“Well, Abend, are you?” he asked again, more gently this time.
—
It had been Spurlock’s idea to see the exhibit together, Mummies of the Andes, at the Museum of Natural History, maybe two years ago now. “You mean the hair-clump museum?” Bethany had said when Spurlock informed her of his plan.
“The what—what museum?”
“Hair-clump. Everything in that museum is either a gigantic beetle or a clump of hair.”
But when he saw Bethany’s reflection in the glass of the display case, her hand pressed to her mouth, he regretted his insistence. The case was a refrigerated vitrine housing the huddled body of a girl. Her hair, a sleek black, plaited in a thousand fine braids, obscured most of her face, but if you stood to the side, you could see the curve of her full cheek, the pout of the lips, her brow creased by a little furrow.
“They just left her there?” said Bethany.
“She was drugged,” said Spurlock, summarizing the explanatory plaque he’d just read. “She was a sacrifice. They let her freeze to death on the mountainside.”
But Bethany had turned away and was heading toward the exit. By the time he caught up with her, she was already on Central Park West.
“Jesus, Nelson, are you satisfied?”
“What’s going on?”
“Why do you make me look at those things?”
“What do you mean, ‘make you’?”
“It’s a beautiful Saturday, and you have to fill it with freeze-dried corpses.”
“Beth, it’s an exhibit—”
“And you’re a ghoul. You say you’re a minister but you are a ghoul,” she said, but smiled and took his arm as she said it, and Spurlock was filled with relief that she had not embarked on one of her litanies of discontent. “Am I taking you to brunch or not, Mr. Ghoul?”
—
That had been at least two years ago, possibly three, and yet the Incan child had chosen this night to appear in his dream. Knowing he would not sleep again, Spurlock had mounted the stairs to his office. The light from the avenue was sufficient to reassure him that the stack of sheets, Abend’s testament, was in fact still there on his desk, undisturbed, just where he had left it.
What would Daniel Abend, psychoanalyst, have said about his dream? Would he have listened in resolute silence? Or would he have simply inquired what the dream brought to mind? What the dream brought to mind was Abend’s voice itself, filling Spurlock’s head like a trapped echo. Yes, that’s what the dream brought to mind, a well or shaft sunk into the depths of a remote past, overflowing with echoes, flooding Spurlock’s head even though that past was not his own. That past had belonged entirely to others and had remained private and sealed until the moment Spurlock slid his pocketknife under the flap of that heavy envelope and started reading.
Father, you will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.
“Are you happy now, Abend? Are you satisfied?” Spurlock said aloud, as though to chase the echo out of his head. His own voice, however, merely joined with the other voices, Abend’s, Clementine’s, Jessica Burke’s. Beneath these others the voice of Abend’s correspondent repeated its refrain:
Que ce soit avec toi, que ce soit avec la fille, je serai satisfait.
Whether with you or with the girl, I will be satisfied.
What Spurlock felt, to his chagrin, was envy. He envied Abend, and he envied Abend’s correspondent. He envied them their shared belief that an account could be settled, a debt paid, an obligation satisfied. Was not the document itself, there on his desk, a testament first and foremost to that fact? (Spurlock had pulled his chair to the window overlooking the avenue, and he sat with his forehead against the cool pane, watching the traffic light cycle from yellow to red to green over the empty intersection.) He envied them all, Abend, his correspondent, even Bethany. After all, Bethany’s job afforded her the pleasure of thumping her hand with a conclusive thwack on a stack of tab-indexed binders codifying the terms of a corporate merger. Months of negotiations concluded, the agreement at last drawn up and signed. “How satisfying,” she would say, dropping the stack into a file carton with a thud. “Document storage will swing by to pick this up tomorrow.” Spurlock envied her authority to dispatch her work for good, her power to banish it to a warehouse canyoned with obsolete documents.
What satisfaction was there for him? Spurlock recalled the time Father Babbet, his first spiritual director, had said to him, “If you’re hot for worldly goods, Nelson, you won’t find them in the priesthood, and Lord knows the body of Christ is replete with assholes. If you ask me, though, the job satisfaction can’t be beat,” and he had been right. Spurlock thought so then and had thought so many times since, and he’d made a point of repeating Father Babbet’s formulation to any new seminarian posted to the Incarnation. Whatever those unbeatable satisfactions were, however, they never involved thwacking a stack of binders into a box and dispatching it to document storage.
Was this a crisis of faith? Had he come to doubt that God’s love was the satisfaction to be preferred above all others? It was just that his work was so…was so unlike work. He suspected that somewhere priests thought of their job as the salvage and restoration of souls, in preparation for eternal life. That would simplify matters. But for Spurlock this view carried the whiff of
