The Miracle: A Visionary Novel - Softcover

Michael Gurian has published sixteen books in seven disciplines. He has authored four national bestsellers, translated into fourteen languages, including the ground-breaking The Wonder of Boys and The Wonder of Girls. The Miracle is his second novel. Michael lives in Spokane, Washington, with his wife, Gail, and their two daughters.

Chapter One: The House of Light

Donnell had not slept much that night. After watching the swift drama of the wreck he had wept quietly; wept for Jeffrey, for all the pain of life, and for his own eighty-one years. It was a catharsis of weeping, there on his back deck overlooking the river. It was the river of tears that had remained at a distance since he'd learned, almost a year ago, that he was terminal. And now the brutality of life emerged again with a little boy, dying of cancer, who dies from a car wreck instead. Donnell had not cried that hard since his wife died.

The sky was a bright blue this morning, a few stray high clouds off to the east. This was a blue like Donnell had seen so often in the turquoise water of the Indian Ocean, the blue just before it splashes toward white. Donnell's mind was clearer this morning, and he knew that Jeffrey's death was also his own. He was an old man dying of colon cancer who would die, like Jeffrey, before the cancer took him, today. Watching death's bloody bath, Donnell realized that during his nine months of very painful decay, the cancer eating him alive, he had forgotten the brutality of life -- brutality he had known in two wars, and as a doctor, and as a man. He had observed his own decay so closely -- his constant pain, his emaciation from lack of appetite, his bald, liver-splotched head, his hairless arms and legs, tiny as sticks, his trembling hands, his deliriums -- that he had forgotten the real and quick randomness of life. Watching Jeffrey and the many people around the boy, then seeing that beautiful light, Donnell sensed suddenly that he had reawakened to life itself, like a dying soldier gets a last passionate vision before death.

Donnell Wight, now a widower for a decade, had been married fifty-two years. He and Mary Ann had two children, six grandchildren, and now three great-grandchildren. With his white hair and long white beard, living as he did on his huge house on the cliff above the river, isolating himself with no trespassing signs and few invitations, Donnell had long ago, even before his terminal illness, passed beyond communal murmurs about his character or state of mind. He had, in old age, become what he had yearned to be in his boyhood -- a part of the land, not a tree but not a talisman either, a human portion of Earth, attentive and stewardly.

His father and mother had bought this land after World War I. Donnell wasn't even ten, but he had felt the land enter him like an invisible breath. For three decades he'd been away in college, medical school, then private practice in Napa Valley; but thirty years ago when his father died and his mother moved into a condominium care facility, Donnell had moved back with Mary Ann; received from his grown son, Sandy, invaluable help in building a new place; lived with Mary Ann here; and felt the land grasp him again.

Donnell had always known that he would die here. For the last few months he'd known that he would die on his own initiative. When a grandchild would say, "Popper, you should be in a hospital," he would think, "Yes, I should," and then he would remember the hospital world in which he had done so much of his work. He always held a special feeling for the hospital. He knew spirits there others did not. But still, it was not where he wished to die. He wanted to die in the world of foals, moths, osprey, bats, and herons, and in the margin of the small neighborhood of people across the river who had become, through his telescope, a second family.

Donnell recalled all the arrivals to Lucia Court a few years before. He had resented them at first. Though he lived far across river, the noise and the smell of diesel fuel from the bulldozers, were like an invasion. He recalled being thankful that Mary Ann, an even more private person than he, had already died. Yet, invasion aside, the development was after all quite far away, and he lived peacefully in bereaved loneliness. Gradually, he came to enjoy his vision of the subdevelopment from far up on the plateau in his huge home, which to the new interlopers must have seemed eternal. He had even come to feel a personal resonance with each of the families across the way, as if his own life, pieces of it long forgotten, was now being reviewed in the lives of young families. Sometimes he found himself talking to them aloud from his back deck, carrying on conversations with Jeffrey's parents about what to do for their sick boy; with Greta Sarbaugh, whom he had met once, an elderly woman who, like himself, had seen much of the world; with Harry Svoboda, nearly Donnell's contemporary, so inflexible in his posture; with the younger teenagers, Sammy and Sally, encouraging them to become friends in an old man's voice that perhaps the children heard like a whisper on the wind.

Over the last few months, Donnell had spoken to them all about his cancer. He told them about preparations he had made -- his living will; a long letter to his nurse, a young man of thirty or so who had befriended him and his land; letters to each of his children; his memoirs. He told them he would take death into his own hands if need be, and probably soon. He told them he had been preparing his son, Sandy, to help him. Sandy, he knew, often walked in the door thinking this day was the day he would help his father die. Today, he would learn that it was.

"Dad," he had said a few weeks before, "you know I'll help, but I'll never feel completely right. I don't think a son can."

Donnell thought his son one of the most courageous men in the world, for Donnell himself could not imagine having to assist his own father die. Yet Sandy would help because he, like his father, believed in assisted suicide, and would always put love and truth above fear and guilt. Donnell told the young people across the river about his son and daughter and his own long life, his time in the second world war, the long marches in the snow. He told them about Mary Ann and what it had been like to watch her die. "And soon I, too, will rejoin the Universal," he had murmured across the river. He told them about his life with Mary Ann and the children, years ago, in New Delhi, and his more recent travels, as an old man, back to the teeming country of India.

"I have lived my life always hoping to justify my existence," he told his yogi, Muti Barunanda, a dark Punjabi half his age, at the ashram in Rajasthan on his last visit to India, at seventy-nine years old. "I have always worked to be acceptable to society and to God. Now I see that I no longer need to justify my existence on the Earth. I'm an old man, much closer to death than you. I have finished the fight that life is. I wonder what my purpose is now?" The yogi, an immensely gifted sensitive, and generous beyond the bounds of his youth, told the wealthy old American to watch out for a young American saint in India who would give him the answer to his questions before this life was done. "He is our little Krishna," the Yogi said. Soon Donnell went to the ashram near the seashore south of Madras and found Ben Brickman, thirty-two, his blond hair long and curly, his eyes a deep brown and eternal, a young man boyish in his enthusiasm for his elderly guest. "Yes, yes, I know you!" the saint cried. "You live in America in a house high up over a river. I see it very clearly. Let me describe it." He described it perfectly, down to the wood roof.

"My God!" Donnell thought. Even after all the years in India, all the squalor, all the people who were not saints, he was always shocked by the visionary gifts of some of these mystics.

"I see the day you will rejoin the Universal there," Brickman told him. "On that day, there will be a light that shivers through your world. I see a river dam far to your left. There is a wilderness all before you, a special place for animal life and animal spirits. I see a cemetery to your right. Your city has been surprised by the deaths of children, children of great promise. On the day you die will be another significant death, a boy, and the animals will speak; then there will be a significant spiritual birth, a woman. Your death, combined with the death of the boy and the woman's new visionary life, will be very special, my friend, more special that I understand. Good and evil will merge. Everything will be encased in death, and therefore awakened to hope. And a teacher will come."

"A teacher?"

"The woman of that day will know. Though yours will be a valley of pain and disease, she will become fearless. Many mysteries will become clear. This is what you live for now, sir. For that day. You will complete your life on that day."

"I will die?"

"I think so. Yes."

"When will this be? How many years from now?" Donnell asked.

"I don't know. But you will be very sick."

"How can you be sure?"

"I don't know."

The young guru smiled the eternal smile of the mystic, and became silent. Donnell stayed at the ashram another week, but "the young American saint" had no more visions for him, only questions about how things were going back home in the U.S.

Brickman's description, those years ago in India -- of the river valley, the houses, Donnell's land, the little boy, who must be Jeffrey -- so accurate. And Donnell had read in the news, as had everyone else in Spokane, about the killer who captured and killed several children over on the south side of town. Brickman had even seen those deaths, his eyes stretching through time. Donnell almost thought Brickman could be reading this morning's newspaper, in which the disappearance of a young child on the south side of town, transpiring a few weeks ago, was still a constant source of front-page news. For a few weeks, watching the terrible news unfold, Sandy talking about it, so many people worried, Donnell fantasized himself catching the killer -- a fantasy perhaps everyone able-bodied might be having now.

Looking over the river valley as the sun heated his cold face and hands, Donnell was not sure what Ben had meant by the woman, but as Ben predicted, animal spirits had spoken to Donnell today -- the great blue heron, the deer, the osprey, coming around to his house in the last few hours. Even the insects had come around in hordes -- moths everywhere, butterflies, horseflies -- coming around to say goodbye? At dawn, a beautiful doe and fawn had come to his back door. Though Donnell owned the hundred-acre wildlife refuge surrounding his house, no deer had come right to his door in fifteen years. And never a fawn. He tried to speak to the deer; he asked them what they needed. They stared, then walked off. With a sense of joy, he watched them go. A few hours later, a great blue heron startled into the air; instead of remaining away from the human, as it usually would do once in flight, it circled back and alighted on a branch twenty feet up and only a tree away. It looked directly into the human's eyes. Then, for ten minutes, the heron stared at the river without moving or, Donnell was sure, even blinking, as if clear in its vision, and heaven sent, sharing its life with an old man. And as Donnell ate a piece of soft bread on the deck just an hour ago, a flock of some fifty moths came to the deck's edge, fluttered there, flew off. Donnell found himself on his knees, in terrible pain, repeating a mantra to the Universal by which to focus himself toward his final hour.

In no time, Sandy would be here. Everything was in order. Donnell bowed and prayed and then sat back on the deck chair, near his telescope. He was in no hurry to be anywhere but here, in this place of refuge, afraid of the end of his life, and yet longing for it to unfold. He pushed his newspaper aside and continued writing the letter he'd begun to Sandy.

"Often we hear, ¿Is there a right time to die?' Of course there is: when one has been invited back home. When the Universal is waiting. The Light will invite you. The Doorway will open. You will know this with either your senses or your intuition or both. You will look outward at the world and experience a sense of peace that only the opened Doorway and the Light can provide.

"If you have fulfilled your destiny in this lifetime, and have experienced the invitation, know that there is no moral boundary worthy of keeping you from the next step in your spiritual journey."

Donnell woke up with a painful jolt. He looked at his watch. It was 10:05. He'd taken a twenty-minute catnap. He pushed up, using the lounge chair and deck table as ballast to get him to the back door of his house. Entering the kitchen hallway, he used the walls to hold himself, padding in his socks, food-stained sweat pants, and gray V-neck T-shirt to the kitchen cabinet. Downing a Darvon on top of the morphine, he looked out the kitchen window for a moment, leaning there, then felt weak again, and moved to the wheelchair that sat by the back door. For a second, he felt the momentum of a body swan-diving off the cliff into the river.

As he leaned on the wheelchair, he was startled to hear knocking at the back deck door. No one ever came up the cliff-ridge to the back. Donnell was not expecting anyone until Sandy anyway. But there was someone. Donnell pushed the wheelchair into the hallway and saw a disheveled-looking man and woman, both in their late twenties or so. The young man had piercing eyes that twinkled in the light. His hair was blond-gray. He had a cherry-red birthmark along his neck and up under his hair, and a camper's early beard. He was dressed in jeans and a brown shirt. The young woman was short, large-breasted, overweight. Her brown hair was greasy and matted, her olive skin pockmarked. The man wore no glasses, but hers were thick, black-rimmed. Donnell recognized them. He'd seen them through the binoculars. They had ministered to Jeffrey last evening.

They smiled and peered in through the windows. Only the screen door was closed, so once they saw him pushing the chair, the man called out, "Hello, sir, we were walking down at the river and, well, we felt we had to come up here. It's very strange. You may kick us out. But we have a story to tell you."

Donnell got to the door and looked into the very serious eyes of young people who live for the mission of life. The woman chimed in, "It's hard to get up here. It was a heck of a climb." Indeed, the knees of their jeans, their hands, their cheeks, their forearms all looked silted in the red rock that comprised much of the cliff below Donnell's house. Donnell murmured -- "human visitors too, from the river, along with all the rest?"

"Excuse me?" the young man asked politely, hearing but not hearing. Donnell pushed at the screen door as the young man opened it for him and helped him cross the threshold. The young woman, too, let him lean on her corpulent body as they moved to the back table and chairs.

"I'm afraid I'm rather occupied right now," he said a little breathlessly, unused to strange company. "But let's sit a minute and you can tell me why you would risk that perilous climb." In thirty years very few people had climbed up the tiny trail along the cliff mainly because one section of it -- about thirty feet -- was nearly straight up.

"I'm Beth," the woman said, going for his blanket on the wheelchair and offering it to his lap.

"I'm Nathan," the man said. Once the old man was stationed, they sat too.

"Donnell Wight. I own this place. Generally I don't like trespassers. You must have seen the signs." He had enjoyed sounding grumpy for about ten years now, but knew his face showed welcome.

"We saw your signs," Nathan continued evenly, "But...have you noticed there's been a kind of light pulsating near your house?"

"Has there?" Donnell asked, his heart beating like a drum. Then he had not ...