Margery was entirely gazing, so terrified she didn’t swallow her spit. She became aware that she was stranded in a remote desert in a stifling concrete bunker. Its tin roof cracked in the heat. She felt the weight of the arbitrary setting: an unlimited desert came into view, entered without clothes or memory. Her vision began to strobe; Mary and Jesus crackled with beams of winter light raying out sovereignty, casting faint shadows. Then they were shabby derelicts, one in grimy blue rags, the other in a stiff shroud reeking of decaying blood.

52

“All my pain is gone. Mother, ask me anything.” Jesus answered her questions.

Margery rose to embrace Jesus but he raised his arm against her, his palm flat as a door. Her desire for conclusion was intensely gratified. You could say Jesus created her in that instant: through him she glimpsed a Margery too abandoned to imagine on her own. Stiff with panic, she threw out her arms hopelessly as though warding off a wrecking ball. Her chest felt sore and heavy. Margery had not understood the stakes in the first place—she would rot in the dirt.

She didn’t doubt there were saints in heaven who had never seen the terrible expression Jesus wore: coldly sympathetic. Each saint touched one version of Jesus; hers was a charming reserved brown-haired blond with bone-tipped shoulders, brilliant skin whose chest hairs could be counted, tiny pink nipples, tiny navel, broad hips, and long blond legs.

Mary brought Margery a bowl of her own soup. Margery set the spoon down. Jesus tried to comfort her too. He felt newly tender now that the issue of eternity was behind them. Her life broke into withering ironies. “Do you want to meet in a half hour?” Jesus asked mildly, with a clarity that sees pain as decoration.

When they met, he said, “Your blue eyes are beautiful.” He felt their relationship was her creation. Still, he reminded her of adventures they’d had together in Italy, as though looking through photos and inviting her to share a tremulous nostalgia: he added gold to the highlights on folds of mountain and cloth. Every image was a farewell to what it portrayed. He retained the pleasant stories and left the cruel ones to her.

He didn’t look at her. “Well, Margery . . .” His eyes crumpled and his lips gave way. His head dropped a few inches and he began to cry a little. Jesus reduced Margery’s bid for transcendence to a scrapbook of experiences. Her eyes remained dry; she’d already given her tears away. She asked to see more of him but he said he was too busy, as though he had to work.

The gods weren’t counting on Margery; they offered no strong belief in the value of life. Their lack of faith made her doubt herself from childhood to that instant. It was no use going back to yesterday since she had been a different person then.