When she spoke of Jesus, the ground emitted organ music that seemed to have a shouting crowd in it; vibrations weakened her arms and legs. She lay still for a long time, then told the Vicar he would die in nine years. “The warning is that your nose will bleed: in three days you will be stark dead.” The Vicar sat with his hands folded, too amazed to move. He felt dead already and abandoned the sense of going forwards, and he wondered how others sustain the momentum to plan their tombs.

Margery recounted conversations with Jesus more exalted than Stimulus Amoris or Incendium Amoris. She had a rare rose and there were not enough ears in the world to hear of the paradise of its bloom.

The Vicar saw himself twisted and crumpled forwards although he sat immobile; he wished for silence. All his appetite and striving would come to nothing. It dawned on him that he didn’t know himself, had never taken the trouble because it meant facing all his sluggish, stubborn unhappiness. That he didn’t like himself, wasn’t likable. She showed him the cries and gestures—inordinate sobbing, Have mercy, Jesus and I die—how people slandered her, claiming a spirit tormented her, or that she was sick.

6

My book depends on the tension between maintaining an impersonation and breaking it—I interject an aside in the deepest possible voice: L. and I were introduced in 1987 by mutual friends when L. considered moving to San Francisco. It was raining. He sat on my Mission chair with his arms crossed, and I wondered actively what it was like to be blond and lanky and withheld. I began an examination of L. which came to equal my own aims and ends. I had been alone for four years—so lonely I was afraid. I was about to turn forty and he was twenty-six.

In clothes he was blank but during our first love-making he clung for dear life. We clung to each other. I laughed with confusion when he confessed he was extremely rich. When I describe L. my language is sleepy—I can’t wake it up.

My love for L. restored a faith that had become as polluted as the air and water. He wrote, “After meeting you in January, I went out again to reclaim my history, my relationships, things that define me. Your attention forced this blossoming. My feeling of belonging in New York has revived.”

•

Huge days and nights. Movement is pointless; sight is muddy. I can only believe that the force of my waiting will change him. I hear—even before L.’s greeting—the echo and hiss of a long-distance connection. Then I know the taste of victory and joy rains down like ticker tape on that narrow electrical street.