The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [69]
was the light, he wondered, and which the shadow? If the trials of Job could be a sign of God’s favor, then couldn’t Ryan’s own good fortune be a sign of God’s hostility? Maybe the crippled, the bruised, the diseased, the damaged—maybe the reason their wounds shone in this world was because God was lending them His attention from the next, looking on with loving compassion or a cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Compassion. A cultivated interest in suffering. Those were the possibilities that played across Ryan’s mind as he lay in bed watching the darkness conduct its usual late-night scintillations. He listened to the legs of an insect ticking across the floor of his bedroom. Say that God’s attention was a product of His sympathy: well, then our pain came first, and it brought His gaze, and from His gaze arose the luminosity of our suffering: y + z = a. Say, on the other hand, that God’s attention was a product of His esteem for certain forms of afflicted beauty: then our pain came first, and it brought with it the luminosity of our suffering, which summoned His gaze: y + a = z. One was the cause and the other the effect, one a and the other z, though either way, our pain came first, our pain was inescapable, our pain was always y. What frightened Ryan—horrified him—was not the possibility that God did not love us but that He did love us and His love was merely decorative. Aesthetic rather than unconditional. That He loved us because we suffered, and our suffering was pleasing to His eyes. The Illumination had overturned all the old categories of thought. For a while Ryan had believed, along with the crystal healers and the televangelists, that the light that had come to their injuries would herald a new age of reconciliation and earthly brotherhood. You would think that taking the pain of every human being and making it so starkly visible—every drunken headache and frayed cuticle, every punctured lung and bowel pocked with cancer—would inspire waves of fellow feeling all over the world, or at least ripples of pity, and for a while maybe it had, but now there were children who had come of age knowing nothing else, running to their mothers to have a Band-Aid put on their flickers, asking, Why is the sky blue? and, Why does the sun hurt?, and still they grew into their destructiveness, and still they learned whose hurt to assuage and whose to disregard, and still there were soldiers enough for all the armies of the world. And every war left behind the shrapnel scars and shattered limbs of a hundred thousand ruined bodies. And every earthquake and every hurricane produced a holocaust of light. And when his sister died she had looked at him with the panic of someone who had no idea what was coming next. And when his friends in Burkina Faso died their wounds seemed to flood the sky. And the gun shops and munitions factories were as plentiful as blades of grass. And the emergency rooms were as full as they had ever been. And there were towns in the great open middle of the country where the cemeteries outnumbered the churches. And in the hockey stands and the boxing arenas, a cheer went up with every split lip, every burst capillary. And in the video games the schoolkids played, the aliens erupted in geysers of blood and golden tinsel. And in the tent cities and domestic violence shelters, the poor and the beaten huddled over their sores and bruises, cradling them like fussy children. And Ryan felt that he had spent his life in a darkened room, groping for meaning or at least consolation. And so, it seemed to him, had everyone else. And their bodies were aging and one day they would fail altogether. And every heart would be soaked in brightness. And every brain would burn out like an ember. And there was God, high on His throne, attending to the whole terrible procession of sorrows and traumas, corrosions and illnesses, with a cool, cerebral dispassion. He took His notes. He never uttered a syllable. He had the whole world, all the little children, you and me, brother, in His hands.