The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [54]
Ryan Shifrin
As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship. Like every apprenticeship, it requires time and effort. He who has reached the end of his training realizes that the differences between things or between events are no more important than those recognized by someone who knows how to read, when he has before him the same sentence, reproduced several times, written in red ink and blue, and printed in this, that, or the other kind of lettering. He who does not know how to read only sees the differences. For him who knows how to read, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. This does not mean that he will not suffer. Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other.
—Simone Weil
Judy was coughing up blood again. He held a tissue to her mouth, watched it darken, then replaced it with another. For a moment, as her stomach rose and fell beneath the covers, everything was quiet. From out of the lull she asked, “Is it May already?” and then, “Who brought the garden inside?” and in a sunburst of intuition he realized that she saw the seven stained tissues on her bedside table as roses, the same lustrous red as the apothecaries their mother used to cultivate when they were kids. It was another five minutes, another handful of roses, before one of the tissues came out speckled a watery pink. At last she was able to close her eyes and rest. He left her to her garden dreams, slipping out into the daylight.
A half hour later, distributing his leaflets, he came to a house where a dog began to bark, its chest concussing against a frosted glass door. For an instant he was eight years old again and Judy nine, facing the old bull mastiff that used to lunge at them from behind Mr. Castillo’s chain-link fence, listening as he called out, “Max! Leave those children alone! Heel!” Except that Mr. Castillo’s dog’s name was not Max, it was Duke, maybe, or Buster.
Was there anyone else who had been there and might remember, anyone but him and Judy?
He backed away and continued down the block.
Every day was the same: young parents and vacationing students, the elderly and the unemployed, all answering their doors to him with open stances and quizzical eyes, as if he might be delivering something they would only then realize they had always secretly desired. Then he would ask them if they had heard the Good News, and their postures would stiffen, their features grow hard. God was a word that embarrassed people. He knew missionaries who were able to use it without sounding pushy or insincere, letting it shine in their voices like some small, familiar object, not the sun but a nail head, a key ring, a strand of silk—something that reflected its light rather than generated it. But he was not one of them. He had seen too many people retreat behind their faces as he spoke, and now he found it nearly impossible to open his mouth without steeling himself for rejection. God—his timidity had stripped all the grace from the word. So instead it was Good News he said. And he smiled like he thought a man filled with peace might smile. And though most of the people he met were polite enough to accept a leaflet from him, he had learned not to expect anything more.
Only twice that day did someone actually engage him in conversation. The first was a woman who saw the Bible he was carrying and asked, “Jehovah’s Witness?” and when he shook his head asked, “Mormon?