For several minutes during a flight's descent into a city at night, the light of the stars above and of the buildings below shine with an equal intensity. I call it the switching point, sometimes the witching point, and if I was a pilot the altitude would be marked in red on the cockpit display.

In May of 1996 I had a window seat when we hit it. Thirteen minutes left in the hour flight from the city where I attended college to O’Hare. I felt the switch come glimmering in on the buzz of the engines, the pressure in my ears—sudden heaviness of oxygen—I closed my eyes. When I opened them, gazing at an illusory horizon in the center of my porthole, the light of civilization and of nature had equalized.

The witching point, I whispered to myself. I imagined an angel, awakened at this altitude, unsure which way is up—zone of angelic confusion. I was half-awake. I’d been reading a book from my art history class about the paintings of women as angels in the nineteenth century. It was clear from the postures of the women in the pictures that they were unable to walk. Angels with broken backs, the book said, beautiful and crippled. I imagined angels released at the witching point, dropping out of the sky, thousands of confused angels falling, raining down into the nineteenth century, to become icons of feminine beauty.

On the inside cover of the book, scrawled in his thoughtless hand, my boyfriend’s phone number at his parents’ place in New York. I looked out the window down at houses and stores freshly emerged from distance, as unlikely as stars. And I thought: There is a point just far enough away from any normal thing where you can see how it comes out of nowhere.

I thought of my boyfriend. His hair. His discipline of drugs and alcohol, that song he liked where between the blurred guitars you could hear someone yelling how he wanted everything to disappear.

Maybe I could have my own discipline, I thought. Watching things disappear is boring. It conveys no information about the thing—it’s just you, falling into sleep or drunkenness.

But if you get exactly far enough away from things, if you can spy on them as they come out of nothing, as they creep up out of nothing—then maybe you know...I didn’t know what you would know. I stared out the window while the houses and buildings grew larger. The light of the universe dimmed into the restrained ceiling décor of civilization.

I said hi to Mom at the baggage claim. Dad lay half-awake in the living room watching the Bulls game. He said you must be tired so I said yeah and went up to my room, closed the door. The Monet print. The photos from prom still stuck to the wall.

With the lights off I couldn’t see any of that. Just the streetlamps on the trees outside my windows. At night, the many-colored things of the daytime world have to choose whether to turn black or white. The May leaves on the branches were so new and thin they turned white when the color left them, white halos around the streetlights!

I picked up my phone from its cradle, and I opened the book—it was bright enough to read—and I dialed the number, and when he picked up and spoke my eyes were closed, and his voice came right out of nowhere.

I had found the distance. And I learned this:

People, when you see them coming directly out of nothingness…it’s not like the stars. The nothingness—it deforms them.

“Stop calling me,” I whispered.

“You called me,” he said, confused.

And that was it. I left his voice lying broken on the air.

I needed a summer job. Dad heard Ace was hiring. I knew they’d hire anyone, had resigned myself, but then Stacy called and told me about this job she had walking dogs. I hadn’t seen her since we’d left for our different colleges last summer. She said I could make $30 or $40 a day easy. Better dogs than Ace, I thought.

She made the maps. We’d drive to different neighborhoods in her new car, parking in strategic spots equidistant from clients’ houses. We’d walk four dogs at a time, four or five times a day if the weather was good.

Stacy would have done it in the rain. You won’t melt, she’d say. I refused. She had this book called Success she was always trying to get me to read, to inspire me. I couldn’t understand her fascination with the relatively small amounts of money associated with the dog-walking business. Her father was a dentist. If my dad was a dentist, I thought, I’d never hold the leash of a strange dog.

The truth is that I looked down on all jobs. I was fascinated by the idea of aristocracy. My teachers at college constantly attacked the aristocracy. All the bad things they said about it just made me love it more. Once I got in an argument with Professor Miles. It was in medieval history class. He was talking about how the peasants were so oppressed that they wouldn’t go to church. The soaring, light-filled, incense-heavy atmosphere of the great cathedrals made them uncomfortable. The peasants felt they didn’t belong in such majestic spaces. They had to be forced with the threat of terrible punishments to go to the cathedral once a month to take communion. The peasants thought communion was too good for them. They thought only the nobles deserved to taste the body of God.

I raised my hand.

“People shouldn’t be punished,” I said “for how they feel.”

Professor Miles stared at me.

“I think the point,” he said at last, “is that the peasants’ feeling of being infinitely worse than the nobles was a malign product of the feudal system. The extreme nature of their negative feelings about themselves provides a vivid illustration of the inhumanity of that system.”

I persisted.

“How can anyone tell someone else that what they feel is wrong?”

I forgot what he said to that. I was thinking about the peasants. I wondered if, on the monthly occasions when they’d been forced to take communion, they had held it in their mouths without chewing, and then secretly spit into their hands when they were back in the pews. That would be the right thing to do. I would have done that, if I were them.

Now I reflected that Stacy provided a vivid illustration of the malign character of our modern social system. I watched her struggle with the leashes of two enormous dogs, not seeing the May trees and the May sky, calculating, wishing she had more hands so she could hold more dogs.

“You know,” I said “I think this job is actually deforming your body, Stacy.”

She looked at me.

“You think my legs are getting too strong?”

Stacy was very concerned about her figure.

“No,” I said. “I was watching your face. You were wishing you had more hands, so you could hold more dogs.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Admit it.”

“So what,” she said.

“That kind of thing leaves a mark on your body,” I said. “By the end of the summer you’re going to have the nubs of little baby hands sprouting from your back.”

She didn’t reply. She was having trouble with one of her dogs.

“In fact I think I saw them the other day when we went to the pool,” I said. “Two gross little nubs under your shoulder blades.”

“They’re wing nubs,” she said. “They’re the nubs of my angel wings.”

I considered this.

“Do you let guys rub them?”

“Yeah,” she said.

That’s why I love Stacy, I thought, despite her incorrigibly bourgeois nature; she’s a good sport.

I did seriously think she was deformed, though. One morning, when it was foggy, I tested my intuition. One of my dogs was taking a long time to do his business, so I told her to go on, I’d catch up. Several seconds after her form had been swallowed by the fog, I called out to her.

“Stacy!”

I concentrated on the white mist hovering over the sidewalk. I let go of everything I knew. I’ve never seen a face, I whispered to myself like a spell. I’ve never seen anything but this mist.

And then it came out of the fog.

The first thing I noticed was the top of it. Hair-covered bone. And when it got a little closer I could see there was moisture on its hairless surfaces—clammy with nothingness.

For two or three whole seconds I saw Stacy as she would appear against the background of infinity.

It was horrible.

And then the human habits clamped back down over my vision, and I saw her like I was one of the people again—her pretty symmetrical features, dark brown hair, light blue eyes. She was beautiful. Really it was unfair to practice my new discipline on her. I didn’t do it to hurt her.

But I believed that an aristocratic face could emerge from a fog or a crowd of people like a star. I believed in a human face that could emerge directly from nothingness into existence without disfigurement.

The next day it was raining so heavily that Stacy didn’t even suggest walking the dogs. Actually she did suggest it. But it was obvious she didn’t expect me to reply.

“Let’s go to the art museum,” I said into the phone.

I was lying on my bed, the sound of the rain coming in through the open windows. I was focusing on the prom pictures taped to my wall, squinting my eyes shut and then opening them, trying to see if I could catch the images emerging from nothingness that way. It wasn’t working.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Parking is such a pain downtown.”

“We can take the train.”

The art museum held examples of the nineteenth century paintings of women as angels. I’d looked through the illustration credits of my art history book.

“Ok,” said Stacy.

After we hung up I considered our relationship. I asked myself whether I looked down on Stacy. I concluded I did not. It was true that when I saw her face coming directly out of the emptiness of the universe it was ugly as sin, but that was also true of my own face.

I’d discovered that it was possible to catch one’s own face coming out of nowhere. All you had to do was to stare into the mirror for long enough. I’d close the bathroom door and begin to examine my face. First I’d wonder if my nose is too big. After awhile it would seem that yes, my nose is way too big. Then my nose would seem monstrously huge, and I’d think, wait, that can’t be right, no-one’s ever said anything about it. I’d grasp for a standard with which to judge the size of my nose, I’d try desperately to remember what someone else’s face looked like—anyone’s—I couldn’t. By that point my face had totally lost its shape.

I knew I was no aristocrat.

Stacy picked me up in her new car. It was a Nissan. Her car made me a little jealous, but only a little. When God sees us coming out of the abyss, I thought, He’ll turn his face away just as rapidly whether we come on the bus or in a Nissan.

I wondered if, when you spy on people or things coming out of nowhere you are really seeing them as God sees them.

The train station was quiet—ten a.m., long after rush hour. The rain stopped and the sun began to slice through unraveling clouds. I could see Stacy was thinking we should abandon our trip and go walk dogs. She was considering how to broach the subject. I walked away from her, strolling along the platform, admiring the extraordinary color of the grass in the new sun.

I was wearing a light blue cotton dress with flower prints. I imagined my ex-boyfriend standing at the other end of the platform. I imagined him turning around and seeing me “come out of nowhere.” I felt sure he would experience my face and form as beautiful, desirable. He’d told me that frequently enough. I saw no reason to disbelieve him.

At that moment I understood for the first time how sexual desire can corrupt a person, making it impossible for them to perceive things as God does, emerging from nothing.

When the train arrived, we found a car that was practically empty, and sat across the aisle from each other so we could each have a window seat. For some reason the windows on the older trains have a light green tint. Watching the sunny landscape going by, submerged in the color green, I broke into a smile. I looked at Stacy, she was smiling too.

“It’s like the outside is underwater,” she said, grinning.

“But still sunny,” I said, grinning.

We smiled at the idea of a train slowly making its way across the bottom of a vast clear ocean, the sun mixing with the water, pouring down in green sheets of light!

When we arrived at the station, we moved quickly through the vast marble hall, and out the revolving doors onto the sunny street, blinking. I led the way. Stacy trotted along behind me. I could sense the distractable, giddy quality of her consciousness, and I wanted to move quickly past the danger zone of expensive shops that lay between the station and the museum.

I imagined Stacy behind me, opening and shutting her mouth like a fish, as one then another of the stores hooked her face. The stores’ visual magic works by legato principles—the eye sliding from one alluring surface to another, the street a slippery mosaic of posed accessories—no chance of catching this expensive handbag coming out of nothing!—only the thinnest of barriers—an eyelid, a blink—between one retail item and the next. I didn’t let her stop.

My excitement mounted once we entered the dim cathedral vastness of the museum. I rushed her up the massive marble staircase, past the facile smashed forms of the impressionists. I reflected how the impressionists painted the world as extremely old people saw it, people whose eyes were so soaked in existence they could no longer imagine true nothingness. The best they could do was a bleary smudge, like something a drunk or tired person would see. Impressionism, I thought, the very antithesis of the aristocratic sensibility.

I had to stop in front of this one Renoir.

“What do you think of this one?” I asked Stacy.

She studied it, her nose wrinkling.

“Honestly?” she asked.

“Honestly,” I said.

She looked around to verify we were alone in the gallery, except for one elderly guard standing against the opposite wall, studying his shoes.

“It reminds me of something,” Stacy said, whispering, pressing her mouth close to my ear.

The sensation tickled. It felt good. I turned and pressed my mouth to her ear.

“What does it remind you of?” I whispered.

She leaned close to me. She whispered:

“It reminds me of garbage.”

We began to giggle. The guard looked up sharply, so we walked out of the gallery, biting our cheeks to stifle laughter. By the time we got to the gallery with the nineteenth century pictures of women as angels, I’d recovered my composure. This is it, I thought. This is why we’ve come.

We stood before an enormous canvas.

“Why do you call her an angel?” Stacy asked.

“My book said there’s two kinds of paintings in this genre,” I replied. “Angels with wings, and angels without wings. This one’s without.”

We gazed at the woman. She lay on a long red couch, naked body twisting, her immobile face gazing at us.

“Why do you say she has a broken back?” Stacy asked.

I pointed at the woman’s torso.

“Look at how her spine is twisted,” I said. “Can you imagine someone like that walking? She’d never be able to get off that couch without help.”

We were silent.

“Her torso is too long,” Stacy observed. “There’s like two or three extra feet between her hips and her shoulders.”

“Her spine was stretched out,” I said. “When she fell.”

We stood gazing at her for several minutes.

“She’s beautiful,” Stacy whispered.

Two days later, back in Libertyville, we were walking dogs when it began to rain. The dark clouds had appeared suddenly when we were at the point in our walk equidistant from all four of the dogs’ houses. On Stacy’s map, this point was marked SP—switching point—the point when we turned abruptly around on the sidewalk and retraced our steps.

This practice had always seemed to me unnecessarily severe, its logic dictated by brutal efficiency, no effort to smooth it, to turn corners like normal walkers until we naturally arrived at our point of departure. We have four points of departure, Stacy said; there’s nothing natural about this. And so, four or five times each day we performed this military about-face on the sidewalk, causing passersby to stare.

“Hurry,” I said, stepping off the curb, pulling my poodles along behind me, grimacing and half-blind in the pouring rain.

“What,” said Stacy two seconds later, stepping off the curb into a grey sedan going forty miles per hour.

I spun around, dropping my leashes. The sound of screeching brakes lay in the air like knives. Stacy lay on the pavement, four dogs crowded around her head, her right leg protruding at an unnatural angle. The elderly driver stood by the damaged bumper, opening his mouth.

Later that week, lying sleepless in bed, I imagined what he had seen through the windshield, the instant before the accident. I imagined clouds of green and blue sliding over each other, legato, the blurred impression of a girl rising at the picture’s right margin.

Stacy and I never once mentioned the painting of the angel in the museum.

I was her first non-family visitor. She lay in the white sheets of the hospital bed, her face too small on the pillow. I’d brought her a book. She reached out for it. Her mother had warned me she was still pretty heavily drugged. Stacy strained her arms out for the book. The lower half of her body remained motionless.

My eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t speak. She looked at me, her lips moved. My heart jerked as I braced for her words—“I can’t walk,” or just “Look at me!” I couldn’t take it. I’d collapse, sobbing, the most worthless friend, she’d despair when she saw it—her mother hurrying into the room…

But she said nothing. She merely reached out for the book, and I put it into her hands. She looked at the cover for a while. I didn’t know what to do, so I opened the book for her, turning the pages and talking about it as if she were a child. Her eyes heavy with painkillers—she stared at the pages without focusing. After a few seconds she’d make a motion, a half-movement of her arm, and I’d turn the page, and she’d lie still again.

I kept talking. I hadn’t read the book, and soon exhausted what I remembered from the back cover, but I kept talking anyway, turning the pages, not reading them, making things up. After maybe ten minutes her mother came in and gripped my hand. I looked up from the book. Stacy was asleep, a tiny smile lifting the corner of her mouth.

She was in the hospital for nearly two months. There were two operations. I didn’t really understand them, even though Stacy’s father tried to explain. I gathered that the lesser operation helped a little, and that the more serious operation didn’t help at all.

I visited her every day. I kept up the dog walking business, on a reduced scale obviously. I still used Stacy’s maps; except I didn’t obey the switching point. I walked around the blocks. It took a little longer, but I didn’t have to pass the scene of the accident. Usually I’d come to the hospital after my last walk. Stacy’s dad was still at work. Her mom used the hour or two I was there to run errands, make dinner for Stacy’s younger brother.

For a couple days after the operations she’d be drugged, and I’d read to her, or I’d sit next to her bed and we’d watch soap operas on the small television. But by the third or fourth day she was perfectly lucid. The nurse would prop her up in the bed, and we’d talk. She’d ask about the dogs, or we’d discuss the book she was reading, or a show she’d seen on television. She had trouble sleeping; she’d wake up in the middle of the night and turn on some random infomercial or black and white movie, saving up weird anecdotes about it to share with me.

Six weeks after the accident, I was sitting with her, telling her about how one of the dogs had developed a problem, crapping in yard after yard. I’d run out of bags, the dog was still going strong, it was amazing, it crapped on this lady’s yard when she was standing on the porch, staring right at it. I held the leash helplessly, trying to invent a gesture that would communicate that I’d run out of bags, that I always brought lots of bags, that no one could possibly bring enough bags for this…

Stacy had been giggling and then suddenly she stopped. My story petered out. She was looking down at the sheets where her legs were.

“You’re going back to college soon,” she said.

It was already mid-August. I nodded.

“You’ll be going back too,” I said. “I mean not this semester, but your dad—”

“I don’t see the point,” she said.

She closed her eyes. The entire time I’d be coming to see her, she’d never once seemed depressed. But I’d expected this moment to come. If it had happened on that first day, I’d have broken down. I’d have been worse than useless to her. Now I was ready.
I’d resolved to teach her my secret discipline.

“Stacy,” I said.

My voice must have sounded different, because she looked at me, surprised.

"What?"

"Do you want to see what God sees?"

She stared at me. But the normal, social, common-sense interior scaffolding that supports the structure of a person’s face, that causes it to crease with an automatic smile of dismissal to any really cosmic suggestion—that was gone. The despair I’d seen in her had eaten it away. Despair had been quietly eating common sense away from the inside of her face for days or weeks, and now it was gone. She looked at me, her face clear and sad and open.

“What are you talking about?”

“Will you just trust me?” I said. “I want to show you something.”

We started with an apple. She had one left over from lunch, sitting on the tray on the impersonal white hospital bedside table. An apple is perfect, I thought. And this room—it’s perfect too. White tiles, white bedspread, white furniture—pure sky in the eighth-story window.

I placed the tray at the foot of her bed, where she could see it without straining her neck. The apple—bright red, waxed—lay in the center of the tray.

“Ok,” I said. “Now close your eyes.”

She closed them. Then I closed mine.

“The trick,” I said, “is to have no expectations. You have to forget there’s an apple there. I mean really forget—otherwise when you open your eyes it won’t work. We’ll just sit like this with our eyes shut until you’re ready.”

“Ok,” said Stacy. Her voice seemed bright, not laughing at me—just kind of bright. Lively. It made me happy to hear it.

We waited for awhile.

“I’m going to say something now that kind of helps me,” I said. I felt suddenly self-conscious. I took a deep breath.

“I’ve never seen an apple,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything.”

I made her say it. We said it three times together, in unison.

I’ve never seen anything.

I’ve never seen anything.

I’ve never seen anything.

“Now,” I said. “When you’re ready, open your eyes. Do it very slowly.”

I gradually peeled back nothingness, and there it was. What surprised me most was that it had no size. For a full second, the thing that had come out of nothing had no size at all.

When it was over I looked at Stacy. She was shaking her head.

“People eat those things!” she exclaimed.

We were still convulsed with laughter when her mother returned.

As soon as I arrived the next day, I could tell she’d been thinking about it.

“Let’s do a face,” she said, as soon as the nurse left.

The window showed a single white cloud, slowly coming apart.

“No,” I said.

She looked disappointed. Her upper body shifted against the pillow she was propped against.

“Why not?”

I sighed. I’d been afraid of this—I’d almost decided not to show her the discipline because of it. I tried to explain that it wasn’t any good with faces—people looked ugly when they came out of nothing. They were horrible. I told her I never practiced the discipline with faces any more, which was true.

“We can try it with my sneakers,” I said, hoping to distract her. “Clothing is really fun.”

But she insisted. She accused me of trying to protect her, like she was fragile or something. She said that if I could handle it, then she could too. What could I say to that? She’d just do it by herself if I refused. It’ll be better if I’m here with her, I thought. I can help soften it. I told her about my dream of an aristocratic face, a face that wouldn’t get deformed coming out of nothingness, a face like a star. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed in that anymore. But I told her anyway. Maybe it would help.

At first she wanted to use a picture. She had pictures of various family members in a photo album her aunt had left. But I knew from experience that it didn’t work with photos. Things in photos somehow never lost their familiar shapes. You couldn’t shake them off into nothingness, no matter how long you practiced. I must have tried it a dozen times with the prom pictures in my bedroom.

“You’ll have to use my face,” I said finally.

She frowned.

“Are you sure, Ellen? I mean I don’t want—”

I smiled grimly.

“I did it with you Stacy,” I said. “In the beginning of the summer, when we were walking dogs.”

“Oh,” she said.

She was quiet for a little while.

“And was I…?”

“Yes,” I said. “Listen, I’m ok with this. I’ll look really bad for a little while, and then I’ll be normal. Just promise me that when you think about me, you’ll think about my normal shape.”

She laughed.

“Promise,” I insisted. She nodded.

And then we began. Stacy closed her eyes. I could tell she was reciting the spell—her lips moved a little. I felt strange, sitting there waiting for her to look at me. It was a cool day, the nurses had left the window half-open. The sound of passing cars came faintly through. At first I tried looking out the window, but I kept getting drawn back to Stacy’s face. After awhile I stopped fighting it.

Her eyes were shut tight—the tiny muscles around them vibrated. She was concentrating hard. I noticed again how pale she’d gotten from the weeks indoors—almost white in contrast with her weirdly red lips. She still used lipstick—her mom put it on for her. Stacy joked about it, but she let her mother go on applying it every morning. From time to time her lips moved as she recited the spell.

I wondered what it was like, behind her face.

Nothingness is growing in there, I thought. Right now. Maybe the only place in the existing world that contains nonexistence is right there—three feet away from me—behind Stacy’s shut eyes, an inch beneath the fine lines of her forehead…

When her eyes opened I was looking directly at them.

They didn’t move. The pupils were swollen. Her lips slowly fell apart.

My palms were sweating now, I wiped them on my jeans. I didn’t want to move. Please, I thought, senselessly. Please.

She blinked. Then she rubbed her eyes, let out a little sound. She looked at me—looked away quickly. Then back shyly, and it was normal again.

“Oh,” she said.

“I know,” I said quickly. “It’s like that with everyone, it’s bad, just don’t remember me that way, I—”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not that. It wasn’t you—I mean, you were beautiful.”

“I was beautiful?” I said.

And then:

“What do you mean it wasn’t me?”

Stacy was looking out the window, where the cloud had almost entirely melted away. Her torso twisted in the bed above her motionless legs.