Jimmy woke up the next morning at his usual hour, just before dawn. The sun was peeking over the horizon when he stepped off the bus at the hospital. There was no time to test what the plastic sunglasses would do, so he had stuffed them in his jacket, along with the candy he passed out to sick kids when the staff wasn’t looking.
After ten years at the same job, his routine proceeded automatically. As Jimmy emptied wastebaskets and tidied up rooms, he felt what the patients were feeling. Helplessness and fear were epidemic in the hospital. Patients rarely saw their doctors, and when they did, usually for a few anxious minutes, they were like guilty defendants waiting to be sentenced. They strained to read the doctor’s face as he glanced at their chart; they waited for the next word out of his mouth, which could send them home with a smile or plunge them into a dark abyss.
Jimmy felt their distress, and he wanted to do something—but what? He had gravitated toward the children’s floor, and over the years he’d become a fixture there. This morning he walked into the largest ward, where excited cries of “Señor Lucky!” greeted him. Quickly he was surrounded by six- and seven-year-olds. One little hand reached into his pocket for candy and came up with the sunglasses instead. They had bright pink rims with sparkles, and suddenly three kids wanted to put them on at once.
Startled, Jimmy grabbed them from the little girl who had found them.
“No, querida, these are just for me.”
She started to cry. The noise level in the room rose rapidly, and Jimmy knew a nurse would be running in very soon. Mumbling “Sorry, sorry,” he got out of there. He scurried down the corridor, avoiding eye contact with anyone he passed.
He was panting, his heart racing, when he made it into the safety of the men’s room. Jimmy didn’t know why he was so agitated. He’d reacted as if the sunglasses were cursed. But they couldn’t be, not when it was Meg who handed them out. He stared at them with uncertainty for a moment before putting them on.
There was no instant effect, and then the outer door to the washroom creaked open. A doctor entered; he didn’t acknowledge Jimmy standing at the sinks. Nervously Jimmy left, obeying his usual instinct to remain invisible.
In his distraction, he didn’t remember that he was wearing the sunglasses. Diego, another young orderly, was loitering beside a gurney in the hallway. He smirked and gave Jimmy a thumbs-up. “La vida loca, eh man?”
Jimmy reached up, but before he could take off the glasses, a rush of golden light filled the air. He froze in place. The process wasn’t gradual, the way it had been for Frank. One minute the hospital corridor was there, the next it vanished, replaced by a shimmering glow. The walls melted away. People were illuminated from the inside, yet only for an instant before they vanished too.
Disoriented, Jimmy staggered forward a few steps.
“Hey, watch it.”
Jimmy felt his shoulder graze somebody, but he couldn’t see who.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, or thought he did. The glowing light absorbed him completely. Sounds were blurred and far away. He barely sensed it when a hand clapped him on the back.
“Orderly, stop daydreaming. I just said I need you.”
I can’t help it, Jimmy thought. I’m floating away. He had the uncanny feeling that his feet were lifting off the ground, and every fiber in his being wanted to break free, rising up and up, wherever the light wanted to carry him, like a feather in the wind.
From a distance he heard fuzzy words, more impatient this time. “You coming or not? This kid is seizing.”
An alarm went off inside, and Jimmy tore away the sunglasses. The world took a second to return. One of the residents was rushing past him into a private room. On the floor lay a small boy writhing in convulsions. The doctor knelt beside him, clasping his writhing limbs. The boy was only nine or ten, but it was almost impossible to hold him still.
Looking over his shoulder at Jimmy, the doctor issued a torrent of instructions. “I need a nurse, stat. Tell her to prep an IV. We’ll inject Dilantin and phenobarb. I’ll also need a tongue depressor, and bring restraints in case we have to tie him to the bed.”
Seeing no response from Jimmy, the doctor snapped, “You got all that?”
Jimmy wanted to rush off to do what he was told, but the afterglow of the light filled him; he wondered if he was still floating.
“Damn it,” the doctor shouted. “Go!”
Suddenly Jimmy’s body was galvanized. He hurried to the nurses’ station, and within minutes the boy received an injection. The worst of the seizure passed, and he didn’t have to be restrained in bed. In the immediate aftermath, the resident, who was younger than Jimmy, gave him a hard look.
“I know you have a good reputation. You don’t need to explain anything, but the next time you don’t jump when I say jump, I’m ordering random drug testing. You get my drift?”
Jimmy nodded, putting on his most contrite face. But inside he didn’t feel humiliated or guilty. In the middle of the crisis, a brave thought had come to him. I can heal this boy. Once everybody leaves, that will be the right time. As if struck by lightning, he instantly knew that he, Jimmy, the lowly orderly, was a great healer, the answer to every sick child’s prayers.
It was all he could do not to shout his thanks to God. There was too much activity around the epileptic boy’s bed, so Jimmy left. There were many other sick children in the wards. His epiphany told him he could cure them all.
They’re getting into trouble. I’m sure of it, Meg thought to herself anxiously. Before she handed out the cheapo sunglasses, she knew that seeing the light with your own eyes was a glorious experience. But that didn’t save it from being perilous too. One way or another, each person in the group was stumbling.
“Keep them safe,” she murmured.
Even after all this time, she still wasn’t quite sure who she was talking to. It could be the disciple or the light or just herself. She lay in bed staring at the ornate ceiling overhead, which was painted like an azure sky with cherubs peeking out from billows of rosy clouds. The bed alone was larger than her cell at the convent.
A beam of morning light found a gap in the heavy velvet draperies. Meg got out of bed and pulled them aside. She was looking directly into the sun, and for a second its dazzle filled the world. But this was only a hint at the golden light that really did fill the world, no, the cosmos.
Meg hadn’t told the group what to expect. How could she put it into words? Only Father Aloysius had come close.
“The light is alive. It’s intelligent beyond anything our minds can understand. It knows us better than we know ourselves,” he told her. “So going into the light can be very simple or very complicated. It’s simple if you surrender. It’s complicated if you resist.”
They were meeting behind the estate’s old dairy barn. Meg couldn’t recollect what year this was, but summer had arrived, and she smelled new-mown grass in the air.
“I used to hate the idea of surrendering,” she admitted.
“Resisting is much easier,” he replied. “But you already know that.”
“I suppose.” Meg was reluctant to talk about her inner struggles.
“You’re very special in many ways,” Father Aloysius remarked, “but not in this. Everyone who glimpses the light is thrown into confusion. I certainly was.”
“You, Father?”
He laughed. “I was the worst, quite giddy and beside myself. I fancied I was in love with every girl on the street. I came close to proposing marriage to the housemaid. She was from Brazil, and I planned to surprise her with two plane tickets to Rio.” He smiled at the memory. “Did I mention that I was eleven?”
He was in an expansive mood. In the warm summer breeze the priest’s white hair was like a dandelion puff against the sun. (This became Meg’s favorite image of him after he died, the one she recalled whenever she wanted to remember him.)
“You see, the light doesn’t care if you are young or old,” he said. “It will undo you whenever it wants. The light exposes everything you’ve hidden from the world.”
“Then what?” Meg asked with feeling. “You’re left to crash on your own?” She still had days when she was lost, twisting in the wind. One part of her hated God for leaving her that way.
Father Aloysius sensed what she felt. “Be calm, child. I came to you, didn’t I? Someone always comes. The light never works for anything but the good. It has no other purpose.”
Meg wasn’t sure she believed him, but she didn’t argue. It was better to be grateful that he had come at all.
Now the tables were turned. The mystery school would be twisting in the wind unless she came for them. Meg dressed quickly. Ten minutes later she was in a taxi heading for the hospital, where Jimmy would already be hard at work. An impulse told her that he was the one who needed rescuing first.
By now, she was used to surrendering. She surrendered to her visions and to the golden chapel. Nothing mystical felt outlandish anymore. (Most people would be bored if the mystical weren’t outlandish.) She didn’t second-guess the disciple when she guided Meg to the drugstore for those sunglasses. Meg was told that their magic was temporary. After a day, they would go back to being cheap plastic sunglasses. Then the group would be in free fall.
The taxi left her at the front entrance of the hospital. Inside there was a bustle of people. The line in front of the reception desk was three deep. She passed through the lobby unnoticed and headed for a bank of elevators.
Meg didn’t know which floor Jimmy worked on, but she remembered that he stopped every morning in the children’s ward to cheer the kids up. He pretended to be Señor Lucky, the pony that the hospital owned so that children could ride on its back. She decided to try there first.
When the elevator doors opened, Meg stepped into a corridor painted in bright primary colors, with rainbows and baby animals at play. A dozen doors stood on either side, but she didn’t have to peek into them. At the far end of the corridor was a chair with Jimmy sitting in it. He was slumped, hanging his head.
Meg knew that his stillness was deceptive. She rushed down the hallway, and as she got closer, she saw that Jimmy was clutching the plastic sunglasses in his hands.
“Jimmy, what’s happening?”
He didn’t look up, for the simple reason that he didn’t see her. He had gone into a tailspin, sunk deep into himself, and it was entirely his fault. After his epiphany, he had returned to the big room where Señor Lucky should have handed out candy instead of running away. The atmosphere was calmer now, but the kids didn’t rush to his side. They were a bit wary of him.
Jimmy smiled magnanimously, spreading his arms out the way Jesus did in the illustrated Bible stories his grandmother bought for him when he was little. “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” That’s all it would take. One touch, and they would be healed, one by one.
“Come on,” he urged. But they were too nervous.
Too impatient to wait, he went to the bed of a girl with leukemia. She had a shaved head because of her treatments and slept most of the day, her body wasted and weak. She would be the first. Jimmy placed his palm across her forehead. He sent waves of love into her. Whether it was this or feeling his touch, the girl woke up. She looked at him, and Jimmy held his breath.
“How do you feel, baby?” he whispered.
“I hurt.”
“You don’t feel better now?” Jimmy asked.
She shook her head. “I hurt everywhere. Why are you bothering me?” She wasn’t angry with him, just sleepy and cross. Turning her head away, the girl fell back to sleep, but not before Jimmy saw the expression in her eyes, which was vacant and lost.
Oh, my God. Jimmy felt himself crash to earth. He had made a terrible mistake. He tried to bolt from the room, but his knees buckled, and he barely made it into the corridor. If a chair hadn’t been sitting there, he would have collapsed. He felt nauseous; far worse, he was sick at heart. What had come over him? A pang of fear struck his chest. What if someone had walked in on him?
As he slumped there, a woman started speaking to him. As if swimming toward the surface from a great depth, Jimmy managed to look up. He recognized Meg.
She bent down and softly said in his ear, “You’re not Jesus Christ. Sorry to disappoint you.”
He was relieved and bewildered at the same time. “Then who am I?”
“You’re one of us. And a very beautiful soul.”
Jimmy managed a grateful smile. Then a fresh spasm of nausea came over him, filling his mouth with its bitterness, and he started to cry.
Meg called an emergency meeting that evening, and one way or another every member was rounded up. She was guided to rescue them, as she had been with Jimmy, but she needed help.
Lilith was likely to be the one who hadn’t run amok. Meg called her at home. It took three tries before she answered.
“How are you feeling?” Meg asked. She assumed that Lilith had tried on the sunglasses.
“What?”
“Are you feeling anything unusual?”
“I feel very well,” replied Lilith. “Very well indeed.” She sounded like herself but mildly confused. “Listen carefully,” Meg said in an urgent voice.
“All right.”
“You’re not God. You’re not a saint or an angel or waiting for the rapture. I know you’re trying to decide which one applies. None of the above. You are still Lilith. Do you understand?”
Silence at the other end. Then in a quavering voice, sounding more vulnerable than Meg had ever heard her, Lilith said, “If I’m not God, wouldn’t God tell me?”
“No, he’s busy. I’m telling you instead. You got a blast of reality, that’s all. It’s wonderful, but you need to come to your senses. We’ve got to find the others, and quickly.”
Luckily, Lilith came down to earth after three cups of black coffee; her years of experience had kept her from becoming delusional.
Mare was fairly stable also. They found her at the bus stop near her house. As the buses rolled up, she stood at the door, her hand raised in benediction. “Bless you,” she said to the passengers getting on and off. “Be at peace.”
A few people smiled at her. The rest were used to crazies in the city; this one seemed harmless. Only one man was irritated enough to say, “Get yourself some help, lady.”
Mare was surprised to see Meg and Lilith at the curb. “Were you sent here too?” she asked. “Everyone is a child of God. I see it. Why don’t they?”
“They’ve got other things on their mind,” said Lilith. “We need to get you home.”
“Why? I’ve found my calling.”
“Maybe so,” Meg said. “But now is not the time.”
“What does that mean?” Lilith asked, looking puzzled. She’d caught the look that passed between them.
“Never mind. Let’s get her away from here.”
Mare had rushed out into the cold wearing only a light jacket and now she was trembling. Like Jimmy she had the plastic sunglasses clutched tightly in her hand. Meg immediately grasped what they were doing to her niece. The look that passed between them had history.
It went back to the legendary Thanksgiving Massacre, as the Donovan family took to calling it. A distant cousin was being ordained, and Mare’s family filled two cars, driving a hundred miles to attend what Mare’s grandfather Tom referred to as a going-away party.
“He’ll miss the best part of life, I’m telling you,” he said.
Mare, who was six, wondered what he meant. Her grandmother told Tom to shush.
Tom, who was “black Irish,” loved the I.R.A. cause and resented priests. At the party he made a nuisance of himself. He knew better than to make cutting remarks about the church, so, instead, he made mischief by goading the soon-to-be priest into drinking too much.
“Another nip can’t hurt you, or you’re not a Donovan,” he said. The young man, barely out of his teens, did what he was told. Finally someone intervened and told Father Ronnie, as they had already started calling him, to get some fresh air. He walked out alone, tripped over a tree root in the back yard, and hit his head. The result wasn’t terrible, a gash on the forehead and a mild concussion. But the gash bled profusely, the parents exchanged hot words with Tom, and that side of the Donovan family was never welcome in the house again.
The disturbing part wasn’t the fight, because Tom never liked his snooty, devout cousins to begin with. The disturbing part occurred on the way home when Mare, sitting in the backseat, started to scream, “Stop the car, stop the car!”
Her outburst was completely out of character. Her mother looked around from the front seat. “What’s gotten into you?”
Mare began to cry, and no one could calm her down. “Please, please,” she whined.
“Do you have to go?” her father said, looking at her in the rear-view mirror.
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
Mare remembered that she was going to blurt out, “We’re all going to die.” A brutal image had flashed through her mind, showing a railroad crossing and a car twisted into a hideous wreckage. At that moment she heard the bells signaling an approaching train, and the flashing red lights for the gate were only a hundred yards away. She was too frightened to speak, squeezing her eyes shut in terror.
“Look out!” her mother warned.
There was a loud horn blast from the locomotive barreling toward the crossing, instantly followed by a sickening crash.
“Look away!” Tom ordered as he slammed on the brakes and leaped out of the car. Ahead of them a driver had tried to beat the crossing gate, but he had misjudged by a matter of seconds. It was enough. In the horror and confusion at the scene, no one found time to question Mare about why she had cried out. She felt incredibly guilty, as if she could have saved the people who died. The newspaper said the driver had been drinking heavily at a holiday party.
In the aftermath, her mother remembered how Mare made such a fuss, but Thanksgiving was the next day, and there was the main event to discuss, the big row over the soon-to-be priest. Mare never came up.
Aunt Meg poked at her turkey in silence and then took her niece into the back yard while the table was being cleared. “You notice things, don’t you? Things other people don’t.”
Mare was alarmed. “I try not to.”
“Why? It’s not a bad thing. Did your mother tell you it was?”
Mare bit her lip. “All right, go back inside,” her aunt said. “Brush the snow off your shoes first.”
At the age of six, it didn’t occur to Mare to wonder about Aunt Meg’s motivation. All she got into her head from that traumatic Thanksgiving was a recurring nightmare. The sound of crunching metal woke her up shaking.
The plastic sunglasses reawakened this bad memory, which thankfully fled as soon as Mare started blessing the bus passengers.
Now she heard Meg say, “Come with us. We don’t want a blessing overload, do we? It might blow the circuits.”
Mare looked confused, but she allowed herself to be led away docilely. When Meg and Lilith got her back home and into bed, she fell asleep instantly.
“On to the next one,” said Meg with a touch of grimness.
They found Frank sitting in his car in the newspaper parking lot. He was blasting heavy-metal rock at a deafening volume and didn’t hear them approach. Lilith rapped on the driver’s-side window. Frank lowered it.
“Why are you here?” he asked. He looked badly shaken.
“To see how you’re holding together,” Meg replied.
He grimaced. “The glue’s not dry yet.”
“What happened?”
Frank had made a fool of himself. At Mare’s apartment the effect of the sunglasses had been overwhelming, but somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered that he had to go to work. He took off the glasses and stumbled to the bathroom. A cold shower helped. He dressed to leave, but Mare paid no attention, perched on the edge of the mustard yellow sofa with a giant grin on her face.
“I’m going now,” he said. “Don’t keep those things on too long.”
“Uh huh.”
The streets were clear, but Frank’s driving was shaky, and he stopped by his young reporter buddy Malcolm’s place. Malcolm was surprised to see him.
“I need you to drive,” said Frank, hoping he sounded normal. Perhaps not. Malcolm gave him a puzzled look and took the wheel.
“You’ve got that political thing in an hour,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come with.”
“Sure, fine,” Frank mumbled. He had no idea what the political thing was. He kept staring out the window at the passing scene. Instead of a grimy city, his eyes drank in a whoosh of colors that was almost musical.
“Heavy night?” Malcolm asked. “You look wasted.”
The concern in his voice made Frank try to focus. He shut his eyes and concentrated. Things came into view.
“The political thing is a press conference?” he said doubtfully.
“Yeah. Boy, I’m glad you asked me to drive.”
At a hotel downtown, a right-wing candidate running for Congress had scheduled a pointless press conference. He was behind in the polls and wanted to agitate about abortion and gay marriage. The only media who showed up were Frank, Malcolm, and a college-aged girl from the local-access TV station.
The candidate looked miffed. He was a local fundamentalist minister who was bewildered that his old hot-button issues had turned cold. He took out his sheet of talking points, but before he could speak Frank raised his hand.
“Questions can come later,” the candidate’s PR assistant said.
Frank stood up anyway. “I just wanted to tell Reverend Prescott something. You’re beautiful, man.”
The candidate, an imposing figure in his late sixties with snowy hair, scowled. “What did you say?”
Frank felt himself slightly tottering. “I said you’re beautiful. Actually, you’re totally full of it. You’ve become a laughingstock. But God doesn’t care. He loves you.”
Frank started to sit down, but had a second thought. “I love you too.”
Malcolm looked around nervously; the local-access girl giggled.
With a sense of dreamy detachment Frank watched the candidate’s face turn purplish red. The PR assistant, who knew all the local reporters, grabbed the microphone and shouted into it.
“Get the hell out of here, Frank. I’m calling your boss. I hope your little stunt is worth losing your job over.”
“No worries. God loves you too. Creep.”
No one heard Frank add this parting remark, because Malcolm was dragging him out of the room. Nothing was said in the car on the way back to the paper. But when he got out, Malcolm was visibly angry.
“Sorry, man,” Frank mumbled.
“If you want to commit public suicide, it’s okay by me,” Malcolm said. “But leave me out of it. I don’t want to get hit by the shrapnel.”
Frank watched him stalk off, then he turned the music on in his car full blast to clear his head. Time passed; he didn’t know how long. The next thing he was aware of was Lilith rapping on the window.
“Can you turn that down?” she said.
“He’s still in shock,” Meg guessed. They gave Frank a few minutes. He clicked off the music and stepped out of the car.
“Jesus, what a mess,” he moaned. “I’m ruined.”
He didn’t want to talk about his grim mood. The two women decided to wait in the parking lot while he went inside to learn his fate. Frank was back in two minutes.
“I can’t believe it. My editor was ready to kick my ass down the street, but he got a call from the owner of the paper. Turns out he hates this wack-job preacher. I might get a raise.” Frank shook his head. “There is a God.”
Lilith shrugged. “Give the boy a gold star.”
Which left only Galen. They swung by his house, but his car was gone, and no one answered the door.
“The painting he tried to deface,” said Lilith. “Maybe he’s gone back to kneel in front of it.”
“No, that’s not like him,” Meg replied. “Everyone reacts according to their nature. That’s how it works.”
Guessing where he might be was impossible, but on the first try Galen answered his cell. He sounded calm. Too calm.
“I haven’t tried the sunglasses on yet,” he said. “I’m still supposed to, right?”
Meg hesitated. She had no right to reverse the disciple’s instructions. “Let me come to you first. Where are you?”
“I’m walking into the planetarium.”
“Why?”
“I used to like it as a kid. Seemed like a safe place to trip.”
Meg said, “Wait there. Don’t do anything.”
She rushed Lilith back into the car. “I have a bad feeling about this,” she said.
When they got to the planetarium, the ticket seller told them the next showing was delayed. In the distance Meg saw two uniformed guards entering the auditorium.
“I’m going in there,” she whispered to Lilith. “Create a distraction.”
Lilith’s idea of a distraction was to empty her purse on the floor and then beg the ticket seller to help her find a diamond ring that had fallen out. It was feeble, but good enough for Meg to scurry past the gate. She hurried into the empty auditorium, which was dimly lit. The domed ceiling was devoid of stars. She heard a commotion in the middle of the room and, once her eyes adjusted, Meg spied the two guards. They were prying Galen off some kind of machine. She ran up and saw that he had wrapped himself around the star projector. He was wearing the sunglasses.
“Let there be light,” Galen was mumbling. “And there was light.”
The burly guards were having a surprisingly hard time pulling him loose. One said, “C’mon, mister, you don’t want to be doing this.”
When they pulled harder, Galen began to squeal and held on tight. Meg intervened. “I’m his sister. Let me try. He’s frightened.”
The guards didn’t give her permission, but she shoved past them anyway, which got her close enough to snatch the glasses off Galen’s head.
“I took him out on a day pass. He’s under care,” she explained.
The guards looked suspicious. At least Galen had let go of the projector. He slid to the ground, softly murmuring “Wow” over and over.
“Your brother needs better doctors,” one guard said. He was older and seemed to be in charge.
“Oh, I agree,” said Meg. “I appreciate your understanding. And, of course, if we’re allowed to leave, there will be a generous contribution to the planetarium.”
“Whatever,” the younger guard grumbled. “I’m going to lunch.”
Between them, Meg and Lilith dragged Galen away. He pawed at Meg’s purse, where she had stowed his sunglasses.
“Mine,” he babbled. “Mine, mine, mine.”
But they managed to keep him from getting at them.
“All gone,” he moaned softly. His head lolled to one side, and he fell asleep.