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This story began on a Tuesday. For you, that is the day after Monday. For me, it is a day that, like the other six, brims with the potential for mystery, adventure, and terror. You should not take this to mean that my life is romantic and magical. Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.
We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which it must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness, and misery.
THE DEAD DON’T TALK. I DON’T KNOW WHY.
I first thought that these shades might be malevolent spirits who fostered evil in those people around whom they swarmed. I’ve since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.
No troll, crouched in the darkness beneath its bridge, relishing the scent of a child’s blood, had ever looked more malevolent.
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician—but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery.
Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard’s thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.
THAT MOMENT IN THE SACRISTY DISTILLED THE essence of my entire existence: always between two doors, between a life with the living and a life with the dead, between transcendence and terror.
“It’s the gate to Hell. If you go looking for it, and you find it, and you wind up in Hell, I’m not going to go down there looking for you and pull your ass out of the fire.”
I understand why I am such an easy mark for guilt. The origins lie with my mother and her guns. Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it. The Chamber of Unreasonable Guilt is part of my mental architecture, and I doubt that I will ever be able to renovate that particular room in this strange castle that is me.
Life, Stormy says, is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It’s about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.
“In the belly of Leviathan, Mr. Thomas, one can either despair and perish, or be cheerful and persevere.”
We are not strangers to ourselves; we only try to be.
More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we’ve witnessed of man’s inhumanity to man, we simply can’t go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don’t permit ourselves to hope.
