Outside the Window
”Come look out the window with me.”
But when we went to the window, I stood in the center, framed by the glass, and he stood behind, over my shoulder and aloof, as if he had studied the view from here too many times to find value in studying it again. No, I corrected myself - it’s more like there’s something outside this window that he has encountered many, many times, and now he wants a barrier between it and him. He’s using me as the barrier. I knew what he feared.
”How do you know he’s watching you?” I asked.
“You can feel it. Don’t pretend you can’t. The only way to make it bearable is to do something extraordinarily great, so that his eyes will be satisfied for a time, and leave you alone. But eventually, they will come back, and stare at you, and drive you out again into the world with their piercing, and since you cannot run from them - and you cannot, for every man is Jonah, and every man will be caught someday by the whale - yes, son, since you cannot run, you must do something again for the eyes.”
“And how do you know what he wants you to do?” I asked with a shudder, frightened of his answer and turning to face him, but he merely looked at me blankly a moment, his eyes cold and indifferent as no parent’s eyes should ever be when they look at their child, and then they slid off me and looked out the window, and that was the first real moment that I knew: I knew my father hated me. Hated me with the same wrath of a housewife spider, and that if his precious conscience had allowed it, he would sure have crushed me completely into the dust long before now.
“And do you think he’s right? About god, I mean.”
Charles often wished that Lily was a deeply religious person, and not a pagan who had grown up with no exposure to God, and now only viewed him as a curious aspect of Charles’s life, rather than an undeniable reality throughout everything that was difficult to pin down.
“I don’t know,” he tried to explain it to her anyway. “I know he’s right that there is a God, but I don’t think he’s right about how he watches us. I think he thinks of God as being the kind of man that he is himself. Same type of father. Not sure which came first - that perception or his parenting method, but they go hand-in-hand.”
“You don’t think God is watching you from outside the window?”
“Oh no, I know He is. But my father likes to keep them outside the window – I fear something greater. I think he’s inside the room with us, even now, and that he watches everything we do, no matter how great, and no matter how evil, and I don’t think the good actions make up for the bad ones in his eyes.”
Lily shuddered and looked around as if expecting to see a third presence in the room with them, and then she looked back at Charles, and giggled. He was so serious when he talked about God that it confounded her, and she had to take him seriously, even though she didn’t want to. She had learned that it was a part of him, a part that he had to work out, and she was honored that he chose to confide in her, but she cracked at this. The idea that there was a presence watching everything that she did was too creepy and horrifying to take seriously. She suddenly understood why Charles was so paranoid and upset about this God idea, for if this was what he believed, then it was a horrifying reality.