He did. He closed his eyes then, and after some time had passed and I thought he was asleep, I stroked his hair with my free hand and made some kind of mothering sounds.
It was dark when we got to the house. I parked the car by the bedroom window, then went around to his side and picked him up like I was going to carry him sleeping to bed. I held him there in the dark for a little while and thought about that, carrying him up to bed, laying him there, laying his head on the pillow, pulling the covers up around his shoulders, tucking him in. It would have been the easiest thing to do, and it was the thing I wanted to do, but then I got to thinking about Penny, and sooner or later, I knew, she would have to be brought in on this, and even though I thought I had done it for her, I could see now that I had really done it for me, like maybe if I showed up with this little Danny she would come back home and the three of us could have another go of it.
But already this little Danny was wearing out. I could feel it in his skin. He wasn’t warm like he was when I had picked him up, I guess because the blood had run out of him on the stone wall. He was breathing, but he was cold, and a little too heavy compared to what I remembered. There wasn’t any future for him, either. I got to thinking about how if I put him in school, everyone would get bigger than him fast, and it would get worse every year, the distance between who he was and who his friends were becoming.
He was stirring a little, so I put his head on my shoulder, the way I used to do, and patted his back until his breathing told me he was asleep again. Then I went around to the front of the house and reached up to the porch and took down my axe from the wood pile and went off into the woods, down the path I had mowed with my riding mower a few weeks back, and which was already starting to come up enough that I had to watch my step.
I kept walking, him on my shoulder, axe in my free hand, until I reached the clearing. Then, careful not to wake him, I unbuttoned my jacket and got it out from under him and took it off and laid it on the ground. Then I laid him down on it and made sure he was still sleeping. Then I lifted up the axe and aimed it for the joint where his head met his neck and brought it down. In the split second right before blade struck skin, I saw his eyes open, and they were wide, and what I saw in them was not fear but instead some kind of wonder, and then, fast as it had come, it was gone, and all I could tell myself, over and over, was It’s not Danny. It’s not Danny.
GLOSSOLALIA
“ARE YOU INTERESTED IN ME BECAUSE I’m a girl or because I love Jesus?”
“I am interested in you because I like you.”
“But if I didn’t love Jesus, would you still be interested in me?”
“I would like to think that I would be interested in you no matter what.”
“But if I didn’t love Jesus, I don’t think I would be the same person.”
“If you didn’t love Jesus, I think in some ways you would be the same person.”
“But I wouldn’t see the world the same way, I wouldn’t read the same things, I wouldn’t make the same choices, I wouldn’t be around the same people.”
“But I think you would still like a lot of the same things. You would still be a ski instructor in the winter. You would still spend the summer here on the beach. You would still run. You would still bodysurf. You would still be physically very beautiful. You still would be a person who cares about other people, and you still, probably, would have taught me to bodyboard.”
“But I used to be a person who didn’t love Jesus. I used to make different choices. Like when I was a freshman in college, there was this older guy, and he used to come into my room and sleep in my bed and he knew how to do things with his hands and his mouth. He knew how to make me feel things.”
“You didn’t have sex with him even though you didn’t yet love Jesus.”
“I didn’t have sex with him because I had an idea of Jesus, but I didn’t yet really know Jesus. I thought I did, but I didn’t.”
“But you prayed to Jesus, didn’t you?”
“I did pray to Jesus, but not in tongues.”
“When did you start to pray in tongues?”
“When I was filled up with the Holy Spirit.”
“Is that when you stopped messing around with this guy?”
“No. It was later. There were other guys. In Madrid, this one guy took me to an R.E.M. concert.”
“Did it make you feel dirty to mess around with him?”
“No. It made me feel good. But I still felt empty inside.”
“How did you learn how to pray in tongues?”
“I prayed to be filled up with the Holy Spirit, and then I was given the gift.”
“Can you do it on command?”
“I can do it anytime, if that’s what you mean.”
“Can I hear you do it?”
“Would you like to pray with me?”
“Will you do it if I pray with you?”
“When I pray I do it. It comes naturally.”
“How do you know what it is you are saying if you are speaking a language you don’t know?”
“I don’t know what I am saying. It is my spirit that knows what I am saying. My spirit is communing directly with God’s spirit. I can’t explain it, but I can feel it, like this energy pulsing through me.”
“If I held your hand, could I feel the energy, too?”
“I feel like you are being glib.”
“I am not being glib. I just feel like this is something I don’t understand but I really do want to understand. I want to be a person who is open-minded to new experiences.”
“Take my hand. Here. Take my other hand. Let’s pray.”
•
“What did you think just now, when I was speaking in tongues?”
“I thought a lot of the sounds were repeated and there were a lot of consonant clusters. I heard maybe some sounds that sounded like German and some sounds that sounded like Hebrew or Arabic maybe. There were also a lot of sounds that you don’t make when you speak in English, like rolling your R’s and flattening out your O sounds.”
“That’s true. I have noticed those things, too.”
“Do you ever try to think about recording what you say when you say it? Like, maybe you could do some code-breaking and make a dictionary.”
“Again, I feel like maybe you are being glib.”
“Hear me out. I’m being serious. The idea is you are speaking a language that people don’t speak on earth, except people who speak the language of angels. So consequently, if you follow the logic, it’s a real language. So wouldn’t it have the things a real language has, like grammar and syntax and vocabulary? And if that’s so, couldn’t you study it just like you could study any other language?”
“That’s movie stuff. That’s like something starring Patricia Arquette.”
“Why not, though? There’s people who do this for a living. They go over to Papua New Guinea or wherever, and they spend time around a language, and then they reconstruct it, even though when they first get there they don’t know the first thing about it.”
“That’s missing the whole point.”
“Why?”
“Because if you knew the language, then the purity of the communication would be lost. You’d start crafting all the words instead of the spirit that indwells in you crafting the words.”
“But — and here I’m not being glib, I’m just trying to understand — don’t you want to know what it is you are speaking to Jesus or the angels or whatever?”
“You don’t pray to angels.”
“But it’s an angel language, right?”
“The idea is that you’re not in control. You’re giving yourself over to it.”