I shatter, and in that moment I see myself for the first time. I am an ocean of light. My Jonah mind is there, but it feels ridiculously small, as if I’ve been stumbling around this whole time in bottoms made for a newborn when I’m so huge there isn’t anything anywhere that could hold all that I am.
Not that this is news. Prophets and mystics are always talking about this stuff. Hell, Mr. Balch’s Quakers could never get enough of the One, going on about how we’re all part of a greater Divine. Only I didn’t think they meant it literally. And I definitely hadn’t put together that I was two guys: the baby-pants guy and the guy carrying a sun in him, one that could blind the world with its light. I didn’t see either of those two coming. Seems like information I could have used before now.
This being I am, this One, is surrounding that tiny human mind, swallowing it, and it’d be easy to lose that lone consciousness, like misplacing a particular grain of sand on a thousand-mile shore. But I cling to it—that puny Jonah mind—longing for one last moment of small-scale tenderness. It’s probably nothing more than a habit of desire or maybe the reflex of a dying organism. But that’s not how it feels. It feels like love, like truth, which are just different ways of saying the same thing.
See, once you understand what you’ve been all this time, understand your true dimensions, you feel sorry for what you’ve missed, for living your life completely blind. You want to tell someone you love so they won’t miss it too.
I decide to go one more place with that Jonah mind, because it turns out far more is possible in death than I imagined. I search the ocean of light for Red and find her on a boat eight months from now—or, in truth, at this very instant, because all of it is here, caught in this moment, the past and the future. She is late in pregnancy, and I am neither surprised nor unsurprised. I do not wonder who the father is. The child is mine, has to be mine. Given who I am, this One, it couldn’t be otherwise.
I feel the draw away from this pinprick consciousness, back to my true oceanic self, but I stay with that floating dot of a mind long enough to sweep into the boat. I will say the words that filled me in Quaker meeting a year ago. Words I refused to speak because I did not understand them, because I did not believe that God would choose someone like me, because I felt too small to pronounce them.
Isaac is in the salon, waiting, and Red is in the bow berth, waiting too. With the last trace of this old consciousness, I draw close to Red. I whisper into that salted air, air as thick as the sea itself, the words I was chosen to speak.
The syllables multiply a thousandfold and land on the sails and pillows, on the book Red is reading, on her wondrous hair. They glisten on the lashes of her eyes and on her warm lips, they quiver delicate and alive as if she is the one who has spoken them.
I am glowing. You are glowing.
The entire world is aglow.
Her hand goes to her belly, and she coos to the baby. Then she rises and moves toward Isaac in the salon, who glows with his own quiet light.