Matter

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God began to be a problem soon after Tommy Ericson turned fourteen, when Sister Larson, his old primary teacher who lived down the street, accidentally killed her youngest daughter Callie while backing into the garage to load boxes of clothes she planned to donate. Since Tommy and his dad home taught the Larsons, they went over that evening with Bishop Wilkinson and a few other ward members. Tommy didn’t want to go. He wanted to shoot hoops with his friends in the summer twilight. But Tommy obeyed his dad—he always obeyed—and put on a white shirt and tie.

At the Larsons’ house, Tommy had never seen such sadness, a sadness so absolute and incomprehensible that he wanted to flee from it: Brother and Sister Larson sobbing and holding each other on a brown leather sectional in their living room as Bishop Wilkinson and Sister James, the ward Relief Society president, listened with bowed heads as the Larsons ran through scenarios of how they could have avoided Callie’s death. Why hadn’t they gone to Zuma Beach that morning? Why hadn’t they donated the clothes the previous weekend? What if they’d just parked in the driveway and carried the boxes to the van?

There in the Larsons’ living room, Tommy had a thought that made him blush: Why hadn’t God saved Callie? He turned his head to see if anyone had heard the thought. For years after, that thought remained for Tommy a moment of deep shame.

For Tommy, Callie Larson’s death was like a curtain yanked open to reveal a vast, strange world his parents had shielded him from.

Soon after Callie’s death, Tommy began stopping at the Burbank Library on his way home from school to scan Los Angeles Times headlines. He thought that maybe if he knew more about the world, he might understand God. But the world Tommy read about made no sense. The Lockerbie bomber. Famine in Sudan. The Rwandan genocide. Catastrophic earthquakes in Iran. A Christian aid group perishing in a fiery plane crash. Always with those headlines, Tommy felt a dizzying vertigo, the library floor tilting beneath his feet. Why didn’t God intervene to save the innocent? Why didn’t he punish evil? And when Tommy asked these questions in his private prayers, God was silent. Alone in that silence, Tommy blamed himself, clasping his hands together and repeating, “Help my unbelief,” a phrase he’d read somewhere that seemed to voice a sadness and yearning he felt in his core.

And that’s how it was for Tommy through high school and into his freshman year at BYU, his unbelief growing, one doubt stacking onto another and then another. Sometimes, lost in distraction and routine, Tommy forgot about his doubts for a while, but they were always there gnawing on the edges of his mind.

Tommy wondered if the God he was raised to believe in was someone’s creation, an idol to worship and adore: a loving father, a God of simple explanations and blessings for the righteous, a God designed to echo back the illusion of an ordered world to faithful believers.

“Or maybe it’s all a mystery, all unknowable,” Tommy would sometimes say to himself like a mantra to explain God’s silence, but the consolation of those words was fleeting. Though Tommy wanted to believe, at some point he quietly surrendered to his doubts, and with that surrender he felt a deep ache that began at his heart and worked its way through his body.

So even as Tommy received his mission call to Italy, shopped for suits, and sat between his smiling parents on a blinding white couch in the celestial room of the Los Angeles Temple, the only belief that seemed to make life understandable and straightforward and transparent to him, that explained tragedy and suffering and God’s silence, was not to believe in God at all. Without God, suffering didn’t need complicated explanations.

Yet at night, alone in his dark bedroom, Tommy pondered the dim streetlights beyond his window and thought, God, why have you forsaken me?

Tommy, Elder Ericson now, was a well-liked missionary, and because he’d excelled academically in high school and played sports, he always found something in common with other missionaries. But he felt distant from them, secretly incapable of accessing their earnestness for the work and their devotion to God—though Tommy worked hard and obeyed the rules, hoping God would speak to him if he did. Often, Tommy felt alone because he couldn’t share his deepest doubts with anyone. The closest he’d come was in the Missionary Training Center, with his companion, Shepfield, who’d been called to another Italian mission.

Shepfield grew up in Orange County, surfed and, like Tommy, played high school baseball. Tommy liked Shepfield, with his sun-bleached hair and tan face, how he’d wink and put his finger to his lips when he opened packages from his mom and pulled out six-packs of Coke and issues of Sports Illustrated. Tommy liked Shepfield’s grinning, laid-back approach to the work, a believer above all the stuffy mission formality, pharisaical intensity, and quiet competition. If anyone, Tommy thought Shepfield would understand his doubts.

One Friday morning when they were both bedridden with a cold, Shepfield on the lower bunk and Tommy on the top, only the two of them in the room they shared with four other missionaries, Tommy tried to explain to Shepfield about Callie Larson and all those Los Angeles Times headlines and the perfect sense of a world without God. The words rushed from Tommy, and with them a sensation of lightness. When Tommy finished, Shepfield said nothing, and Tommy wondered if Shepfield was asleep. Then Shepfield whispered, “Never tell anyone what you just told me.” Shepfield paused. “I won’t tell on you.” They didn’t speak about it again, and Tommy never brought it up with another missionary.

And that’s how it was with Tommy late one cold winter evening a year later in La Spezia, Italy, as he and his companion, Elder Barlow, walked back to their apartment on the stone promenade that ran along the city harbor.

It was the week between Christmas and New Year. A heavy rain had fallen earlier, churning up a rotten smell from the bay. The rain had stopped, and now a dense mist veiled the lit apartment windows along Viale Italia and rushed past the streetlamps lining the harbor. Tommy and Barlow had just come from an appointment with a young navy cadet on holiday leave who’d been more interested in practicing his English and talking about his favorite American movies than discussing God—and Tommy was fine with that, though, of course, he felt a heavy guilt that he hadn’t steered the conversation more toward God.

At 9:15, the streets were empty. The bay water slapped at the harbor’s stone sea wall, and the wind whipped at the palm trees. Still, Tommy sensed a gaping silence beneath the wind and the water. It’s all a mystery, he thought. How can we understand anything?

Talked out by the end of the day, Tommy and Barlow said nothing as they walked along the promenade, a longer route to their apartment that Tommy had chosen so they wouldn’t arrive before 9:30, which would have been against the mission rules. Tommy wanted the warmth of the apartment, a bowl of cereal, and a few minutes rereading a letter from a girl he’d met in his ward at BYU.

The mist drifted by the low streetlamps in ghostly shapes that almost put Tommy in a trance, a distraction from his thoughts and the damp cold. Then Tommy heard something just in front of them, two voices speaking a language he didn’t understand, something Slavic, and then a third voice repeating a word that pitched higher and higher until it became only a sound. Three men, lit by a streetlamp’s golden light, appeared through the mist. One, tall with blond slicked-back hair and a camel-colored leather coat, held a short, bearded man from behind, and the other man, his teeth bared, repeatedly plunged a knife into the bearded man’s chest.

Tommy stopped, not wanting to believe what he saw, the horror amplified by its unexpectedness. A harsh sound, as involuntary as the twitch of a muscle, slipped through Tommy’s parted lips, a mix of disbelief and revulsion.

The man with the knife turned his head to Tommy and Barlow, absorbing them with one long, startled look: their dark suit pants and white collared shirts, their knotted ties peeking through the unbuttoned tops of their black trench coats. The knife was coated with blood. Tommy’s heart hammered in his ears, and every muscle in his body felt stitched together. Far away, a ship horn sounded, one sustained, low moan the wind swallowed up. The tall man took a step backward, uncoiling his arms from the bearded man and shrugging him off like an unwieldy load. The bearded man fell heavily and unimpeded to the ground, landing fully on his back with a low grunt. The two men turned and ran.

A deep cut across the man’s right cheek dribbled blood into his trimmed beard, and his thick sweater, the color of a pumpkin, darkened around a half dozen frayed holes in the fabric. His trembling fingers moved over his chest.

Barlow’s hand covered his mouth. “What do we do?” His eyes were shut tightly, his pale, pinched face turned from the man.

Tommy’s body shook. An icy cold dripped into his arms and legs. “Call someone,” he said, pointing toward Viale Italia. “Find a payphone.”

Barlow nodded and turned toward the road, vanishing into the darkness.

A part of Tommy wanted to leave, too, to turn away and follow Barlow, but something kept him there. To leave the man alone, he felt, was wrong.

Tommy knelt next to the man, the moisture and cold from the promenade’s rough stones seeping through his wool pants. The man looked Moroccan or Tunisian, copper skin, a long, thin nose, and eyes so brown that Tommy couldn’t see the irises. “Help will come,” Tommy said in Italian. He squeezed the man’s right shoulder, a touch to reassure him, what Tommy imagined appropriate, what he thought anyone would do. His pressing fingers sensed thin muscle and the hard bone beneath the skin, and Tommy almost recoiled from the foreignness of this stranger’s body, the sudden intimacy of that touch.

There was a gurgling in the man’s throat. Tommy knew to apply pressure for the bleeding, so he put his gloved hand over an oozing hole below the man’s heart—but this felt futile. Tommy had a vile of consecrated oil in his backpack. He’d been ordained with the holy priesthood, taught that he could put his hands on the man’s head and offer a blessing of comfort, even healing. But this also felt futile, pointless. There was so much blood.

The man, his lips a blueish gray, stared up at the sky, not blinking. He whispered one repeated syllable. Tommy lowered his head to hear through the wind. “Ab,” the man said. “Ab, ab, ab.”

Tommy mouthed the word, the quick press and release of his lips forming the sound. “I don’t understand,” Tommy said in Italian, wondering if the repeated sound were just a reflex of shock, a scrambled synaptic misfire. Then, like a sudden flash, a distant connection to something he might have read or heard long ago, Tommy understood the word. His throat tightened. “Father,” the man was saying in Arabic. “Father, father, father.”

Tommy touched the man’s right hand, but his glove felt like a barrier between them. Tommy pulled the glove off and held the man’s hand. It was cold and calloused on the palm.

“Ab, ab, ab,” the man continued. A single tear leaked from his right eye.

Tommy squinted into the mist. He listened for sirens, for footsteps, for voices. Nothing. It was as if he and this man were the only two who existed.

The man coughed. There was blood at the corners of his mouth. Breath rasped through his parted lips, and his chest heaved. “Help will come,” Tommy said again. Then out of habit, he began to pray, the words flicking noiselessly on his tongue. He prayed that Barlow would find a phone, that an ambulance would arrive, that this man, by some miracle, would live.

But Tommy felt foolish—and then angry. He glared into the dark sky. “Do something!” he shouted. And then Tommy thought: What does it matter?

A crescent sliver of moon surfaced through the mist. The sea lifted and fell. Under and above him, Tommy sensed the patterned, ancient movement of the earth and moon and sun, separate from him, though so close. But then the weight of the man’s calloused hand in his hand, the weakening voice calling for his father—Tommy knew that it did matter.

The man twisted his head to look at Tommy, but Tommy wasn’t sure if the man saw him or someone else. The man’s breath rattled. Tears trickled from his eyes. “Mio figlio,” Tommy said to the man, though he wasn’t sure why. And then dredging up his almost-forgotten high school French, he said, “Mon fils. Mon fils.” But the words, familiar though still foreign to Tommy, stretched like an abyss between him and the man. Tommy brought the man’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “My son, my son,” Tommy said in English, bending down to whisper in the man’s ear. “Don’t be scared. I’m here. I’m here. Everything will be all right. I love you.”