A Bare and Beautiful Place
written by Brendan Michael
“out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.”
— Li-Young Lee, “Nativity”
Khalil awoke in a room he had only ever seen in a dream. There was the window that looked out to sea, here the hope chest the color of aged copper, and beneath his bruised flesh the ache of broken bones. The light of morning was everywhere in the room. The sighing sound of tides snuck itself beneath the window sill.
All of these things he had seen and felt before many times, for the dream had haunted him since boyhood. Always the same room, the same morning, the same ocean. Now it would appear his strange life had caught up with his strange visions, and he would have laughed but for the pain in his body.
He tested his limbs gingerly, shifting them beneath his sheets. He had been beaten, badly. By whom? He made an effort to remember: thickness of night, evergreen boughs in the pouring rain, mud lit by lamplight, squared white faces peering down, their fists rising and falling like breathing. He closed his eyes tightly, recessing back from things, trying to recall. Too difficult. He relaxed his face and allowed his body to sink into the bed. What always happened next in the recurring dream? Ah, yes -
The pale boy with the flaxen hair and the gray pajamas was perched on a stool, peering at him with large, sunken eyes. He seemed merely curious, not afraid. For several long moments the two figures blinked at one another, as if posing for an artist — dark broken man in bed and white sickly child on stool. The palette of the painting would have to be striking, diametric, devoid of soft colors that interplayed.
Khalil couldn’t remember from the dream which of them was supposed to speak first. He shifted in the bed and winced. The boy shifted on the stool as if in response, and coughed. A hoarse, discontented cough that splintered its way from his small body.
Perhaps neither of them were to speak. In the wake of the terrible cough the room retrieved its silence reluctantly, and the sound of the nearby sea slowly reset itself to a distant pulse. Then the boy’s mother entered the room. She was a tall and willowy woman, underfed but unfazed, and her tautly-pulled hair was as flaxen as her son’s. She wore a smudged white apron that clung to her thin frame.
“I see you’re up,” she said as if remarking on the weather. She nudged the boy. “Go fetch him some water.” He slid off the stool and padded out of the room.
The woman gave Khalil an appraising look. Somewhere in the house a faucet ran, and the boy coughed. The woman’s reaction to this sound was subtle — a crinkle in the brow, twitch of the lip.
“You were in a fine state,” she said to Khalil finally as the boy returned, unsteadily, with the glass of water. “None of my concern, but what were you up to out there? We don’t get too much foreign folk out this way.”
Khalil received the glass of water with a nod of thanks. “I was on a trip,” he said to the woman. She waited expectantly for the rest of the story, but it didn’t come.
“Salesman?” she asked suddenly.
“Pardon?”
“You a salesman? Sometimes we get them out this way.”
“No, I am not selling anything. I merely came on a trip. I stopped to get some food, and these men — they did not receive me kindly. As you say, I am foreign.”
As he spoke these words, he felt his wounds throb as if remembering the hands that wrought them.
“They hurt you?” the boy asked in a small voice. The woman shushed him, but Khalil said it was fine. He looked into the boy’s eyes and smiled.
“Yes, they hurt my body,” he said. “But there is more to me than my body. And in that way, they did not hurt me so bad.” The boy smiled back at him.
The woman gave Khalil another appraising look, then took her son by the arm. Their guest needed to rest himself, she said.
“Wait,” Khalil managed, and the woman paused at the door. “Thank you,” he said weakly. “For your mercy.” She nodded, and they left the room.
Khalil spent most that day and the next asleep, occasionally lifting his head above the low-hanging fog of weariness to spy the woman who tended him. She came in once an hour to change the wet cloth on his head and to treat his wounds. There was always a glass of water on the bedside table (often supplied by the boy), and very often some small bit of nourishment — bread and cheese, slices of fruit with a dab of honey. The giving-grace of the poor, Khalil thought, and he gave thanks.
These impressions of a warm bed, a soothing hand on his brow, and the beautifully meager provisions, Khalil remembered from the dream of his boyhood. Each time he opened his eyes to glimpse a new mercy, he knew that he had glimpsed them before in some other world, and he gave thanks.
On the third day he felt well enough to sit up, and there was the boy, perched unsteadily on the stool, a checkerboard balanced on his knee. Khalil asked him where was his mother? He said she was out tending the garden, and would he like to play a game of checkers? Khalil said he would be delighted. They played for a while, the checkerboard resting on the bedcover. The boy (between his coughs) asked him questions about the world beyond the evergreens, and beyond the sea itself. Khalil told him of his own home, a foreign place, very beautiful this time of year. He told the boy about the colors of his culture, of what fruit would be in season, of the dancing bustle in the street market. The boy listened with wide eyes. Then, as Khalil was making his next move on the board, he saw the boy falter on the stool, and then fall.
Outside, the woman was indeed tending the little garden, which eked out its troubled life on a difficult patch of cliffside soil. Beyond the garden was a rocky precipice, in which a few strangled shrubs grew, then the great chasm and sea beyond. The winds tore and whipped, the waves heaved themselves against the rocks, and so it was without end. It was a bare and beautiful place. The woman that now cut leaves of meager cabbage from the earth was as sparse and beaten as the landscape itself. But she paid none of it any mind, for only one thing, one small fragile heartbeat amid the cluttered cosmos mattered to her anymore.
The door of the cottage opened and she looked up, but was disappointed: the wrong person came walking down the path. Khalil moved gingerly but with purpose toward her, swaddled in a threadbare blanket, his shoulder turned against the sea gale rising up from the abyss. She stood up, clutching the cabbage in her hand.
“What happened?” she asked. Her voice was quiet, surely lost beneath the roaring waves and wind, but somehow he heard her.
“He is faint,” he called back, “and dizzy in the head, but he is otherwise fine. I gave him the bed. He seemed to need it more than me.”
The woman dropped the culling knife into the dirt and rushed into the cottage. Khalil watched her go, but did not follow. He knew she would need this moment alone with the boy. He absently wished he had cleaned up the checkers — they were scattered all across the floor.
With a shiver, he clutched the blanket more tightly around himself and hobbled over to the small garden. He groaned audibly as he lowered himself down to the ground. His muscles screamed in protest, and the pain that had cooled to embers was suddenly rekindled to flame. No matter — he was in the soil now, and he picked up the knife where she had dropped it. The wind finally subsided a bit, so he could hear the sound of the dull knife cutting through leaf, and it pleased him. He gave thanks.
He had harvested several heads of cabbage when the woman reemerged from the cottage. She stopped short when she saw what he was doing.
“Get up,” she said. “I won’t have you down there in the dirt. Not in your state.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late,” he said, starting in on the last head. “How is the boy?”
She hesitated, plucking at one of her frayed apron strings. “Asleep,” she said finally. “He’s got a temperature.”
Khalil nodded, working away with the knife. Then almost as an afterthought, he asked, “How long has the boy been ill?”
The woman stiffened, and her hand dropped to her side. “I only just told you that he’s got a temperature.”
“I don’t mean that,” he said. “He has a deeper illness. The temperature is but the most recent sign.” Khalil did not look up from his work, but he could sense the woman’s discomfort.
“You a doctor?” she asked. Khalil shook his head. “Some kind of holy man?” Khalil paused at this, and looked up.
“That is nearer to the truth, yes. Allow me a moment.” With another groan, Khalil eased himself to his feet. The cabbage leaves lay bundled in his blanket. “Come, we will go inside,” he said with a smile. “I will help you make him soup.”
The kitchen was predictably small — little more than a gaslit stove, petrified cooking hearth, and three-legged sitting table. The woman fetched a pot of water from the well, and they set to making the broth. The work was silent for a time, until she had clearly had enough.
“I don’t believe it was just a trip,” she said finally, almost to herself, as she was dicing the carrots.
“Pardon?”
“You coming out here, way far north in another country, just to get yourself beat up. Something don’t fit.”
Khalil stirred the pot over the fire, pondering how to respond. Should he tell her of the dream that had pursued him each night since before he came to manhood? Of the visions he had been given, of a bare and beautiful place by the sea, where cabbage wilted in a small garden, and a boy lay dying? It simply would not do. Not the whole truth, anyway.
“I came to this place because I felt I was meant to,” he finally replied. “It is a difficult thing to say. I go to the places I am told to go. I speak the words given to me. I do what I am called to do. I live a life that is meant. You see, it is a difficult thing to say.”
Khalil tried to read the woman’s reaction to this, but her back was to him, dicing at the table. He suspected that even if her face could be seen, it should be inscrutable.
“You sound like a strange kind of preacher,” she said after a time. “Preacher would have just said that the good Lord has a plan.”
Khalil chuckled. “Well, I suppose that is true. But I would not say plan, because that is an even more difficult thing. That is why I speak of things meant. Things given. Things told. Because then I must bear an Image. I must Listen, I must Respond. And I must Love. You see, it is a difficult thing to say.”
“But you knew he was ill,” she said, turning around now to look at him. “The deep illness, like you said. How did you know that? I never told a soul.”
Khalil frowned, and stopped stirring the pot. Gently, he lifted the spoon to his mouth and sipped, then nodded in approval. He looked up at her, his eyes full of a deep kind of knowing. “Perhaps you would believe if I said I saw it in the manner of his movement, or the color of his his face, or in his eyes, because he simply does not look well. But it is not that. Perhaps you would not believe me if I said I Saw it long ago, written somewhere upon the world, or through the glass darkly, and am now meeting it face to face. And it is nearly like that, in truth.”
He shook his head, frowning, as if trying to find the right words, then gently opened his hand. “But also I sense it,” he said, “in this very moment, like something in the room for me to reach out and feel, because it is given to me, and so I Receive. It is why I came to this place, at the edge of the world, because there is something to Receive. If men had not given in to hate and beaten me, then you would not have taken me in, spared my life. I would not know that blessing, and I would not know the suffering in you, and the suffering of your child. You see now: the things most true, most beautiful, are difficult to say.”
The woman was silent. She kept at the vegetables, but there was something moved and troubled in her. Khalil allowed her the silence, and they finished preparing the soup. He asked if he could bring the soup in to the boy, and she agreed.
The bed seemed to swallow up the child, as if his body had been made immaterial and lightened of heavy things. The stuff of life was leaving him, and Khalil knew it as he entered the room. A frost was upon the air. He lay the soup bowl gently down on the bedside table, and eased himself into the chair. The woman had gathered up the checker pieces and stowed them on the hope chest, but she had missed one. Khalil picked it up and ran his finger over its raised edge, all the while looking with settled sorrow at the boy.
The boy was looking back at him, and trying to speak. Khalil leaned in close.
“I’m glad you came,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to get hurt. But I’m glad it got you here.”
Khalil nodded.
“This is my bed,” the boy continued, running his hand up and down the well-worn blanket. “But I’m glad it got to be your bed. For just a while. Sorry to take it back.”
Khalil nodded again, and then the boy fell asleep. Soft sighs in the room, and rising steam from the wasted bowl of soup. The frost remained in the air.
That night Khalil took a thin blanket and curled up on the floor in the small kitchen to sleep. The woman wanted to give him her cot, insisting that he was still injured and needed a proper bed, but he refused. He was used to sleeping on the floor, he told her. It felt more like home — awaking in the bed was a stranger experience. Khalil lay awake until he could hear the boy’s rattled breathing settle into soothing rhythm, then he allowed himself to drift to sleep.
The boy was dead by the next morning.
It was the woman who learned first. In the hazy world suspended between dream and waking, Khalil heard her open gently the groaning door and slip silently into the room. Without opening his eyes, he caught the sound of her steps shuffling, then steps ceasing. Then a punctuated moment of silence, hanging terribly, followed by the sharp intake of breath, of grief. And Khalil knew, then.
He didn’t wish to get up and drive a difficult wedge into this moment between mother and child. He allowed her several minutes — they felt like ages of the world — to shrink into herself, to crimple like thin paper against the thing she cherished. Khalil clutched to his blanket and kept his eyes screwed shut. He heard her feet defy gravity and depart earth as she climbed quietly into the bed to curl herself around him.
He didn’t know how long they all lay there — stranger upon the floor, mother amid grief, child unto death. But the heavy quiet lay like a confused commingling of comfort and dread. Finally, the woman seemed to drift back from bed to floor, and she stooped to gently wake her guest. Khalil slowly opened his eyes, which were already wet, and turned to look up at her.
“He took him,” the woman whispered, her eyes large and hollow like the child’s. Khalil frowned, confused. Was the boy missing?
“Who -”
“Your God took my boy,” she said, her voice tinged with bitterness. “He took him away. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed -” she was babbling now and turning away from him, slipping herself from the room. A moment later he heard the telltale sound of retching.
Khalil eased himself to his feet with much pain and trembling — his body could not forget its travail — and looked at the body stilled by death. The boy looked as if he still slept, but there was in his aspect the strange and mysterious notion of death. Khalil could not explain it. He had seen it before, felt it before — the presence of the Curse working all of life backward, stopping the breath of things in a room.
He felt the woman’s presence at the doorway, and he turned. She was looking through him, through the boy even — she was looking at a truth and an abyss somewhere beyond the walls.
“Well?” she asked. And somehow Khalil knew it was pointed at him, at God. He thought of everything he had said the night before, about things meant, things given, things told. He thought about the dream, how he had seen this place, these people before. Knew them like he knew an old bedtime story. But the truth was that in the dream, the boy never died. He was always sick, always pale, always kind and gentle amid his suffering, but always alive.
And so Khalil was at a loss.
“Tell Him I’m sorry,” the woman said. She leaned wearily against the doorframe, still staring into a void. “I’ve done some bad stuff, and I’m sorry. But He didn’t” — she faltered, her voice breaking — “He didn’t have to take my baby. Oh God.”
She was undone again, sinking down to the floor. Her body was wracked by sobs, and she rocked back and forth, her head shaking “no” again and again and again. Khalil felt her pain course through him, deep and terrible and far worse than what the bad men had done to him. He was moved and powerless.
“Leave me with him,” he said suddenly, not entirely sure what he was doing. It was an impulsive snatch at the air, perhaps even uncouth and inappropriate, but it felt like a given thing. And he was a man that always received what was given to him.
The woman’s eyes flickered to her child then back to Khalil, her face disturbingly impassive. She nodded absently, then climbed the doorframe back up to her feet. Then the door was closed, and Khalil was alone with the Almighty.
The heavy quiet came again upon the room, but this time it was full of presence. Khalil felt the broken heart of the Maker weigh heavily upon him. He leaned against the bedpost for support. He heard the voiceless cry against death, but it didn’t feel like enough.
“Is it enough?” Khalil said into the stillness. “Did You take him, or did he go from us? Is it a judgment?”
The answer was silence.
“Was this Your hand? Was it simply Death that came, with Your leave?”
The answer was silence.
Khalil shook his head. “Why show me an unfinished thing? The dream You gave, was it not a true thing? But You never showed me this.”
He remembered an old story, perhaps the oldest story, about the giving of things and the taking of things, of a Name that was blessed in want and abundance, death and life, sweetness and sorrow. In the center of the Death that hovered like a spectre in the room dwelt a greater Ghost, at once more real and more unseen, and it seemed to open its hand. Khalil closed his eyes and received.
He reached over the bed, his tender wounds stretching and splitting, his bones aching, and it felt much like the night of his beating — body cast down and prostrate in the mud, the blows falling, the heart hoping for deliverance and will wishing for patience, the mind moving against madness.
He leaned over the body and gently lay his hand on the forehead as if he were merely feeling for fever. In the moment of stillness that followed, something changed in the room. The Presence seemed to turn and sigh and breathe, like blowing warm air into a cold palm. The sea outside held its breath, and for an instant Khalil felt the weight of all instances, the terrible gravity of timelessness, the invasion of the eternal, and he was nearly undone. Then the moment passed, and the boy drew breath.
Khalil cried out and stumbled away from the bed. The woman hurried into the room just as the boy was opening his eyes to the rapidly-returned world. She lingered on the threshold, then threw herself at the bed. Khalil backed himself against the wall. His vision blurred and mind reeled as the nearness of his experience began to withdraw itself. He looked at the boy, heard the air move itself through his lungs with deep, sweet clarity, and muttered, “I believe. Help my unbelief.”
Then the boy began to speak. The words spilled from his lips, and they were strange: “Kcab ti ekat ot yrros. Elihw a tsuj rof. Deb ruoy eb ot tog ti dalg m’i tub. Deb ym si siht.” The woman looked fearfully at Khalil, who merely shook his head, dumbfounded. The boy also turned his eyes to Khalil. “Ereh uoy tog ti dalg m’I tub,” he said. “Truh teg ot dah uoy yrros m’i. Emac uoy dalg m’i.”
There was something familiar about the words, and even the cadence by which the boy spoke. The boy had settled back into silence and closed his eyes in sleep, and the woman shook him, tears streaming from her eyes. She pleaded with him to stay awake, to not leave again.
“He’s not leaving again,” said Khalil, closing his own eyes in understanding.
“How do you know?” the woman asked, running her hands over the boy’s face.
“The words. Those strange words,” Khalil said, and a slight smile crept onto his face. “Don’t you see? They were going the wrong way. His last words, all turned around.” He looked at the woman, his eyes clear as day, full of hope. “He is undying.”
