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By Root 425 0

time he walked through the door, her voice no louder than a breath, scarcely strong enough to make a candle flicker. It was for her sake that he was still distributing the leaflets. He devoted a few hours a day to the job, circulating from one neighborhood to the next so that he walked down every block on his route at least once a month. The church paid him for it—not much but enough, or enough for now. Enough along with the insurance settlement. Enough along with his investments and the money he had saved during his brokerage days. “For the Lord God will illumine them,” the new leaflets read, from the final chapter of Revelation, singular, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, and he marched from house to house with a sheaf of them in his leather satchel. When no one was home, he would take a leaflet from the sorry-we-missed-you stack, scroll it shut, and tuck it into the doorjamb, next to the campaign flyers and the pizza offers. When someone answered, he would smile as if he understood why he was smiling and ask the question he always asked: “Tell me, have you heard the Good News?” He abided by business hours, which meant that there were always more sorry-we-missed-you houses than have-you-heard-the-Good-News? houses. In the summer it was mainly schoolkids he saw, in the winter retirees and homemakers. And there were the invalids, too, of course, a surprising number of cripples and terminal cases, as if on every block two or three houses had been seized in the jaws of some great machine and reduced to stone and timber. The old men with prostate conditions. The diabetes patients with ulcerated feet. The arthritis sufferers with swollen joints. All of them were illuminated with the telltale signs of their own infirmity. “Sorry about your heart,” Ryan wanted to say, or, “Sorry about your legs,” but he was still getting used to the etiquette of the situation. Was it discourteous to admit that you could see a person’s sickness playing out on the surface of his body? What if it was a form of sickness that had always previously been hidden?

One afternoon, at a yellow brick house with a lopsided magnolia dropping its leaves in the yard, a boy who had clearly been beaten opened the door. The collar of his shirt was frayed, and a scab was beginning to heal on his chin. He wore his glasses too close to his eyes, which gave him the downcast look of a dog in a trench. Ryan had the impulse to pick him up and carry him away. No, no, this won’t do, he wanted to say. This won’t do at all, but instead he smiled at the boy and asked him if his parents were home. The boy held up a finger—just one second—and sprinted into the darkness of the house. A bruise with squared-off edges radiated through the seat of his pants.

Ryan switched the satchel to his other shoulder and looked around as he stretched his muscles. A chain of roots arched across the lawn, appearing every so often as a ropey brown bulge in the overgrown grass. A patch of concrete was crumbling at the end of the porch. When the boy reappeared—alone—he handed Ryan a book. Ryan had never become a father, had never even done any babysitting, and talking to children, he always felt a strange and powerful foreignness emanating from their delicate little skulls, as if he were trying to communicate with someone who was secretly much cleverer and more intuitive than he was, attuned like the elephants to the hum of some mysterious subsonic tone. He riffled through the book’s pages.

“What’s this you’ve got for me?”

The boy waved him away.

“Yes, this is a nice book. A nice book indeed. Here, you can have it back now.”

The boy recoiled. Barely a second had passed before he slammed the door.

When Ryan knocked, no one responded. It seemed to him that a choice had been made on his behalf. For some reason, the boy had given him the book; for some reason, he wanted Ryan to keep it. He put it in his satchel.

Later, at home, skimming through the pages, he discovered a long sequence of tiny handwritten love notes, each one printed in the same slanting blue ink. I love watching you sit and