The Score

There is a man in the coffee shop near me who looks at his hand before he looks at anything else. He is not admiring it. He is wearing a ring that has watched him sleep, and the ring has given him a number, and the number is seventy-one. He slept fine. He woke up before the alarm and felt like a man who had slept fine. But the ring says seventy-one, and so he sits there with his coffee going cold and his face arranged into the expression of a man who has been told something about himself by a higher authority. He has been awake twelve minutes and has already been judged, and he has already accepted the judgment, and the one thing he has not consulted is his own body, which was right there the whole time and knew the answer.

I want to be plain about what I think is going on with that man, because it is not what he thinks. He thinks he is taking care of himself. He thinks he is being responsible, in the way people in his class use the word, which means spending money on the prevention of things that have not happened. What he is actually doing is converting his body into a piece of equipment and himself into its operator, and he is doing it so that he will never have to be told the one thing the body was put there to tell him. The ring is not there to help him sleep. It is there to stand between him and the knowledge that he is going to die.

O’Connor knew something about this from the other side. She was diagnosed with lupus at twenty-five and lived with it for fourteen years on her mother’s farm in Georgia, with the peacocks and the crutches and the cortisone that rotted her bones, and she wrote in a letter that she had never been anywhere but sick. “In a sense sickness is a place,” she said, “more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow.” The man with the ring has arranged his whole life so as never to visit that place. He has bought a device whose purpose is to see the border coming and turn him around before he reaches it. And what he does not know, because the ring cannot tell him, is that the country he is so careful to avoid is the only one in which he was ever going to meet anybody who mattered, including God.

Consider the glucose monitor on the healthy arm. It was built for diabetics, who need it, and who wear it the way a man with one leg wears a crutch, as a thing that answers a real lack. Now it is worn by people with nothing wrong with them, who have paid for it, and who check it after lunch to see what the sandwich did. This is a new thing in the world and it deserves to be looked at squarely. A healthy man has strapped a sick man’s instrument to his body as a precaution against ever becoming the sick man. He has taken the body, which was given to him whole, and placed it under surveillance, as one places a suspect under surveillance, on the theory that it is up to something. And it is. It is up to dying, slowly, in the ordinary way, and he intends to catch it at it.

Out in California there are men who have announced that they do not intend to die at all. They say it without embarrassment, in interviews, and they have the blood work to prove they are making progress. I do not think they are fools and I do not think they are monsters. I think they have been told something by the devil, and the devil has told it to them in the one accent they are able to hear, which is the accent of engineering. What he has told them is that death is a bug. It is not a judgment, not a mystery, not the wages of anything; it is a defect in the system, regrettable but temporary, that will be patched when the right people have had enough funding for long enough. This is the cleanest piece of work the devil has done in some centuries, and it is clean because it does not require anyone to deny God. It only requires them to make Him unnecessary. A man who is not going to die has no use for the Resurrection. He has not rejected Easter. He has rendered it redundant, the way a new highway renders the old road redundant, and he drives past the empty tomb every morning on his way to the lab without the smallest sense that he has refused anything.

I believe in the devil, and I mean a person and not a tendency, and I want to be certain he gets identified as the devil here, because the thing he has done is so much better than the things he usually gets blamed for. He has not tempted anybody to lust or cruelty. He has tempted them to maintenance.

Now what this does to charity is the heart of it, and it can be said in one sentence. A man who has managed never to be sick or weak has also managed never to need anyone. He has never been carried. He has never had his head held over a basin by someone who loved him and did not enjoy it. He has never had to receive, which is the only school there is for giving, since you cannot give what you do not know the weight of. The man with the ring has friends, and he will tell you so, and he will mean the men he runs with at six in the morning, each of them in his own instrumented silence, each of them checking his wrist at the top of the hill. What he does not have is anyone who has seen him helpless, and so he does not have anyone whose help he has had to accept, and so, by the strict logic of the thing, he does not have anyone he loves in the way that counts, which is the way that costs. He has arranged not to be a burden. He thinks that is a virtue. It is the loneliest sin there is.

O’Connor wrote an introduction once to a memoir about a child named Mary Ann, who had a tumor that took half her face and who died at twelve in a cancer home run by nuns, and who was by every account a cheerful and ordinary child who liked to boss the other patients. The nuns wanted a book about how good she was and O’Connor told them, more or less, that she could not write it and neither could they, because goodness like that is not a finished product but “the good under construction,” and the construction is done by the thing that is killing her. Then she said something that I think about every time I see a man check his wrist. She said that one of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and that in the absence of faith we now govern by tenderness, and that tenderness cut off from the person of Christ “is wrapped in theory,” and its logical outcome is terror. It ends, she said, in the forced-labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber. She was writing in 1961 and she had no idea about the rings. But she knew the shape. A tenderness toward the body that has been detached from the Cross does not end in gentleness toward bodies. It ends in a quiet contempt for every body that will not optimize: the old, the slow, the sick, the ones with the number that does not improve. The man with the ring is tender toward his own flesh in exactly the way that will make him, in thirty years, look at a hospital ward the way he now looks at a phone that will not take the update.

Humility is a word that has the dirt in it. It comes from the ground, humus, the soil, which is what the body is made of and what it is going back to. A man who treats his body as soil knows what it is for. It is for growing something and then for being turned under. A man who treats his body as an engine does not know what it is for, because an engine is not for anything in itself; it is for running, and when it stops running it is scrap. The whole terror of the optimized man, if you could get under his dashboard, is that he has no account of what the running is for. He is tuning an instrument he has never once played.

And the knowledge of God. I will put this plainly because O’Connor would have. You do not meet God in the place where everything is working. Nobody ever has. The place where you meet Him is the place where nobody can follow, and the whole genius of the ring and the monitor and the two million dollars a year is to keep you out of that place as long as money can manage it. The man will say he is spiritual. He meditates, with an app that scores it. But he has never once been reduced to the thing he actually is, which is a creature that will stop, and so he has never once been in the position from which the only true prayer is prayed, which is the one that says nothing because there is nothing left to say it with. O’Connor’s Asbury, in “The Enduring Chill,” comes home to die a meaningful death and is informed that he has undulant fever from drinking unpasteurized milk, and that he will live, chronically, for years, and the last thing he sees is the water stain on his ceiling that he has always thought looked like a bird, descending, “emblazoned in ice instead of fire.” The Holy Ghost comes to him as a chill and a disappointment and the wreck of his plans. The ring would have caught the fever early. It would have saved him from the bird.

The body is a temple. The Church has said so since Paul, and the dashboard people would agree if you asked them, because they think a temple is a thing you keep clean. It is not. A temple is a place where something is offered up and burned. The one Body that matters was not maintained. It was given, in those words, “given up for you,” and it was given up by being broken, and the breaking was not a system failure. The healthy girl in O’Connor’s story at the fair hears the freak in the tent say that God made him the way he is and that he does not dispute it, and say “I am a temple of the Holy Ghost,” and the child does not understand it and neither does anyone else, and it is the truest thing in the book. The freak knew what the body was for. The man with the ring does not. One of them had a number he could not change and the other has a number he cannot stop looking at, and only one of them is free.

I do not expect any of this to be received. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures, and the figure I would draw is this. The man dies anyway. The update does not come. He dies in a good bed with his numbers on a screen beside him, and the ring on his hand goes on scoring for a few hours after there is nothing left to score, out of habit, like a dog waiting by a door. And in that moment he finds out that his body was a temple after all, and that it has been standing empty the whole time, swept and lit and monitored, with nothing on the altar. Whether anything is put there in the last second is not a thing I know or a thing the ring will record. Grace changes us, and the change is painful, and it does not show up on the dashboard. That is the one mercy left to him, and he spent his life trying to engineer it away.