Evidence

A short story from the perspective of a Catholic priest in Vietnam who discovers God in a cave. There's a twist, but I don't want to spoil it.

I have been here, in this village, for forty-three years. I came when I was only twenty-five, on a two-year mission. My church is only a part of the school, which is a Catholic school. It is the only school for twenty or thirty kilometers, so all the children who can afford it come here. When my mission ended, and I was twenty-seven, I asked to stay, and they granted permission. My friends in America do not understand. They say, “There are so many people trying to get out of Vietnam, and you want to stay?” I could have left many times, but the nature around here is so beautiful, and there is so much that no one has explored. I am a spelunker, you see--it is a hobby, because some days there is not very much to do in the village. So I have found this cave, a very beautiful cave, but very wet and slippery. So after I am finished exploring it, I am planning to bring sand so that it will not be so slippery, because I want to bring Julia. She is a friend of mine, a teacher at the school connected to my church. She likes the caves, but when I first brought her to a cave I had not explored, she slipped and broke her wrist. So now I explore caves alone first. It is hot--well, it is always hot here--and I am old, and the paths are not very good. I am walking for an hour when I reach the entrance to the cave. The entrance is small, and I must crawl to go inside, but the cool air out of the cave is a good change from the outside. Inside the cave, it is soon wide enough for me to stand. I walk for a while, looking for passages I have not explored. I am walking about five minutes when I see one; it is a small opening, but I can get through. As I walk, I am marking the wall on my right so that I know how to get out. I reach the end of the passage and turn to go back, when I see a crack on the left wall of the chamber. It looks like it is glowing or--or sparkling, you see. I walk over to it, hoping that it might be crystals or gold, but I find that it is a small crack into another chamber.

            Here is where I perhaps should have turned back. After all, one rule of spelunking is that you do not open new chambers. I could have caused a cave-in, or released an underground lake. But can you really tell me that you would have turned back then?

            I knock on the wall near the crack and I feel it give slightly. So I push against it, gently at first, and lean my whole weight on it and heave with my legs. The wall breaks, leaving a hole as wide as I am tall. I fall through and find that the edges are still sharp; here, I will show you the scar.

            So now I am in this cave. It is large enough for most men to stand in, but I am tall, so I stoop a little. And in the middle of this room I see the source of the glittering light. It is soft, like silk threads that hang in the air, but they pulse with light and move and change colors as I watch. It is not something that I can describe to you, I think. But I see this silk orb, and I know that this is God. Only He would dare to take a form like this. And I sit here, in this little room, for many hours, just watching the colors of the orb and listening. For I am vain, and I think that maybe the Lord wants to speak to me. Of course, he does not speak to me yet. So after some hours I wish to show some friends this marvelous thing. I run out of the cave and into the village that is close by, where some other priests from my church are having lunch. I ask one of them, Ho-Khanh, to come with me. He finishes his lunch as I wait impatiently. But soon we are off and running. As soon as we reach the left fork, I know that there is something wrong. I do not see any light coming from the end of the corridor. We walk down to the end, and there is the cave that I broke into before. I know it is the same; it has my blood on the edges. But inside the cave there is nothing. Ho-Khanh tells me that I must be dehydrated, and that is why I am now seeing things. 

            I try to forget about it. I know that it sounds crazy, so I try to hide it from everyone. No one says another word about it for many months. I go on living in the church, preaching at services, spending my free time in the village. I do not go back to the cave; I am afraid, you see. I am afraid that there will be nothing there, and I will not have seen anything. And even more, I am afraid that there is nothing there, but I have gone insane and that is why I am seeing God. I am always thinking about it: when preaching, when eating, when reading. I dream about it three, four nights every week. In one of these dreams, I find and explore the cave, and I see God, but there is one difference: I bring Julia with me in the dream. When I wake up, I know that I have to bring Julia to see God. You see, Julia did not believe in God. It was strange, because she was teaching at a Catholic school, but she did not believe in God. This is how we met; when we introduced all the new teachers, she announced that no one had ever convinced her that God was real. To me, it sounded like a challenge. I tell her about the Bible, about Christ, about everything that I know. She tells me that I have "no evidence" to support my theory. It was maddening. The beauty of a crystal, the harmonies of music, the light shining through a rainbow…how could these things not be made by God? We became acquaintances, but our arguments always kept us from being friends.

            One night, we had been debating for two or three hours. She refused to accept the evidence all around her of the power of God. Finally I stood up and started to leave, but she stopped me and said, "If I ever see a miracle, like the ones in the Bible, I will believe." I understood. We stopped arguing; we talked about other things. Soon we were good friends, and I brought her with me on spelunking trips.

            I realize that this cave is a miracle, if it is real. Still, I do not tell her for many weeks. I worry that she will not believe me or that when I try to show her, there will be nothing there. But I want, more than anything, to make Julia believe. So I tell her one day. At first, she is not taking me seriously. She looks into my eyes, and so she knows that I am not lying to her. I clear a path to the cave as well as I can, and I lead Julia inside. She sees the light, and her eyes widen. She steps up to it and leans close to the light, so close that I must pull her back, because I am afraid that perhaps it will hurt her. She wants to test it, so she picks up a pebble and throws it into the light, and it disappears. I do not know how to explain this. It does not explode or burn up; it enters the light and does not come out again. Julia is very excited. She tells me that she wants to do experiments on the light. I tell her that she cannot, because I will not let her. It is as if, meeting Jesus, she wants to dissect his feet to see how he walks on water. We yell and fight, and Julia runs out of the cave.

            I do not know what to do. I walk back to the village and try to forget about it, about Julia. Weeks pass. When I see her in the hall, we do not look into each other's eyes. We do not talk anymore, not about God, not about her students, not anything. I have no other real friends but Julia and God, and it seems that He, too, is angry at me. Many nights, I lie awake, listening to the mosquitoes whining outside my window, praying for guidance. If He speaks, it is drowned out by the insects.

            I did not realize how much I depended on Julia until she was gone. I do not do anything at all after she stops talking to me. I have read every book in my house and I know every person in the village. In these times, I would go and look for caves, but I do not want to find any more caves. I am afraid of them now.

            One day, I am sitting alone in a classroom, rereading a book for the hundredth time. I hear a noise, and when I look up, it is Julia. I remember then that this is her classroom, and I must leave. As I stand to leave, I look at her face, and I am startled by how tired she looks. Her whole face looks like it is in shadow, and I can barely see her eyes behind her drooping eyelashes. When she sees me looking at her, she quickly looks to the side and walks into the classroom. I ask her if we can talk, she says that she has to teach her class. She still does not look at me. Her hand is trembling, holding a piece of chalk, but not writing anything. Finally I leave.

            That night, I go to her house. It is small, just a little house on the edge of the village. I knock on her door, and there is no answer. I know she does not leave her house in the evening, so I do not know what to do. I think that perhaps she has gone to get food, so I wait on her porch for a while. Soon, it is getting dark. I know that Julia keeps a key to her door inside the first porch step. I go into her house, and I see that all her books are scattered across the floor. The window blinds are shut, and all of the lights are off. The only thing that is still organized is her desk. There are four different binders on her desk…they were blue, green, black, and red. I open the black one, and I see photographs…

There were tens, hundreds of them. Different angles, different times of day…and then there were the papers. All these experiments she did, looking at it like a power source, or a light source, or a method for travel. Graphs, data tables, everything.

I am too angry to think. I try to rip them up, but instead I sit down and cry. I wait for Julia that whole night. I do not sleep. I read her papers for hours and hours and I do not even read half of them. She calls it a “black hole”, a “singularity”, or a “distortion”. How could she not see it? How could anyone look at a miracle for weeks and weeks and never see it?

In the morning, I am still waiting in her house. At noon, I know that there must be something wrong. So I go back to the cave, for the first time in weeks. She is lying on the floor of the cave; her eyes are open. She has no pulse, she is not breathing, and there are bruises along her arms and neck.

So they accused me of murdering her. We had had a fight, so people thought that I was angry at her. When they found me that evening next to her body, they assumed that I must have strangled her. They asked me to tell them what had happened; what could I say? That God killed her? That I just happened upon her body after she had been killed by someone else? I am not looking for an insanity defense. And perhaps I did kill her, by showing her the light. I should have known. I asked the coroner for the time of death. He says that she died at about 8 o’clock at night. I was reading her papers. I was sitting in her chair, reading her papers and hating her when she died. So tell me: who should be doing the repenting?

Reviews

[Abdul Alsaaidi]

Interesting story yet a bit strange but interesting, it would be nice if there is some romantic between him and Julia. The climax maybe needs more excitement and I think the end was unexpected and unnatural.