The Signature of All Things

me in church and punish me for sleeping during services, but I had not been sleeping. I had been . . . corresponding. Now, after reading Jacob Boehme, I wanted to meet the divine even more intimately. That is why I gave up everything in the world, including sustenance.”
    “What happened?” Alma asked, once more dreading the answer.
    “I met the divine,” he said, eyes bright. “Or, I believed I did. I had the most magnificent thoughts. I could read the language hidden inside trees. I saw angels living inside orchids. I saw a new religion, spoken in a new botanical language. I heard its hymns. I cannot remember the music now, but it was exquisite. Also, there was a full fortnight when I could hear people’s thoughts. I wished they could hear mine, but they did not appear to. I was kept joyous by exalted feeling, by rapture. I felt that I could never be injured again, never touched. I was no harm to anyone, but I did lose my desire for this world. I was . . . unparticled. Oh, but there was more. Such knowledge came into me! For instance, I renamed all the colors! And I saw new colors, hidden colors. Did you know that there is a color called swissen , which is a sort of clear turquoise? Only moths can see it. It is the color of God’s purest anger. You would not think God’s anger would be pale and blue, but it is.”
    “I did not know that,” Alma admitted, carefully.
    “Well, I saw it,” Ambrose said. “I saw halos of swissen , surrounding certain trees, and certain people. In other places, I saw crowns of benevolent light where there should have been no light at all. This was light that did nothave a name, but it had a sound. Everywhere I saw it—or, rather, everywhere I heard it—I followed. Soon after that, however, I nearly died. My friend Daniel Tupper found me in a bank of snow. Sometimes I think that if winter had not come, I might have been able to continue.”
    “Without food, Ambrose?” Alma asked. “Surely not . . .”
    “Sometimes I think so. I do not claim it to be rational, but I think so. I wished to become a plant. Sometimes I think that—just for a very short while, driven by faith—I became a plant. How else could I have endured two months with nothing but rain and sunlight? I recalled Isaiah: ‘All flesh is grass . . . surely the people is grass.’”
    For the first time in years, Alma remembered how, as a child, she had also longed to be a plant. Of course, she had been a mere child, wishing for more patience and affection from her father. But even so—she had never actually believed that she was a plant.
    Ambrose went on. “After my friends found me in the snowbank, they took me to a hospital for the insane.”
    “Similar to where we just were?” Alma asked.
    He smiled with infinite sadness. “Oh, no, Alma. Not at all similar to where we just were.”
    “Oh, Ambrose, I am so sorry,” she said, and now she felt thoroughly sickened. She had seen more typical hospitals for the insane in Philadelphia, when she and George used to commit Retta to such houses of despair for short periods of time. She could not imagine her gentle friend Ambrose in such a place of squalor and sorrow and suffering.
    “One need not be sorry,” Ambrose said. “It has passed. Fortunately for my mind, I have forgotten most of what occurred there. But the experience of the hospital left me, forever after, more frightened than I had been in the past. Too frightened to ever again experience full trust. When I was released, Daniel Tupper and his family took me into their care. They were kind to me. They gave me shelter, and offered work for me to do in their print shop. I hoped that perhaps I might be able to reach the angels once again, but through a more material manner this time. A safer manner, I suppose you could say. I had lost my courage to swing myself into the fire once more. So I taught myself the art of printmaking—in imitation of the Lord, really, though I know it sounds sinful and prideful to confess that. I wanted to press my own perceptions into the world, though I have still never madework as fine as what I wish it to be. But it brings me occupation. And I contemplated orchids. There was comfort in orchids.”
    Alma hesitated, then asked, not without discomfort, “Were you ever able to reach the angels again?”
    “No.” Ambrose smiled. “I’m afraid not. But the work brought its own pleasures—or its own distractions. Thanks to Tupper’s mother, I began eating