The Gap of Time Read Free

dispute with the past?
    I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.
    “Shep! Shep?” It’s the pastor. Yes, thank you, I am all right. Yes, what a night it was last night. God’s judgement on the million crimes of mankind. Does the pastor believe that? No, he doesn’t. He believes in global warming. God doesn’t need to punish us. We can do that for ourselves. That’s why we need forgiveness. Human beings don’t know about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a word like tiger—there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is.
    I can’t forgive myself for what I did…
    One night, late, deep night, the dead of night—they call it that for a reason—I smothered my wife in her hospital bed. She was frail. I am strong. She was on oxygen. I lifted the face cone and put my hands over her mouth and nose, and asked Jesus to come and take her. He did.
    The monitor was beeping and I knew they’d be in the room soon. I didn’t care what happened to me. But no one came. I had to go and fetch someone—the place had too few nurses and too many patients. They couldn’t be sure who to blame—though I am pretty certain they thought it was me. We covered my wife with a sheet, and when eventually the doctor showed up he wrote “Respiratory Failure.”
    I don’t regret it but I can’t forgive it. I did the right thing but it was wrong.
    “You did the wrong thing for the right reason,” the pastor said. But that’s where we don’t agree. It may sound like we’re just tossing the words around here, but there is a big difference. He means it is wrong to take a life but that I did it to end her suffering. I believe it was right to take her life. We were married. We were one flesh. But I did it for the wrong reason and I knew that soon enough. I didn’t do it to end my wife’s pain; I did it to end my own.
    “Stop thinking about it, Shep,” says the pastor.
    —
    After church I went home. My son was watching TV. The baby was awake, very quiet, wide eyes on the ceiling where the light made shadow bars through the slatted blinds. I picked her up and let myself out again and headed for the hospital. The baby was warm and easy to carry. Lighter than my son had been when he was born. My wife and I had just moved to New Bohemia. We believed in everything—the world, the future, God, peace and love, and, most of all, each other.
    As I walked down the street carrying the baby I fell into a gap of time, where one time and another become the same time. My body straightened, my step lengthened. I was a young man married to a beautiful girl and suddenly we were parents. “Hold the baby’s head,” she said as I carried him, my hand enfolding his life.
    That week after he was born, we couldn’t get out of bed. We slept and ate with our baby lying between us on his back. We spent the whole week just staring at him. We had made him. With no skills and no training, no college diploma and no science dollars, we had made a human being. What is this crazy, reckless world where we can make human beings?
Don’t go.
    What’s that you say, mister?
    I’m sorry, I was daydreaming.
    Fine looking baby.
    Thank you.
    The woman walks on. I find I am standing in the middle of the busy street holding a sleeping baby and talking to myself. But I’m not talking to myself. I am talking to you. Still. Always.
Don’t go.
    See what I mean about memory? My wife no longer exists. There is no such person. Her passport has been cancelled. Her bank account is closed. Someone else is wearing her clothes. But my mind is full of her. If she had never lived and my mind was full of her they’d lock me up for being delusional. As