Dying was less painful and so much worse than you thought it would be. Pain does not describe the sensation of being slowly shaken out of sentience while your wife clings to you and begs you not to go.

There is an unbearable vibration to it that seems to go on without ceasing, increasing in power as sight and sound, taste and touch crumble in the background of your awareness. When you were younger, your uncle let you come over when he was demolishing the old shed in his yard. The strange, T-shaped tool you used made your arms numb as you tried to break the floor . You thought the shaking was going to tumble out your back teeth as the point scrabbled against the concrete.

This is like that but consuming, terrible, sharp. The sensation of losing your body is not painful; it is worse.

You know it’s close when the insane back-and-forth movement of your soul starts to fade. You embrace the void, eager to finally shed this skin. Eager to take the high dive so that the locusts, ripping apart your stomach as you stare into the depths, will sheath their teeth.

I’ve been told by others that dying was like sinking into a warm bath, like tasting a nectar, honey-sweet on the tongue. It was not like that for me when I passed, and it is not like that for you.

You fall into the bliss of nothingness as your wife sobs.

Afterwards defies comparison to anything you’ve felt before. The blank space before a dream is perhaps the closest thing. There is no pain. Really, there’s not much of anything. No vistas, no symphonies of trumpets. No red-horned man, no awakening into another form, no great merge into the cosmos.

Your mind is alert. The relief you feel at continuing to exist is considerable. Your curiosity moreso.

That’s when I find you, as much as we can find anything in this place. Without a body to process the scattering of light waves or to give scale to space, movement is intuitive and sporadic. In the life before I would have climbed a watchtower so that I could be the rescuer. But here, I am looking for lost, and you are, so we manage to wind up together.

I tell you, “Don’t be afraid,” to the extent that I can. Speech here is impossible. How do you talk with no mouth? How to hear words with no ears? I have no eyes to see the shapes your lips would form, if they existed. Instead we share our memories, mind to mind, with a sense of feeling that comes as well. We speak by exchanging ourselves in a way which is as frustrating as building with sand, and moreover, sublime.

So rather than greet you, I send you an early field of Egyptian campion I had found one morning, stirred by the wind and creating beauty in an expanse of rock and dust. I send you the feeling of a lamb worrying my knuckles and blessed water to my ankles when the sun fell on me like an anvil. Korah laughing when I showed him how grass would whistle between his thumbs, the laugh of a child looking up to his older brother. Small good parts of my life.

This seems to calm you. I catch a scrap of your first steps as a child, vision not quite formed, toddling limbs.

We share small thoughts, back and forth, like a child and a parent playing catch. Through your eyes I see your home, a spacious place of glass and new metal at the top of an impossibly tall building You see the hide tent I carried through the desert.

You show me the day you and your wife signed papers in front of a judge. She sat high on her throne and spoke kind words in a voice that was not usually kind. You were thrilled and pressed your wife’s hand, shaking it with excitement at the child joining your family.

Laughing to myself, I showed you when Shuah accused me of stealing chickens before the officer of fifty, and Shuah’s face when the officer decided I had done nothing wrong. Then I showed you the fine meal those chickens had made for the hungry children who flitted through our camp.

The time passes pleasantly. The space between us is warm with the beginning of a friendship until a slight pause in our “conversation.” You break the silence by sending me something like a question.

There was a woman, hair cut like a warrior’s helmet, with a white rod she was using to mark on a green rectangle on the wall. There were a series of symbols: a large circle, an arc, a smaller circle, a bar, a circle split in two, another bar, and then a sun, a moon, and stars. Arrows flowed from one symbol to the other. The divided circle is in sharper focus.

Your memory ends and I pause, search for an answering recollection, then send it winging toward you.

Moses wore brown, sand-baked robes, as did we all, except the Levites when performing ordinances. His hair was black and his eyes were black and sharp.

He spoke, “Even those who had passed beyond this life did the LORD show unto me. And the LORD shows mercy unto them, and lovingkindness, as he has not brought them destruction despite their rebellion, so that even in death they may know that he is the LORD, and that he is mindful of his people.” Moses and I locked eyes, and I had looked away. Korah had been dead for quite some time at this point. I hoped he would find mercy. I expected I would not.

I think you are beginning to understand. It is different now. We are not what we once had been. There would be no seeing your wife or daughter.

I send you the Egyptian campion again. The feeling of my mother’s skin against mine. Cold air when I stepped out of the tent at night when I couldn’t sleep and being inside felt like choking.

It is not enough. Nothing can cut through your grief in this moment as your memories come over me, pulling me down into your youthful self with the violence of a thunderstorm.

The helmeted woman is back, and the green rectangle. You are in a small room, sitting on hard chairs, with several other young women around you.

She speaks. “Girls, Satan is trying hard to tempt you. The scriptures tell us that he will deceive the very elect, and, well, ‘Go and watch the news,’ right? What kind of things is Satan telling us are good, but really aren’t?”

One girl raised her hand, “Umm, R-rated movies?”

“Yes, absolutely,” said the teacher, and she wrote on the rectangle with the rod. There was a long pause.

“Drugs, Sister Anderson,” said the girl closest to you.

The girl who just spoke was wearing a white dress. Her hair cut through the fabric like inky waterfalls down her shoulders.

“Yes, Taryn, and you young ladies need to watch out. There are so many these days. My son is a policeman and he tells me all kinds of stories.” More writing.

“Gays,” piped up a girl wearing a simple shift worn to thinness, who then shrunk back into herself, as if the group was going to tear her apart for speaking at all.

Sister Anderson pulled her wrinkles into a scowl. “Same-sex attraction Melody, but yes. I’m sorry you girls need to hear about this.  People are even talking about the government making it so that those people can marry.”

You snuck a look at Taryn, your neighbor in white. She was studying her hands in her lap.

“That’s like, so gross,” you said, and crossed your arms.

“Yeah, I can’t believe that you could actually do that with another girl,” said the first girl.

“Read what Moses said in Leviticus,” Sister Anderson said. “It doesn’t get much plainer than that.”

Guilt. Guilt so heavy through the whole of you, ingots of guilt in every cell, immobilizing.

It was night and you were next to Taryn, both wrapped in bedrolls, sheltering in a gossamer thin tent with the girls from the class sleeping all around you. Taryn’s eyes locked with yours. She nodded.

You stretched out toward her, and your lips touched, parted, then touched again.

It was an unskillful kiss and seemed to fill you with joy. Your smile covered your face when it was over, and you giggled softly. “Shhh,” said Taryn, then turned away from you. But she reached back, and you fumbled your hand into hers. Her breathing softened into sleep.

You didn’t sleep the rest of the night, and only let go of her hand when the air grew light.

The cavalcade of guilts continues. I do not think you mean to give me so much; the sharing of pain was instinct over intent.

Things twist and now I see you in an office full of bookshelves stuffed with too many books. There was a man in a rich set of clothing, looking expensive and mercenary. He slid over a piece of paper and smiled, “They shouldn’t be sending hometeachers after you once you mail this in. Probably the most scalding resignation I’ve ever drafted.”

You felt a smile reach up to your face. “So this is really it then? It’s over?”

“If it isn’t, you come talk to me and they’ll have bigger problems than they can deal with,” said the man, and put his feet up on the desk.

You marked the paper and said, “You can bill me a thousand an hour for this if it works.”

“I’ll take you up on that. One of the girls will send the paperwork out this afternoon. Enjoy your first breath of free air, Mrs. Morgan.”

You told them you would send a retainer payment on your way out. “Just in case you need it later,” you told the receptionist.

Fresh new guilt, enough to cut you to the quick and grind you to the bone.

Another image, brief, a man with kind brown eyes. You’re both wearing long robes of dark blue and talking as you walk past a duck pond, “I still wake up some mornings thinking I’m going to hell. I don’t think it will ever really leave me alone,” he says.

Guilt. Guilt like falling and not knowing when you were going to hit the ground.

A woman with familiar eyes was sitting across the table from you. The room smelled of not-quite-clean dishrags and a single light was barely beating back the night outside. “I love you, but I don’t love what you do,” she said with a smile that looked forced, “What you’re doing is a sin, and you know what Jesus said about that.”

“Jesus never said anything about me being a lesbian,” you replied, voice even. “I do remember him talking about loving your neighbor.”

“That’s why we have a prophet, so we have revelation for our day. It’s not like there were lesbians back then. There’s someone important out there talking to God about this. He has the answer and you won’t listen.” Her smile was straining.

“If he’s really a prophet, God would be telling him how to feed starving kids or how to keep Paul Jensen from beating his wife. The world is going to burn up and you think God cares who I sleep with?”

“God cares about all of it!” she yelled as her smile shattered. “Think about the people out there who have things so much harder than you. Sister Jensen, since you brought that up. You’re not better than her.” Tears dripped off her chin and her voice sounded scratching and too high.

“You don’t really care about me, do you?” you said.

“What do I say to that?” The woman looked off into nothing. “Am I talking to the wall here? Where’s Lauren? Oh, she’s not here, it’s just a wall. It doesn’t matter what I do here, might as well be talking to the wall since Lauren is so much smarter and richer and better than her mother.”

“Most mothers would be happy their daughter is successful,” I said.

“Most daughters would be supporting their mother after their father died.” She was close to tears. “You should be here helping me, not with Taryn.”

“I should be in my home, with my wife. Goodnight mother,” you said, and walked out of the flickering light while your mother sobbed.

The crying got quieter as you slipped out into the street and away. You got into your chrome and black vehicle. I could see the relief on your face as the thunk of the door cut off the last trickles of weeping.

Guilt. An ocean of guilt. A world. A universe. All was regret and guilt.

I offer up the Egyptian campion again. It is less than adequate. Small memories begin to fragment off you like chaff in the wind and I can feel you seeping out of yourself.

I had seen this happen once before. Another new spirit, like yourself, falling to pieces until it dissolved into a fine mob of memory. I drifted through what remained afterwards and could only discern dim rooms with medicinal powders, forceful whispers, lies, and piles of clothing on the floor. Some two hundred years later and it still hadn’t managed to coalesce.

I could leave you. I do not owe you anything. I can drift and trade recollections of niceties with other new spirits, as I have been doing for the past few centuries. There was nothing wrong with floating in the current of my afterlife. Alone save for some glimpses of a stranger’s memories.

Still unable to truly talk with anyone in this land with no voices.

So I throw the worst of what I was into you to try and shock you out of your stupor. You will hate me, of course, as everyone else I have shown does, but I cannot stand to see you scatter yourself. This is a chance to actually act, and not to be acted upon.

The memory has so much weight that you cannot help but view it with me when I show it to you.

We were camped in the red-brown folds of Sinai. God had spoken to us. I knew it and it filled me with horror, because God was real and murderous to the unrighteous. Traveling along the seabed while the hungry ocean formed walls around us was terrifying; seeing the dead Egyptians bobbing in the waves was worse.  Every day in the wilderness there had been manna before my tent, save on the Sabbath, but never enough to be safe, never enough to keep me alive if God chose to abandon us for our sins.

The land we traveled through was hot and angry. I had fought the Amalekites at Refidim and the memory made my stomach heave every morning. We had killed so many. God had preserved me, but I did not know for how long. One divine whim, one Israelite wrongdoer, and all our camp would suffer like we had suffered in the plagues.

I could not sleep at night, wondering when we would be punished next. My terror grew when Moses went up to the mount and I could feel the rebellion fomenting in the camp.

The whispers started almost immediately. Moses was dead. God had forsaken us. God had kept Moses in Mount Sinai because he would be calling a new leader for this people.

Aaron came around collecting gold. “For an offering to the LORD,” he said, but I knew better and did not give him my bracelets nor my earrings. The disobedience was like seeing a flood coming and knowing there was not enough time to reach the river’s banks.

They made an idol and they worshiped an idol in the shadow of the mountain where man talked to God. I knew they would need to be punished. I knew God would punish me with them unless we could appease him somehow. God did not take Israel out of Egypt to be betrayed but to be obeyed absolutely.

So when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, glowering, I was terrified and prepared. Even more so when his dark eyes flashed. “The LORD decreed that this people shall be destroyed because of their idolatry,” he said, quiet, but those words went through the crowd like a shockwave. “They forsook his worship while I was speaking face to face with the LORD in the mount. Such wantonness does not please the LORD.”

“Then let’s kill them all!” I heard myself shouting. The crowd of Levites around me roared back. I drew my sword and held it aloft. “Let us go from one end of the camp to the other, to remove the unclean!”

I ran towards the idol worship. Moses was yelling, “No! Stop! You need to stop!” I wish I had tried, but I ran with the fear of God and the crowd was an animal now stampeding behind me to the place of idolatry.

The calf had been worshiped for days, losing its novelty, and I could see only a few thousand dancing, eating, or resting in the low valley where it lay. Good. Fewer to die so that God would not kill me.

The first murder was easy, although there was more resistance that I was expecting as I rammed my sword through the unarmored man’s back. A horrible splash of blood as I pulled the weapon out. Screams that I pretended not to hear.

The rest of the killing was a horror. My entire body went numb as we slaughtered them through the sunset and into the dusk. I could not feel the sword in my hand or the strangers’ blood that ran down my chest. I could not feel the impact as I lashed out again, and again, and again. The worshipers cried in agony. Some were pushed into small knots and crushed together. Not one struck back at the butchers that should have been their friends, and so we killed them entirely and completely.

I knew I was wrong with every blow I struck but did not know how to stop.

After the slaughter Moses walked through the carnage. He sat on a stone and wept. “I had convinced the LORD. I had wrestled like our father Jacob and had won mercy for our people despite their idolatry. There was no need for the death of our brothers.”

A wailing and lamentation tore itself from all our throats.

I found Korah, cleaved through, the next day when burying the bodies. I have wondered every moment since if I had slaughtered my younger brother.

I have your attention now. Likely your disgust, but that is nothing new. I need to act quickly, before you can leave.  I want you to understand so badly what I wish to put to words, but how can I send you a memory of something never happening? I try to express that thought to you, but nothing happens

We are next to each other, silent, and I know that you will drift away from me, as had always happened before, and would always happen, once someone truly knows me.

Then you offer me an embrace from when you were a small child. You had leapt out of a tree too high and were plunging toward the sandy ground too fast. You screamed.  Your mother caught you close. You could smell the scent of cinnamon and laundry. You knew you were loved absolutely. It was all whole; it was all perfect that day.

There was no shred of judgment or hatred in that memory. Only love.

It shocks me like a miracle. I know I have to show you what you did not know in the life before, so you are not in agony needlessly. We do not have the time for me to run you through the memories of my life and hope you guess correctly. You are suffering and I need to help you now. I pray, which I have not done for thousands of years, and strain to share something more than the recollections we have been exchanging. I struggle to succor you in this place where there are no muscles to act or words to comfort.

And then something shifts. There is a piercing sensation and I am descending into you and you into me and suddenly we are meshed together as one. There is a “you” and an “I” that are distinct, but completely open to each other. If I focus, I can hear each of your breaths, from when you first wailed escaping the womb, to your final rattle in Taryn’s arms. So many days with your daughter, so much laughter. I see the greed, the anger, the love, all before me in the now.

You feel the harshness of sun on my skin, my guilt after my occasional heft, and my family distancing themselves from me after Korah’s death. You are rummaging through my life and it is glorious. After all these years of stumbling into others, seeing nothing but darkly painted images of their memories, this is water to a thousand-year thirst.

And now that we can know as we are known, I take you to the things that were not said, which you needed to see.

Memories. Memories without the errors you had been taught. Moses had instructed us to avoid adultery and abuse. He had told us to avoid incest. He had warned us most strongly to shun the molestation of children. All these memories are with you, full and complete in a moment.

There is nothing to show that Moses would have looked on you and your wife with anything but approval. Privately I thought that this Leviticus of your Sister Anderson must have been written by a Canaanite.

You draw my attention to a conversation that I had not thought to show you at all. It had been a long day of gathering manna for the Sabbath, and I had found myself next to the prophet. He turned and looked out into the desert, where Miriam continued to fill baskets for those too ill to gather themselves.

“Always having to prove she is righteous,” he said, then shook his head. “Always working for others. Sometimes I wish she would take time for herself.”

“And find someone to take care of her,” he said, and then grinned when he saw the shock on my face. “Not you, of course. No, I do not think she would approve of you at all.”

That had always stung. I knew I was not enough for the prophet’s sister, but it was something that should not have been spoken. Now with your eyes, the pain was gone. I had simply been too focused on myself and my obsession with my own unworthiness to see that Miriam might not have wished to be with any man. I hope she had found someone.

In your rummaging, you pull another set of memories that I did not intend to show you. Moses speaking again, giving us the points of the law, as we’d proven we required direction in every detail, “If your family becomes poor, you are to take them in as honored guests. You should not charge them usury nor should they be made to feel they are a burden. As the LORD has spoken, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

Another speech, “There need be no poor among you, sayeth the LORD, for the land which I am giving you to possess for an inheritance is flowing with milk and honey. But if there be any poor, lend freely to them. Give generously and without a grudging heart.”

Over and over, a lifetime of preaching service to the poor.

I know you had been wealthy like I could know everything about you now. Everything you had done was tinged with wealth. Your fine apparel, your ostentatious vehicles, your rich food, your conversation looking down on those with less than you.

There was extraordinary wealth and no desire to share it. You had left your mother to the moneylenders. I could see you purchasing a cottage by a lakeside when a family in your neighborhood had their home stolen from them by the usurers. No sympathy for Melody and her worn clothing. Your world grew warmer through your wanton use of fuel. There was fire and flood, as you and others like you consumed through the catastrophe and did not do so much as lift a finger to help the unfortunate. So many humble petitions for aid and you granted none of them.

I think you may leave now. You had accepted me as I was a murderer, a brother-killer. But now you know I thought you had been miserly and rough with your wealth. A smaller sin than mine, certainly, and I do not judge you for it. This connection between us is too delicate for anything like judgment.

So I bring you the Egyptian campion a fourth time, now in perfect clarity.

Meshed as we are, I can tell you receive it with understanding and forgiveness.

The sense of oneness recedes somewhat and we find ourselves weeping together with that joy that is unspeakable and full of glory.

I recall that I cannot weep. How is this happening? Images are forming before my eyes, which I do not have. I weep more and further for the return of sight after thousands of years in darkness.

There is now you, and there is me, and a woman with us, all of whom I can see. Her eyes are brown and her hair is brown and she is clothed in brown leather. She is the most extraordinary person I have ever seen. She cradles a branch in her arms and from each stem of the branch blossoms a flower in different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. I sense she is old, older than anyone. She is radiant in her simplicity.

“Welcome.” To hear words again is like a song, but this is something more than that. It is like the word refined to its most perfect form, so that everything that is welcome and all feelings that are welcome and all thoughts that are welcome are captured entirely by the word.

“The bondage that is the absence of your spirits from your bodies is beginning to lift,” the woman says, every word as whole as the first. “Remember the words of our Savior: for I was hungry, and you gave me meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came unto me.”

I can see you now. You are weeping as much as I, and smiling. I reach for your hand and feel your fingers wrap around mine. It is the first thing I’ve felt in millennia. It feels like discovering a new world.

“Come, ye blessed,” the woman says. “Come receive the message of the redemption of the Lord, in the place where we can truly teach it.”

And you and I follow her out of our darkness into our light.

 

J. McMullin

 

➝   ◯   ➝