Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

I was waiting for that voice, waiting for the way, driving up and down the narrow streets of a city I had never much liked. I could almost hear my car, huffing through its exhaustion as it climbed those ample hills, and exhaling, relieved, as it flew down them. I found myself in neighborhoods with houses like miniature castles, the lawns vast and vibrant, shimmering green, and I found myself in alleyways where strung-out men and women sat on stoops and convulsed on sidewalks, and I felt saddened by it all.

When we were children, unaccompanied and unsupervised, Nana and I used to sneak into the gated pool a few blocks away from our house at night. Our swimsuits were too tight, several years old. They hadn’t kept up with our growth. Nana and I were all too happy to take our dips under the cover of darkness. For years we begged our parents to let us join the pool, but for years they had made up excuses for why we couldn’t. Nana figured out that he was tall enough, his arms long enough, to reach up and over the gate, and unlatch it for me. As our mother worked the night shift, we waded in that pool.

“Do you think God knows we’re here?” I asked. Neither of us really knew how to swim, and while we were trespassers, we weren’t stupid. We knew our mother would kill us if we died. We stayed in the shallows.

“Of course God knows we’re here. He knows everything. He knows where every person is at every second of every day.”

“So God would probably be mad at us for sneaking into the pool, right? We’re sinning.”

    I already knew the answer to this and Nana knew that I knew. At that time, the two of us had never missed a Sunday at church. Even when I was contagious with pink eye, my mother had fitted me with a pair of sunglasses and marched me into the sanctuary to receive my healing. Nana didn’t answer me at first. I assumed he was ignoring me and I was accustomed to being ignored, at school, where I asked too many questions, and at home, where I did the same thing.

“It’s not so bad,” Nana finally said.

“What?”

“I mean, this is a nice sin, isn’t it?”

The moon in gibbous looked off-kilter to me. I was getting cold and tired. “Yeah, it’s a nice sin.”

I drove past coffee shops and secondhand clothing stores. I saw kids playing in playgrounds, their mothers or nannies watching over them. I drove until it got dark, and then I pulled into the back parking lot of an ice cream parlor and turned the car off.

“My mom’s going to get better,” I said to the windshield or to the wind or to God, I don’t know. “I’m going to finish my paper and graduate and years from now all of this work will have been worth something, will matter to someone out there, and my mother is going to be alive to see all of that, right?”

The lot was empty and dark except for a couple of lazy streetlamps shining their dim light. I turned the car back on and sat there for a minute longer, fantasizing about what my apartment would look like when I returned to it. My mother sitting upright on the couch, a pot of jollof rice warming on the stove.

“Please, please,” I said, and I waited a moment longer for some kind of response, some sign, some bit of wonder, something, before pulling out of that spot and starting the long drive home.

From our house in New Jersey, Han and I can hear the church bells ring every Sunday.

“Your people are summoning you,” Han sometimes jokes. I roll my eyes at him, but really, I don’t mind the jokes, I don’t mind the bells.

Once every few months or whenever the mood strikes, I take the long way home from the lab I run at Princeton, just so that I can step into that church. I don’t know the first thing about Episcopalianism, but no one seems to mind when they find me sitting in the back pew, staring ahead at the figure of Christ on the cross. Han has been in here with me a couple of times, but he fidgets. He steals glances from Christ to me, in a way that lets me know he’s counting down the seconds until I’m ready to go. I’ve told him many times that he doesn’t have to come here, but he wants to. He knows everything there is to know about me, my family, my past. He was with me when my mother finally passed away, in my childhood home, in her own bed, her own caretaker beside her to help us all through to the end. Han understands me, all of my work, my obsessions, as intimately as if they were his own, but he doesn’t understand this. He has never heard the knock, and so he’ll never know what it means to miss that sound, to listen for it.

    Usually, I’m the only one there, except for Bob, the maintenance man who sits in the office, waiting either for the evening service to get started or just to close up.

“Gifty, how are the experiments going?” he always asks with a little wink. He seems to be one of those people who hears “scientist” and thinks “sci-fi,” and his winks are to assure me that he won’t tell anyone that I’ve been trying to figure out how to clone an alien. He and Han get along.

I wish I were trying to figure out how to clone an alien, but my work pursuits are much more modest: neurons and proteins and mammals. I’m no longer interested in other worlds or spiritual planes. I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption. In people, I’ve seen even more.

From the back pew, Christ’s face is the portrait of ecstasy. I stare at it, and it changes, goes from angry to pained to joyful. Some days, I sit there for hours, some days mere minutes, but I never bow my head. I never pray, never wait to hear God’s voice, I just look. I sit in blessed silence, and I remember. I try to make order, make sense, make meaning of the jumble of it all. Always, I light two candles before I go.