compound to the telescope.
The telescope was a parabolic radio telescope, sixty feet wide and about eighty feet tall, a scooped dish of metal rods pointed hopefully at the sky. Its skeletal shadow moved around its base like a giant sundial. With the cooperation of some of the more tax-savvy Sorias, the telescope had been constructed during the fifties—ostensibly to monitor the weather but practically to spy on the Russians—and had been decommissioned after only one use. The head engineer on the project would not report on what his team had picked up with the tracker, only that everyone else would sleep better at night having not seen it. Later, everyone on the team quietly moved to colder climates in distant countries.
Beatriz now used it as a place to think. Sometimes she climbed the ladder forty feet into the air and observed Bicho Raro from the metal mesh platform. And sometimes she removed her shoes and climbed past even that, feet pressed into metal bars and legs hooked over supports on the back side of the dish, sometimes dangling, sometimes clinging, until she managed to heave herself over the rim of the dish and into it. Then she would lie inside the metallic nest of the dish and stare up at the sky, imagining herself—her mind, that is, the important part of herself—being projected as far up into the sky as she could see. She would hold her thoughts up there for hours at a time, breathing them back into the altitude if they started to drift down, and then, finally, she would turn those distant thoughts back down to Bicho Raro and consider her home from that great height instead. Things came into better perspective, she felt, when viewed from one thousand feet.
Sometimes, Daniel would join her, the only other person Beatriz had found so far who she could share her sanctuary with. Although they were very different, they shared one important trait: They did not try to change other people and rarely judged them unless the other person’s values directly influenced their lives. For Daniel, this meant that he had, before his incident with the painting, hung out with young men whom others found to be of dubious character. For Beatriz, this meant that she had often frustrated Judith by refusing to take sides in moral discussions or disagreements.
This trait also made Daniel and Beatriz good conversation partners. A debate without a goal of philosophical interference can continue endlessly without drama. One of their earliest radio dish discussions had centered around who could receive a miracle. A pilgrim had just abandoned a fractious stallion at Bicho Raro, and the horse’s famously ill temperament was the topic of every Soria conversation. Beatriz and Daniel, then ten and twelve, had looked down into the pasture from that great height and speculated upon whether they, as Sorias, could visit their miracle upon an animal.
Daniel argued that a horse’s lack of humanity presented an insurmountable problem for the second miracle. Even if the Saint could manifest its darkness, surely the horse lacked the moral certainty to come to an understanding of how to banish it. The second miracle would never occur, and the horse would therefore live out its days plagued by the same darkness that had previously lived inside it, now made worse by being given concrete form.
Beatriz agreed that the horse’s lack of humanity was indeed the obstacle, but she believed that the Saint wouldn’t be able to perform even the first miracle. Humanity, she maintained, was necessary for darkness to exist. Without an understanding of the concept of darkness, morality, or other existential subjects, the unpleasantness inside the individual could not be darkness but rather simply nature, and thus could not be cured with a miracle, or perhaps at all.
“So that horse will be terrible forever?” Daniel had asked.
“I do not think the darkness is about being ‘terrible.’?” It had taken slightly longer for ten-year-old Beatriz to find the words that she needed. She had still been learning how to live with the hard truth that the most interesting parts of her thoughts usually got left behind when she tried to put them into words. There were often very long pauses as she strove for a perfect translation. “I think the darkness is about shame.”
Daniel had contemplated the pilgrims he had already seen in his twelve years. “I think you’re right.”
“We were nearly in agreement in the beginning,” Beatriz had added, in order to be a gracious winner.