Chapter 12 #3
I parked in the visitors’ garage and proceeded to the front desk, where the nurse guided me to room 312.
I walked slowly to the elevator, passing an old man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank and a young woman holding a bloody rag to her head.
In every room, I imagined, there were other patients suffering.
There were victims of gunshots, circular saws, roach poisons, and cancers.
Had they all made their own bad deals with the Almighty? I didn’t think so. Only me.
My stomach was queasy as I rose in the elevator, drawing closer to Phil’s room.
I knew on a conscious level I hadn’t caused the accident with my divine disobedience, but even if that was the case, I could also see how it might be argued I’d caused it by my sneaking around.
If not for me, Phil and Sarah never would have been out on that road.
Phil would have been home, preparing for classes.
Sarah would have been at the library, shelving books.
They’d have eaten dinner together, and gone to sleep, and awakened this morning as happy or unhappy as they’d been the day before.
I could see how, through Phil’s eyes, I might be a vile, guilty person, with or without God’s help.
I almost pressed the button to go back down but I kept rising.
The elevator opened and I walked the last length to Phil’s room.
The air was bright and smelled like lemon disinfectant.
At the doorway I paused and took a deep breath, and did one last inventory of my intentions.
Was I here for the proper reasons? I asked myself.
Or was it only out of my own selfish need to feel virtuous?
I tried to peer through the contradictory emotions of shock, grief, guilt, and love, and reminded myself again that the love that Sarah and I had shared wasn’t any crime.
It was a gift we’d been given. Any sane person, including Phil, would understand that.
He’d also understand that the accident was unrelated to anything I’d done or failed to do vis-à-vis God.
At bottom, I told myself, I was here as an act of kindness. I wanted to serve Phil.
I stepped across the threshold to find a curtain dividing the room.
The near bed was empty, which meant Phil was in the far bed, behind the curtain.
There was a nurse in the room, checking some charts, and in the corner sat a man I recognized from Phil’s department.
He had a walrus mustache and reddish, unruly hair.
He looked like he’d already been there for hours.
He gazed up at me with exhausted eyes and communicated silently that this was a profound moment we were living through.
We were meeting in the deepest foundations of existence here.
We didn’t need to bother with introductions.
“I was hoping to see Phil,” I said. “Is he awake?”
“I think so,” the man said. He peered over at the bed. “Yeah. He is.”
“Is he seeing people now?” I said.
“I’ll find out,” the man said. “Phil? Are you okay with a visitor?”
“Who is it?” I heard Phil say.
The man looked over at me questioningly.
“Arthur,” I said.
The man looked at Phil, and waited, and for a moment my fate seemed to hang in the balance.
Which way would the pin fall? One path stretched into the room; another, somewhere else.
Maybe the two paths converged up ahead, or maybe they bent off into disparate realities.
Maybe the fork itself was an illusion. But maybe, too, the fate of my very soul was spinning at this moment, waiting for the arrow to land on its ultimate number.
The man turned toward me again, nodding me in.
“He’s going into surgery soon,” he said, “so he probably can’t talk long.”
“Okay.”
I walked beyond the curtain and stood at the foot of Phil’s bed.
Phil was lying on his back, his hands clasped on his stomach, a brace around his neck.
His face was abraded and swollen. On his head was a thick, gauzy helmet.
He had two black eyes. His cheeks were marred by yellowish smudges, bruises feathering out from under the bandage.
Looking at him, I could feel the last vestiges of doubt about the accident’s reality evaporating.
The shock of it went through me all over again. Sarah was gone.
Phil looked at me with druggy bewilderment.
“Arthur,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
He sighed and seemed slowly to shake his head. I waited as time elapsed in slow motion to hear the verdict. At last, after twenty years, he spoke.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. His eyes were hazy but filled with what seemed like genuine gratitude. “Thank you for coming. You’re a good friend.”
We didn’t talk long. Phil was still in shock, and muddled by painkillers, but in the time we had I could tell he was pleased I’d come.
I’d done the right thing. He didn’t seem to hold me responsible for anything.
He didn’t even seem to know about the affair, which was the best news of all.
The relief I felt was almost grotesque. The terrible, awful, liberating relief from the truth.
Going forward, I vowed, I’d never bring it up.
Whereas the day before, it had seemed evil to keep Phil in darkness, today it seemed evil to cast him into the light. The only thing to do now was be of use.
I talked to the other man in the room for a few minutes and gave him my email address.
In an hour, he said, Phil would be getting a piece of metal screwed into his hip and a rod inserted in his leg.
The recovery would take three months, at least, with much agony and grueling rehabilitation involved.
I told the man I wanted to be on any food tree or help wagon that developed.
Then I went home, feeling shaken, but cleaner.
Over the next few days, I fed myself, and bathed, and tended the regular stations of my life.
At times, shame rained down on me, and other times, morbid grief filled my bones, but overall, I kept busy.
I fed Phil’s cats and picked up his mail and volunteered with the group that coalesced to prep his house for his return.
I went to the hospital at least twice a day to advocate for him with the physical therapists and went grocery shopping so his refrigerator would be stocked when he got home.
I picked up books from his office and arranged a workspace he could use lying down.
At all moments, Sarah was on my mind. Where was she now?
I wondered. Her voice, her smell, seemed to float just out of sight.
For all the progress of humankind over the millennia, all the new technologies, all the new science, I found it hard not to think about her soul in the most old-fashioned terms. I found myself imagining Sarah as a ghost in the sky, or a watchful presence hovering somewhere behind the colors of the world.
I talked to her in my head as if she could hear me and entertained the idea that I’d meet her again someday on a cloud or in a misty alpine meadow.
The world conserves its matter, I told myself.
Why not its spirit, too? How could anything truly die?
It only transformed in some way. So went Phil’s compost thinking.
Wherever she existed, though, she was utterly inaccessible.
She never answered, as much as I talked to her.
It may have seemed like her essence was everywhere—infusing the pillows in her house and the waxy rhododendrons on her street—but it also was definitively not there.
It was like she was locked behind some soundproof wall.
It was shocking, I thought, how life never reconciled itself to death.
In the entirety of existence, life had never figured it out.
How could it? The leaves returned every year, but they weren’t the same leaves.
The future recurred in a weird way, and resembled the past, but it wasn’t the past. New people were born who looked like the old people, and echoed the old peoples’ lives, but they didn’t have any of the old memories.
There was obviously some kind of circle in play, but it was a broken, lopsided circle, kicking dust on every previous cycle, keeping the future always out of reach.
The circle of time was a cracked mandala, a rolling, oblong prison without windows.
After the accident, I didn’t work on the book at all.
I couldn’t stand being at home, so I took walks in the hills instead.
Traveling under the boughs of the incense cedars and ponderosa pines, over the cold, wet ground shining with slug trails, I thought about what I was going through, and tried to tease out all the theological ramifications.
The forest was helpful, as always, in reminding me of life’s natural seasons, the ebb and flow of creation and all that, but even the trees couldn’t answer all my questions.
If Sarah had died in a more commonplace way, without the seeming miracle involved, maybe I could have gotten over it more easily.
I might have grieved naturally and accepted our fate as a sad but comprehensible turn of events.
But instead the grieving was compromised.
I was haunted by something I couldn’t grasp.
I walked into town trying to distract myself, but the town was too small and didn’t offer anything of interest. And even on the empty streets, the ghosts of Sarah were everywhere.
I saw her disappearing around corners, passing in cars.
I imagined her shelving periodicals in the library and buying baguettes at the bakery.
I stood outside the bakery window for long minutes replaying our first polite conversations together, waiting for our numbers to come up.
I visited the offices of the Barn, but that was a mistake.
The rooms were so infused with her I almost collapsed.
I stood at the fence of the elementary school and watched the children playing, filled with aching desire.
I’d never dreamed of fatherhood before, but now, too late, the dreams poured through me.
I thought about the life we might’ve lived together, the mornings spent making French toast, the afternoons picking up the kids as they climbed off the bus.
I thought about the little shoes and little pants our child would’ve worn.
I wondered who their friends would’ve been.
Watching the kids clambering on the play structure, shaking the chains of a giant metal web, I wondered if the embryo had already been growing. Was it a double murder God had done?
I was living inside two realities at once, unsure which was true.
I was the one to blame yet I was not the one to blame; in either case, Sarah was gone.
There’d been a child; there’d never been a child.
Who could say? One thing I knew, standing there at the playground, I hated these fathers.
To watch them standing there around the perimeter of the playground, thumbing their phones, was to despise them for all their inattention, their utter ignorance of their gifts.
I wanted to walk over and knock the phones out of their hands.
Look at your children! I wanted to yell at them.
Look at your blessings! Don’t you know how lucky you are?
Don’t you know how soon this will all be gone?