What struck me first was the absolute irrevocability of that nakedness, a nakedness all the starker for the sealed veil over the face. And it was from that sense of her nakedness that everything followed. Shame filled me to have happened upon her like this, to have happened upon her even now, three years later, peering through the pane of the photograph, her body laid out in cold water and morning sunlight. Someone had been there, and what they had known since that morning I knew now too. They had wanted me to know it. The time had come. I had been admitted into the inviolate privacy of it, and a latch had clicked shut behind me. Only then did I notice the two words written along the bottom margin of the photograph in the now familiar block capitals. Only then could I read them. Or rather hear them, as though a cold breath from a cold throat had whispered them in my ear: REMEMBER ME.
SPURLOCK 11:57 P.M.
Daniel Abend, said Spurlock aloud. No answer. Only darkness and the shuffle of restless sleepers. Spurlock thought of the stack of papers on his desk in the dark of his office, each sheet a weightless onionskin, though the stack itself was heavy, like a stone.
Was this awful alertness the pressure of God’s mysterious hand? To hell with that. As for the mystery of God, Spurlock had always maintained that God’s part was no mystery at all. The command was clear: to love. But love whom? the heart objected. Everyone, God foremost. Love how? With everything you have. A task, in short, doomed to failure, but that was part of the plan, because fulfilling the commandment was meant to be costly. In fact, it was meant to cost everything. Sooner or later, everything would be taken away—success, reputation, possessions, health, memory, mind, body—the soul at last stripped naked before God. Love was nothing but this discipline of surrender, the practice of relinquishment taken up each day anew. The soul would seek to avert its gaze, to flee from the charge, but the instruction itself left no room for doubt. The mystery was no mystery, the secret no secret at all.
How resourceful the soul was in pretending otherwise. He thought of his wife Bethany’s tireless, lucrative toil for her firm. The firm was a creature of appetite, not for justice or even riches (the money was secondary, a means of keeping score), but for the exercise of power, perfectly adapted to the intricate wilderness of the law. This region was where Bethany lived and thrived, swooping among the mountainous contracts and filings like a hawk among everlasting alps. Faced with complexity himself, Spurlock had always trusted his impulse to stop, to sit, or to kneel, confident that in time he would hear the still, small voice of the command. What should I do? Love. Whom? Everyone. When? Always. If at times this imperative seemed infantile and unbelievable, well, that was how God came into the world, as an infant, cradled in the straw of an incredible story.
Now, however, as Spurlock lay on his back in the dark church, for the first time in his life he felt the weight of a new thing, and beneath the weight he felt his old confidence buckle. What was it, this new thing? He did not know, but he registered its presence as an act of justice, a chastisement for his lifelong presumption that clarity and simplicity were his due. If obedience to God’s command was to cost everything, he wondered for the first time, why should it not cost his belief as well?
Father, my name is Daniel Abend. You will not remember me.
Of course he didn’t. They had never met. Abend had said so himself. Nor had Spurlock ever met Jessica Burke. The only time he had seen her was in the photograph set up beside the coffin at her funeral.
Once, not long after he’d been ordained deacon, Father Spurlock had accompanied an anxious parishioner to a cardiologist’s appointment for an angiography. He had watched on a video screen as the doctor steered a catheter from an incision in the parishioner’s groin up into her laboring heart. Once in position, the catheter was made to release a dye, in pulses, and with each pulse, for an instant, the branching path of blood was visible, as if the body were nothing more than a mist and the mist had been blown aside. Now, thought Spurlock on his cot, he was the one who had been infiltrated. The probing voice of Daniel Abend had threaded its way into him and released its radioactive stain. Spurlock closed his eyes, but the mist kept blowing away, revealing with each gust of dye the negative image of a heart on a screen.
FOUR
Do you, Father, have children? Listening to you at Jessica Burke’s funeral, I thought you must have. You said that to lose a child was to lose everything, not just a person, but hope, purpose, meaning, faith itself. There was no place to hide—not even, you said, in religion. That is why, you said, in the Passion narratives the mother has to be there at the Crucifixion. The Passion is the Passion because the mother is present. All of us can and will lose our friends and our illusions, as Mary Magdalene and the disciples do. All of us can and will lose our lives, as Jesus does. Losing a child, however—that is a different matter. For other people it has happened, does happen, will happen. For one’s own child, however, it cannot. The event is not only unthinkable but, in some elemental way, impossible. One can continue to live after the death of a child, but no one, properly speaking, survives. After the death of a child, all life is afterlife.
I am certain you can imagine what gratitude poured into me later that day,
