The Illumination

the same sentence, reproduced several times, written in red ink and blue, and printed in this, that, or the other kind of lettering. He who does not know how to read only sees the differences. For him who knows how to read, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. This does not mean that he will not suffer. Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other.

—Simone Weil

Judy was coughing up blood again. He held a tissue to her mouth, watched it darken, then replaced it with another. For a moment, as her stomach rose and fell beneath the covers, everything was quiet. From out of the lull she asked, “Is it May already?” and then, “Who brought the garden inside?” and in a sunburst of intuition he realized that she saw the seven stained tissues on her bedside table as roses, the same lustrous red as the apothecaries their mother used to cultivate when they were kids. It was another five minutes, another handful of roses, before one of the tissues came out speckled a watery pink. At last she was able to close her eyes and rest. He left her to her garden dreams, slipping out into the daylight.

A half hour later, distributing his leaflets, he came to a house where a dog began to bark, its chest concussing against a frosted glass door. For an instant he was eight years old again and Judy nine, facing the old bull mastiff that used to lunge at them from behind Mr. Castillo’s chain-link fence, listening as he called out, “Max! Leave those children alone! Heel!” Except that Mr. Castillo’s dog’s name was not Max, it was Duke, maybe, or Buster.

Was there anyone else who had been there and might remember, anyone but him and Judy?

He backed away and continued down the block.

Every day was the same: young parents and vacationing students, the elderly and the unemployed, all answering their doors to him with open stances and quizzical eyes, as if he might be delivering something they would only then realize they had always secretly desired. Then he would ask them if they had heard the Good News, and their postures would stiffen, their features grow hard. God was a word that embarrassed people. He knew missionaries who were able to use it without sounding pushy or insincere, letting it shine in their voices like some small, familiar object, not the sun but a nail head, a key ring, a strand of silk— something that reflected its light rather than generated it. But he was not one of them. He had seen too many people retreat behind their faces as he spoke, and now he found it nearly impossible to open his mouth without steeling himself for rejection. God—his timidity had stripped all the grace from the word. So instead it was Good News he said. And he smiled like he thought a man filled with peace might smile. And though most of the people he met were polite enough to accept a leaflet from him, he had learned not to expect anything more.

Only twice that day did someone actually engage him in conversation. The first was a woman who saw the Bible he was carrying and asked, “Jehovah’s Witness?” and when he shook his head asked, “Mormon?” and when he shook his head again asked, “Methodist?” When he told her the name of his church, Fellowship Bible, she pointed to herself and repeated, “Methodist,” shutting the door. The second was a man who took a flyer and read it out loud: “ ‘1 John 1:5: This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’ ” He was one of those people who did not fold or crumple the page but laid it gently on a table, as if he were attempting to balance a coin on the surface of a puddle.

“What’s your name, son?” the man asked.

“Ryan Shifrin, sir.”

“Ryan Shifrin. I want you to promise me something. Can you do that?”

“I think so.”

“I want you to promise me that you’ll never darken my door again. And I want you to promise me that you’ll tell your buddies to stay away, too.”

It was not the promise Ryan had been hoping for, and at the end of a long day of no thank you’s and not interested’s, he had just enough billy-goat tenacity to ask why.

“Because you’re making a grand mystery out of total horse-shit,” the man answered, “and don’t get me wrong, that’s your constitutional right as an American, but I resent you bringing it into my home.”

What could Ryan say? That he apologized? That he understood? It was Judy who had always been the diehard, the true believer, praying that it would not snow on her birthday, that Wheaton College would pluck her from its waiting list, that the cancer would not spread to her lungs and afterward, when it did, that her suffering would be bearable, but always and only if it be God’s will. Their shared childhood of bedtime prayers and family devotionals had carried Ryan to church nearly every Sunday of his life, but it had carried Judy much further, into a world of praise music, revival meetings, and mission work. She was a Christian by constitution, whereas Ryan was merely a Christian by inertia. Or he very nearly was, he would have been, if not for the occasional moment waiting at a stoplight or pushing a shopping cart with a floating front wheel through the supermarket when, despite the fact that everyone was in pain and everyone was dying and no one knew what they were or where they came from, an inexplicable sense that it would all be okay washed over him like a wave. It was the same feeling that Wittgenstein had found so curious, the one that had convinced him of the existence of God. A hint, a clue. Not a burning bush or a disembodied hand marking out letters in plaster, but the slight breeze He left as He brushed past the world.

That evening, when Ryan got home, Judy was still sleeping. A new stain had appeared on her pillow, a spatter of blood, already dried to rust along the edges. He could hardly bear to see it there, grazing her lip like the plume of a long red feather.

He cradled her head while he replaced the pillow, trying not to disturb her, but she woke anyway. She blinked and recognized him, gave a teetering smile. “Ryan,” she said, “you’re back.”

“That’s right. Home again.”

He pressed his hand to her cheek. This simple moment of ordinary respiration, with her breath warming the backs of his fingers—he knew that it would not last.

She asked, “How were the leaflets today?” and when he groaned, she laughed, a thin puff of air she expelled through her nostrils to keep herself from coughing. The attempt did not work. It was as if she reserved all her energy for these explosive hacking noises that left her completely exhausted. Quietly, between coughs, she said, “Well, thank you for doing it anyway, going to all those houses for me.”

“A promise is a promise.”

“Oh, poor Rye-rye. Just look how it wears you out.”

“It’s your life, I’m just keeping it warm for you.”

This was how they spoke to each other these days, not like brother and sister but newlyweds pretending they had already grown old together. It was a beautiful service, wasn’t it, dear? The finest. You and your suit and me in my dress. Yes, you never looked lovelier than you did in that dress of yours. It had started when their parents died, their father barely a year after their mother, and settled into habit once Judy got sick. Soon, Ryan went to the kitchen to prepare some of the vegetable broth that was the only food she could stomach anymore. He fed her with one of the antique silver spoons they had inherited from the family. Afterward he cleaned her face and neck with a damp washcloth he heated in the microwave. She was already drifting back to sleep by the time he finished.

“Hey, Judy?”

“Mmm?”

“Mr. Castillo, do you remember? The old guy who lived next door. What was his dog’s name?”

She thought about it for a second and murmured, “Trinket.”

That was the night he woke at two o’clock to the sound of retching. He rushed to Judy’s bedroom. She was coughing once more but with her lips closed this time, her cheeks bloating out again and again, as if she were blowing up a balloon, and when finally she opened her mouth, he saw that on her tongue she had produced something the size of a strawberry. Her face exhibited a look of astonishment and humiliation. Is this normal? she seemed to be asking. This can’t be normal. She spat the lump out of her mouth, and Ryan left to pack it in a bag of ice. For the rest of his life, whenever he remembered the night