Molly laughed when Maggie reported to her what Tony had said, but she was on another track.
“But how did you get into him and from him to Maggie?” she pressed.
“I really don’t know,” he responded. “There is a lot about this that is a mystery to me.” Tony wasn’t sure why he lied about the kiss. Perhaps information was advantage and he was not ready to trust even these two. Maybe it was something deeper. Whatever, he shrugged it off as he had many times before.
“Hmmm,” mumbled Maggie, not convinced. “So why are you here, in our worlds?”
“I really don’t know,” he answered, which was mostly true. “I suppose we will have to trust God with that.” In his mouth his words sounded plastic and fake, and he winced, but it was an easy way to avoid the question. “So, Maggie, how did you two meet?” he asked, changing the subject.
Maggie explained that she was employed as an on-call practicing registered nurse, referred to as a resource RN, at OHSU and Doernbecher. She had to work a set number of minimum hours per month to maintain her contract, but she usually worked substantially more. Portland had been the end of a long migration west after the hurricane had decimated her family in New Orleans. The few distant relatives who were left planted new roots in Texas, but she wanted something different and greener and took jobs along the Pacific until she landed in the big hospital on the hill.
“Is that where you got your accent?” asked Tony.
“I don’t have an accent,” retorted Maggie. “I have a history.”
“We all have histories,” added Molly. “Everyone is a story. It was Cabby that brought the two of us together; this was a while back, before Lindsay got sick. I found this house but couldn’t swing the expenses on my own…”
“And I had been in town for a while and was looking for a place to settle,” interjected Maggie.
“So one day,” continued Molly, “Cabby and I are at Trader Joe’s not far from my apartment, and he runs a shopping cart into this pyramid of cantaloupe. Maggie ‘happened’ to be there and helped me clean up. She couldn’t stop laughing and turned a mess into a new possibility. She was an answer to prayer, and that’s what Maggie is. God’s kiss of grace.”
Maggie smiled. “I would say the same thing about Molly and the kids. After my ‘history,’ home is not as much about a place you belong as people you belong to. I belong here.” Tony knew it was true. He could feel it as she spoke, and he suddenly felt lonely. He quickly changed the subject again.
In the course of the next hour Tony tried to explain what it was like to be inside someone’s head, to see with their eyes, how he could look at something other than what they were looking at as long as it was in their field of vision. Maggie made him demonstrate until she was convinced. To answer her concerns about propriety, he explained how he could hop-turn until he was looking away, allowing privacy, but he neglected to mention what he could see when he did. He avoided any mention of the gift to heal and nothing about the barren wasteland of his own heart and soul. Jack, who was still a mystery to him, also did not make it into the exchange.
They had question after question about Jesus, and couldn’t believe he was serious when he told them Grandmother, the Holy Spirit, was an old Native American woman.
“I don’t believe this is happening!” said Molly at one point. “Maggie, I’m talking to a man who’s living inside your mind. It is a great story, but we can’t tell anyone. They’d think we’re nuts! I’m thinking we’re nuts!”
It was well past midnight when Maggie and Molly discussed the schedule for the coming couple of days to make sure all bases were covered.
“Now don’t stay up all night visiting, you two,” Molly said and snickered, dismissing herself and heading for her room, stopping as she always did to check on Cabby.
Maggie sat thinking in silence for a few moments. “Well,” she finally stated, “this is awkward!”
“You think?” Tony responded.
“Can you read my mind? I mean, do you know what I’m thinking?”
“Nope! I have no clue what you’re thinking.”
“Whew!” She breathed a deep sigh of relief. “Thank God for small favors. If you knew what I was thinkin’, we’d a got a divorce already.”
“Been there, done that,” he revealed.
“Well, you can tell me about all that another time. I’m tired and I want to go to bed, just not sure how to do that with you, you know, roaming around.”
“If it helps, I don’t think I’ll be in your head all the time,” he explained. “I wasn’t in Cabby’s every minute. Somehow he told God that he didn’t want me in his dreams and so I wasn’t. I was back with Jesus and Grandmother.”
“Dear God, I do not want this man in my dreams. Amen!… You still here?”
“Yeah, sorry! I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Well, you figure it out and let me know. I will be right here sitting in this chair waiting.” With that Maggie reached over and pulled a fleece blanket from the couch and draped it over her legs, settling in for what could be the night.
“Maggie?” Tony hesitated.
“Tony?” she responded.
“May I ask you a favor?”
“Maybe. Depends.”
“I would like to go up to OHSU tomorrow and, you know, visit myself.”
“That’s your favor? You want me to take you up to the hospital so you can see yourself in a coma?”
“Yeah, it probably sounds silly, but it’s just something I need to do.”
Maggie thought for a couple of moments. “Actually, I’m not sure that I can do that, even if you are still here tomorrow. Neuro ICU is not where I work, and they have a closed area, you know; only relatives and people on a short list can visit, and even then only two at a time, which in your case is not the problem. Cabby gettin’ in there was nothing short of a miracle, and I’m sure they are not too happy about it. You got any next of kin that I can contact and go in on their coattails?”
“No, I don’t, wel—no, not really.” He hesitated and Maggie waited, her eyebrows raised in question.
“Well, I have a brother, Jacob, but I don’t know where he is. We haven’t talked in a few years. He’s really all I have and I don’t really have him.”
“No other family?”
“Ex-wife on the East Coast and a daughter that lives close to her who hates her father.”
“Hmmm, you always had such a positive effect on people?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Tony admitted. “I’ve tended to be the cross other people have had to bear.”
“Well,” Maggie noted, “I am prayin’ right now that God would remove one particular cross from me. That’s what I’m prayin’, just so you know, but if you are still here tomorrow, I’ll try and figure out a way so you can go and visit yourself.” She shook her head, incredulous at her situation.
“Thanks, Maggie. By the way, I think you can go to bed, because I think I am leaving…”
He didn’t know how, but he sensed it coming this time, and as quickly as he wondered about it, he was gone, again asleep, in between.
11
BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
What one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.
—C. S. Lewis
Tony woke with a start, a little groggy and uncertain of his whereabouts. Stumbling out of bed, he drew back the curtain and to his surprise realized he was back in the bedroom of the ramshackle ranch where Jesus supposedly lived. But it was larger and better appointed. His bed was solid and crafted, a significant improvement over the springs and old mattress he had first experienced. Hardwood had replaced part of the plywood floors, and at least one of the windows was now airtight and double-paned.
He heard a knock at the door, like before, three taps, but when he opened it expecting to find Jesus, it was Jack holding a tray of breakfast and coffee and sporting a big grin.
“Oh, hi, Jack-from-Ireland!” exclaimed Tony. “I wondered if I would ever see you again
after our first little encounter.”
“It is a delight and gift to see you again, Anthony.” Jack smiled and Tony stood aside, letting the man and his burdens into the room where he set them down carefully on an end table and proceeded to pour a black, aromatic liquid into a larger than normal mug. He turned, handing the drink to Tony.
“Black coffee, if I remember. As far as I am concerned, you can never get a cup of tea big enough.”
Tony nodded his thanks and took the first sip, smooth and sliding like silk. “And I am pleased to let you know,” added Jack as he took the cover off a plate of eggs over easy, some steamed vegetables, and a buttered scone, “that you and I are destined to see a great deal of each other, in time as it were.”
“I’m not sure if I should even ask what that might look like,” muttered Tony, enjoying his first bite of food.
“No matter,” sighed Jack, pulling up a cushioned chair and plopping himself down. “This moment contains all moments anyway, no need to be anywhere other than now.”
“Whatever,” Tony acquiesced. He had become more at ease with his own lack of comprehension, even for words spoken in his own language. “Let me ask you this, Jack, if I may…” He waved his fork in a spiral motion in the man’s direction, as if to make his question more pertinent. “This place, this in-between-time place where you and I are right now, is this the afterlife?”
“Oh, heaven’s no!” asserted Jack, shaking his head. “This is more the inner-life, not that it is independent of what you consider the afterlife, which you should know is more accurately the life-after.”
Tony still held his fork in midair, frozen as he tried to follow.
“You are caught, as it were, in between life-before and life-after, and the bridge that is connecting the two is inner-life, the life of your own soul.”
“So where do you live?”
“Well, I live wherever I am, but my dwelling is in life-after. Dear boy, I am only visiting you here, in between.”
Tony chewed his food but hardly tasted it, his mind awhirl. “So this afterlife, I mean, this life-after, what is it like?”
“Ah, now there is a question.” Jack sat back into the chair pondering, absentmindedly pulled out his pipe, still lit, from his jacket pocket, slowly inhaled, and returned it to its nest before returning his gaze to the man across from him. He let the smoke emerge from between his lips as he spoke.
“You are asking me something where the knowing is in the experiencing. What words exist that truly communicate the sensations of a first love, or an unexpected sunset; the smell of jasmine, gardenia, or oriental lilac; or the first time a mother holds her baby; or the moments you are surprised by joy; or a piece of music that is transcendent; or standing for the first time on a mountain you have conquered; or a first taste of honey from the comb… Throughout history we have been searching for words that link what we know to what we long for, and all we get are glimpses through a glass darkly.”
He scanned the room. “Here, let me give you an example.” Jack walked to the dresser by the window, on which, among other items, rested a garden pot. In it bloomed a stunning multicolored tulip. He brought it back and sat down. Carefully he began to break away the dirt, gently so as not to injure the plant, until he revealed the bulb, the stem, and flower above.
“This is a classical parrot tulip,” he explained, “grown right in your own backyard. Notice”—he leaned in so Tony could look closely—“these extraordinary petals. They are feathery and twisted, fringes of scalloped edges that curl around a variety of colors, gold and apricot and bluish-purple. Look, there are even ravines of green that run through the yellows. Magnificent!
“Now look here, Tony, at the bulb that produced this wondrous flower. It looks like an old piece of wood or clod of dirt, something that one would discard if one didn’t know better. It really is nothing to look at, nothing that would draw your attention, utterly common. This root, Tony…” Jack was animated, now carefully replanting it in the pot, moving and packing the soil with tender care. “This root is the life-before, everything you know and experience rippled as it is with foretastes of something else, something more. And within what you know and experience, all part of the root, you find hints of the flower—in music and art and story and family and laughter and discovery and innovation and work and presence. But having seen the root only, could you begin to imagine such a wonder as the flower? There will be a moment, Tony, when you finally see the flower, and in that moment everything about the root will make utter and complete sense. That moment is the life-after.”
Tony sat and stared at this beautifully simple but complex flower, stunned as if he were in the presence of something painfully holy. Again he wondered, Where have I been all these years? He had never really lived, as far as he could remember. But along with that thought came others, small remembrances of mystery that had penetrated his rush and agenda, bits of light and love and wonder and moments of joy that had whispered to him in his pleasures but screamed for attention in his pain. He had never been one to sit, to listen, to look, to see, to breathe, to wonder… and it had cost him, of that he was now certain. He felt, in this moment, like a waste, expressed in the damage of the land outside this window.
“Tony, you are a root,” Jack said, interrupting his spiral, “and only God knows what the flower will be. Don’t get lost castigating yourself for being a root. Without the root, the flower can never be. The flower is an expression of what now appears so lowly and unimportant, a waste.”
“It’s the melody,” exclaimed Tony, finally understanding, even if only a little.
Jack smiled and nodded. “That is exactly right. It is the melody.”
“Will I know you, Jack? In the life-after, will I know you?” Tony hoped he would and needed to ask.
“Completely! In flower-ways that you cannot begin to comprehend looking as a root at a root.”
Tony thought he understood but waited for more, which Jack was kind enough to give.
“The way you see me right now, Anthony, is the best that your recollections can conjure up, a composite of memory and imagination of how your mind thinks I should look to you. You are a root looking at a root.”
“And if I saw you in the life-after?”
“Well, this might sound like sheer self-aggrandizement to you, but it would be true for anyone you encountered in the life-after. If from where you sit now you saw me as I truly am, you would probably fall on your face in reverence and worship. The root would see the flower and it would undo you.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Tony, surprised at the answer. “You’re right, that does sound like you are full of yourself.”
“In life-after, I am everything that I was intended to be, more human than I ever succeeded in being on earth, and fully dwelt within by everything God is. You have barely heard one note of a symphony, seen one color of a sunset, heard one drop of a waterfall. You are rooted in your life and grasping after anything that will bring you a sense of transcendence, even turning other roots into the imagination of flowers.”
Tony stood up and began pacing the room. “Jack,” he confessed, “my life that I defined as a success is actually a total shambles, and yet you’re suggesting that underneath it all, there is an unimaginable beauty? Are you telling me that I matter? That even though I am this ugly, ordinary-looking root, that I was designed and intended to express a unique and extraordinary flower? That’s what you are telling me… right?”
Jack nodded, again removing his pipe for a puff.
“And I assume,” Tony continued, “this is true about every human being, each person born—”
“Conceived!” interrupted Jack.
“Each person ‘conceived’ on the planet, each one living in life-before, each one is a root in which a flower is waiting? Right?”
Again Jack nodded, and now Tony walked over and positioned himself directly in front of this man, leaned forward and put a hand on each shoulder until their faces were inches apart. Through gritted
teeth came the next words, biting and desperate: “So why all the crap, Jack? Why all the pain and disease and war and loss and hate and unforgiveness and cruelty and brutality and ignorance and stupidity and…” The litany of evils came spewing out, a list terrible in their speaking. “You know what we do with roots, Jack. We burn them, we use and abuse them, we destroy them, we sell them, we treat them like the disgusting pieces of detritus we think we are ourselves!” With that pronouncement he pushed himself back and away from Jack, who had listened kindly to the tirade, never changing his expression.
Tony walked over to the window and looked out, seeing nothing in particular, and combed his hand through his hair. The silence, hanging thick and almost separating like a curtain, was brushed aside by Jack.
“The problem of pain,” he said softly, “is a root issue.”
Tony heard the answer behind him and dropped his head, looking at the floor.
“I don’t know, Jack,” he revealed. “I don’t know if I can face all my stuff. The pile is awful and high.”
“No worries, dear boy,” responded Jack kindly. “You will cross that road when you come to it. You must remember, Tony, that there is not one good thing, or memory, or act of kindness, not one thing that is true and noble and right and just, that will be lost.”
“And what about all the bad, the cruel, the wrong?”
“Ah, there’s the real miracle.” Jack must have gotten up from his chair because Tony now felt a firm, meaty grip on his shoulder. “Somehow the pain, the losses, the hurt, the bad, God is able to transform these into something they could have never been, icons and monuments of grace and love. It is the deep mystery how wounds and scars can become precious, or a ravaging and terrifying cross the essential symbol of relentless affection.”
“Is it worth it?” whispered Tony.
“Wrong question, son. There is no ‘it.’ The question is and has always been, ‘Are you worth it?’ and the answer is and always, ‘Yes!’ ”
The statement hung in the air like the last note of a cello, lingering while fading. Tony felt a tightening of the grip, friendly and encouraging, loving even, and Jack offered, “Would you like to go for a hike? See the property? Meet some of your neighbors? You should probably put some clothes on.”