God, Bethany’s God, was not believable to me—this God who was already setting a place for Peter at his heavenly feast table before my brother’s body was even buried in this world. Such an instant and naive solution to suffering seemed repellent and unreal. Even if I could have imagined it before Peter’s death, now that I had been a part of this horror, I couldn’t believe in anything as simple as this God who was portrayed as a smiling dinner host. Still, Bethany had also spoken of another aspect of her God—that he knew and understood everything and he had a plan into which even Peter’s death fit. This plan, Bethany implied, was benevolent and purposeful in a way we mortals couldn’t, because of our limits, comprehend, something grand and sacred that only a god could grasp.
If there was no plan, if the game board really had become irrevocably blank, then I had nothing to hold on to but that single, other word people had used to explain what happened: “accident.” If there was no plan, then maybe the god who ruled this world was named Accident, a god who joyed in randomness, who ripped apart lives for no reason, who swallowed stars and toyed with the Void.
But this was an insupportable idea. How could I live in a world where everything was random, where Accident ruled and where one day I might wake to sunshine and blue sky, and another, find my own brother dead at my feet? Accident. Unbearable word, unbearable world.
And so I came back to Bethany’s God. But maybe her God was different than she, in her naive goodness, believed. Maybe he wasn’t merely a designer of obscurely comprehended but benevolent plans—no, but a God even more inscrutable, with a penchant for making sinister, incomprehensible patterns. Patterns like this: I killed Peter with a gun, just as my father, years before, when he was my age, had also killed an unknown someone with a gun.
If not for a god, a strange and dangerous god, how could anyone explain a repetition as bizarre as this? My father and then myself—each performing the same, almost unimaginable deed. Here was a chilling and compelling pattern right before my eyes. I might not believe God could lift Peter out of the morgue to dine at his celestial banquet, but how could I doubt that this violent coincidence was full of meaning? And wasn’t that what I wanted and desperately needed that day of Peter’s death: a world where meaning existed?
I decided that there must be a God who had willed this pattern, and that for some reason he had turned his other face toward me: his merciless aspect, riven with mysterious shadows. I had a choice: I could try to live without meaning, or I could bow before this God. I bowed.
5
Child Mind
I don’t know how adult minds arrive at meanings. I don’t know what they need, or how they figure things out. But here are two stories about children and how they think. When my wife, as a child, first heard the opening phrase of the prayer “Our Father who art in Heaven,” she imagined a bearded man wearing a smock and a beret, holding a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, and standing before an easel. And why not? Here was a Creator God. Here is the figure who might well have painted the bright primary arc of the rainbow as a symbol of his good intentions toward his people. I’m not surprised my wife became a painter.
The other story about how children think isn’t so charming and benign. I heard it from my younger brother, Jonathan, only recently, when he learned I was writing this book. It was a story he had never told anyone except his wife in all the time since the accident. The week of Peter’s death, Jonathan was scheduled to have a math test that he knew he couldn’t possibly pass. That Sunday evening, before he climbed into bed, he prayed to God: “God, if you just get me out of this math test, I will never ask you for anything else again. Just help me this once, please.” We didn’t go to school that week after the accident, and when we finally did, Jon’s math test was long forgotten.
As Jon sat in his room, as he watched neighbors enter to dismantle Peter’s brass bed and carry it out to be stored in the barn, as the slow days went by and he tried to comprehend what had taken place, an awful realization dawned on him: God had answered his prayer. God had heard his selfish request and had granted it by killing Peter.
6
Numb
I was numb at the funeral. I remember almost nothing except a white curtain that was drawn to keep us, the family, separate from the rest of the mourners. We sat in a little alcove. I remember the chairs—the same folding metal ones I’d set up or folded countless times in the school gym or at Cub Scouts or in church basements. I don’t remember people, except as a kind of whispering around me. And where was I? I was deep in a desert wilderness as desolate as that inhabited by those early, God-tormented Christian saints who lived their whole lives alone on top of stone columns. Only I wasn’t on top of the column, I was embedded inside it, as if it were a shaft of pure shame transparent as Lucite, and I was immobilized inside it, like an insect or some unusual beetle. I heard people whispering around me like the desert breeze around the pillar, but I couldn’t move or look up, and so as far as I could tell no one was there.
The grave site was a two-hour drive from our town—across the Hudson and north into the Helderberg Hills southwest of Albany, where we had lived when I was first born. As we drove home, in the dark, I felt my faith in the devouring God grow stronger. I saw that Death, his angel, was everywhere, that it had entered our lives and I had opened the door to welcome it. I saw that it could enter in the spectacular, terrible form of Peter’s violent death, but that it could also insinuate itself in minor ways, in numberless tiny shapes you might not even notice until they had worked their way toward a beating heart in order to still it. Sitting in the dark in the back seat during that long drive, I saw that death was with us. It was the small white snail of wadded Kleenex my mother kept pressing against her face; it was nibbling holes in her cheek as if it were a leaf. I saw that death was the moonlight’s patch of blue mold growing on my father’s shoulder as he drove, oblivious, through the deep night.
When I tried to sleep that night and for years after, I could only do so if I began in one position: flat on my back with my arms crossed on my chest and my legs hooked over each other at the ankles. Lying like that in the dark room, in the pose of a mummy in an Egyptian sarcophagus, I calmed myself toward sleep. I imagined I was both the body inside, immobilized by its wrapping of thin linen strips, and the wooden case itself, painted with the expressionless face and figure of its dead occupant. I was afraid of my thoughts and afraid of the dark. I needed a double magic of rigidity to brace me against the violent storms of my dreams.
7
The Field
In my dream, I heard God’s voice demanding, “What have you done with your brother?” His question was like a fiery finger poking a hole through my chest, through my life. I saw the Bible they’d given me years ago in my first Sunday school, with its black leatherette cover stamped at the top in large gold letters “Holy Bible” and at the bottom “Gregory Orr” in a tiny font. A slow-motion bullet approached the book from behind and struck the back cover dead center, entering it in a ragged hole but not emerging on the other side. Now the book was a black wall I was facing and the bullet hole had become the entrance to a cave. I walked through the tunnel, listening to whispers from the tissue-thin pages that had been torn to incoherence. I could feel that the book’s later meanings had been destroyed by the bullet, especially those that offered hope and redemption. It had penetrated all the way to the earliest pages and now I had to follow its path. I walked for hours through darkness. The whispering disappeared. I saw nothing and heard only the sound of my own breathing. Then far ahead there was a dim red glow that grew brighter as I approached, and suddenly, I was standing in a hollow space stained with