Kevin Brockmeier - The Illumination

In the fourth decade of the Illumination, shortly after Ryan’s eighty-first birthday, he was selecting an orange from a display at the supermarket when a whistle rang in his ears, beginning with a greaselike sizzle, then rising slowly and leveling off. Suddenly the floor was cool against his cheek. Dozens of oranges were rolling around him like billiard balls. He did not remember lying down, but he must have. The woman hovering over him said, “Are you all right? Took a little spill there, didn’t you, sir?” and though he could see the arthritis shining in her fingers like a string of pearls, she gripped his hand to help him stand up.

Maybe that was when it started, or maybe it was a few days earlier, when he lost track of himself while taking his afternoon walk and regained his thoughts wandering through the lobby of an office building several blocks away, but soon Ryan realized that something had happened to his mind. It became difficult for him to distinguish the past from the present. He could no longer be sure he knew where he was. One minute he might be an old man waiting in line at the bank to make a cash withdrawal, and the next he would be nine years old and in Miss Fitzgerald’s music class, sitting crisscross applesauce between Jeffrey Campbell and Jessica Easto, angry that the instrument box had been nearly empty by the time it reached him, which meant that he had gotten stuck—again!—with the rhythm sticks instead of the hand drums. He might be jimmying a spoon under the lid of a jar and look up to see the sun shining on a snowcapped Russian mountain, or clouds breaking over the Gulf of Mexico, or the moon wavering in the bug-stitched mirror of the lake where his college girlfriend kept her cabin. He could never tell. Or perhaps he would be watching the palm trees streak past his windshield, flinching at their trunks as the wave spun his car in circle after circle, then find himself attending an air-conditioned Midwestern church service where someone he could not recollect having met, a pastor with the pliant, swaying voice of a yoga instructor, was offering a sermon in celebration of his retirement from the mission. That was where he seemed to be right now: the church.

“We are here today not only to worship the Lord,” the pastor said, “but to pay tribute to a man who has dedicated his life to His service, Brother Ryan Shifrin,” and that was him , Ryan thought, he was Brother Ryan Shifrin. And his sister was Sister Judy Shifrin, and his father was Father Donald Shifrin, and his mother was Mother Sarah Beth Shifrin, and his dog was Scamper Shifrin—Scamp for short—and there she came bounding across the lawn with her tongue lolling over her lips, the tag on her collar jingling like a sleigh bell.

“Scamp! Scamper! Here, girl!”

Either she did not hear him, or Ryan merely imagined he had called out, because she disappeared beneath the pulpit, and when she reemerged, she was not his dog but Mr. Castillo’s, Max—no, Trinket—barking and lunging at the pastor’s vestments. And then there was no dog in the church at all. The stained-glass window was casting its tinted shapes onto the carpet. The communion rail was riddled with plum-size holes. The banner on the pulpit read, I LOVE THE HOUSE WHERE YOU LIVE, O LORD, THE PLACE WHERE YOUR GLORY DWELLS, and for the first time in years, Ryan thought of the beaten journal of love notes the boy with the bruised backside had given him a few days ago.

I love driving to the bluff and drinking cheap red wine out of paper cups with you .

I love how beautifully you sing when you think no one is listening .

I love it when the computer freezes up or we get stuck in a traffic jam and you lean back and pull out your old “Ahhh! This is the life!” routine .

When had he lost it, he wondered, where had he left it behind?

“Now, some of you may not know this,” the pastor was saying, “but Brother Shifrin has been working for the church in one capacity or another for more than forty years. Kids, that’s longer than some of your parents have been alive. You may not believe it”—he patted his chest—“but that’s longer than old Pastor Wallace himself has been alive.”

Ryan was sitting at the outside corner of the left front pew, directly beneath the giant black box speaker on its crossed metal stilts. The altar was lined with Easter lilies. He couldn’t wait to start high school next fall, and his hip was aching with a soft lucidity, and his hands were stained with liver spots and petechial hemorrhages, but that did not keep him from catching the Frisbee his scoutmaster was throwing through the crisp November air, nor from knocking on a hundred doors each afternoon with his satchel and his leaflets, though he confessed he found it hard these days to tie his shoelaces and operate his telephone, and he had been away from home now for such a long time.

It seemed to him that he had grown old not in the usual way, day by day, but in a series of sudden jerks. His sister died, and ten years fell on his shoulders. The flames burst from the building in Ouagadougou, and down came another twenty. The street tiles cracked, the stadium collapsed, the shanties were flattened, and the years fell over him like rain.

Why had he never married or fathered children?

He wanted a Heaven of starting over, a Heaven of trying again.

The pastor was speaking gently into the microphone. “And when you listen to the testimonials I’ve received, I am sure you will say to yourself, as I have, Truly, this is a man whose work has been blessed by the Lord. For what better life can we imagine than a life of Christian service, a life of waiting upon the Creator and His beloved children? Before I read the first of these letters to you, though, I’d like to ask that you all please rise and join me in a song that exemplifies the spirit with which Brother Shifrin has dedicated himself to the church, number two hundred fifteen in our hymnal, ‘Teach Me Lord to Wait.’ ”

As the organ resounded and the benches creaked, Ryan thought of his sister: how she had loved to sing, and how young she had been when she relinquished her life, and how assiduously he had taken it up and lived it.

What do you think, Judy? What do you make of that? Did I keep it warm enough for you?

Now the worshippers were on their feet, performing a hymn he knew by heart, their voices flowing just alongside the melody, as if tracing the banks of a stream. And if a bomb were to land on them as they sang so humbly and sincerely, the splendor of their bodies would bathe the town in silver. And if every bomb flew from its arsenal, every body displayed its pain, the globe would catch fire in a Hiroshima of light. And maybe, from somewhere far away, God would notice it and return, and the cinders would receive Him like a hillside washed in the sun.

She was in Seattle, at the bookstore across from the university, with the high windows and the wooden chairs and the microphone that lent a floating electric quality to her voice, and The Age of Girls and Boys kept creaking as she flexed its spine, and her mouth was shedding a raw white light that sharpened to a knifepoint every time her lips came together, and she could see that she had wrested the audience’s attention, their genuine attention, though whether they were listening to her or watching the light show was anyone’s guess, and there in the second row, sitting with his tousled hair and his loose-necked posture, was the man who had approached her the night before, at the event in Bellingham, to sign a galley proof of Off-Campus Apartments , her sad sunken ship of a first novel. She could hear him reacting to the story she was reading, making half-voiced subliminal noises of agreement or fascination, chuckling when she mentioned the widow’s inexplicable accent, and nodding vigorously, gymnastically , as if choosing sides in a debate, at “the world, the good and beautiful world, where people got married and had children and slowly grew old together.” Was he experiencing his feelings or merely demonstrating them? She couldn’t decide. Afterward, he made sure to claim the last spot in line, mothing away to investigate the new releases, when a woman with a tote bag fell into place behind him, then drifting back over to the procession. She had already autographed twenty or thirty books by the time he reached her.