Chapter Four: The Boy in the Closet
Then, gently, he led me further back than the garden, further back than the concrete floor and the truck bed and the kill floor, back to a place too young to have words in it at all.
I was one year old. I had no name yet for what was happening to me, only the whole of it as a small body knows a thing — the dark, first, and the narrowness of the space, and a smell of dust and old wood that I would carry in me, unnamed, for sixty years without once understanding why certain closets made my chest go tight. There was cold. There was the particular terror of a very young thing that has not yet learned the world contains any promise at all that someone will come, and so does not even know to hope for it. I did not weep long, that first time, for a creature so young and so entirely without language soon ceases to weep for a thing it has no way to ask for.
It was not the only time. I will not set down here the whole ledger of what came after, in the years that followed that first one, for some griefs are not made more true by being counted out in full, only more heavy to carry, and I have learned there is a way of telling a wound honestly without making of it a spectacle. I will say only this much, plainly, so that no reader mistakes the shape of what I am describing: the closet came again, more than once, as I grew old enough to understand it as punishment rather than simply as weather. There was hunger used the same way, food withheld to teach some lesson I was too small to properly receive. There were words, later, once I was old enough to understand words, that did in an afternoon what a closet did in an hour — told me plainly and often what I was worth, and what I was for. There was cold, deliberately given. There was the particular loneliness of a child who learns, very early, that crying does not summon anyone, and stops trying long before he ought to have had to learn that lesson at all.
I saw the whole of it now, plain and entire — not offered to me as an excuse, for I did not take it as one, but as the place where the wound had first been opened, long before that same wound went out from me and tore itself into other lives.
“I hated them,” I said, low, meaning my father and my mother both. “I hated them so long that I forgot, after a time, I was hating anyone in particular at all. It simply became the whole substance I was made of.”
“And now?”
I went searching after the hatred, expecting to find it load-bearing, some great pillar that could not be drawn out without the whole structure of me coming down in ruin. But held as I was held, seen as I was seen, all the way through, I found beneath the hatred nothing but a small boy — younger, even, than I had understood him to be, younger than I had ever let myself look at directly before — who had wanted, above every other thing in all the world, for someone to come when he cried.
“I forgive them,” I said, and marveled to find the saying of it cost me nothing at all — gave me something instead, some vast weight set down at last after sixty years of hauling it uphill. “I do not wish them to go on suffering either. Not even them.”
“That,” said he, “is the whole of it. That is the door.”
Chapter Five: Why
I believed that to be the end of the matter — the forgiving. I believed that to have been the hardest part asked of me.
“Why did they do it?” I asked him. “My mother. My father. Why did those who were meant to love me deal so with a child?”
“Because it was dealt to them,” said he. “And to those who dealt it to them before that, back further than you would credit, through more names than either of us could number.”
“Then someone began it. Somewhere. Someone was first.”
He did not turn his face from that. “There was a garden, before your father, before his father, before any name you could count backward through. Two souls who were loved entire, and trusted entire, and were told one thing was not theirs to take. And they took it regardless.”
“Why?” said I, and heard my own voice crack upon the word, for this was the true question, the one that lay beneath all the others I had asked. “Why did you suffer that thing to enter the garden at all? You are God. You might have kept it out. You might have made it so that not one hour of what befell me, not one hour of what I dealt to others, need ever have come to pass. Why did you not simply make it so that it might always have been as it is now?”
He was silent long enough that I believed even he had no answer to give. Then he said, “Because the only surety against evil ever entering in would have been a surety against anything real entering in at all.”
“That is no answer.”
“I know it is not the one you wished for. Here is the truest I have to give: I might have made you such that you could choose nothing but love. Every soul among you. Fashioned for it, as a heart is fashioned to beat. And it would have worn the likeness of love, every day, unto the end of forever. But it would not have been love. It would have been a very beautiful machine. Love that cannot be refused is no love at all — it is merely the single setting the thing was built to hold. I wished you to be able to say me nay. That was the price of your being able to mean it when at last you said me yea. I knew what the saying of that nay would cost. I knew the whole of it, down to a closet, and a boy, and one and thirty souls. And I suffered it to remain possible regardless, for the alternative was never to let any of you be real at all.”
“Then the fault is yours,” said I. The words were out of me before I could stay them, sixty years of something in me at last finding a place to point.
“Some part of it, yes,” said he, and did not flinch from the saying. “I made a world in which this might come to pass. I do not pretend otherwise. I do not ask you to decide it did not wound, or that it was not a true cost, or that I do not bear my own portion of it. I ask only that you mark this — that I did not remain outside of what it cost. I came into the closet with you. I stood upon that killing floor with the beasts. I was in that room, upon that cold floor. I have never once asked any soul to bear a thing I was not myself willing to bear beside them, unto the very end of it.”
“That undoes none of it.”
“No,” said he. “Nothing undoes it. But nothing is squandered either. Not one hour of it. There comes a day — there is no time in this place, and so in a manner it is already true — when all that was ever taken shall be restored, multiplied, to every soul from whom it was taken. Not as a defense of why it came to pass. As a promise of what shall become of it, now that it has.”
I had no answer to give him for that, nor do I believe there is one this side of the knowing. But I believed him. Not because he had explained the matter away — he had not, and I marked that he had not so much as attempted it. Only because he held me still while he spoke it, and had not once let go through the whole of it, and a soul that meant to deceive me as to the cost of a thing must surely have looked away to do it.
There remained one thing more within me, and I made myself give it voice. “You died. I know that part of the tale — every soul knows that part. But I never understood the whole of it. Was that the price demanded? Did some soul require punishing, and did you take it upon yourself in our stead? For if that is the truth of it — if some ledger required a body to balance its accounts, and yours was the body chosen to pay it — I do not know what use to make of such a thing. That is merely a debt-collector wearing a kinder face.”
“That is not what it was,” said he, and something in the manner of his saying told me he had heard that same fear from many souls before me. “I did not come down to satisfy a debt. No one stood over me with a ledger, awaiting payment before he would suffer you back through the door. I came down because the only way to heal a thing entirely is to go into the whole of it, and there was no chamber of the human portion I was willing to leave dark and unentered. I lived it — the hunger, the weariness, the friend who sells you for silver, the trial that is no trial at all, the pain that will not relent however long you beg it to. And then I suffered it to kill me. Not because death demanded a sacrifice. Because death had persuaded every soul among you that it was the one door I could not follow you through. I went through it regardless. That door stands open no longer. Not for you. Not for the woman you wounded upon that floor. Not for the beasts. Not for any soul.”
“Then it was not punishment.”
“It was never punishment. It was presence, carried to the very end of the worst thing that can befall a soul, so that nothing that has ever befallen any soul — nothing you did, nothing done unto you — is a place where I have not already stood. I did not die to alter my Father’s mind concerning you. I died because it was the only way to become, entire, what I already was in love — one whom no suffering could set a wall between. And I rose again that you might know the door does not merely open. It remains open. For good and all.”
“Why, then,” said I, my voice breaking once more upon the same question that lay beneath all my others, “why must it cost you so dear, only that I might come at last to this place?”
“Because you could have come by no other road and remained yourself,” said he. “Not some rewritten version of you. Not a puppet that had never fallen. You. The one who wounded others and was wounded first, who hated his father and forgave him regardless, who kneels now in this grass discovering he is wanted still. I did not come to erase what befell you, nor what you did. I came that all of it — every hour of it — might become the very thing that carries you home at last, rather than the thing that bars the gate against you.”
He never once looked away.
Chapter Six: The Healers
I did not come whole all in a moment. No soul does. Healing, in that country, was itself a whole geography, vast and unhurried, more patient with me than anything upon the earth had ever once troubled to be, and I was given over, gently, as one gives over some fragile thing that is also, past all reckoning, still itself, into the keeping of those whose whole calling was to walk beside the most broken among the newly arrived.
Some among them had been physicians, upon the earth. Most had been nothing in particular there at all — only souls who had suffered enough in their own lives to know precisely how to sit beside another’s suffering without flinching from the sight of it. I learned that there were degrees within that country. Not degrees of punishment — never that — but degrees of readiness, as a man mending of a shattered limb cannot be asked to run before first he can stand. Further on, in reaches of that country I glimpsed but never entered, no creature did harm to any other. Nothing was hunted. Nothing was put to slaughter. It was the garden entire, restored the whole way through.
I was not yet fit for that. No soul made me feel the lesser for the knowing of it.
I passed what would have been years, had years yet held any meaning there, in the company of the healers. I wept for the beasts as hard as ever I wept for the men and women — harder, upon certain days. Slowly, the boy who had been shut within that closet, and the man who had gone on to shut others within closets of his own devising, began, by small degrees, to become one whole soul who might hold both truths at once without being torn asunder by either.
And because there is no time in that country, there was no contradiction at all in what followed. What had seemed to me the better part of a year — the garden, the reckoning, the whole of my childhood walked back through and at last set down, that long slow season among the healers — had required, by the clocks in the chamber I had left behind, the space of one and thirty minutes only.
Chapter Seven: The Three Who Are One
Near the ending of my time among the healers, Jesus led me to a place I had not known to seek. Two others stood there. I have no art sufficient to describe either in any fashion that would signify to a soul who had not stood before them, and so I shall not labor overmuch at the attempt. One felt as the very ground upon which all else stood — no cold and distant judge, nothing near akin to the one I had feared the whole of my life. The other moved as the air itself moves, or perhaps was the air itself; I never resolved which — and each time some grief loosened of a sudden in my breast, or some fear at last found its name, I understood, though none told me so, that here was the one at work.
“You have been wondering how it is we are constituted,” said Jesus, and I had been, though I had confided the wondering to no soul.
“There are three of you,” said I. “Yet all men say one God.”
“Both are true,” said he. “We have never once been apart, and never once been the selfsame. We did not begin apart and resolve to join together. We did not begin as one and afterward divide into three. There was no beginning to speak of at all. We have simply always been precisely this — three, and one, in the very same moment, for longer than time itself has stood to measure it by.”
“How can such a thing be?”
The one who felt as the ground made answer to that himself. “Because love was never a thing we resolved upon only once there was aught else to love. Love is what we already were, betwixt the three of us, before ever anything else had being. A Father loving a Son. A Son loving a Father. And love enough between the two that it was no mere feeling passing back and forth, but a Person — one real enough to stand as a soul in his own right.” The air about me stirred, gentle, unmistakable. “That is the one you have felt shifting things in your breast this whole while.”
“Then you are not three separate souls who merely abide well together.”
“We are not separate at all, in the manner you mean it,” said Jesus. “Picture three dancers so long practiced, so wholly given over each to each, that from any distance a man could not say where one body ended and the next began. Not because they have lost themselves one in the other. Because to give oneself over so entirely to a beloved proves, in the end, the most complete a soul can ever be. That is the thing you were made able to enter into. Not the dance as we three dance it — you shall remain forever yourself, and we are glad of it. But that manner of giving. That manner of never once standing alone within it.”
“I have spent the whole of my life believing that to stand alone was the only safety there was.”
“I know,” said he, and I felt the hand of the ground-one rest upon my shoulder, warm as I had imagined, the whole of my childhood, a father’s hand ought to feel, and never once had. “That is the great lie beneath every other lie you were ever given to believe. We shall spend the whole remainder of forever undoing that one particular thread, should it require the whole of forever to do it.”
Chapter Eight: The Choice
Near the very last, before the lift and the litter and the year that had been but one and thirty minutes, they sat me down and told me a thing I had not looked for: that I might remain.
“You need not go back,” said Jesus. “You might rest here. You have earned rest, whatever that word may ever have meant to you before now. No soul compels this. It must be a thing you choose.”
“What follows, should I choose to remain?”
“You heal, slower, gentler, the whole remaining way, without the cost of returning into a body that shall remember all of this the moment you wake,” said the Father, and said it plainly, leaning toward neither answer. “There is no wrong choosing here.”
“And should I go back?”
“It shall hurt,” said Jesus, and did not soften the saying of it in the least. “You shall wake in a body that carries still one and thirty minutes’ worth of absence, and sixty years’ worth of all that came before it. The memories go nowhere. Some mornings you shall open your eyes and feel the whole weight of all you have just passed through in this garden, fresh again, as though it had only now befallen you. You shall have labor to do, every day, for the whole remainder of your life. That labor does not cease merely for having met us here.”
“Then why should I go back at all?”
“Because I shall not cease coming with you,” said he. “Every single day. Not as a memory of this garden. As Myself, present, the very same as I sit here now. You shall never labor at it alone again, not for a single hour of it. And there are souls below who shall have need of precisely what you are about to become.”
The air stirred once more, near, steady. “I too shall be there,” said the Spirit, in whatever manner the Spirit says any thing at all. “Each time the old pain rises sudden, in the midst of some ordinary afternoon, I shall be the one you feel easing it before ever you have words for what has happened.”
I weighed the matter as long as I had need to, and no soul hurried me toward an answer.
“I choose to go back,” said I, at the last. “Not because I am unafraid. Because I believe the going back is itself a part of what all this was for.”
“Then let us go,” said Jesus, and his hand was upon mine still when the chamber in the hospital swam once more into view about me, and I asked, in a voice grown hoarse with a year’s weeping, whether some soul might bring me water.
