“Wow, indeed,” I said. Starving, I tried to bite into a crusty sandwich yet peer respectfully at Mr. Yancy over the edges of the bread. You have to give someone your full, solemn attention when they’re imparting a spiritual experience.
“Oh yeah. It was indescribable. I mean, where was I?” His arms suddenly shot up over his head as if I’d barked at him. “Where the hell was I?”
I gazed back at him, shaking my head in sympathetic wonderment.
“Well,” he answered himself, “I did not know. I mean, this was my first time out of Canada. I bought a return trip from Toronto to San Jose and stopped off in the Fourth Dimension.” He let out a happy, surprised guffaw. “Anyway, then I saw this light.” His eyes slid back to me, seeking permission to continue.
“What kind of light?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard about that before, right? How people see a light that grows from a pinprick in the distance and then surrounds them.”
I nodded. “Was there not—you didn’t go through a tunnel?”
“What?”
“Isn’t there supposed to be a tunnel?”
“No, no, there wasn’t one, some people—in fact, a lot of people—go through tunnels, but I didn’t.” He pushed at his glasses and shrugged lightly, as if embarrassed by this small defect in his experience.” One guy I know didn’t go through a tunnel either, he just had his clothes torn off by demons. Then he prayed: ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’ that prayer? And Jesus pulled him into the light.
“Anyway,” he continued, now fully relaxed, “this light was so incredibly radiant, it was like …” he held his hands up in front of his face as if framing something, “but it didn’t hurt my eyes, it wasn’t a glaring light. It was just … it was warm, and it was enveloping and I realized that I was really a part of it, actually, which is very hard to describe, my friend. But I was at one with the universe. And that was the way it should be.”
“That is so cool.”
“It was. But then a voice told me it wasn’t time. I don’t know whose voice, but I like to think it was Jesus. That’s what I believe.”
At this, he lapsed back into silence and clasped his hands, his gaze returning to the middle distance. It occurred to me that Mr. Yancy was deeply shy, and that if he hadn’t found God and begun coming to church, he wouldn’t have said anything at all by noon on a given Sunday.
Step out into the world of belief, and you begin to see how faith is a secret that is hidden in plain view. Look for it amongst your friends and colleagues, and you glimpse it as a discernible shape within the shadows of the secular world. Before anything was asked of me—as Father McPhee had put it—I had tended to break my world into two rough camps. On the right: fundamentalists of all persuasions, using God as a force to condemn me for my blunders. On the left: agnostics, who were just a lazier version of atheists, in that they apparently had neither time nor inclination to consider God at all.
I’d never probed for shades of gray. That rarest of questions at parties. Tell me—in addition to these disclosures you’re offering about your marriage, and your botched liposuction and your addiction to Dristan—do you believe in God? It just wasn’t done, as they used to say.
“Do you still have the same job?” I asked Mr. Yancy. “Since this happened?”
“Well, I used to be the Webmaster for a Jeff Goldblum fan site,” he replied, “and I don’t do that any more. I understand that, now, to be idolatry. I mean, I don’t think I was sent back to this world to continue worshipping a movie star. I feel like the scales fell from my eyes on that one. But I do still work as a Web designer. Now, I make sites for churches, mostly. Like this one. St. Stephen’s.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” I said, but then I couldn’t think of how it was interesting, really, compared to floating above the rain forest as a disembodied soul.
“I have to collect my son from downstairs,” I added. “But it was very nice to talk to you, Mr. Yancy. You’re a very lucky person.”
He nodded and smiled. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
In Sunday school, Lester had painted something passably resembling a fruit tree. A vertical stroke of brown paint. A cloud of green. Some apple-red dashes and dots.
“Adam and Eve ate apples for dinner,” he explained, holding up his art work with both hands, “even though God said they weren’t allowed! So then God got mad and chased them out of his garden.”
“Like Mr. McGregor and Peter Rabbit,” I offered, holding his hand as we ducked out of the church and turned right on Argyle Street, soft-shoeing over iced sidewalks.
16
Calvin was not as impressed as I was by Don Yancy’s revelation, and did not believe, as I did, that it was worth phoning Bernice at the hospital simply to tell her that some guy I’d met in Toronto knew for sure there was a Heaven. Good news! She really was knocking on Heaven’s Door.
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“No.”
We were doing the dishes, which consisted of him washing, rinsing, drying, and putting them away, and me watching.
“So you don’t believe that Don Yancy’s consciousness separated from his body?” I said, to be sure.
“No. I don’t.” He squeezed out the dishcloth.
“Why not?” I gave a little hop of indignation. “Why do you have to pooh-pooh everything, Calvin, and be so bleak and so …” I bit down on my thumbnail, “so monosyllabic?” Could my life not feature more voluble men?
“What other questions have you got?” Calvin asked tersely. “Because I don’t have a lot of time here, I’m very busy doing all of the housework.”
I sighed loudly, angry. “Okay. So you don’t think there’s life after death.”
“I think we live, and then we die.” He tossed some freshly rinsed knives into the drainer. Wiped his hands on a dishtowel. Examined a water stain on his soccer shirt.
“You don’t believe that human beings have a spiritual purpose?” I cocked my head. He pulled a bottle of Beck’s out of the fridge and twisted off the top. Took a swig.
“Human beings are just ants who have learned how to drive.”
I threw up my hands. “You are so nihilistic, Calvin. Jesus.”
I don’t know why it suddenly mattered. But then I thought, there is parenting at stake. “You should be ashamed of yourself, gobbling up God’s food if you think Lester should be a good little cynic.” In agitation I grabbed a handful of spoons from the drainer and put them away, slamming the drawer shut. I reached for the mugs.
Calvin stood back, crossed his arms and appraised me with a smile. “You’re so tidy when you’re mad.”
Goof. Meany. How did I wind up living with a man of such impeccable cynicism? Luck? Fate, or taste? A man who had legally changed his name from Patrick to Calvin as a direct retort to his mother’s Catholicism—though he claimed it was because he didn’t want to struggle through life as Pat Puddie. And what a liar. If we were just ants who had learned to drive, then why had Calvin been convinced last year that his father was trying to send him a message from the Other Side? Hmmm? Has he conveniently forgotten that episode, shortly after Stan died, when a crow flew in through our front door, and then sat on the fireplace mantel as if it were a geegaw? Just like the shiny ceramic crow that Stan kept on his mantelpiece in New Waterford? Like that geegaw? And Calvin murmured, “This is my father’s doing.”
Ants who drive, my foot.
As it happened, a few nights later, we caught a new show on Fox Television that worked nicely, I thought, as an illustration of Calvin’s need to place his faith in Nothing rather than admit his yearning for the traces and echoes of a love left behind.
The show was called Fact Factor, and featured “the world’s most extreme debates.” Naturally, after that tag line, Calvin got up on his hands and knees and began crawling across the bed to grab the remote and change the channel. But I said, “Wait, Calvin, wait.”
Calvin had his thumb poised
over the button.
“No, no, don’t. They’re doing the Shroud of Turin, I want to see this.”
“The Shroud …” said the show’s announcer, totally over the top, pronouncing the word as if he were play-growling at a Vegas show girl, “what is it, really? A relic of God? Or a trick of man? Join the debate. Tonight. On Fact Factor.”
Calvin crawled back across the bed, growling softly to himself, “The Shhhherrowddd. Yeee-ow. Here comes the Shhheerowdd.”
“Shush,” I advised.
The Shroud of Turin demands full attention. I feel this way because, really, how is it possible that a faded, ratty length of linen from France could stymie dozens of top-notch scientists for decades, in spite of all their spectroscopes and microscopes and MRIs? No matter how sophisticated their tests, apparently they still cannot figure out whether this thing is a work of medieval tie-dye or the cloth that enshrouded the dead body of Jesus Christ. That commands my respect. If it is just a medieval hoax, it’s the best twentieth-century science-busting medieval hoax ever dreamed up by medieval people, who surely weren’t even aiming to bust twentieth-century scientists. At most, they were aiming to impress fourteenth-century Christendom, and here I would be thinking of a populace that believed the world was flat, and that sin caused cancer. Not too, too hard to pull the wool over their eyes, I wouldn’t think.
“Okay,” Calvin said, “so … just to confirm. Does this mean I can’t watch the game between Montreal and Boston?”
“Correct.”
And then again, what if it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ? What then? Well, I’m not actually sure what then. From my own selfish point of view, the What Then is that I would finally have something objectively true to tell Lester about “what happened to that guy.” He was buried! And we have his shroud!
Calvin abruptly guffawed with laughter. On the TV, two aging scholars in sweaters and Wallabees were walking manfully toward the camera in slow motion, pumped to begin their first challenge, which entailed answering the question:
Blood? Or paint?
“Tonight’s scholars are bitterly opposed to one another’s position on the significance of the reddish stains that cover the Shroud of Turin,” explained the announcer in his weird, hubba-hubba voice. “Josh Nelson, an investigator with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal, says it’s paint.”
“I don’t just say it’s paint,” said Nelson, staring irritably into the camera. “It is paint.”
“Why do you say that, Josh?” asked the announcer, now materializing on screen.
“Well, look,” said Nelson, a guy with trim mustache and receding chin. “I have observed microanalyses that conclusively show that the ‘blood’ and ‘body’ images were rendered in tempera paint.” He flashed a mirthless smile. “These die-hard Shroud enthusiasts just keep chasing the Holy Grail with pseudo-science, faulty logic and the suppression of historical facts.”
“Okay, Josh,” said the announcer, “but Hans Schumacher, one of Europe’s leading forensic chemists, says it’s blood.”
Schumacher, who was small, stout and bald, defensively straightened his shoulders, smarting from the accusation that he was a pseudo-scientist. He glared across a replica of the Shroud that was laid out on a table between him and Nelson. “There is no doubt at all in my mind that what we see here are traces of blood,” he said between clenched teeth.
“Why blood, Hans?”
“I will tell you why.” He gestured stiffly at the cloth. “I have successfully replicated the chemical analyses done by your own American scientists, Dr. Heller and Dr. Adler, and once again, I have firmly established the presence of the bile pigment bilirubin, a porphyrin fluorescence, and the substances hemochromogen and cyanmethemoglobin. These are all blood properties that you simply do not see with paint.”
Calvin and I were staring at the TV now in a lax, uncomprehending stupor.
The two men plunged into a heated exchange about whether one would or would not expect to see the release of nitrogen gas bubbles in a particular kind of test done on ancient blood. Nelson cited earlier tests by famed “microanalyst” McCrone, who had not found the telltale nitrogen bubbles. He crossed his arms languidly and leaned back in his chair. “McCrone wrote the whole thing off twenty years ago as a medieval forgery, and here we are still having to talk about it.”
“McCrone,” retorted Schumacher, visibly reddening, “failed to perform controls with artificially aged blood. He failed to check the possibility that nitrogen gas will not be produced by very aged, strongly denatured blood samples.”
“Okay, smartass,” Nelson shot back, “why is the blood red? If it’s two thousand years old, it should be dark brown.”
“The blood is not whole blood, you fool!” burst out Schumacher. “It is exudate from a blood clot. You must work with what you know of the circumstances. If you beat a man, and scourge him, and then nail him up to a cross, you will destroy red blood cells! And the cell debris will go to the liver! And be converted there into the bile pigment bilirubin!”
“You see, Calvin? That’s my point,” I said, settling smugly back against my pillows.
“No, I don’t see. What is your point?”
“My point is that a medieval hoaxer would have been as likely to paint the Shroud to look like phlegm, choler or bile, right? Because those were the four humors that they thought flowed through the body. So what are the odds that he or she used paint to mimic the pigment bilirubin?”
“Gosh, I don’t know.” He got out of bed and padded down the hallway. I heard the click of the bathroom-door lock. After the commercial, Josh Nelson began arguing that the real Shroud of Christ would have been made of several pieces of linen, not just one.
“The Shroud contradicts the Gospel of John,” he barked, “which describes multiple cloths, as well as ‘an hundred pound weight’ of burial spices—not a trace of which appears on this thing.”
“Ach, that’s rich, coming from a professional skeptic,” retorted Schumacher. “You wouldn’t recognize Moses if he parted your soup, and now you argue that the Shroud is inauthentic because of the Gospel of John. A skeptic turning to the Bible for proof!” Schumacher shook his head and threw up his chubby arms, turning angrily to the host. “Now I have seen everything.”
Oh, I said to myself, since Calvin was still in the bathroom, touché. That’s a very good point. There’s a skeptic so obsessed with upholding his skepticism that he turns to the Bible. As orthodox in his skepticism as a born-again Christian.
“Can we watch the hockey game now?” Calvin asked, rematerializing in the doorway and swan-diving onto the bed. “If you’re into blood sport, I guarantee you hockey’s more interesting.”
What Calvin despised, it seemed to me, as I puzzled it out in the darkness that night while he snored, is how people make such fools of themselves in their quest for meaning. He was afraid of that. His best defense against heartbreak and sorrow was to dismiss hope. Illusions could only be shattered.
17
At work on Monday morning, I tried Don Yancy’s conversion in Costa Rica out on Avery, hoping for a more enthusiastic response.
“Ho,” he exclaimed, twisting his arms and scratching his neck, “hmmm. At least he didn’t claim that angels danced on his teeth.”
I stared at him.
“That’s not a very compelling counterargument, Avery.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
We both started laughing.
“I haven’t read any literature on NDEs,” Avery reflected, “but I imagine the argument could be made, uhh, that they fall within the Gnostic tradition. An experiential knowledge of God that you can neither prove nor disprove.”
“Why not? Why can’t you disprove it?” I leaned forward on my elbows and tapped my pencil against my chin.
“Well …” Avery toyed with an elastic band as he thought of how to put it. “If I said that I loved you, and you said, ‘Prove it,’ how would I? How would I prove it
?”
I mulled this over for the rest of the morning, as I thumbed through new books and jotted down notes about whom I might call to review them. How could someone prove love?
That afternoon, the hallway in our building was abuzz with the news that the Moral Volcano had lost its bushy-bearded senior editor, Leonard Greenberg. It was a major blow. Greenberg was a star. A former opera critic whose innate snobbishness had drawn him to the Volcano at its much hoo-hawed inception, he had flourished in the ensuing months as an editor and columnist, displaying the talent of an idiot savant in his singular ability to ridicule liberals. But now, at least according to the gossip, Greenberg had done an abrupt volte-face and was running off to start a blog excoriating his former conservative friends, apparently after being trapped in the elevator at Robarts Library for several hours during a power outage with a kind, knock-kneed opera-buff librarian liberal, who soothed Greenberg’s claustrophobic panic by humming arias from Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel.
By late afternoon, the Volcano’s editor-in-chief, Sherman O’Sullivan, having looked around wildly for a replacement editor, suddenly discovered me. I heard later that he learned through the grapevine that I had edited at New York’s Pithy Review some years earlier before coming home to raise Lester. For Torontonians, word of a gig in New York invariably trumps all other considerations, such as competence, and thus O’Sullivan immediately trotted down the hall and knocked on our door.
Avery, tipped back in his wooden swivel chair, glanced up from his reading when he heard a loudly cleared throat, and then gazed at me with a sly and expectant smile. Lo, it is Sherman O’Sullivan, declared Avery’s expression: he of the impeccable suits and boyish face whose blue eyes are so round and ingenuous that they must have been stolen from the Gerber baby. That happy child-man we have often discussed.
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