Chapter 11 #2
“I don’t remember being in the pile at all,” she said.
“Why are you so curious? I wouldn’t even know it’d happened if Phil hadn’t told me about it.
And if my wrist wasn’t broken. And if I didn’t have a concussion.
Tell me what you saw. Phil told me what you did, but I haven’t heard it from you. I want to know what you did.”
I told her my version. I told her about fighting the fire and climbing the trail at dawn to find her under the pile of debris.
I told her about touching her wrist and feeling no pulse and trying to dig her out from under the rocks and tree, but not being able.
I told her how I’d taken a few steps away and prayed.
And how I must have somehow unlocked the tumblers of the universe because I’d turned around and there she was, living again.
“So you levitated me out of the pile or something?” she said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not exactly. But it did kind of seem like it at the time.”
“You roped my soul back into my body?” she said. “Wow. That’s pretty crazy. Thank you for that.”
“I’m just telling you what it seemed like,” I said. “I’m not saying it actually happened.”
“Maybe you really did,” she said. “Maybe you’re, like, an angel of light. Did you smell any celestial perfume up there? Did any birds talk to you?” She couldn’t help the sardonic twist. It was her way.
“There were no birds,” I said. “I should also tell you, I kind of made a deal with the universe up there.”
“What kind of deal was that?” she said.
“I said I’d give you up if you lived through it,” I said. It seemed like she should know, even if she found it unconvincing. “That was my deal with God. You for you.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t read the fine print. But I think I’m not supposed to be with you anymore.” As I said them, the words seemed more absurd than ever.
“I thought when you saved someone you became their servant for life,” she said. “That’s what I always heard.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I said. “A live-in butler.”
She thought about it for a second. “You really think God cares that much about us?” she said.
“I think He cares about everything,” I said. “That’s what they say.”
“He has a lot of other things on His mind,” she said. “That’s what I think.” And then she laughed. “That would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it? If we had to leave each other now, after everything? I really hope that isn’t what’s happening.”
“Me, too,” I said.
We shared another moment of silence, pondering what it all meant, and then she laughed again, washing away our doubts.
“I’m not too worried about it, Arthur,” she said. “I think I’d probably know it if I’d been dead or not. The point is, you came and found me. That’s what I find amazing.”
A good thing about a book is the way it fills up your time.
It’s always there, ready to distract you from enormous tracts of your life.
You can always burrow down into the clauses of your language world and put the other, real world out of sight.
It can be sad, really, how selfish it makes a person.
I’d once liked to believe I’d become a writer because it connected me to other people, but sometimes, I had to admit, the opposite was true.
Writing allowed me to isolate. And with Sarah stuck in bed, and Phil standing guard, I went in deep.
It helped that I was entering a fertile period in the process.
The binding energy was starting to gather, and connections between far-flung chapters were starting to make themselves known.
I could see the text reaching out to itself and knitting into a big, beaded web of associations.
The Tree Book was itself becoming a kind of tree, branching toward the light.
Around the invisible trunk of research, a skeleton of language was building, leafing out into a shaggy bloom, sprays of color budding at the very tips.
It was such a mysterious process, writing a book.
Every new pass brought you a step deeper inside, and also laid a new layer on top.
Deeper and higher, around and around, the coursing energy of revision.
Whenever Sarah had a few minutes alone over the next week, she called from her bed.
I always picked up, not wanting to seem like the kind of person who succumbed to superstition.
As long as I wasn’t physically touching her, I told myself, I was still inside the letter of the law.
Not that I believed in the law, per se. But if I did, I wasn’t breaking it.
It became a joke between us. The miracle had both happened and not happened.
I wasn’t exactly giving her up, but I wasn’t wallowing in her presence, either.
We were drifting in a kind of bardo together, some in-between zone.
We were two bodiless voices communicating in the ether.
On her side, she wasn’t concerned about the situation at all.
“Are you worried about it?” she said. “Really?”
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe in God. Not like that, anyway.”
“Not at all?”
“Not really,” she said. “Do you really think He exists?”
“Not exactly.”
“Do you think I really exist?” she said. “Or is everything in the universe just a projection of your mind?”
“I think you exist,” I said.
“Are you sure?” she said. “This might all be a dream you’re having.”
“It’s not my dream,” I said.
“How do you know that?”
“Because in my dream I’d be fucking you right now.”
Sarah loved hearing about the miracle. She wanted me to tell her the story over and over again, like a fairy tale. She’d text me teasing notes.
“Is God watching you right now? Is he putting your name in his little book? Oh, that’s Santa Claus, sorry. I always get my omnipotent guys with white beards who defy the logic of space and time mixed up. My bad.”
Or: “Can you do me another miracle? My back itches. I can’t reach it. If you could deal with that, that’d be great….”
For her, the story of the miracle was evidence of my all-too-human mind in the grip of oxygen deprivation.
She also saw it as proof of my obvious, exultant love for her, and that made her happy.
I’d climbed a mountain to rescue her. What more could anyone ask?
It was the story that would seal our love.
A story to tell our grandchildren. The test was over. We’d won.
“I’m really glad you’re not like Abraham,” she said one night, late, as we lay in our respective beds, drinking our respective cups of tea. I was still working on my pages. She was finally back at home, but still quarantined, staring at her walls. “I doubt he told his woman anything.”
“I think the deal between Abraham and God was extremely private,” I said. “That was part of the bargain. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you about this, either.”
“It’s such a strange bargain, isn’t it?” she said. “Kill your child to prove your faith. It’s totally abusive, really.”
“God was giving Abraham a test,” I said.
“Yeah, I get that,” she said. “But it’s sadistic.”
“An act of faith only works if it’s kind of insane,” I said. “If it were reasonable, it would just be a normal, transactional agreement. I do this, you do that. If it isn’t crazy, it isn’t really a pure relationship to the divine. That’s one theory, anyway.”
“Thanks, Kierkegaard,” she said. “But why is God so needy? You’d think He’d be more above it all. I would think that, anyway.”
“You’d have to ask God that,” I said.
“I doubt He’d give me a straight answer.”
I escaped ever deeper into the book. I was spending hours in there, late into the night, to the exclusion of almost anything else.
In the mornings I woke up and made coffee and went directly to work.
I carried the manuscript around and made notes in the coffee shop, at the bar.
I walked away from the desk only to have another thought and go straight back and get it down before the brightness faded. It had its claws in me.
I was becoming happy with the Merle and Candy chapter, which I felt captured their warmth and optimism.
I liked the chapter on Muir, too. Writing against something was always a pleasure.
Sometimes I felt like all writing was against something or other.
The fairy chapter was turning into something surprisingly moving.
Between those pieces, I had a sturdy foundation in place.
I was able to read them through without a single complaint, which was about all I could ask for.
There was nothing in the sentences that bothered me anymore.
To go beyond that, to raise the hairs on my own neck, or to weep over the poetry of it all, was more than I could expect.
But to feel unbothered. I could get there.
I could navigate by the negative path once again.
As the days went on, the meaning of the miracle continued shifting in my mind.
I still worried that I was failing a test of some kind, succumbing to temptation, or lack of faith, but the more I bantered with Sarah on the phone and over text, the more the worries dissipated.
The whole meaning of the miracle seemed to be evolving.
I started understanding those blazing, smoke-filled moments as only one passage in a larger arc of meaning.
The interpretations surrounding the experience were fusing with the experience itself, changing it, blurring its lesson.
All the doubts were part of the greater event.
If it had even happened at all, which it probably hadn’t.