There he stood with the heat rising slowly to his face. “I’m forty-two.”
“Mmm–hmm, mmm-hmm,” the pastor said, and he rested a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Tell me, don’t you think it’s time you gave your life over to something bigger than yourself?”
At first, Ryan found mission work difficult. The hotel rooms with their loamy beds and broken thermostats. The hospitality houses with their pet dander and overbuttered food. The forced camaraderie and the lack of solitude. After a few years, though, he grew accustomed to the food and the company, if never to the hotel rooms, and began to take pleasure in his duties. Gradually he developed a reputation for his thoroughgoing nature, his quiet sense of responsibility. The other missionaries noticed his reluctance to testify during prayer meetings but attributed it to the modesty of his character and the hushed power of his faith. They failed to see the truth, which was that he had—or seemed to have—the religious instinct but not the religious mind-set: his intuition told him that everything mattered, everything was significant, and yet nothing was so clear to him as that life presented a riddle to which no one knew the answer. But ultimately, to his surprise, evangelism was a job like so many others, where it did not matter what you believed, only what you did. A good thing, since he had never been exactly sure what he believed. He believed in holding on. He believed in keeping up. He believed in causing as little trouble as possible, which meant, he supposed, that he believed in squeaking by. He believed in English Breakfast tea and egg-white omelettes. He believed in pocket watches and comfortable shoes. He believed in going to bed at a reasonable hour. He believed in exercising three times a week. He believed there was a mystery at the center of the great big why-is-there-anything called the universe, and that it did not speak to us, or not in any language we could understand, and that it was an insult to the mystery to pretend that it did. He believed nevertheless that his sister was watching him from somewhere just out of sight, that even if her affection for him had died along with her body, her attention—her interest—had not. He believed that his life would make sense to him one day. He believed there was more light, more pain, in the world than ever before. He believed that the past was better than the future would be.
For his rookie post he had been sent to Seattle, the kind of safe, prosperous city, with a healthy network of ministries and outreach programs, to which the church assigned people who needed to be eased into the work. From there he moved on to Chicago, and then to New Swanzy, Michigan. After that, every six months or so, he would find himself being transferred yet again, sometimes to the most blighted area of a large city—East St. Louis, North Philadelphia, Hunters Point in San Francisco—sometimes to a fading farm town in the Plains or the Mississippi Delta, some small cluster of fields and houses strung together by a single-pump gas station and a couple of local businesses, one a grocery store with a sign that read STORE, the other a restaurant with a sign that read RESTAURANT.
The pastor would call him aside and say, “Shifrin, you know where we could use a man of your skills?”
“Where’s that?”
Seeley Lake, Montana. Or the Vine City neighborhood of Atlanta. Or Barlow, Mississippi.
And off Ryan would go, packing his bags and leaving his forwarding address with the secretary at Fellowship Bible. He knew evangelists who liked to talk about their feeling of backward homesickness, that overpowering sense of estrangement that alienated them from their friends and families and drove them into the world to spread the Gospel. Maybe, Ryan thought, he had developed his own variation of the disorder. No, he was not troubled by homesickness, of either the backward or the forward sort. He had grown used to the itinerant life, though, and no longer missed his old rootedness. What was home to him? What did it have to offer? If he had a home at all anymore, it was not a where but a when. Home was thirty-five years ago, when his parents and his sister were alive, and his bedroom walls were plastered with football posters, and his days were marked by triumph or defeat according to whether or not Becca Yeager had spoken to him at school.
He sensed that the church was grooming him for something. Seven years had passed since Pastor Bradley coaxed him into volunteering. Seven years of reflection, seven years of wandering. Seven years of trying to look through the sickness he could see in people’s bodies to the sickness the Bible said lay in their souls. Every few months he was posted to a new city where his colleagues would ask him to try his hand at a different brand of missionary work. The radio ministry, the literature ministry, the church-planting ministry. It was obvious to everyone where his talents lay—he was suited to literature, not to church-planting, and certainly not to radio. No matter how chancy the neighborhood, he could walk its streets with a stack of pamphlets and spend the day safely emptying them from his hands. He could explain the messages they contained in words that were, if not convincing, then at least clear and precisely shaded. And when they had fallen out-of-date, he could rewrite them, a task he found intimidating until he realized that preparing a religious pamphlet was simply a form of collage—splice a few Bible verses together with a story or two of sin and salvation and voilà: a lesson in scripture. His true gift, it turned out, was for titles. One night he happened to hear a discussion on public radio about great works of literature and their failed early titles, and though he was listening with only half an ear, he caught the speaker saying how poorly Gone With the Wind would have been received if Margaret Mitchell had allowed it to remain Tote the Weary Load, or A Farewell to Arms if Hemingway had persisted in calling it They Who Get Shot. He examined the pamphlets that were cataloged on the church computer. The first one to meet his eye was “The Power of Prayer.” Not bad, he thought, but what if it were “God’s Line Is Always Open”? Next came “You Can Be Free from the Bondage to Offenses,” which was—let’s face it—awful. He changed it to “Which Cheek? The Other Cheek.” And then there was “Salvation: The 5 Most Asked Questions,” which, after some thought, he recast as “Go to Hell! (and How Not To).” He had done enough tampering for one night, he decided. He printed fifty copies of each pamphlet and added them the next morning to the church’s literature stand.
That Wednesday, after the evening service, he discovered that the pamphlets were all gone, every last one of them. This was in Miami, at a busy Cuban church housed in the back of a thrift shop. It seemed possible that someone had simply stolen them for scrap paper. But the next day a team of missionaries took a boxful to distribute in the Art Deco district and returned to Ryan’s room in less than an hour. They had already given out the entire assortment, they reported, and afterward, walking home, had found fewer than half of them in the trash cans lining Ocean Drive. “What we’ve got here is the milk chocolate—no, the crack cocaine—of religious tracts,” someone said to Ryan. “I’m telling you, man, you should have gone into advertising.”
For the next three weeks, until another call came and he was appointed to Boxholm, Iowa, everyone called him the Ad Man.
He had traveled the entire country during his seven years of service. He had visited tiny clapboard houses exiled at the ends of wooded roads. He had picked his way through hivelike clusters of bars and apartment buildings. He had driven through the countless nameless suburbs that went snowflaking out from big Midwestern cities, giant recurring patterns of green grass and smooth black asphalt. He must have been witness to tens of thousands of people, and over time he had formed an interest in the varieties of injury they displayed. He could have put together a book sorting their traumas into two separate lists on the basis of where they lived, one for the city and one for the country. A Comparative Taxonomy of Wounds. On any city street you could spot the pulse flares of impacted heels, in any city hospital the elongated V’s of stab wounds, while at any country fair, any minor-league baseball game, you would find skin cancer pocks like small clusters of stars, sprained knees like forks of lightning, dislocated shoulders like the torchlit rooms of ancient houses. People in the city exhibited the sickly luster of pollution
rashes and the silver sparks of carpal tunnel syndrome, while in the country they wore the shimmering waves of home tattoo infections, the glowing white zippers of ligature abrasions. In the city you had your lungs and your stomach to distress you, in the country your skin and your liver, and everywhere, everywhere, there were the agonies of your head and your heart.
And yet somehow Ryan had escaped with barely a scratch.
He was convinced he had seen every disease imaginable, but one day he was in Brinkley, Arkansas, buying a bottle of water from a convenience store, when the girl at the cash register closed her eyes, planting her palms on the counter, and the entire armature of her skeleton showed blazing through her skin. Her lips shaped the numbers one, two, three, to the count of seventeen, until the pain had run its course and the light diminished.
She let the air out of her lungs and finished scanning his water bottle. Her eyes had the clarity of ice thawing in a silver tray. Nonchalantly she said, “That’ll be a dollar seventeen.”
Ryan was shaken. “Are you all right? Give me just a second—” The girl’s full name was printed on her badge: Felenthia Lipkins. “Give me just a second, Felenthia, and I’ll call the hospital.”
“It’s Fuh-lin-thia. Like Cynthia.”
“Fuh-lin-thia. Would you like me to call a doctor?”
“You said Felon-thia. Black girl working at the Superstop so I’ve gotta be a felon. Is that it?”
Her voice was salted with the cheerful testiness of someone who was merely pretending to be angry, and though he was relieved that she was feeling well enough to badger him, he never knew how to react in such situations. It was as if the claim that he had offended someone, no matter how spurious, tripped a set of switches in his head. Even if he realized he was being teased and that the appropriate response was to do some teasing of his own, he could only answer squarely, with gravity and embarrassment. “Look. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply … or to infer … to suggest that—”
“Relax, man. I’m just funnin’ with you.”
“Oh. Oh, all right then.”
The hot dogs revolved in their metal carousel. The drums of the frozen Coke machine made their ocean-in-a-seashell noise. Everything was spinning.
Ryan collected his water and headed for the door.
“Hey, what about that dollar seventeen?” Felenthia Lipkins called after him, and when he did an about-face she added, “Who’s the felon now?”
A week or so later, he was distributing leaflets in the parking lot of a cafeteria, watching the windshield wipers snap into place like flyswatters and fix the papers to the glass, when from behind him a voice said, “Excuse me.” He presumed the remark was addressed to someone else. As a rule, people avoided him while he was working. Some overburdened mother could walk outside with an armload of leftovers and three crying children at her legs, and still, if she spotted him near her car, she would linger by the building until he had moved on.
“Oh, I see how it is. Black girl says excuse me, and the white man won’t even answer.”
He swung around. It was her, Felenthia Lipkins, pronounced fuh-lin, not felon, the girl whose bones showed through her skin. She was standing with a little boy, no older than two, rubbing the luminescent blotch at the corner of his eye and repeating, “Yo, yo, what’s up?” to himself, as if he had just learned the phrase and didn’t want to forget it.
Felenthia cut her eyes at Ryan. “You’re the guy who thought he could leave without paying for his water, aren’t you?”
“And you’re the girl who hates white people.”
She nodded, impressed. “Touché. What are you doing with the flyers?” He handed her one from his satchel, and she read the verse printed at the top. “ ‘Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. Ecclesiastes 11:7.’ Well, that’s fine and all,” Felenthia said, “but you’re forgetting Ecclesiastes 11:8: ‘If a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all, but let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. All that comes is vanity.’ ”
“Wow. You know your scripture.”
“Preacher’s daughter,” Felenthia admitted, and she gave the kind of speedy little dilatory curtsey that could not be mistaken for anything but a joke. “You, though, I wouldn’t have guessed for a Christian type. Tan slacks, aftershave, gray hair in a side-cut. I was thinking businessman.”
“Well, in an earlier life, I was a stockbroker.”
“Uh-huh. And you made a billion dollars and stashed it away in the Cayman Islands and realized the hollowness of money so you resigned to devote yourself to—”
Which was when it happened again. She gasped, shutting her eyes, and her bones lit up. He could see them throbbing through her clothing, growing brighter with each pulse, every rib presenting itself to be counted. Her skull peered out from in back of her face. When she raised her hands to her cheeks, he saw her finger bones stacked on top of one another like the sunstruck windows of a skyscraper. Somehow she managed to support herself, though it must have been agonizing. The boy who was with her said, “Auntie Fen,” then turned it into a question, “Auntie Fen?” and tugged at her skirt.
Her knees pivoted and buckled. Ryan caught her just before she fell, holding her up by the arms. Together they waited for the episode to pass. He could not read his watch, so he measured time by the signal-circuit of a traffic light: two reds and a green, and then her pain surmounted some sort of peak and the brightness faded, lingering in a last flush of milky white. A hard sweat had broken out on her face. The boy was saying, “Auntie Fen, Auntie Fen, yo, yo, what’s up?” and a car was honking at the end of the aisle, and she tried to lift herself out of Ryan’s arms, but in the late-July heat that made the pavement ripple like a reflection in a pool of water, her legs kept keeling out from under her.
He waited until he was sure she had gained her footing before he let go. His work with the church had taken him to a thousand hospitals and nursing homes, so many that he frequently imagined the world was nothing but patients—there were recovering patients, and there were worsening patients, and there were patients whose time had not yet come. He had witnessed the effects of tuberculosis, anthrax, and malaria, of cystic fibrosis and viral pneumonia, Huntington’s and multiple sclerosis, lymphoma and dysentery. He had seen cancer after cancer, infection after infection, diseases that filled the body with bales of fluttering light and diseases that brushed lightly over the skin like snowflakes. Never before, though, had he witnessed something like this, a disease that confined itself so tightly to one system and filled it so uniformly, that blazed with such radiance and then vanished so completely. It was as if a firework had detonated in the shape of her skeleton. He could still see the afterimage on his retina. What was wrong with her, he wondered, what was she undergoing, and this time he could not stop himself from asking.
“A little indigestion,” she said.
“No, seriously, what just happened to you?”
“A touch of the flu.”
Clearly she wasn’t going to give him an honest answer. “Do you and your son need some help getting home?”
“Nephew. And I think we’ll manage.”
She pointed to the one-way street that ran past the cafeteria, where an apartment building was separated from the interstate by a spinney of pine trees. On either side of the walkway, rising from the grass, stood a pair of fluted concrete pillars, their lines meant to carry the eye to heaven, but the cement had fallen loose from them in chunks, exposing veins of black rebar that absorbed the sunlight and directed the eye inward rather than upward.
“That over there,” Felenthia said. “That’s us.”
Ryan watched her cross the road with her nephew, his great big steps and her tiny baby steps, until they reached the apartment building and disappeared behind a screen door. Then he returned to his satchel and his flyers.
That was the afternoon the pastor called him aside to tell him he was being transferred again. “Detroit. August first. Pack y
our bags, Brother Shifrin.” The first of August was only eight days away, and Ryan presumed he would not meet the girl again, but as it happened, he saw her once more before he left town.
He was riding with one of the other missionaries through Wheatley, a small agricultural community a few miles down the highway from their hotel, when they came to a stop sign across from a swimming pool. The sky was thick with tea-colored clouds, the kind that had a yellowing effect on the landscape. The trees and bushes stood motionless to the smallest leaf. Though it was barely noon, the insects were already intoning their night songs. The pool was not crowded, and Ryan was surprised to see Felenthia sitting at the end of the diving board, reading a magazine with her elbows on her knees. She looked wholly at ease, as if she had never suffered so much as a hangnail. The boy treading water beneath her had a glittering infection in his right eye. The other boy, who did a cannonball into the deep end while Ryan sat watching from the passenger seat, wore a fresh puncture mark, a luminous crater high on the shoulder plane of his back. Felenthia swatted at the air with her magazine. She might have been shooing mosquitoes. “Y’all fools quit splashing,” she said.
Ryan lost sight of her as his car pulled away. The next day, alone, he swung into the Superstop where she worked and found the gas pumps disconnected. Someone had nailed a sheet of plywood over the door, writing across it in big handpainted letters, CLOSED DUE TO VANDALISM, ROBBERY, AND THE “CROOKS!!” AT PATTERSON INSURANCE. He went over to the window and peered inside. The damage was considerable. Most of the shelves had been overturned. The microwave was missing its door. The cash register was lying busted in a pool of blank lottery tickets. The soda dispenser had been torn from its cords and hoses, staining the wall with plumes of dark brown syrup. The road maps and potato chips, Starlite mints and charcoal briquettes, had all been swept into a reef beneath the shattered glass of the freezers. Suddenly it seemed to Ryan that he had looked out over this same vista a million times before, as if he were a rich man and these broken machines every morning were the city that greeted him as he stood at his penthouse window. He found the feeling hard to shake.