The Light of the World

The Light of the World “The operation saved your sight,” the doctor explained. “Without it you would be blind.” He paused, looked away, then added, “It’s not all good news, I’m afraid. Without what we removed… that diseased filter… seeing will eventually become painful. Even unbearable. It will take years but eventually it will feel like burning. But at least you’ll see.” He paused.“You may even be able to see… more.” Worried, I asked, “More? What do you mean?” The doctor touched me on the shoulder. “Most of us see the world through a lens darkly. It protects us. We never see the world as it really is. Yours was damaged. It’s very rare but it happens. You know Joyce, the Irish writer? He’s the most famous example in the medical texts. Joyce had fourteen surgeries before they finally understood the trouble. Near the end he said that simply opening his eyes each morning was like filling them with acid. He suffered a great deal.” The doctor hesitated. “He called it a light all around him. That will take years though. It’s progressive. It begins with brief flashes, then a kind of burning. We saved your sight, but eventually vision will be painful.” I was just finishing school when it began. Flashes at the edge of the horizon. Just glimpses of a light no one else could see. At first it felt like I had discovered a kind of electricity, stray sparks that surged then disappeared. A kind of fleeting brilliance. A buried current that came and went of its own accord. But exposed in those flashes was another world. The unseen world was hidden. It was vast and unruly. Both terrible and beautiful. It was almost as though someone had painted over a luminous masterpiece that I began to see in short bursts. It obscured but also eternal. I felt drawn to it, to these glimpses. To this hidden world beneath my senses. At times it almost seemed like it was calling for me to follow it down. But how? Young men of that age can seem aimless. Before they find their place in the world. I suppose I did. But the truth was I was not aimless in any way. I was aiming at everything. I answered an ad for a part-time job at an art auction house. It had been commissioned to restore a collection of ancient paintings in various states of ruin, darkened by smoke from a museum fire. My job was to assist the master conservator, an older man, meticulous in dress and habit. He insisted on working alone, but that year, his 86th, he had begun to understand that his time was dwindling, so he tolerated my presence. He seemed to savor my naïveté, like innocence itself was a gift. I think he hungered for my simplicity. The weightlessness of it. Its absence of grief and time. And I, for my part, was hungry for what he knew of the world I could only feel in flashes and shadows. He had been tasked with reviving a medieval religious canvas, the figure of Jesus stepping from the tomb. The painting was called The Light of the World. As I watched him work in silence day after day, I could almost hear him, hour by hour, whispering goodbye to life. His hands were twisted by time and arthritis and soiled from a lifetime of trying to remove damage and paint. Some other part of him seemed stained too, but in another way. A devout man, he had watched his wife suffer and wither away that year. Cancer. In her last days, try as he might, this master restorer could not clean away the fumes of death. He was powerless to reclaim love from loss. And after she passed, bent by anguish and unforgiveness, he became a determined unbeliever, holding God responsible for the exchange of love for grief. As sometimes happens, his faith had been incinerated. He told me once much later it was like watching her slowly become smoke. My job, day after day, was to assist him. To help him stand, hand him brushes and swabs, watch the unbearably slow craft of restoring The Light of the World. I believe now he wanted to pass on what he had learned of craft and art. Of shadow and of light, and how a man must struggle between them. One day, without warning, after weeks of only silence, he turned to me and called out, “Above all else… first you must learn to feel the darkness.” Then using cotton he worked at the dark edge of the canvas, trying to persuade it to let go of the light buried beneath it. “It requires patience, boy. You may not erase it quickly. Or even ever entirely. No! It is like night; you must… endure it… before you can ever hope to understand enough to unlock it.” He closed his eyes and reached a hand out toward the divine figure hidden beneath the damage, entombed by neglect and duress. “Stop seeing with just your eyes. Only then will you be able to reach what’s beneath… to free the paint.” He waved his hand as though he was listening to a graceful unheard melody. “It’s imprisoned, you see. But you must be patient. You must wait for the light to rise. Like dawn.” It went on like that in the weeks that followed. Hours of silence, the master craftsman, like a surgeon removing layers of ruin. And me at his side, my darkened vision touched by moments of incandescent epiphany. But day by day, even as he worked to restore the light, I could see that he was losing his vision. Drawn to the world beneath the shadows, he was slowly becoming enveloped by them. His fingers crippled by time, his sight beginning to fail, he sometimes asked me to be his hands, guiding mine along the darkened canvas, warning against moving too quickly. “It requires patience. To see,” he said again and again. Even as his eyes dimmed, mine seemed to strengthen. I was seeing lines I had not been able to discern slowly become clear. The savior began to seem trapped and required only my faith that he might be freed from the cell that held him captive. And each night I would walk home alone, surrounded by the shadowed city, certain that I was beginning, in brief fits and starts, to see the masterpiece waiting beneath its dark veil. — One day as I arrived the old man sat cradling a photo of his wife. Seeing me, he became embarrassed, then ashamed at his embarrassment, he set the portrait in a drawer. His voice grew thick with memory but wavering seemed thin also. “A painting is the world searching for light and finding only fire,” he told me. “Great art begins like a stray spark in a man’s eye. It follows down into the wilderness of him. Sometimes the spark dies. In some men though it finds kindling.” Then reaching for the photo of his wife, I watched his grief rise into rage. “It is arson, boy! God is an arsonist! He throws sparks waiting for the flame to ignite our blood.” Pointing to the canvas he bellowed, “He comes to save the world, but only by setting it ablaze. It is not just Light He offers. He comes as fire!” Then collapsing into a fit of coughing, struggling for breath, I helped him to his chair. He waited for his breath to return then, turning to me, whispered, “If you want the light, there is no other way… you must give yourself over to the burning.” “I don’t understand,” I said. “No,” he answered, reaching up and touching my cheek. “Not yet. How could you?” I wanted to tell him I had seen that other world, the unseen world. That I had begun to feel the burning beneath the smoke. The world of buried light. “I’m starting to see,” I stuttered. He looked at me with pity and envy. “Perhaps… in time.” Then he leaned close, took my hand in his and looked into my eyes. “But beware, boy. There’s a price in it. In freeing the light. What you take into your eyes, you must also take into your heart. You have to be taken by shadow first.” He held up a hand discolored by age and paint. “There’s a stain to it, a weight in it.” He reached across and touched my chest. “It will make your heart heavy, trying to lift what it has come to know.” I didn’t care, I thought. I wanted to unlock the hidden world. Suddenly possessed, he turned back to the canvas once more, talking only to himself, said, “I must remove the smoke to see it clearly. To save the light. To save this world.” He touched the buried savior like he was trying to raise it from the tomb. Back into this life. I watched in awe, sure that something of this unseen world was slowly shedding its disguise. And each day I was more certain. I wanted to reach the masterpiece. I wanted to save that world. I was trying to rescue the light. — Each morning the old man, bent with age and more frail by the week, worked carefully removing the soot of time. Painstakingly he silently argued with the smoke of ruin. Sometimes he would begin to cough, then struggling to breathe would fill a cloth with blood. He looked at it like it was paint and that he himself was a canvas on fire. Then using swabs and solvents he would brush, arguing with the shadows, urging the canvas back toward life. “It’s a resurrection, you see,” he said, pointing to the shadows. One day he turned to me and steadied his voice. “Remember this, boy… above all else this. The light shifts. It is its nature. You must not trap it. We should not try. We can only hope to follow it,” he said. His voice faltered, then whispering to himself said, “It is my only hope now. To follow it.” I touched him on the shoulder, the way a man tries to explain to another man that he understands how the world is pitiless and all we have is some small tenderness to offer. Exhausted, he touched my hand and said, “I am nearly finished cleansing the smoke… from myself. Leave me to it, leave me now. Leave me to The Light of the World.” — One fall morning the gallery administrator met me at the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you were fond of him.” It was a surprise the way death always is, but not a shock. “We found him sitting, eyes closed, before the fully restored painting, you know the one. The savior emerging from the tomb, The Light of the World it’s called.” “We won’t be needing you anymore,” he said. “We commissioned the rest of the work out.” “Will there be a funeral?” I asked. “No… he was an atheist. Strange though—when we found him his fingers were wrapped around a crucifix. So no, no ceremony. He’s to be cremated.” “The light requires the burning,” I whispered to myself. And I thought of him following his wife into the smoke toward whatever lay beneath. — By winter the flashes of light had become stronger. The world by contrast seemed darker. I was determined to restore the hidden thing I felt moving beneath the days. The unseen world. The one masking the terrible beautiful masterpiece. So I took a job for a time driving a cab in NYC. Nights only. I was trying to make it dark enough to see the light. It would only be there that I might be able to bend the shadows enough to see. There were times, driving those first nights through the worn pathways and histories of humanity, when the edges of so many lives, clustered together like leaves in autumn, began to seem irredeemably separate. The essential truth about the city is we crowd together because we, each of us, feel an unsolvable hunger to reach beyond ourselves, pretending again and again that the vast distance of being human might ever find a way across to another. So we jam together on a rush hour subway or lose ourselves on a crowded Christmas avenue. We wait together in traffic halted for an ambulance wailing as it passes into the night. But we remain solitary. The universal human language is not hope or fear or the wordless equations of music or math. It is not the common denominator of a beat in each chest or the way a heart swells with each passing possibility of love. It is not time or its demands or love or grief or death. The universal language of our kind… the only thing we can feel of ourselves echoing in each other, is loneliness. A hulk of a man with long grey matted hair ran into the traffic waving his arms and hollering to no one. As he reached the corner beneath the red light he raised an arm, as though he and he alone had been granted power over all of Manhattan. Pointing to the traffic signal, he began obsessively chanting to himself. “The light changes… the light… the light changes.” Then, when he was sure the world had obeyed his commands, gazing upward like he was waiting for a sign, the signal overhead would turn. And certain that he had once again forced the light to yield, he began to wave his arms, allowing the halted lives to continue on their way toward appointments and phone calls, toward wealth and happiness and love and whatever barriers rose to each. The street people called him Zeus, but he had once been a clear-eyed boy named Henry. Henry had been sent to a jungle war at 18. Part of him remained there after the war ended. It was the part that believes life is only merciful and endings are always happy. Henry was left behind in the mud of memory, left with the cries of dying friends and the sound of gunfire. Even after he returned he remained gone. A boy lost, lost to family and time, then finally to himself. People get lost. It happens all the time. They lose pieces of their hearts or their minds. Their souls sometimes follow. Henry, lost forever in the jungles of himself, never returned. Zeus took his place. Henry had been set to fire. From seeing. “What you take into your eyes you take into your heart,” the old man said. Zeus’s heart had been driven mad by what had entered through Henry’s eyes. After discharge on a psych he was arrested a few times for disorderly, screaming into alleyways about long-dead comrades that followed him from Khe Sanh to this corner of Gotham where he made himself all-powerful, a barrier to more casualties. In that time the damaged, like Zeus, were usually taken in by the authorities, examined by a government doctor then committed by the court. It was a kind of mercy. Also a sin. Sometimes they appear together. That’s how we treated the traumatized and unstable, the harmless oddballs and the vulnerable schizos. The lost, unable to care for themselves. Zeus was committed. He spent a couple of years medicated into submission with a bed and three meals. In the ’70s, cost cutters decided to free all but the dangerous. The rest were given small stipends, enough for a bed and a hot plate in an SRO — Single Room Occupancy — paid monthly by the government against the loan of a boy’s soul. In the ’80s, another round of cuts stripped away those stipends. The evictions followed and Manhattan quickly filled with the dispossessed, pushing their lives in grocery carts, sleeping under the East River Drive. People are determined to forget all that now. How we acquitted ourselves by blaming the most helpless among us. How we decided “you’re on your own” was ok. America became darker that year. The light changed. Along with the truth, it retreated and the world took on a darker hue. And in flashes I began to make out the outlines of that other unseen world. Both terrible and beautiful. And it burned. I was there, each night a witness in that darkening world. Trying to find the light. — “Some mornings my eyes bleed,” I told the doctor. A trickle of blood had caked on my eyelids. It was like something I could barely feel was battering my dreams. The doctor switched off the light and shook his head. “This is what I warned you about. You remember. The burning.” “What can I do?” I asked. He shook his head. “It’s all around you now?” I nodded. “Yes… under… everything.” “Great gifts demand great costs. There’s only one thing you can do.” He looked away. “Endure it.” It was almost 2 a.m., late winter, still cold but mud on the ground. I needed a fare as a disheveled man flagged me down on the Bowery. He was a little off, but it was 2 a.m. in Manhattan. At that hour the streets are filled with the crippled, by loneliness or by love, stumbling along trying to find their way to daybreak. He wanted to go to a housing project across the river in Astoria. “I’m Salvador,” he said. He was in his 30s but seemed much younger, with an almost childlike demeanor. “My priest says Salvador means savior. He says I’m a savior.” I glanced in the mirror. “Do you need saving, mister?” I ignored him and he continued amiably mumbling to himself. Not unusual for the 2 a.m. crowd, typically drunks whispering the things they should have said to the boss or the wife. But something about him, his bearing… his eyes… seemed to catch the light. Halfway up Third Avenue I began to get a whiff. I took a hard look in the rearview and realized he might be a street person. “Look here,” I said. “You have enough to pay the fare, right?” He was suddenly serious and respectful. “No sir. I don’t have any money right this minute, but my sister Sonia will gladly pay you. I’m going to see her!” Then solemnly, quietly, like a prayer, he whispered, “Sonia loves me.” If it was love it was a kind I had never encountered. It was the kind of love that left her adoring, damaged brother to the hard liberty of the streets. To sleeping under park benches and shivering in the gray of winter waiting for the salvation that never came. Salvador was beaten down each day by the street until some part of him retreated into the unseen world. The world covered with dirt and smoke. The masterpiece of both the terrible and the beautiful. “Sonia will pay you mister. She will. She’s my sister… she loves me.” My eyes began to ache. “Great,” I muttered to myself. We drove along in silence, the apprentice restorer chasing the lights up the darkened avenues and Sonia’s simple vagrant brother, abandoned to its alleyways. A savior certain of just one unshakable truth. That his sister still loved him and always would. The projects have always been dangerous. Poverty and hunger have a way of forgetting right. Sometimes they pick up a bat or a knife or a gun. But the Astoria projects then were still running on the fumes of middle class. As we pulled up he begged me to come inside, into the decrepit elevator and up to the fourth floor where, he said, Sonia and her husband lived. He led me down a long narrow hall past identical apartment doors until he stopped. “This is it,” he said. “This is where Sonia lives!” He began knocking and calling, whispering to the locked door then crying and finally hollering, “Sonia… Sonia… Sonia.” Finally inside a guard dog began to growl and bark, and a man’s voice hollered, “Get away! Or I’ll let him have you.” A woman’s voice answered then the sound of a couple arguing, voices rising, bellowing back and forth, then suddenly quiet. Salvador leaned close to the door whispering, “Sonia, can I have 8 dollars? I have to pay the man.” The lights seemed to flicker in the silence and the hallway seemed to darken. Then the woman’s voice answered, “Go outside… out by the window.” “Ok!” he said, cheering. My heart began to sink. An ever slow descent. Sonia had the kind of love that forever locked the door to her brother. My eyes began to ache. The world, vast and unruly, terrible and beautiful. Suddenly also cruel and in focus. “See! See Mister!” Salvador cried. “I told you… I told you… Sonia loves me!” We walked back to the tiny decrepit elevator. The middle of the night in the projects. I stood looking at this mildly unstable man, overjoyed, childlike… abandoned but smiling at me because he was sure the world was just and love was, once again, undeniable. Shaking my head I whispered to myself, “I don’t want to see no more.” Suddenly concerned for me, Salvador touched my arm, like he was sure I needed saving. He whispered, “I know just how you feel.” Outside in the cold March air we wandered across the muddy grass until he found her window high above. Then he closed his eyes and raised his arms like he was waiting, certain salvation would descend any minute. High above a window finally opened and a woman’s hand reached out. It waved once then one by one eight dollar bills gracefully floated down to the mud below. Then, just as it