A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  They stood in a small and sparsely furnished room. It had bare walls, a table, and one tiny window with a white plastic Madonna on the sill. A portable heater threw out fumes that made the room airless. Gregory felt his eyes begin to smart. The tabletop was partly covered by offerings that included Bibles, dolls, bracelets, and bars of chocolate. Carla stood one pace behind Gregory and a little to one side.

  At the head of the room the girl who saw visions sat on her own in a comfortable chair.

  Carla drew a small, neatly wrapped package of expensive tea from her pocket and left it alongside the other gifts, and then she spoke for about fifteen seconds. Gregory only knew a few words of the language, but he recognized that Carla was reminding Little Maria that he was a photographer, and that they had met before.

  The girl appeared much taller than when Gregory had seen her last. Her face had filled out and her hair had been restyled simply but effectively. After a few seconds he noticed that she wore a gold ring on her little finger. Her blue eyes never left his face and never blinked. He felt that she was looking deep into him and finding nothing there.

  When Carla had finished speaking Little Maria remained silent. After a few seconds Gregory began to feel uncomfortable. He did not know what to say or do.

  “You must speak now,” Carla said softly, and Gregory cleared his throat.

  “My name is Gregory Pharaoh.”

  Immediately he felt guilty, and that he had been caught out in a lie. Little Maria stared at him as if waiting for the truth.

  “But I invented that name. I was born George Farrar. I was a photographer.”

  He felt something lift within him, as if he had walked out of a shadow.

  “I took your portrait last year. It was printed in a newspaper. Maybe now it is hanging in an exhibition of my work at a gallery. I was happy and proud because I thought it was a good photograph—it is a good photograph.”

  As Carla translated he looked to see if there was a change in Little Maria’s expression. There was none.

  “It’s good because it lets people know what you look like. But it can’t tell the world what you have seen—who you have seen. Any photograph is just . . . surface. It’s like a sign. A magazine or a book or a print on a wall, they’re all a kind of maze of surfaces. I didn’t understand that for years, but I do now. I lived in a world where all that mattered was what could be seen. Surface was all there was. That’s why I’m here. I have left behind me a folly of signs.”

  Carla finished her translation so quickly that he wondered if she had omitted some of his explanation. Maybe he had been too ambitious in speaking to Little Maria like this. Perhaps he had confused her enlightenment with an ability to understand. She said nothing as she stared at him.

  And now Gregory believed that he stood within Little Maria’s changeless gaze as if it were a searchlight that was illuminating all his lies, all his ambition and all his vanity.

  “I based my life on the look of things,” he said weakly. “Only one of the five senses informed my work and that was the sense of sight.”

  Gregory paused. Nothing in the room had changed; perhaps the light coming through the single window was a little stronger, that was all. He remembered standing in the crypt with light from a solitary window fading across skulls and bones. In the end everyone was reduced to bones, to dust, to ash. There had to be more to life than a heap of ash.

  Little Maria spoke. Although her voice was plain and unquestioning, Carla’s translation was hesitant and slightly tremulous.

  “The Holy Mother understands and forgives. She is the way to our salvation.”

  “I heard a voice,” Gregory confessed. “A woman’s voice.”

  There was no response.

  “It spoke to me when I was imprisoned by light and unable to move and unable to think. I had a . . . revelation. It was like something out of the scriptures. I don’t know who said them but they were the words you said to me.”

  Little Maria paused for a long time before speaking again.

  “And what did I say?”

  She could not have forgotten, Gregory decided. Her question was not simple; it was deep. Little Maria was asking him to measure his behavior and his belief against what she had told him.

  “You said that I need not live my life in the way that I was living it.”

  Gregory felt suddenly alone, as if he stood at the edge of something that others shared but that he could not enter. He did not know what this was; he only knew that it existed.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted weakly.

  Little Maria could have nodded her head slightly; he was unable to decide.

  Gregory went on. Every word he said felt as if others could also have spoken it. His plight ceased to be individual and became common.

  “I believed that when I came here I would find the answer,” he said.

  She appeared to be waiting for him to say more. He spread his hands helplessly.

  “I’m here because I was sent.”

  Little Maria answered. At the end of each sentence she paused and waited for the translation to end. Carla struggled to find the right words. They came at Gregory like bursts of code.

  “The Holy Mother knows and understands. The Holy Mother gave me the gift to see into your soul. You lived with avarice, with lust, with ambition. You can live now as you have been living or you can change. You made the right decision. The Holy Mother will smile on you. You may not be able to see her face, but I can promise you it will be smiling. But the Holy Mother cannot cure you. The answer lies within. You must heal yourself.”

  Abruptly, Little Maria fell silent. It was as though she had discharged all that she had wanted to say. Cold sunlight, building across the window glass, touched her face to give it the look of marble.

  “What must I do?” Gregory asked.

  Little Maria’s head inclined slightly. At first Gregory did not understand that this was a signal.

  The young man who had let them enter the room appeared alongside him. He reached out and held Gregory’s elbow in a light but firm grasp. Gregory had not realized that the man had been standing behind them all the time, ready to end the audience when he was told. They had only been in the room for a few minutes.

  “Our time is up,” Carla said in low voice.

  Little Maria remained impassive.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Gregory pleaded, but Carla did not translate.

  The young men reached his other arm in front of Gregory and tugged slightly so that he would turn and face the door. As though in reflex, Gregory obeyed. Carla had already turned. He wanted to look back and call out to Little Maria, but he knew that if he did he would not be answered, and that if he were judged to have misbehaved then he would never again be allowed an audience with the girl who saw visions.

  As they were escorted to the door the young man murmured soothing, incomprehensible words. The door closed like a judgment behind them. In the vestibule Carla talked to the man while she and Gregory put on their coats.

  “I told him you want to come back,” she explained. “He says you are welcome but that you must wait your turn.”

  “And that could take weeks,” Gregory replied. It was not a question.

  Carla shrugged. “There are many who want an audience. And some are far, far richer than you.”

  Within less than a minute they were back outside with the cold air clearing Gregory’s head and singing in his ears. Standing in front of the door were the people with the wheelchair. They had cramped, desperate faces. The woman in the chair was swaddled with scarves so that only a pair of bright, hunted eyes showed as they glanced rapidly from side to side. The people said nothing as Gregory and Carla set off down the incline. Concerned only with lighting their cigarettes, the two guards also ignored them as they passed.

  “You do not want any of these mementoes?” Carla asked as they walked between the stalls of crucifixes, statuettes and souvenirs.

  Gregory shook his head vi
gorously. He was not sure if she was asking ironically.

  They were silent for a while as they made their way past the roadside cars and the tall wooden crucifix and back down the snowy road. Sunlight illuminated the tops of the conifers; soft plates of snow tumbled from the high green branches and disintegrated against the lower ones.

  After several minutes an old car labored up the hill, its worn tires making it slide alarmingly across the hissing surface. Gregory and Carla were forced to stand aside until it had passed.

  “And what about you?” he asked. “Will you stay?”

  “What she said to you,” Carla said after several seconds, “it was almost exactly the same as what she said to me.”

  “So?”

  “It’s probably what she tells everyone.”

  “Perhaps that’s because we all have the same faults and need to be told the same thing.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Just because it’s repeated doesn’t mean it’s without worth. When I was a photographer my work didn’t lose anything by being reproduced. It still had the same point, still had the same value. But it reached more people.”

  “You may be right,” Carla said neutrally, making it apparent that she did not wish to argue.

  Soon, ready to part, they stood together at the settlement’s edge. Someone had lit a wood fire and its smoke drifted across the site. The kneeling woman still prayed from within her closed world. A touring coach with tinted windows and bright lettering drove up the hill, snow exploding from its wheels.

  Gregory stared at Carla. Unapologetic, she looked back at him.

  “You haven’t found anything here,” he said flatly.

  “I tried. I really tried.”

  “I always thought you believed in her.”

  “I did. She’s not a liar. I’m sure that she saw the Virgin. But I do not think she sees her any more. Visions like that don’t survive in this world. They are like creatures taken out of water—they die because they can no longer breathe.”

  Gregory’s feet were cold. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “You haven’t told me if you’ll stay,” he said.

  “This place is only a stage in life. It’s not an end.”

  “That’s what you think. I’m different. You’re here out of interest, but it was destiny that brought me back. There’s an answer for me somewhere. I have to stay.”

  “Gregory—are you still Gregory? Or are you George?”

  “Maybe now I’m more like George than Gregory.”

  “Whatever you call yourself, I have never known a person who has changed so much. You never believed in Little Maria. You said her visions were absurd and you joked about them with that reporter. You thought that I was crazy for giving her the benefit of the doubt.”

  “You’re right. But I was forced into change. I almost died. Maybe I did die. And a man lost his life so that I could stand in the right place at the right time.”

  “That is cruel. I cannot believe that God acts like that.”

  “Little Maria would tell us that we can never know God’s purpose. All I can say is that when I look back on the last few months everything falls into place. Who I met, what I did, what happened. For me there was no such thing as coincidence.”

  Carla stared at him like a doubting inquisitor.

  “I was chosen,” Gregory insisted.

  She looked from side to side, as though wary of being overheard.

  “We were lovers,” she murmured.

  “Just for one night,” he said, as if she needed to be corrected.

  Gregory had no reliable memory of their lovemaking. He could recall almost nothing. Recently, whenever he was tempted by the memory of sexual pleasure, or its promise, it was with an image of Alice Fell standing naked and untouched in a room with crumpled sheets that had been spotted with paint.

  “But it was a night that we shared,” Carla insisted. “Was that part of your destiny, too?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being given a comparison.”

  Carla pulled the hood of her coat up around the lower part of her face. Hurt still showed in her eyes.

  “I believed that you had picked me for myself,” she said, bitterness seeping from the words. “I did not suspect that you had been compelled. If we made use of each other it was because we were both searching for pleasure. It was not because I was part of some divine plan.”

  Gregory shrugged.

  To him the conversation had become almost pointless. Carla would never accept his conviction that destiny was at work in his life, nor that others would have to suffer because of that. For Carla the world was still a puzzling, contradictory and impenetrable place. For Gregory, it was beginning to take a locatable shape. He did not know why he had been selected to shuffle so awkwardly toward an understanding, an enlightenment; he only knew that it lay somewhere ahead of him, in space, in time, or perhaps only at the moment of his death.

  They said a perfunctory goodbye and Carla walked away from him through the trodden snow. Gregory wondered if she expected him to follow or to call her back. He did neither. All he thought was how ridiculous her hat looked, with its crown of bobbing fronds.

  And then he thought how ridiculous he would look to Cassie, how shambling, how morally dependent, how pathetic. Uncertainty passed over him like the shadow of a whirled cloak, and in that instant Gregory knew that he was destined eventually to return to the life he had believed he had given up forever.

  Some hours later, when he least expected it, a vision came to him. Even though he was the only person in the caravan there seemed to have been a change in the light, as if something bulky yet furtive had paused in front of his mirror. A prickling sensation tingled at the corners of his eyes. Gregory had experienced this before, a week ago, but it had subsided. Now he felt that something was about to happen that he must witness but not necessarily understand. He put down his Bible and stared into the mirror.

  At first he thought that the glass was lying, as he could see the back of a naked man’s shoulders and head. As he stared, the man slowly turned and rose, as if his feet had lifted free of the ground. Gregory saw he was looking at himself. And then, quite suddenly, the reflection became edged and defined by a white halo of light that radiated outward for several seconds before dissipating to leave no trace behind.

  Gregory stared at his new self in the mirror. The surface of his skin became translucent and within the bars of his ribcage there pulsed a gigantic heart. It almost filled the entire chest cavity, and it glowed a fierce blinding crimson with each unyielding beat.

  Outside on the caravan roof, across the settlement, and over Little Maria’s broken-roofed cowshed at the top of the hill, snow began to fall—quiet, deep and relentless.