Emmylou is grinning at her. “And I just happened to throw an epileptic fit at that very moment, even though I never threw one before.”
“No, actually, you have a history of fainting spells. And anyway, coincidences happen.” Lorna feels the falseness in these words, even while she clings to their validity.
“Yes, they do,” the woman agrees. “Just some damn Eskimo again. There’s a whole Congregation at the Vatican devoted to distinguishing between the coincidental and the miraculous. Of course, you would say they’re all superstitious nuts.” She held up the Bible. “God speaks to us in Scripture, and through our inner voice, but he also speaks to us through a conspiracy of accidents. George Santayana said that, and he was at Harvard.” She stretched and yawned. “Mercy, but I’m tired of this place! And I don’t want any more drugs.”
“They’re supposed to help you,” says Lorna, wondering whether she’d heard correctly. Damn Eskimo?
“No, they help y’all. I don’t fit into your mold of what a person’s supposed to see and believe, so I’m crazy, and if crazy, I have to be drugged. But I’m not crazy, as you very well know.”
At these last words she casts her gaze directly at Lorna, they lock eyes, and once more the pins that support Lorna’s view of the world and of her own place in it soften and bend. She is the one who breaks eye contact. She is sweating, her heart flutters. She struggles to fit this experience into a familiar box. Hypnotic elements. Her own physical condition, low energy, stress, prone to brief hypnagogic episodes, Emmylou’s the crazy one, not you, and so on, until she was again in possession of herself and is able to speak.
“Emmylou, even if you assume that, um, spiritual forces are involved here, it still doesn’t make sense. Why did God wait for just that moment to cure Horace. Why didn’t he cure him before he murdered two women? Why not before he hurt a couple of people right here on the ward?”
Dideroff waits a moment before answering, a peculiar look on her face, like a maiden aunt just asked by a child where babies come from. “Well, you know,why is not a question we like to ask of God. It opens the whole issue of theodicy, and you know Milton wrote a zillion-line poem about justifying the ways of God to man, and I’m not sure how successful he was except to make people admire Satan.” She taps the Bible again. “And there’s Job, of course. I’m sure you’re familiar withAn Answer to Job by C. G. Jung. Have you thought at all about my dream with the giant Twinkies? It’s relevant, don’t you think?”
Lorna says, “Of course,” spontaneously, but she is thinking about Milton and Jung. She has heard the names, naturally, but has not read the referenced works. It almost never happens that psychologists working in the public sector meet as clients people smarter or better educated than they are. The thought passes through Lorna’s mind that this skinny woman on her loony bin bed, this high school dropout, is brighter than Lorna herself, and certainly more widely read in the Western canon. She realizes that she does not know what theodicy means. The woman is looking at her expectantly, but Lorna’s mind is completely blank.
Emmylou rescues her. “I think it was triggered by a line from Weil, actually. I mean the dream.”
“Vay?”
“Yes, Simone Weil. You know who she was, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure,” Lorna lies.
“Well, she says that the pure love of God means being exactly as grateful for your afflictions as you are for your blessings. It’s an interesting way of looking at the world, isn’t it?”
Lorna is recalling the dream interpretation she’d cocked up for Mickey Lopez. “Yes, if bad and good outcomes are the same, then you’re off the hook aren’t you?”
“Off the hook?”
“Yes. You can relinquish the unbearable responsibility for having done bad things. If bad things and good things are both randomly distributed by God, then there’s no need to grow, to take responsibility for your acts. I mean, wouldn’t that be another way of interpreting that image?”
“You think I’m trying toavoid responsibility?”
“On a certain level. I think you’re retreating from what you’ve done, from what’s happened to you. And I don’t blame you at all.”
Emmylou leans back and lets out a sigh. “Ok anhier ok yin.”
“Pardon?”
“Dinka. It means ‘I’m lucky to be with you.’ It was an illustration, meaning you don’t understand my language and I might as well be talking Dinka. I’m sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a conversation with someone with no religious sensibility at all. Look…oh Lord, how can I express this so you’d understand? Okay, God is omnipotent, and good, but there’s evil in the world, bad things happen, and they sometimes happen to good people. How to explain this? Well, we’re advised in the strongest terms not to try, but putting that aside, and also putting aside pure materialist atheism for a second, how do you live in a world like that? Y’all can be like the Buddhists and say it’s all an illusion, no good, no evil, break free of all attachments, and then if y’all make it, return as a bodhisattva and dispense compassion. There’s fatalism. You see it in Job, in the classical world, the Stoics, and it survives pretty well intact in Islam: God knows, we don’t, shut your trap and drive on, don’t whine, it’s ignoble, and so on. Not a stance that would appeal to us improving Americans, so what we do is to whine alot while drugging ourselves into insensibility with work, sex, money, actual drugs of course, and the illusion that we can live forever. Most of us live terrified, desperate lives and die like dumb animals in places like this. On the other side, we have what Weil said about the greatness of Christianity being not that it provides a supernatural relief from suffering, but a supernaturaluse for it. Say you have every good thing. Then you thank God for the honor of being able to serve the poor and wretched. Now say everything is taken away from you, you’re crushed like a bug. Simone calls itmalheur, the last extremity, nothing left of your personhood at all, sociology has failed, medicine, economics, politics, all the usual dodges are futile, but on the other hand you’re a tissue paper away from God. Lose everything, get everything and more, unimaginable graces. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You can’t lose.”
Only some of this got through to Lorna. She had been trained to discount the content of what the insane had to say, and to examine their speech only for the evidences of pathology or to find some entry for the insertion of a therapeutic remark. She now does so.
“Well, if suffering is so great why did you devote your life to a nursing order? I mean, why relieve suffering at all, if suffering brings you close to God?”
“Because it’s a commandment. It’s also a paradox, but if you’re impatient with paradoxes you need to stay away from Christianity. Atheism is so beautifully simple, like a kid’s drawing. I can see why you’re reluctant to let it go. I certainly was when I was at St. Catherine’s.”
“Which is what?”
“It’s a priory of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. It’s in the Blue Ridge, the Virginia panhandle, right close to where I was staying. You’ll read about it in the notebook I gave you, my first sight of it. What all happened there is in the next one, and all the stuff about Africa.”
Dideroff falls back against the pillows and closes her eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s the dope. Have you cured me enough today? I really need to drift off.”
Lorna puts her notebook and recorder away in her canvas attache case, making agreeable noises to hide her distress. She has never had a session like this with a patient; yes, occasionally you draw a therapeutic blank, but this one was completely out of control, almost as if the patient were therapizing her!
Dideroff opens her eyes and smiles. “Sorry for the two-minute theology, it’s a bad habit of mine. St. John of the Cross warns against it as an impediment to spiritual progress. Don’t forget the notebook. I just finished another one. I never thought it would take so many pages. But one more ought to do it.” Dideroff indicates a school notebook on her nightstand; Lorna picks it up and starts to leave. She pauses at the door, feeling a certain resentment now, a need to exert control. She says, “Emmylou, do you want me to do anything about your houseboat? I’d be glad to go talk to your landlord if you want to keep it.”