Ambrose had told him to go to Mass on a weekday.
He had said it at the end of the Thursday meeting, after the cipher work and the conversation about Teodor, when everyone was collecting themselves to leave and the room had the particular quality of rooms where something real had happened and people were adjusting to having been in it. He had said it the way he said things that mattered - without emphasis, in passing, as though it were a minor administrative detail.
"Go to Mass on a weekday," he had said. "Any parish. Any weekday. Before the next Thursday."
Joshua had not asked why. He had learned, over the four weeks of Thursday meetings, that asking Ambrose why was usually less efficient than simply doing the thing and finding out. Ambrose's reasons were never arbitrary and were usually apparent afterward, and asking for them in advance produced only the patient look and a response along the lines of because it will be useful, which told Joshua nothing he could use.
He went on a Tuesday.
He chose a parish that he had driven past without entering - a brown brick building from the 1880s with a parking lot that held perhaps forty cars and a sign out front advertising the weekday morning Mass at 8:00 a.m. and the food pantry on Thursdays. He arrived at 7:52 and sat in the third pew from the back on the left side, which put him far enough from the altar to feel like an observer and close enough to the exit to leave without difficulty if the whole thing proved to be exactly what he expected it to be.
There were eleven people in the church. He counted them twice, which was the kind of thing he did when he was trying to maintain a specific quality of attention. Three elderly women together in the second pew. A man in work clothes who sat alone near the middle and looked like he had come straight from a job site. A young woman with a sleeping infant in a carrier strapped to her chest. A man in his seventies who arrived after Joshua and sat directly in front of him and whose coat smelled of cold air and something mechanical. Three people scattered individually through the middle pews, each in their own silence. And the priest, who appeared from the sacristy at exactly 8:00 - elderly, small, moving with the careful deliberateness of someone whose joints had opinions about the cold.
Eleven people on a Tuesday morning in March, in a brown brick church, doing something they apparently did every day.
Joshua had attended Mass his entire childhood and had stopped in his early twenties, not dramatically, not as a statement, but in the gradual way of a habit that no longer has enough force to sustain itself. He remembered the structure - the entrance rite, the liturgy of the word, the liturgy of the Eucharist, the dismissal - the way he remembered other structures he had studied professionally: as architecture, as the visible form of an invisible intention, as a thing built by people who believed something about what it was for.
He followed along. He stood when the eleven people stood and sat when they sat and did not kneel, which he registered as a choice he was making, a maintenance of the observer's distance. The readings were from somewhere in the first letter to the Corinthians and from one of the synoptic Gospels, and he listened to them with the part of his mind that listened to primary sources - attending to the text, noting the language, thinking about what a person in the first century would have understood by these particular words in this particular order.
He was still doing this at the offertory.
He was still doing this through the preface, the Sanctus, the eucharistic prayer, the long prayer over the bread and wine that the priest said in a voice so quiet it was nearly inaudible from the third pew from the back.
He was doing this at the consecration.
And then he was not doing anything.
He could not, afterward, describe what happened at the consecration with any precision. This was not evasiveness. He was a man who had spent his professional life learning to describe things precisely, and the failure of precision in this case was itself a datum he did not know what to do with. What he could say was this: the apparatus had stopped. The part of him that categorized and filed and maintained the observer's distance had simply ceased to operate for the duration of whatever had happened, and in its place was something he had no instrument to measure - not feeling exactly, not thought exactly, more like the specific quality of presence you have in a room when you understand for the first time that the room is not empty - in fact, when the room now holds something you're unable to fully understand. He had been present for something. He could not say what. He was not certain the question was well-formed.
He was in the third pew from the back. The priest elevated the host. The words had been said - he knew this because he remembered the moment before the elevation and the moment after it - and in the interval between those two moments something happened that he could not locate in the interval itself, could not recover by thinking carefully about it, could not reconstruct from the available evidence.
He was present for it. He was certain he was present for it. He was less certain, afterward, what he had been present for.
He found himself in the parking lot.
He did not remember leaving the church. He was simply in the parking lot, in his car, in the driver's seat, with his hands on the steering wheel and the engine off and the key in the ignition and the church behind him. The Mass was still going - he could see through the glass doors that the congregation was still at the altar rail. He had left before communion.
He sat in the parking lot.
The time that passed while he sat in the parking lot was forty-three minutes, which he knew because he checked the clock when he arrived in the parking lot and checked it again when he became aware that he had been sitting there for what seemed like both a very long time and no time at all. The clock said 9:17. He had left the church at approximately 8:34, which was during or immediately after the Mass, which was when the eleven people on a Tuesday morning in March were doing something they apparently did every day.
He sat for another two minutes and then started the car and drove back to Alton.
He did not call Ambrose. He had thought about this on the drive home and decided against it, not because he was unwilling to report what had happened but because he did not have language for what had happened and was not willing to put forward inadequate language for something that deserved adequate language if it deserved language at all.
He did not tell Daniel or Claire or Margaret. For the same reason.
He went back to his grandfather's house and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table and looked out the window at the street for a while. A woman walked a dog. A car he didn't recognize pulled into the driveway across the street and a man got out and went inside. Ordinary Tuesday morning in Alton, Illinois.
He thought about the priest elevating the host. The specific quality of the gesture - not perfunctory, not theatrical, simply present, the action of a man who had been doing this for forty years and still believed it mattered. Eleven people in a brown brick church, three elderly women and a man from a job site and a young mother with a sleeping infant and some others, doing something on a Tuesday morning that they apparently did every week.
He thought about the parking lot. Forty-three minutes.
He did not examine what had happened at the consecration. He was not ready to examine it, and he was honest enough with himself to know this and leave it alone, the way you leave alone a door that you are not certain you want to open, which is different from refusing to acknowledge that the door is there.
The door was there.
He filed it under things to return to.
He went back to work.