More Than You'll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez

Author:Katie Gutierrez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Lore, 1985

Years later, Lore won’t remember exactly what she and Andres were talking about in the kitchen on the morning of September 19, 1985. She’ll remember earlier, in bed. She’d taken to selecting one of his classes and reading along with the syllabus. Kant and Nietzsche, Otto and Kierkegaard. They’d been talking, lately, of Otto’s concept of the numinous, a word Lore loved for sounding exactly like what it meant.

“It’s wholly other,” Andres says in bed. Even this early, the apartment is honeyed with summer. They lie naked on a mostly naked bed, any unnecessary fabric hurled to the corner of the room. Through the open windows, music and yelling and the blare of honking horns float up from the Paseo de la Reforma.

“Wholly other,” Lore repeats, her fingertips grazing his chest, his hips, his inner thighs, stroking him.

“Unlike”—Andres struggles to speak, hard in her hand—“anything we experience in our day-to-day lives.”

“Anything?” she murmurs against his neck.

“Mmm.” He closes his eyes.

She removes her hand. “Go on, Doctor.”

He groans. “Lore . . .”

“Tell me.”

“You know. You’ve read,” he says, but he continues, brisk, hurrying through. “It’s the experience that is meant to underlie all religion. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Mysterium is the mystery, the unknown, the impossible-to-know. When you feel it, the only possible reaction is silence.”

“Silence,” Lore says, and it sounds like a command. So they’re silent, eye to eye, and when they do this, when they look into each other, Lore wills herself open, nothing hidden, nothing untrue. She wills him to see her.

“The numinous provokes awe,” Andres says, not breaking their gaze, “but also terror, because of its overwhelming power.”

Lore has been trying to get through Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which Andres’s Philosophy of Religion class is reading. The whole book explores the story of Abraham, whom God commanded to sacrifice his son as a demonstration of his faith. Lore has always hated that story, God so petty and cruel, so desperate for human affirmation he would inflict upon a parent the greatest suffering one could endure—and Abraham? What kind of father raises a knife to his son before sacrificing himself? Kierkegaard calls Abraham a “knight of faith” for being able to hold such a contradiction in his heart—that the God who would ask such a terrible sacrifice was also a God who loved him, that this is the essence of faith, but when Andres asked her what she would do in that circumstance, she was indignant: “I would never sacrifice my child. Not for anything. And any God who asked me to can go fuck himself.” Andres looked startled, and she understood why: she sounded like a mother.

“But the numinous is also merciful,” Lore prompts him.

“Yes,” Andres says. “Fascinans. Merciful and gracious.”

She closes the small distance between them, her warm mouth to his, and soon they are so slick with sweat they need to take a second shower.

So in the kitchen afterward, maybe they’re still discussing the numinous. The foundation of Abraham’s terrible faith. Or maybe they’re talking about nothing at all.

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