She stood close to her lover, took his free arm in hers, forming a united front. They took strength from each other and together were stronger than either alone.
“Okay, who are you and what is going on?” Liam demanded, pushing his voice to a lower, more determined register.
“I am the Messenger.”
“We’re not looking for trouble,” Emma said. “We just want to get out of here.”
“That will not be possible,” Messenger said. “Yet.”
Liam pushed away from Emma, preparing himself for a fight. I liked the way he looked. He was scared but resolute. He was determined to protect Emma. And she was just as prepared to defend him. Someone had once said to me that the thing to understand about love was that you were two people who had each other’s back. That you were two against the world. Someone had said that. But who? The memory had just been there, it had just appeared, as if my memory were my own to command, but when I searched for detail, I was frustrated. It was almost as if some counterpart to the mist was inside me, in my mind, defining what I could know and what I could not.
But then that mental mist retreated, oh so grudgingly, showing me just a little more.
I gasped, for I could see him now. My father. I could see him in memory, and with that single picture, that yellowed photograph, came other facts.
He is white, my father. It’s my mother who gave me her Chinese physiognomy. I took very little of my looks from his genes, but I had taken on more of his personality. He’s a soldier, my father, a professional soldier. United States Army. A captain. A stocky man with wide shoulders and hair turned gray too early. A serious man.
And he’s dead.
The realization opened in my memory like some dark flower that greeted not sunlight but the blackness of night.
They had handed the folded flag to me. The officer in charge of the burial had been solemn and correct, compassionate but distant, and I had thought, even then, even as a child of nine, that the officer must do this a lot. How many times had he walked the folded, dark blue and white triangle of flag to a wife or a husband or a child?
I was drawn out of my sad reverie by what Messenger was saying. It was a phrase I would hear again: “You have done wrong. You must first acknowledge the wrong, and then you must atone.”
“What?” Emma demanded. “What do you mean, atone?”
“Do you acknowledge the wrong you have done?”
“The dog?” Liam said. “We didn’t mean to do that—that was an accident.”
I wanted to jump in and point out that hitting the dog the first time was an accident; running over it again was just to cover up the fact that they had been together. But I had begun to feel that I was watching something of great importance. I wanted to see what Messenger would do next, though as I thought about it more, I began to dread it. What if Messenger killed them?
But Messenger just stood and waited. Emma and Liam shifted uncomfortably and made a few halfhearted attempts to justify themselves. But it was clear that they, too, were fully aware that they had indeed done wrong.
Guilt is a parasite on the soul, a worm that begins small and grows, grows, feeding on every moment of fleeting happiness. It stabs at you when you laugh. It cuts when you recognize beauty, receive affection, experience joy. It reminds you at the very worst moments that you have done wrong and are not worthy of happiness.
I did not then ask myself how I had come by this knowledge. How should I know so well what shame and guilt can do? But at the moment I was still weak from the memory of my father, mourning, I suppose, for a man whose place in my mind had been reduced to a still photograph and a handful of dusty facts.
And, too, I was fascinated and repelled by the place and situation I found myself in. So I did not ask how I knew what guilt could do. I was like a doctor who, recognizing a disease, has forgotten medical school and his practice and retained only that barest dry and useless knowledge.
“Okay, we’re sorry,” Liam said finally. “Really. Okay? I panicked. You don’t understand.”
“My apprentice will understand,” Messenger said, “And thus, so will I.”
Liam and Emma both looked at me. It was only after they had stared expectantly for a few seconds that I realized Messenger was talking about me.
“Apprentice?” It came out squeaky, that single word. I almost laughed. I wanted to laugh. Because, after all, this was really just some kind of dream or hallucination or . . . or something.
What it was not, what it could not be, was me as Messenger’s apprentice. The very idea was like a steel cage being erected around me, like I was watching the bars being put in place, confining, defining, controlling.
I felt like prisoners must feel facing the judge who pronounces their sentence.
“No,” I said. I shook my head violently. “No,” I said again.
Messenger’s face wore a look I had suspected it might be capable of, but had not truly seen until this moment. His expression was one of compassion. He was not glorying in my fear; he pitied me. He understood what he had just told me. He understood what I was feeling. He could see the panic rising in me like the mercury in a boiling thermometer.
“No, no, no,” I said.
And that’s when I saw through the mist. The mist did not part—it did not cease encircling us—but it became less opaque so that I saw a tableau. I saw two people. One was Messenger. The other was me.
And I heard my own voice distorted by wracking sobs of what I believe was remorse, though I had no memory of it. Sobbing. Holding myself with my arms across my chest. My head was bowed. My face was distorted by emotion present and emotion past. I had, I felt, been sad for a long time.