The Imitation of God - Chapter 25

 

Chapter 25: Glass and Light

 

The city was made of pale glass that morning, everything rimed with a winter light that didn’t quite warm. Michael’s sedan coughed once and settled into its old rhythm, a patient thrum that matched the low hum in his bones. Snow along the curb had been chewed to gray by tires and boots; salt skittered under his wheels like sand. He drove without the radio. The silence felt cleaner than sound.

He kept to the small streets, avoiding the expressway’s frantic bargains. A bakery on 31st steamed its windows and made the block smell briefly of sugar; a bus shouldered past with a groan and the faces inside turned as one to the same thought: morning. He wore a clean shirt and the black windbreaker that could pass for formal if you didn’t stare. His collar rested against his throat with the faintest pressure, a reminder more than a badge.

He counted breath on the long reds. He let the car idle as if it, too, were gathering itself. When a delivery truck’s backdoor thumped open and a stack of crates shifted, he flinched before he could stop himself. The nerves hadn’t learned the difference between a door and a shot; probably they never would.

At a corner near the river he caught sight of the far skyline: flat winter sky, the hard glitter of high glass, a hint of steam rising from rooftops where heat escaped and met cold head-on. For a moment he had the absurd thought that the whole city was breath—held, released, held again.

He turned on to the block of the chancery. The building rose from the sidewalk like a ship run up on shore: old stone, window mullions catching thin light, a worn set of steps softened by a hundred winters of feet. The small garden to the right was bare, the iron bench holding a shallow bowl of snow like an offering. Through the glass, lamps glowed—gold, steady, human.

He parked, killed the engine, and waited a beat with his hands on the wheel. The imprint of the seam pressed into his palm. He let it go. The wind at the curb made no promises and asked for none. He stepped out, his knee complaining at the sudden cold, and crossed to the door.

Inside, heat and polish and the sweet ash-ghost of last night’s incense greeted him. The foyer smelled faintly of citrus cleaner and old paper. The marble floor had been buffed to a quiet sheen that caught and flattened the light from clerestory windows. On one wall hung a charcoal portrait of a bishop long dead, the lines of his face sharp as a verdict. On another, a tapestry of the city’s skyline woven in blues that had faded to good gray.

He signed the little book at the desk—his name and the time, tidy as a schoolboy—and waited. The waiting felt different than it used to. He wasn’t bracing for a door to fly open, only for one to be opened.

The secretary appeared from the inner office with a file in her hand and a cardigan that tried hard to be cheerful. She had the same look as last time: briskness with a soft edge, as if the work had taught her to move quickly without stepping on anyone’s soul.

“Deacon O’Connor,” she said. “You’re right on time. He’s finishing a call. Coffee? Water?”

“Water would be kind,” he said. The words came out steadier than he felt.

She poured from a little carafe into a paper cup that had a gold cross printed on it so faintly you had to decide to see it. “He’ll take you straight in,” she said, and motioned to the corridor.

They walked past offices with open doors—desks neat enough to suggest purpose without bragging. A priest on a phone turned his chair to the window and pressed a finger to his other ear, listening hard. A woman at a copier unstuck a jam with the practiced patience of someone who knows when to forgive a machine. Somewhere down the hall a laugh loosed itself and then quickly remembered where it was.

At the end of the corridor, the secretary held the last door and nodded him inside.

Bishop Anthony Caruso stood to greet him. The room was all wood and book and morning; a small lamp on the credenza threw a cone of warmth against the wall. Behind the bishop, a painting of a lake at dusk remembered how to be blue; beside his chair, a small table held a cup and a single oatmeal cookie on a napkin, untouched. Caruso’s cassock’s black made his face look more like stone than usual, but his eyes were the same—watchful, patient, lit from within by something that knew how to wait.

“Michael,” he said, and the name had weight and ease. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” Michael said, because there were not better words yet.

They shook hands: dry, human, ordinary. The bishop gestured to a chair and took his own again, settling with the careful economy of someone who knows he will be here a while because he intends to be.

“How can I help you?” Caruso asked, and then was quiet.

Michael had told himself in the car to begin simply, and then had rehearsed six different first sentences anyway. None of them came when called. What arrived, instead, was the memory of the pop of static at 3:16 a.m., the way the room had filled with that blue light, the voice that had made sense of fear by giving it a grammar. He felt his hands tremble and locked them at his knees.

“Last night,” he said, “the television turned itself on.”

Caruso nodded once, not a surprise, not a judgment, only a sign that the sentence had found a listener.

“It… spoke,” Michael said. “It used the news to—” He found himself unwilling to narrate the image and the voice; not here; not in this room that had been careful with people for years. “It said what it wanted. Then it stopped being news and started being command. It used my name.” He swallowed. “Said I should carry it. Its… word.”

He lifted one hand, then let it fall. “I turned it off. It turned itself back on. When it ended I was on the floor asking for words I’ve said every night for years and finding only the holes where they were.”

He tried to smile and failed. “Not the first time I’ve forgotten a prayer. Just the first time it felt like the forgetting wasn’t mine.”

“Mm,” Caruso said softly, meaning: go on.

“I tried the rosary,” Michael said. “The first lines would not stick. I’ve trusted those words to get me through things that would have sank me otherwise.” He rubbed his thumb against a callus as if smoothing it could smooth the past. “Last night they were… shapes I used to know.”

He looked down. The floorboards here were cleaner than his, the grain close as a fingerprint. “And then there were the… pictures.”

He breathed in, steadied the line.

“I saw the child,” he said. The air in the room shifted, as if someone had opened a vent. “Not new. That’s old news in my head. I saw him the way I always do. The ball. The turn. And the falling. But this time it felt like something in the picture looked back. And judged.” He looked up, expecting to see the bishop flinch, and found the same still face, the listening trained on him like a light.

“I saw another thing,” Michael said, “that I’ve worked to deserve not to remember. The hallway. The cuffs. The way anger feels like a clean tool when you want to quiet noise. I used a man’s face to prove to myself I still controlled something.” He flexed his hand and released it. “They put me on ice for it. I told myself I’d learned. Maybe I did. But the learning… last night it looked like a mask that had slipped.”

He swallowed again. The secretary had set the water on a side table; the cup’s gold cross winked once and went quiet. He didn’t reach for it.

“I saw my kitchen,” he said. “Too-bright light, bottle with the old voice inside it, words I wish I had never practiced. She left. I didn’t follow.” He cleared his throat. “I saw every barchair with my shape in it, every morning I earned twice in a row because the first one didn’t hold.” He let the breath out. “I’ve been sober long enough to trust myself to go to bed without an argument but last night I was a man who never got better.”

He found the word he’d been skirting. It arrived small and accurate.

“I’m afraid,” he said. “Not the kind that makes you run. The kind that makes you think you should sit down and stop being a problem for other people. I’m afraid what’s in me is more useful to whatever that thing is than anything I claim to serve.”

He tried to make a joke of it; he didn’t have the tools for that this morning. His hands betrayed him with a tremor that climbed up into his forearms and set his breath tapping. He put both palms on his knees to steady the machinery.

“I want to pray and I don’t know where the floor is,” he said. “I want to be good enough and I know I’m not. I want to tell it to go to hell and it knows exactly which part of me believes I deserve to go in its place.”

He stopped. The room opened a little more in the quiet that followed, as if admitting a guest.

Caruso did not speak immediately. He did not swivel for effect or change his posture to signal the pivot to counsel. He stayed exactly as he had been: present, sutured to the moment by the simple stitch of attention. When he did speak, it was in the voice of a man reminding someone how to breathe when they’ve forgotten.

“Thank you,” he said. “For not editing that.”

Michael let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was bracing.

“You told me once before,” the bishop continued, “that you confessed those sins years ago. In the plain way we were given for such work. That you told the truth to a priest, and more importantly to God, and heard what there is to hear in that room.”

Michael nodded. It felt strange to nod. It felt like agreeing with a witness.

Caruso’s gaze did not leave him. “Sins you have confessed are not yours to keep,” he said gently.

Michael swallowed hard and had no words to put after that, so he let the sentence hang in the air where he could see it.

“As for the thing on the screen.” Caruso’s face didn’t sour, didn’t formalize; if anything it softened, the way faces do when naming a known sorrow. “When we said last time that the machinery could be an antichrist, we meant only this: that you can make an idol out of anything you trust to save you instead of God. This ‘image that speaks’—” he lifted a hand and let it fall—“is a very sophisticated mirror. It captures devotion. It does not deserve it.”

Michael felt something in his chest give, not snap—more like a knot loosening a notch.

“Fear,” Caruso said, “is a poor teacher and a worse master. It will take whatever shape you hand it and call itself proof.

He poured water from a carafe into a second cup and handed it across the small table. Michael took it because refusing would have felt like a performance. The paper’s thinness warmed quickly against his fingers; the small cross on the side put nothing on him except, perhaps, a sense that someone had thought about what a cup might say.

“You told me you couldn’t find the prayers,” Caruso said. “That happens. The words are sturdy. They can carry your silence as easily as your speech. You don’t have to do it right for it to count.”

Michael nodded again, a small debt paid. He took a sip and felt the water climb his throat like help.

Caruso sat back a little, not distancing, only making space. “Would you like to lay it down again?” he asked, voice light as a hand on a shoulder. “Not because it didn’t take the first time. Because you’re carrying weight and you don’t have to.”

Michael didn’t trust his voice. He answered with a tilt of the head that felt like consent.

The bishop did not move to theatrics. He simply folded his hands for a moment, glanced at the crucifix that hung without glare on the far wall, and began quietly, the way a craftsman speaks while working.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he said, low enough that the words seemed unwilling to disturb the room.

Michael inhaled, and the air went where air should.

He spoke plainly. No ornament, no surgery on sentences to make them acceptable. He named the temper that had set itself up as a judge. He named the drink that had stolen mornings without returning receipts. He named the sharpness with which he had used words as if they were tools designed to pry people open. He named the pride that still liked the shape of a gun in his hand, even in dreams. He didn’t dress his language in theology; he didn’t hide it in euphemism. He said it like inventory.

The bishop listened like a man taking a confession in a war bunker: alert, unflinching, grateful for the quiet.

When Michael finished, the room felt taller.

Caruso’s words of absolution were brief, the formula intact but unadorned, spoken as if they’d been built for rooms exactly like this, for men exactly like him, for mornings when the air is thin and the floor unsure. There was no music in them and there didn’t need to be.

When it was done, neither man moved immediately. Somewhere in the building a phone rang, twice, stopped. Outside, a delivery truck hissed to a halt, idled, moved on.

Michael looked at his hands. They trembled less.

“The thing on the screen,” he said, finally. “If it calls again.”

“It will,” Caruso said simply, and this—more than any number of reassurances—felt like someone telling the truth.

“Then?”

“Then you do what you did,” the bishop said. “You tell someone sober. You don’t do theological surgery on a snake. You resist the liturgy of panic. You say a small prayer, or you sit without words, and you let grace be the one doing the holding. You don’t argue with a mirror.”

Michael breathed out. The window across from him showed a sliver of sky that had remembered to be blue. He didn’t trust it yet. He let it be what it was.

Caruso leaned forward, elbows on the arms of his chair, hands loosely linked. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. “Same time, if you can. I have someone I want you to meet.”

Michael’s first thought was why. His second was yes. He nodded. “I’ll be here.”

The bishop’s mouth made the ghost of a smile. “Good.”

The secretary reappeared at the door as if summoned by a timer the room itself set. She did not look surprised to see both men sitting still, as if stillness were the expected outcome. She had a small paper with a penciled note and a paperclip at one corner.

“Nine tomorrow,” she said to Michael, with a quick glance to Caruso that was also a question. He nodded.

She handed Michael a card with the appointment block highlighted in yellow. The ink had bled into the paper a little, making a soft halo around the time.

“Thank you,” he said to her, which meant more than the card meant, and then turned back to the bishop. “Thank you,” he said again, and this meant more than the office meant.

Caruso stood with him. They did not shake hands; there wasn’t a ceremony requirement for that. The bishop only touched his sleeve near the elbow—a light grip, a permission to let go of shame for at least the length of the corridor.

“Go home,” he said. “Eat something that grew. Try the prayers again when you’re not trying so hard.”

Michael smiled, small and true. “I will.”

He left the office into a hallway that had learned how to hold footsteps without echoing them back. The secretary walked him to the foyer. She pressed a peppermint into his hand as if she had been doing it for fifty years. “For the road,” she said, and then, almost conspiratorially: “For the breath.”

Outside, the air had warmed two degrees. The bench in the little garden had shrugged half its snow. A sparrow landed on the armrest, considered the light, and decided to stay.

He stood at the top step and let the sun—such as it was in January—touch his face. The city’s ordinary sounds—bus brakes, a horn, a child’s laugh from somewhere you could not immediately place—threaded themselves together and made a kind of music that didn’t mind if you didn’t clap.

He walked to the car with the appointment card in his pocket and a peppermint on his tongue. He started the engine. The radio stayed off. He didn’t mind the quiet. He drove home by the small streets again, counting breaths at the long reds, trusting the green when it came, not because green means safe but because moving matters.

Tomorrow at nine, something waited. Someone. He didn’t name that hope. He held it loosely, like a cup too full.

On the ride back, the city looked less like glass and more like a body: flawed, warm somewhere under the salt, stubborn in the places that matter.

He let the car carry him. He let the morning do what mornings do: rise, without asking permission.