Jack (Gilead #4)(22)
Finally he said, “You don’t mean to judge me.”
She said, “I don’t.”
“You probably ought to.”
“Why should I?”
“Well, if things go wrong for you—the slide into haplessness can be quick. You can find yourself looking at the world from the wrong side before you know what’s happened. I think people look at me and they see that. They call me preacher and so on. Professor. It usually means they want to give me a little trouble. I bother them, because they don’t think I’m the sort who ends up like this. I know there might be more to it. Of course there is. I’m just saying it can happen. It’s nothing you should be anywhere near. Take my word for it.”
Stillness. A presence in a dream always seems to mean something. It has threat or guilt or grief like an atmosphere around it. Her stillness felt strangely like assurance. It felt very like loyalty, if he was not mistaken. It was as if she had said, We ended the world, don’t you remember? Now it’s just the two of us.
He was reminded of something. “Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with pure.” Not that. That was not part of the assignment. The teacher had sent him home with a note. He put it in one of the Edinburgh books, those old theology books no one ever looked at, out of respect for their authority, for what his father called their finespun argumentation.
What she actually said was “You are living like someone who has died already.”
Well, there was a good deal of truth in that. He had wondered from time to time whether he’d actually scared himself to death, or half to death, anyway. Harmlessness. A banner with a strange device. He said, “I’m almost never here, Miss Miles. I don’t normally pass my nights in the cemetery, believe me. You might have gotten that impression because you happen to have come across me here. That’s completely understandable. I mean, that you would not quite realize what a remarkable coincidence we’re dealing with. That our lives should intersect—I would have almost as good grounds for supposing that you spent your nights here, if you think about it—not really, of course. I didn’t mean that about our lives. But, logically speaking, you see what I mean.” Listen to that fool go on.
She said, “The cemetery is part of it, I suppose. Maybe.”
“So you’re saying what? I’m a ghost of myself? The mere shadow of a man—and then the moon went down.”
“Yes.”
“No. That’s pretty disheartening. I have to object.”
She said, very softly, “I don’t think it’s disheartening. I think it’s kind of—beautiful.”
“Did you say ‘beautiful’?”
She nodded. “Beautiful. In a way.”
He laughed. “Well, that’s a surprise.”
She said, “Something happened that made you decide you’d had all the life you could stand. So you ended it there. Except you have to stay alive, for your father.” Her voice came very close to that annoying lilt of realization you hear when people go spiraling off into some supposed insight. They become inaccessible to common sense, to distraction, even. She said, “You don’t feel like part of the world anymore. Maybe you’re more like most people than you think.”
“I can’t quite persuade myself that I’m like most people. And I certainly can’t persuade anyone else that I am. If you find any of this beautiful, it’s all right with me. Which is not to say you should. I must have misled you somehow. I’m pretty sure I’ve told you that I lie. I lied as a lisping child. So whatever you think I’ve told you probably isn’t true. If it’s actually what I said.”
She nodded. “That’s interesting.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a damned nuisance, most of the time.”
Quiet.
She said, “I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don’t do that. In your own way, you’re kind of—pure.”
He sighed. “No no no no no. Your poetical impulses have overwhelmed your good sense. Miss Miles, I can’t let that happen. Within five minutes I’ll have come up with a way to disillusion you, and we’ll both be unhappy.”
She nodded. “That’s how you defend yourself. That’s how you keep yourself at a distance. Anyway, we’re both unhappy as it is, so I’m not putting particular confidence in my illusions. If that’s what they are.” She said, “I’m just trying to tell you that there are reasons why you should, you know, keep body and soul together.”
“To beautify, no, beatify, this tedious world. I can’t tell you what multitudes are unmoved.”
“Well, there’s Jesus,” she said, which startled him.
He said, “A gentleman I am at considerable pains to avoid.” He thought, Sweet Jesus, don’t let her try to convert me.
“I’m sorry. I know how that sounded. I really just meant that there is—anyone, any human being, and then that person’s actual life, everything they didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over. That’s reality. So someone who would know the world that way, some spirit, seems kind of inevitable. I think. Why should so much reality, most of it, count for nothing? That’s how it seems to me.”