And it was you who suffered for my failings.
That was the problem of the religion he’d been born into. Christians, he thought: his parents had been two of them, but he could never bring himself. He had lived and now was dying an un-Christian, quite pleasantly godless . . . for the problem with the story of Jesus was simply this: it was a reversal, it was a perfectly backward version of the story of humankind, a mirror image of the world. For in reality itself, as opposed to the holy script, it was not one man who suffered and the rest of the world that was saved. It was the whole world that suffered for the sake of one man.
He could make the stipulation now, he could indulge in bombast now that he was, so unexpectedly, becoming dead. The whole world suffered and bled for all eternity, through all of human history, so that a minuscule, paltry few could have leisure and joy and the liberty of wealth for as long as they each should live. There is no doubt, the poor are the sacrifice, he thought, and he remembered this knowledge like a sight he had seen—all the poor and the untended and powerless. Together they are Jesus on the cross, bleeding so openly, bleeding for all to see, and thin like Jesus too, their arms and veins opened.
And yet the rich, especially the very, grotesquely rich, that fraction of a percent that make up the one man that is saved, blithely deny the truth of this, though it is perfectly obvious and as transparently clear as glass. The rich may worship God or they may pretend to but they are kicking Jesus to the floor daily, kicking him viciously and stepping on his face.
Because the poor are Jesus, in their billions. Plain as the nose on his face . . . and he himself, neither Jesus nor Judas but someone in between, was dying.
But maybe it would be all right in the end, or in the end beyond the end. Maybe somehow a second chance would come for him. And next time he would make sure she was not injured at all. He would take her away to a safe place and there she would be kept separate from accidents . . . there had to be a shelter like that for her, even for both of them. As simple as that bar at the end of the street, beaming its warmth. Was it so much to ask? A safe place for his little girl. If bargains were possible he would give himself up a thousand times before he would let them hurt her. Let them accept him, let them accept his pathetic, meaningless sacrifice. It was paltry. He knew that, for chrissake. But what else did he have, what else could he bargain with?
And this was melodrama, he knew that too, so sue him, who cared, he was dying. And anyway the melodrama did not make it less true . . . all he wanted was to hear the word yes. Yes: we will accept it. We will accept what you offer, be it ever so puny. In exchange we will give life back to your girl.
So she will always be young. And she will always be beautiful.
Whatever he did or could never do, in the end it was she who had formed whatever he was that was worth being. It is the child who makes the parent on this earth, he would say to her if she was here to listen, not the other way round. The child was more than father to the man; children were father and mother to the soul, whatever that might be. He did not pretend to know much about souls, or the idea of them. He never had. But once or twice he had thought he could hear a sound, a faint music. The spirit moves around us, falls past us invisible like air through air . . . all we are sure we have, all that we know, is the suspicion of its presence.
And if he did ever see it, if he ever caught a glimpse of this passing soul, it was because she let him: she let him see the world was full of hurt things. The world was made up of these shifting beings, of glancing pain between them as they moved—these solitary worlds that inhabited the total, the millions of small worlds that made up the host. That was where the pain came from, he thought, it came from the friction between worlds, the brushing past, the shiver of contact—the touch of feeling and unfeeling. The pain and grace of the temporary.
She showed him and he got to see, but by then it was already too late. By then his own world had become very small, and in his own world only the one hurt thing mattered.
He had forgotten all the rest. He never even saw them.
Small, my girl, oh small, small, small. You see? The world shrinks around us: we give it all up for you. We close our eyes to it, we shutter them, we give it away though it is not ours to give.
For you we give up the world.
Praise for Lydia Millet and Ghost Lights
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
A San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book
“[Millet] exhibits the sweep and Pop-Art lyricism of Don DeLillo, the satiric acerbity of Kurt Vonnegut, the everyday-cum-surrealism harmonics of Haruki Murakami, and the muted-moral outrage of Joy Williams. . . . Millet is operating at
