Do you see it now, how even then, even all those years ago, the dark, dilated eye of my correspondent’s lens hung open over me, watching me, tracking me, as vigilant and invisible as a new moon?
SPURLOCK 3:41 A.M.
A darkness like tar has filled the church. Someone has even let the eight-day sanctuary candle burn down. In the grip of his dream, Spurlock gropes his way up the aisle, feeling for the edges of the pews with one hand while holding Abend’s testament in the other. He shoves off from the front pew and sweeps the darkness with his free hand until his foot strikes the first step leading up to the choir. Finally he makes it past the choir stalls to the altar rail, where, clutching the document to his chest, he begins the climb up to the altar, the stairs in darkness so much steeper and more numerous than he remembered. How easy it would be to fall, how impossible to arrest that fall. Finally, however, he makes it to the top, where he discovers that the sanctuary candle is in fact still lit, though weak and guttering on the lampstand. In the morning he would have to contact Mrs. Burke, the sacristan, Jessica’s mother, so that she could replace it.
Clinging to the altar edge with his free hand, his heels hanging over the lip of the narrow step that holds him, Spurlock can finally accomplish what he has come to accomplish: placing Daniel Abend’s testament on the altar. When, however, Spurlock attempts to set his burden down on the marble surface, something objects with a desiccated crunch, seems to push back against the weight of the pages. What is this? Has Mrs. Burke left a bundle of straw or branches on the altar, to be included in this Sunday’s flower arrangements? Surely she knows the altar is not a work surface, much less a storage space. He had never known Mrs. Burke to be so careless. But then again, she had reason to be distracted, he thought, probing the bundle to see if he could move it. Her daughter Jessica had been having difficulties again. Suddenly, detecting beneath the coarse fabric of the bundle a knee or elbow, Spurlock recognizes with horror that the bundle is in fact a person, a person hunched or squatting on the altar. This person is no doubt one of the visitors, the homeless, in the crouched posture of one accustomed to sleeping sitting up, on subway cars, or on park benches divided by cast-iron armrests whose express purpose is to prevent vagrants from lying down.
“Sir,” Spurlock hisses, startled by his own vehemence. “This is the altar of God! You cannot sleep here.” There was no response. “Sir!” Spurlock hisses again, this time lifting the eight-day candle from the lampstand toward where he thought the face would be.
The man’s hair hangs down in front of his face. With a crackle and a frizzing of acrid smoke, the candle singes a few strands.
“Oh, I am sorry!” Spurlock says, all his anger turning at once to consternation. He sees in the candlelight that the lock is perfectly black, not gray or matted, and has been braided with meticulous labor into fine plaits, sleek and lustrous. Smoke billows around the man’s head. Is the hair still burning? Is the man not aware of this? Spurlock realizes that what he’d thought was smoke is in fact the cloud of his frozen breath. How terribly cold it is all of a sudden: he sees how the knuckles of the man’s small hands had gone pale as marble from the exertion of clutching his knees to his chest.
“You must come with me,” Spurlock says. “We must get you a blanket. We must get you a proper bed. Luis will be here, and he will bring hot coffee…” But Spurlock knows as he says these things that the person cannot understand him. “¿Café? ¿Café caliente?” he says, venturing one of the few words he knows in Spanish. Or is Spanish the wrong language? Spurlock knows no words in Quechua, which is unfortunate, because Spurlock understands now that the person on the altar is not a man but an Incan child, a girl, barely in her teens, a virgin surely, else she would not have been brought here to die. Bearing her on its shoulders, a winding procession has delivered her to the lip of this stony precipice and abandoned her, here, where the cold obliged her to clutch her knees to her chest, to breathe down under her cloak to conserve what little heat remained in her body. Such a cold place to die in, Spurlock thinks, and she had died such a long time ago, so many hundreds of years. So very cold, he thinks, and yet had not the cold itself kept her body intact, protecting her in its steadfast embrace? Spurlock pushes aside the curtain of her hair, careful this time not to singe another of the braids when he brings the candle closer to her face, that face, he sees now, still full with childhood, heavy with slumber. He sees how deep, how serious, it is, this slumber: the furrow on her brow, the girl’s lips pushed forward in a swollen pout, her head tilted a little to one side.
—
With a gasp, Spurlock jerked upright in his cot, heart hammering his rib cage. A sweat chilled his skin even while a rage surged inside him: “Jesus motherfucking God, Abend!” he said out loud. “Are you satisfied?” One of the sleepers grunted as
