Love
It was perfect. This anger. Anger was the correct response to her endless rejection of the gift of life, her bitter ungratefulness, her grandiose selfishness. The Other had finally allowed itself some feeling, and the feeling was wrath. The conscious awareness of this tectonic shift came only partially to her, because it was competing with a more primal response. She was afraid.
But as her conscious mind frantically tried to make sense of the change, and as her legs fought to keep her upright, she slowly began to see ... that anything was possible. After all, it had been an act of will that made the creeps. And this will had governed the fact that they had remained, so far, something only a little lower than the animals, possessors of a kind of soul, but none of the spirit. And now? Everything around her, she was beginning to see, was bound not by some limitation of technology but by choice. And where there is a choice to be made, the chooser can be moved.
But to bend the will of a power such as this? One that had been frozen in code for millennia? This would take more than an act of will; it would take an act of God.
The artist looked at her now and she was not sure whether he was one ... or all ... or whether she could trust her perceptions in the least. She was barely holding on – which was dangerous because she had come right to the edge of the abyss to shout into the emptiness. And now the emptiness was answering back.
When he spoke again, his voice was the only sound: ‘No.’
A dam inside the woman broke, and adrenaline rushed through her like a flood over desert clay. Before either of them knew what was happening, she was flying across the space between them. With no thought for her own safety she launched at him with a rage that had been denied to her for thousands of years. He threw his arms up in defense, but she overwhelmed him with a shout, repeated shouts, from some locked-up cell inside her, now thrown open, repeating again and again until her voice was rasping and catching in sobs: ‘It’s not enough!! It’s not ... you can’t just let me be! You ... you ...!’. She joined the battle like Jacob and the angel, pushing past the veil of otherness, the terrible mystery, with all the desperation of her utter poverty. She flailed at him, threw him, pinned him, pummeled him, while he struggled to free himself, crying out to be released. She refused, insisting through ragged gasps for air on the blessing she required as the last human being.
Then she had spent it all; she was empty and heaving on top of him, aching in every joint, and wondering what might come next.
She pushed herself up on shaky arms. Through bloodshot and blurry eyes, she became aware of two things in quick succession. The first was that, though he was beneath her and defeated, he’d fought her. He had not avoided her assault, nor did he passively submit. He struggled as she wrestled him to the ground, fighting hard, and yet, she’d won, though she had not at all been certain of the outcome. The second thing she became aware of was that he was looking at her through one bruised and swelling eye, and smiling through a bloody grin. She burst out crying.
He held her, his hands like sandpaper on her bruised skin, which was now turning purple in great spots, and the two of them remained there in the dust for a long time; she became aware of an increasing warmth radiating between them. Slowly, she began to move on him in a different way. She felt as though he was truly alone with her, and that she was alone with him. How was this possible?
Closing the final distance, she would become the announcing angel. The time for begging was over. Now, she confronted the power in him with a terrible choice. With a holy zeal she insisted, until the life buried deep within him, the real presence that until today had only manifested in pale images, until this creature by sheer force of will – yes she willed it! – bore its final miracle. A singular, flesh-and-blood other. She felt his pulse quicken, suddenly caught his scent, saw something burst in his own eyes.
Breath passed between them. She felt a change all around her – all was fading, dimming in the presence of something new ... and she saw him, now, with a shock of clarity – immediate, individual, incarnate, mortal. Awe came upon her. His was more thrilling than any face she had looked into in ages. Was it because he also, finally, had seen her? As he leaned in to her, he whispered in her ear. A name. Was it her name that he spoke?
All the boundaries, the barriers, the endless space between had been erased. She had spoken the word and he had received it even though it meant a kind of death for him. A tumult kicked up and surrounded them – she might have completely missed it in that moment except for the strangeness of the phenomenon, which slowly grew in volume and intensity. She would only realize later that it was the wind. She had never before felt the wind in this place, though her town’s windmills had always turned gently and steadily above the quiet streets. At the moment, they were spinning frantically, only now in the opposite direction.
