[Also read the second AML review here.]

Chapter VII

Deja que bailen los dioses

-Robi Draco Rosa, Vivir

Early one day Elder Childe and I stepped out of our apartment when who should pull up but the zone leader in the standard mission-issue Toyota Corolla. “My companion will do a tradeoff with your companion today,” he explained quickly, “and you’re coming with me, Warner.”

“What, where?” I said.

“San Juan,” he replied, “Guynabo. The Mission home. President Coyle just called me this morning, he wants to meet with you.”

—-

One day later Elder Childe and I were riding our bikes beneath the burning sun; the kid knew where the next cita was, having found it during a trade-off with the zone leader’s companion the previous day. “Lead the way!” I said.

We biked along a busy highway. “We cross here,” he said.

—-

I actually had a lot planned for today, I thought as we pulled into the San Juan mission home, He sure better not be congratulating me on all our recent success, as though my vanity would somehow be offended.

“Welcome in, Elder Warner,” said President Coyle with a firm handshake and a warm smile—he’s a tall, lean man in his 50s, a lawyer in his other life, “Please step into my office.”

—-

Now, what the kid meant of course was “Let’s cross at this junction when the road is clear.” But words are vicious things, slippery and traitorous, frequently failing to mean what we intend. For when I heard “We cross here,” I assumed he meant the imperative, the command form—an hazlo instead of the Spanish hagalo—and proceeded accordingly.

His next imperative, however, was much less ambiguous: “Watch out for that car—”

——

He pulled up a foldable chair directly across from me, eschewing the cold formality of his desk. Scattered around his office were overflowing cabinets, portraits of Christ, and framed photos of the Santo Domingo and Salt Lake Temples. To my right was a giant white board with every missionary’s photo on a magnet alongside their current companion and their relative placement across Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. I glanced over it quickly, quietly cataloging where my scattered friends were then serving, such that I was only half-aware of myself mumbling, “So, what’s this all—”

“Your mother’s cancer’s returned.”

——

I glanced to my left, and sure enough, before I could flutter an eyelid, there was a gray…SUV I think it was, cruising about 40, just to my immediate left.

Or maybe it was a sedan, I couldn’t tell.

No matter.

Poor lady didn’t even have time to hit the breaks.

—-

“I wanted to tell you in person, not over the phone.”

I paused. I now stared as hard into his eyes as he into mine.

“Your parents called the mission office yesterday and I talked to them personally,” he continued quietly, “They didn’t want you to have to wait until their next letter to know, and I didn’t want to wait until the next Zone Conference, and business in San Juan today kept me from driving out to Fajardo myself.

“The doctors give her two years.”

—-

Strange experience, being.

Being hit by a car. Thing is, I don’t recall feeling a thing. It was akin to an out of body experience, I suppose. Most peaceful sensation (or lack thereof) I’d ever felt in my life. I was pure consciousness, unconscious of all.

I only remember this…blur, I suppose, of warm colors, like some impressionist painting—the pastel blue sky, a swirl of landscape (bold brush strokes), a flourish of red to the side, like seeing everything out the corner of one’s eye. If it had hung in a museum, I would’ve stared at it for hours.

—-

“And that’s optimistic. The tumor has been virulent, and they’re already planning another operation in May—up in Seattle they told me. But even this surgery, they told me, is more out of desperation, a Hail Mary.”

—-

Then I hit the pavement.

“But the doctors,” he leaned in closer, “Don’t know everything.”

—-

Suddenly I was in my body again, and all sensation returned. My back rested on that warm tropical asphalt while I stared straight up into the wide-open sky. My view was immediately cluttered by a crowd of chattering Puerto Rican faces swarming over me, with eyes that clearly expected to find me dead.

Slowly my lips began to form a gentle O as a low “ow” that trembled out of my throat.

And then a stabbing pain shot up my back.

—-

“For they don’t know the Lord,” he said, his voice now trembling, “And in two years, or two days, or two seconds, he can send that disease away like that.” He clapped his hands for emphasis.

—-

And for that first split second I was back in my body, all the worst possibilities I’d ever considered in my life were co-present and simultaneous and hung in the air at once: Internal bleeding, death, paralysis, brain damage, spinal injury, life in a coma, life as a vegetable, years upon years of inactivity, inaction, regret, despair, everything awful I’d feared and refused to ponder in a lifetime of adolescent timidity and fear were suspended before me in a moment that occupied all possible universes and timelines and stretched out and filled the immensity of eternity and All Eternity Shook—

—-

“The Lord watches out for the families of missionaries,” he continued, “And he will watch over your family, and he will watch over your mother, as he has watched over you.”

I finally flinched and broke eye contact. I looked down. The thin carpet was blue.

“Elder, please tell me what you’re feeling.”

—-

I was afraid to move a thing lest I unwittingly damage something else, but also because to move is to know, assuredly, beyond all doubt, what has actually happened to me and thus face all I never wanted to know—no, no, I told myself, I will not move for if I move I will know with a perfect assurance that I can’t move, Oh My Dear Merciful and Terrible God, it is better to never move and never know than to try to move and still not move and know for sure, better to live with this awful doubt and fear than to ever ever know, better to exist in this terrible moment of anxiety and tension and limbo for all eternity—

So I moved my legs.

—-

And for the first time in a long time, I cried. I cried, I cried, I cried.

Finally he asked if he could give me a blessing. I nodded. I remember the weight of his hands on my head and the warmth of his voice and the spirit washing over my soul, but heaven help me I can’t remember a word he said.

—-

My legs slowly rise, bend, stretch. I rotate my ankles, I wiggle my toes in my shoes—good, good, not paralyzed. Relief rushes through my nerves. I know now that if my legs are fine, then my arms surely will also—yes, yes, my arms are lifting, my elbows bending, my fingers moving, nothing broken, no bleeding, no bones protruding, nothing hanging by a vein or a ligament. My confidence grows. I lift a hand to feel the back of my head which aches (I wasn’t wearing my helmet, in the stupidest move of all)—I’m a little scraped, a little bloody, but no brains, nothing’s cracked open. Dear Lord, I really am ok, aren’t I, I start to rise—

“No, no, stay down, stay down,” Elder Childe came running over. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—” as though it’s his fault; it’s just what we say to each other I guess, apologize for the universe functioning the way it does, that we would fix it if we could, because somehow deep down we all know that it’s not supposed to be like this, though we can’t quite say why—

“You alright?” I asked him.

“Shut up you stupid prick, don’t you scare me like that!”

“Oh, don’t be a girl.”

“Warner, I swear…”

“Oh, you swear what? You swear what?”

“I’ll punch you in the face right now!”

“Bring it kiddo, I just got hit by a car, you think I’m scared of you?”

He laughs. I laugh. The circle of Puerto Ricans stare at us dumbfounded. All while the woman in the car cries inconsolably because her windshield was smashed and she thought she had just killed a man.

—-

And now while I kneel over my High School bed, I reach my hand up behind my back and touch just below the left shoulder blade where for months afterwards, if I turned too suddenly, there was a sudden shot of pain so unbearable that I had to fall to my knees and grip something. It was always at the most inopportune moments—in the homes of the grieving, in Church on Sunday, on the sidewalk—

Yet each time I got back up, you hear? Because I should be dead: I was literally a patient upon a table after that surreal ambulance ride to Hospital San Pablo, but I was not etherized, not paralyzed, barely even damaged—I was discharged that afternoon with a prescription of Vicadin that I didn’t renew when it ran out a week later.

So quick was my recovery, that at future mission gatherings I was not comforted or cared for by my fellow missionaries, not mourned or grieved, but roundly and good-naturedly mocked for my literal faux pas in front of a speeding car. Even after I caved in the windshield of that poor woman’s sedan, no criminal charges were made, no insurance claims filed, as the local traffic court immediately cleared us both of wrong-doing—the local Bishop praised not how I was saved from death, but from the paperwork. From the paperwork.

And now Lord Almighty you will overcome death for her too, do you hear me. You’ve overplayed your hand Dear God, for I now know—not believe, not have faith in, but absolutely know beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt know with a perfect knowledge that you can save and preserve and raise the living and the dead.

And now that I know you can, I must naturally wonder why you won’t, for you can’t just sit up there on your Golden Throne in a thoughtless stupor at the edge of the universe while still marking the fall of a sparrow and tell me that you will not grant me this one boon, and not even for me but my blessed mother for you’ve already done so for me, understand? Each time I went down I arose again, and now she will too, she will rise again because I didn’t come home just to watch her die so help me God—

I cried out—