The Sparrow

to Emilio, who was now sitting up, feet over the side of the bed, eyes wide and blinking.

'What happened?' he asked.

'You passed out. Must have been the surprise about the planet. The autonomic nervous system will do that to you. You can feel your arms and legs get cold and then everything turns white.'

He nodded. 'That never happened to me before. What a strange sensation.' He shook his head to clear it and his eyes widened again.

'Whoa. Just sit there a while. Takes a little time for your blood pressure to get settled.' She was leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed, watching him with a clinical eye but thinking about what she'd just seen. He laughed a little and then sat still, letting his equilibrium reassert itself.

'I am surprised,' Anne said judiciously, 'that you were surprised.'

'About the planet?'

'Yes. I mean, this whole thing was your idea. I thought you had some kind of direct line to God about this.' She wasn't as sarcastic as she might have been. In fact, she said this with a straight face, almost, with only a hint of insincerity to protect herself.

He was silent for a long time, starting twice to say something and then stopping again. Finally, he said, 'Anne, may I tell you something? In confidence?' She slid down the wall, as controlled in her drop to the floor as Emilio had been boneless, and sat cross-legged, looking up at him. 'I've never told anybody this, Anne, but—' He stopped again and laughed nervously. 'This must be some kind of record, yes? A man who can be completely inarticulate in fourteen languages.'

'You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.'

'No. I need to talk to someone about this. Not someone. You. I need to talk to you about this. Anne, I'm just getting somewhere that everyone thinks I've been all along.'

There was another silence, as he tried to decide how much to tell her, where to start. She waited, watching him, pleased to see the color come back and then touched to realize that he was blushing. Self-disclosure is almost like sex, she thought. It isn't easy to bare your soul.

'You have to understand, Anne, I'm not one of those guys who decided to be a priest when he was seven. I started out—well, you've seen La Perla, right? But you can't imagine what it's like to grow up there.' There was another pause, as the memories crowded in. 'Anyway, the Jesuits, D.W. especially, they showed me a different kind of life. I'm not saying that I became a priest because I was grateful. Okay, I admit, that was probably part of it. But I wanted to be like them. Like D.W.'

'Not a shabby ambition,' she said, eyes steady.

He took a deep breath. 'No. It was a good ambition. And it wasn't all hero worship. I wanted this life and I have no regrets. But—Anne, do you remember when I said that it's difficult to tell from the way people behave whether or not they believe in God?' Emilio watched her carefully, looking for shock or disappointment, but she didn't seem horrified or even terribly surprised. 'You'd make a good priest, you know.'

'Except for that celibacy shit,' she laughed. 'And the popes keep saying I have too many X chromosomes. Don't change the subject.'

'Right. Right.' He hesitated again, but finally the words began to come for him. 'I was like the physicists you talked about. I was like a physicist who believes in quarks intellectually, but doesn't feel quarks. I could make all the Thomist arguments about God and discuss Spinoza and say all the right things. But I didn't feel God. It was not a thing of the heart for me. I could defend the idea of God but it was all from hearsay evidence, a lawyer would call it. None of it had any emotional truth for me. Not like it does for guys like Marc.' He hugged himself and leaned forward over his knees. 'I mean, there was a place in me that wanted God to be in it, but it was empty. So, I thought, Well, not yet. Maybe someday. And to be honest, I sort of looked down on that kind of thing. You know how there are people who'll tell you that Jesus is a close personal friend of theirs, yes?' His voice was very low and he made a face that said, Who are they kidding? 'I always thought, Sure, right, and you probably see Elvis at the laundromat.'

'Hey! What's wrong with that!' Anne cried, offended. 'I have personally seen Keith Richards at a grocery store in Cleveland Heights.'

He laughed and moved back onto the bed so he could sit against the wall. 'Okay. So, one day, I get this call at four in the morning. And then we're all sitting in Jimmy's office, listening to this incredible music and I say, I wonder if we could go there? And George and Jimmy and Sofia say, Sure, no problem, just do the math. And you thought we were crazy? Well, so did I, Anne. I mean, at first, it all was sort of a game! I was just toying with the idea of it's being God's will, really.' Anne remembered the playfulness. It had seemed so strange at the time. 'I kept expecting the game to stop, and everyone would have a good laugh at my expense, and I'd go back to trying to get Ortega to give me that house for the preschool and arguing with Richie Gonzales and the council about the sewers in the east end and all the rest of it, right? But it just kept going. The Father General and the asteroid and the plane and all these people working on this crazy idea. I kept waiting for someone to say, Sandoz, you idiot, what a lot of trouble for nothing! But everything kept happening.'

'Like D.W. said, a whole hell of a lot of turtles showing up on a whole hell of a lot of fenceposts.'

'Yes! So I'm lying in bed, night after night, and I can't sleep anymore, and you know me—I used to fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. All night long, I would be thinking, What is happening here? And part of me would say, God is trying to tell you something, you dumb bastard. And another part of me would say, God doesn't talk to punks from Puerto Rico, you know?'

'What makes you say that? I ask as one semicommitted agnostic to another, you understand.'

'Well, okay, I take it back about Puerto Rico, but it's not fair for God to play favorites. What makes me so special that God would bother to tell me anything, right?'

He ran out of steam for a while, and Anne let him stare and gather his thoughts. Then he looked at her and smiled and climbed down off the bed to sit next to her on the floor, their shoulders touching, knees drawn up. The difference in their ages seemed less important than their near equality of size. Anne had a flashing memory of sitting like this with her best friend when they were both thirteen, telling secrets, figuring things out.

'So. Things kept happening, just like God was really there, making it all happen. And I heard myself saying Deus vult, like Marc, but it still seemed like some kind of huge joke. And then one night, I just let myself consider the possibility that this is what it seems to be. That something extraordinary is happening. That God has something in mind for me. Besides sewer lines, I mean…And a lot of the time, even now, I think I must be a lunatic and this whole thing is crazy. But, sometimes—Anne, there are times when I can let myself believe, and when I do,' he said, voice dropping to a whisper and his hands, resting on his knees, opening, as though to reach for something, 'it's amazing. Inside me, everything makes sense, everything I've done, everything that ever happened to me—it was all leading up to this, to where we are right now. But, Anne, it's frightening and I don't know why…'

She waited to see if he had more but when he fell silent, she decided to take a shot in the dark. 'You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love?' she asked him. 'You are just naked. You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe the other person loves you back and that you can trust him not to hurt you.'

He looked at her, astounded. 'Yes. Exactly. That's how it feels, when I let myself believe. Like I am falling in love and like I am naked before God. And it is terrifying, as you say. But it has started to feel like I am being rude and ungrateful, do you understand? To keep on doubting. That God loves me. Personally.' He snorted, half in disbelief and half in astonishment, and put his hands over his mouth for a moment and then pulled them away. 'Does that sound arrogant? Or just crazy? To think that God loves me.'

'Sounds perfectly reasonable to me,' Anne said, shrugging and smiling. 'You're very easy to love.' And saying it, she was pleased to hear how natural it sounded, how unburdened.

He reared away to look at her and his eyes softened, doubts set aside for a truth he was sure of. 'Madre de mi corazon,' he said quietly.

'Hijo de mi alma,' she replied, as softly and as certain. The moment passed and they were back together, staring at their knees, companionable again. Then the spell was broken, and he laughed. 'If we stay in here much longer, we shall give scandal.'

'Do you think so?' she asked, eyes wide. 'How flattering!' Emilio got to his feet and offered Anne a hand up. She stood easily in the low gravity but held onto his hand a moment longer than necessary, and they embraced and