76
“—REVERSE. REACHING MORNING. The sun sinking instead. The puddles of dew retreating back into the lawn. The idea that you can feel anything correctly. A notion of perfect worthlessness. Something negative being flawless. A mold depressing itself to take in the media, space that must be emptied before it can be filled. The mold breaking around the sculpture but the sculpture holding still. The cage door opens and the bird stays put. The walls pull apart and the floors stack in place like pancakes. Shadows forming chalkier in the dusty evening than in the plump, damp morning. How hard it is to have surprising feelings when you know someone is watching. Being startled out of sleep by the sensation of falling. No forcing yourself to feel. How out of havoc and anger and threats can come veneration. How we think of God as old and all of our saviors seem to die young, turning over inside themselves while the world has them pinned.”
I listen to Julie run herself out. I recognize this jag of her mind as something close to what my own did when I was stalled in front of that photograph at the museum and when I let myself lie down in the water. As a driver in a figurative ten-car pile-up, I can tell if I am going to live. Watching it happen beside me now, I am searching a spiderwebbed windshield for my wife. I can’t know if she will be okay. That broken monologue whirs out into the space between us. The singing has turned into a chanting, like the drone of the house pulled into focus. I drag her in close to me to shrink the gap. “Julie, stop. Shh.” She jerks away. Her face is her own, but behind her eyes is something unfamiliar. Her pupils have ballooned. The whites of her eyes glow.
“How we rehearse and consider what to keep private and what to share. How this transforms. How being completely open with your opinions and feelings can strip away intimacy, honesty traded for privacy. Switch to refusing to answer. How it can be hard to imagine yourself a hero with all of your faults laid plain. Keeping secrets so you have something to share. How a priest might lose control of the secrets he’s been given. How a priest might hold so many stories while also creating his own. How a therapist might whisper the things she knows into her pillow at night to make room for more. Compassion fatigue. How there is no limit to how many times you can tell a person, I understand. How it might still not be enough. How language lies mostly in the flourishes that catch our ears. How language can sometimes only be heard in its consequences. How it can’t stop being heard after that. How it might be easier to know what to say than when not to speak. How both silence and speech can expand until you’re tightly in a corner. How contagious intensity deserves a name of its own. How only one of you might not need the other. How the other still needs to be needed. How impossible that situation becomes. How forgetting can pick up as much as it leaves behind. How necessary it is to reveal your disappointment. How life depends on it. How endings can’t happen without this. How you’re required to gaze at theft as it happens. How you mustn’t look away. The wisdom of watching the candle flames lick the legs of the ladder and keeping quiet. How the strain becomes less frustrating and is no longer called to mind. How desire can be weakest when the fulfillment is most plausible.”
The blankness of her eyes has filled her entire face. The Julie I know is nowhere to be found. A fire is lit inside her. I try to take her hand again. She rips it back. She shoves my shoulder. I stand and step away from her. Her strength startles me.
The chant has risen in pitch, still monotone, but earsplitting now. She screeches, the pace picking up at the end of her sentences, like an accelerating bouncing ball, until she’s razed all the air from her lungs and fills the vacuum again. “The Lord has grabbed you and he has you in his sights and you must understand that he will not let you go and you must understand that you are belonged now and you must understand that you are not owned by yourself and that you have been filled up with a growth of spirit that is spread through words and images and I will provide you your new rule.”
I keep hoping she might snap out of it. I keep hoping I might flip her switch. I speak more quietly. I aim to draw her out. “Julie. Please stop. You’re really scaring me.”
She tells me I don’t know what scary is. If this is scary, I should see what the devil has in store. I should see what evil lurks in the unknown. She proclaims herself full of truth. She will not talk to an impostor. “Produce James,” she howls. “I can see through your paltry imitation.”
“It’s me. I am James.” I move toward her again. She flinches. She tells me that I can touch her when the Lord shows up in my eyes. I pretend. I tell her I can feel him in my sight. I tell her that every bit of my being is filling with a new vision.
She calls me a liar. She says that when I feel it truly, she will know. We will spread this newfound honesty together. We will create our own language, like twins. Until then, she will beat me. Until the god in me comes out. Until she can trust that I will not corrupt her. She tells me to jump off the roof. If I am full of the dove of the holy spirit, then I will know how to fly my body to the ground.
I can’t keep up the charade. “I am not ready for flight,” I admit. I try to match her tone. I hope this might bring her closer to me. She brims with satisfaction. “But you, too, cannot fly,” I say, eager to break her logic. She flees for the attic. Regret forms immediately, tight like a belt around my chest.
77
I SHOULD RACE after her. Instead I go to the backyard. I go to the dead lawn. Its blades loosen their fingers from the earth. The days of neglect compound beneath my feet. We have not watered the lawn. Or the tainted water of that wave Julie says besieged the house has suffocated the grass. I go outside to wait for a flight I don’t believe will happen. Such radical instinct cannot be born so immediately.