What Marcus Would Have Said

Seventy Times

Chapter 23: What Marcus Would Have Said

On a Tuesday night in late October, Ezra sat on Elena's couch and asked his brother a question.

He did not ask it aloud. He was not a man who spoke to the dead in the literal sense — he did not address empty rooms or photographs or the sky. He was a man who carried the dead in the particular way that chaplains carried them, which was theologically and practically and personally, and the carrying sometimes produced conversations that were not conversations but were the closest thing to conversations that the living and the dead could manage, which was the living remembering with enough precision that the dead became temporarily articulate.

Marcus had been articulate.

More than articulate. Marcus had been the kind of person whose speech moved faster than his listeners could process, not because he was careless but because he saw connections before other people saw them and his mouth tried to match the speed of his mind, and the mismatch between the two was the gap where Marcus's particular charm lived — the stumble between insight and expression that made him the kind of person you wanted to listen to even when you could not keep up.

Ezra remembered Marcus's voice.

Not the general quality. The specific voice. The Memphis in it — the way Memphis sat in the vowels of every person who had grown up there, regardless of education or profession, a geographic imprint that could not be fully removed by a Tennessee State engineering degree and that Marcus had not tried to remove because Marcus believed that where you came from was not something to be corrected but something to be carried.

He remembered Marcus's opinions about forgiveness.

Marcus had opinions about everything, and his opinions about forgiveness had been formed not by theology but by experience — by the specific experience of growing up in a neighborhood in Memphis where forgiveness was a daily negotiation between people who did not have the luxury of holding grudges because the geography was too small and the community was too interwoven and the man who wronged you on Tuesday might be the man whose mother brought you dinner on Thursday, and the web of obligation and harm and proximity was too dense for grudges to survive without strangling everyone in the web.

"You forgive because you have to live next to people," Marcus had said once, at Thanksgiving, the year before he died. "That's the secret. It's not noble. It's practical. You forgive the man who stole your lawnmower because he lives three doors down and his kid plays with your kid and his mother goes to your mother's church and if you hold the grudge the grudge becomes the whole neighborhood's problem and the neighborhood has enough problems."

Ezra had said, "That's not forgiveness. That's coexistence."

Marcus had laughed. "Zeke. What do you think forgiveness is? You think it's some moment? Some big resolution where the clouds part and the choir sings and you feel the weight lift? Forgiveness is what happens when you stop letting the thing that was done to you organize your life. Forgiveness is the day you walk past the man who stole your lawnmower and think about something else. Not because you forgot. Because you decided the remembering wasn't worth the space."

"And if the thing that was done is worse than a lawnmower."

"Then the forgiveness is harder. But it's the same shape. The shape is: you stop organizing your life around the wound. You don't forget the wound. You don't pretend the wound doesn't exist. You stop letting the wound be the architect."

Marcus had said this at twenty-one. He had said it with the authority of a young man who had not yet been tested by the thing that would kill him, which was not a theological test but a geographic one — the test of being in the wrong store at the wrong time in the wrong city, a test that could not be studied for and could not be passed and that revealed nothing about the person being tested except that the person existed in a world where such tests were administered without warning or appeal.

Ezra sat on the couch.

He looked at Marcus's photograph. The mortarboard. The grin. The finger pointing at the camera.

"Would you forgive him," Ezra said.

Not aloud. In the space where the dead were articulate.

He knew what Marcus would say.

He knew because he had known Marcus for twenty-two years, which was the entirety of Marcus's life and the first twenty-two years of Ezra's, and in those years he had compiled a model of his brother that was detailed enough to produce answers to questions Marcus had never been asked, answers that were approximations rather than certainties but that had the ring of Marcus's voice and the shape of Marcus's logic and the speed of Marcus's thinking, and the approximation was the only Marcus that existed now, and Ezra trusted it the way he trusted the Bible Marcus had left behind — not as the original but as the best available version of something irreplaceable.

Marcus would say:

"You're asking the wrong question, Zeke."

Marcus would say:

"You're asking whether I would forgive the man who drove the car. But that's my forgiveness, not yours. And my forgiveness died with me. The only forgiveness that's alive is yours. And yours is the one you're afraid of, not because you can't give it but because you know what giving it costs, and the cost is that you lose the wound as an organizer, and the wound has been organizing your life for seventeen years, and if you take the wound out of the architecture the architecture has to be rebuilt, and you don't know what the new architecture looks like."

Marcus would say:

"Also, you're a chaplain in a prison teaching Philemon and you can't see that you're Philemon? You're the free man. He's the one in chains. The letter is written to you. It's always been written to you. You've been teaching it like it's about other people and it's about you. It has always been about you."

Marcus would say:

"God is a bad mathematician, Zeke. The forgiveness costs more than the offense. That's the math. That's the whole deal. If the math were fair it wouldn't be grace."

Ezra sat on the couch.

The apartment was quiet. Donna's television was off. The refrigerator hummed. The reading lamp produced its circle of light that included the couch and the Bible and the two photographs and the man sitting among them with his dead brother's voice in his head, saying things the dead brother would have said if the dead brother had been alive to say them, which was a conditional that contained seventeen years and a conviction and a sentence and a transfer and a ninth chair and a letter about receiving back and a question that Ezra had been circling since September and that Marcus, with the impatient speed of a man who had always seen connections before other people saw them, had answered in three seconds.

You're Philemon.

He's Onesimus.

The letter is written to you.

Ezra closed his eyes.

He did not know if the dead spoke truth. He did not know if the Marcus in his head was the real Marcus or a construction built from grief and memory and the particular need of a man in crisis to hear the voice of the person he had lost. He did not know if the answer Marcus had given was God's answer or Ezra's own answer wearing Marcus's voice the way a ventriloquist's voice wore the puppet's mouth — the words coming from one place and appearing to come from another.

He did not know.

But the answer had the ring of truth, which was a ring Marcus's words had always had, even when the truth was uncomfortable, especially when the truth was uncomfortable, because Marcus's particular gift had been the ability to say the true thing at the speed of the true thing, which was faster than the comfortable thing and harder to dodge.

Ezra opened his eyes.

He picked up Marcus's Bible.

He opened it to the flyleaf.

Zeke — don't lose this one too. M.

He had not lost it.

He was beginning to understand what Marcus had meant by this one too — not the Bible, not the physical book, but the thing the book contained, which was the faith, which was the room, which was the willingness to be the person the letter was written to, which was the free man asked to receive back the person who had wronged him, which was the hardest thing the faith required and the thing the faith could not survive without requiring.

He closed the Bible.

He went to bed.

He did not dream.

He slept the way he had not slept in weeks — deeply, without interruption, with the particular rest that arrives when a question that has been circling finally lands, not because the answer is easy but because the answer has been spoken and the speaking has given the question a place to sit that is not the chest of the man who has been carrying it.

The question sat.

The answer sat beside it.

The night continued.

Sunday was coming.