Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

“Christ went away,” he discovers at last how to tell her, one morning, the eaves a-drip, the bleary Sun irregularly brighter and dimmer, “one day, for no reason that I could see, Christ came to me and said, ‘Peter, I am going away. You thought it was hard before this? Here is where it gets impossible.’ “ ‘Are you coming back?’ I almost couldn’t speak. “ ‘You must live ever in that Expectation.— Come, spare Me that Face,— of course it is a lot to ask.’ He seem’d in a dangerously merry State. Was it relief at being shut of me, at last? “ ‘How do I proceed without you?’ “ ‘What have I been teaching you all this time?’ “I was smit dumb, Luise. I didn’t understand the Question. ‘Be more like You?’ I tried. He’d been teaching me? All this time? Wehe! “ ‘Alas.’ His Smile, at least, was not a pitying one, nor was it quite as disappointed as I’d fear’d. He turn’d, for the first time I saw the back of His Robe. He had a Motto in German embroider’d fine as could be in Gold Threads, upon the back. I couldn’t read what it said. He receded. He was gone.”