The Sparrow

The answer is no, as far as I'm concerned. And that's the end of it.'

Supper was unusually quiet in the Edwards household that evening.

At the end of that long Sunday, Jimmy was called into the office of Masao Yanoguchi, who took note of the ludicrous rumpled clothing and the red-rimmed eyes and estimated that the boy had been awake for almost thirty- six hours. He waved Quinn into a chair and watched the comically elongated framework fold itself into a sitting position. The guard's log was open on Yanoguchi's desk.

'Mr. Quinn, I recognize the names of Ms. Mendes and Mr. Edwards. I assume Dr. Edwards is the wife of Mr. Edwards. Who is E. J. Sandoz, please?'

'A friend, sir, a priest. They are all friends of mine. I'm sorry. I should have called you first but it was four in the morning and I wasn't really sure, not a hundred percent…'

Yanoguchi let the silence fill the room. Jimmy twisted his watch around and around his wrist in unconscious mimicry of Sofia, hours earlier. He stared at the floor for a few moments and then glanced at Yanoguchi but looked away almost immediately. 'I was afraid I was wrong and I wanted someone else to listen—' Jimmy stopped and this time when he looked up, he didn't turn away. 'That's not true. I knew. I was sure. I just wanted to share it with my friends first. They're like family to me, Dr. Yanoguchi. That's no excuse for poor judgment. I'll resign, sir. I'm sorry.'

'I accept your apology, Mr. Quinn.' Yanoguchi closed the guard's book and lifted a single small sheet of paper from his desk. 'Ms. Mendes left this memo for me. She recommends that the AI project be restricted to request and return. I believe I agree. This will be carried out at considerable savings to ISAS because of your suggestion that the project be done as a wager.' Yanoguchi put the memo aside. 'I would like you to continue to cooperate with her, although you will no longer be required in your former position.' He watched Quinn master his reaction and, pleased with the young man's self-discipline, went on to say, 'Starting tomorrow morning, you will be in charge of a full-time effort to monitor the source of the transmission. You will supervise a staff of five. Round-the-clock coverage, two people per shift. I'd like you to coordinate the effort with similar crews at Barstow and the other telescopes.'

He stood, and Jimmy got to his feet as well. 'Congratulations, Mr. Quinn, on a historic discovery.' Masao Yanoguchi, arms at his sides, bowed briefly; later, Jimmy would realize he was more surprised by this gesture than by anything else that had happened that day. 'Permit me to give you a lift home,' Yanoguchi suggested. 'I don't think you should be driving. I'll have my chauffeur pick you up tomorrow morning as well. You can leave your car here overnight.'

Jimmy was too dazed to say anything. Masao Yanoguchi laughed and led the boy out toward the parking lot.

That night, for the second time in as many nights, Emilio Sandoz had trouble falling asleep.

He used this apartment gratis because the house was too close to the encroaching ocean; no one else dared to stay in it anymore and the landlord had given up trying to rent it out. Tonight, alone as always in the little bedroom, Emilio stared at the cracked and patched ceiling made beautiful by moonlight reflected off the sea, and listened to the hypnotic sound of waves nearby. He knew sleep would not come easily and did not close his eyes to coax it.

He'd been prepared, to some extent, for nights like the one he'd passed the previous evening. 'Lotta people in this ole world,' D. W. Yarbrough had warned him once. 'Sometime, somewhere, one or two of 'em gonna ring some bells for a man. Count on it, son.' So even before he met Sofia Mendes, he understood that he'd have to reckon with someone like her. He no longer denied the turmoil she aroused in him; he simply accepted that it would take time to bring a natural response into congruence with his vows.

He'd never really questioned the vows. He accepted them as essential to the Apostolate—for making him readily available to work for the good of souls—and when the time came, he took them wholeheartedly. But at fifteen, when it all began? He'd have laughed himself stupid at the idea of becoming a priest. Oh, sure, D.W. got the charges dropped and got him off-island before anyone else took a shot at him, and he was grateful in a half- articulate way but in the beginning, he only intended to lie low until he was eighteen and could do as he pleased. Go to New York. Break into the minors. Box, maybe. Flyweight. Welterweight, if he filled out more. Sell again, if he had to.

The first months in the Jesuit high school were a shock. He was as far behind the other students scholastically as he was ahead of them in raw experience. Few of the boys talked to him, except to goad him, and he returned the favor. D.W. made him promise one thing: not to hit anyone. 'Just master your hands, 'mano. No more fighting. Get a grip, son.'

Nobody from his family ever wrote or called, much less visited. His brother beat the rap, D.W. told him toward the end of the first semester, but still blamed Emilio for what happened. Well, fuck him, who gives a shit? he thought savagely and swore he'd never cry again. He went over the wall that night. Found a whore, got wrecked. Came back defiant. If anybody noticed he was gone, no one said anything about it.

The tide began to turn for him about eight months into his sophomore year. The quiet orderliness of life in the boarding school began to seduce him. No crises, no sudden terror, no gunshots and screaming in the night. No beatings. Each day planned, no surprises. Almost in spite of himself, he did well at Latin. Won a prize, even. 'For excellence.' He liked the sound of that. Rolled the word around in his mind.

He did better junior year, despite the fact that he spent nearly all of it arguing with the priests. So much of what he knew about religion struck him as total bullshit; he was disarmed when the fathers freely admitted that some stories were in fact pious fictions. But, judging his character, they dared him to cut through what he called the crap: to find the core of truth, carefully preserved and offered to all comers through the centuries.

As the months passed, he began to feel as though something in his chest were loosening, as though something that had kept a grip on his heart had begun to let go. And then one night, the image of a full-blown rose unfolding petal by petal from its tightly wrapped bud came to him in a brief wordless dream and he woke from it, shattered, face wet with tears shed in sleep.

He told no one of this dream, tried hard to forget it himself. But when he was seventeen, he entered the novitiate.

Many were surprised, but as D. W. Yarbrough pointed out, Emilio had a good deal in common with the Basque soldier who had founded the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. Like Ignatius of Loyola, Emilio Sandoz had known brutality and death and stinking fear, and as the days of silence during the Long Retreat passed, he had a past worthy of the name to reconsider and to turn away from.

Things that drove other young men from the path to priesthood were balm to him: the ordo regularis, the liturgical cadences, the quiet, the purposefulness. Even the celibacy. For, looking back on his chaotic youth, Emilio had no experience of sex that was not about power or pride or lust undiluted by affection. It was easy to believe that to live as a celibate was a charism—a special kind of grace. And so, it began: after the novitiate, classical and humane studies, and then philosophy. Regency, when the scholastic was sent out to teach in one of the Society's high schools. Then years of theology with ordination at last, and from there further: to tertianship and final vows. Perhaps three out of ten who began Jesuit formation stayed the course. Emilio Sandoz, to the astonishment of many who'd known him as a boy, was among them.

And yet, in all those years of preparation, the prayer that had resonated most strongly in his soul was the cry, 'Lord, I believe. Help me in my disbelief.'

He found the life of Jesus profoundly moving; the miracles, on the other hand, seemed a barrier to faith, and he tended to explain them to himself in rational terms. It was as though there were only seven loaves and seven fishes. Maybe the miracle was that people shared what they had with strangers, he thought in the darkness.

He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather than deny the existence of something he couldn't perceive himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty and carried on, praying in the face of his doubt. After all, Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier who had killed and whored and made a thorough mess of his soul, said you could judge prayer worthwhile simply if you could act more decently, think more clearly afterward. As D.W. once told him, 'Son, sometimes it's enough just to act less like a shithead.' And by that kindly if inelegant standard, Emilio Sandoz could believe himself to be a man of God.

So, while he hoped someday to find his way to a place in his soul that was closed to him now, he was