Easter

EASTER I pick up the phone and he says: "It's Easter and my hands hurt so much. Every year, Celia, the stigmata. I swear I can feel it."

He laughs.

"Hello Peter, my beloved," I say, in halting Swedish. "How do you always know when I'm thinking of you?"

I only have to hear his voice and it's as though there's a warm hand on my forehead.

"How are you?" he says.

"Thirsty, and in constant pain," I say with a laugh. "Very happy to be talking to you though. Tell me about your hands."

It's like getting on a flying carpet, the minute he starts talking—like being inside a fluid poem.

I've known him for more than 20 years, since the fateful and lucky day I asked him to teach me to play the drums in an artistic community center in Orebro, Sweden, which is now a parking lot. A manic-depressive and an outright genius, he would play so powerfully it put the whole audience in a trance. Afterwards, he'd climb down off the stage like somebody who'd been beaten and robbed, and I'd turn his hands over to look at the damage.

A real artist, is what I'm trying to say. He was large, infinite. He gave the gift that people so rarely give, of true hearing, true compassion. I always perceived his mental illness as the buildup of everything he had taken onboard, through his undulled senses and wide-open heart—the stuff that "healthy" people block and reject. Other people's sins. And it cost him, of course. You could hear it in his cough and see it in his gait.

I've tried to write about him before; I've described him as being so tall he grazed the heavens, and with feet so large he had to buy his shoes in Denmark. That's saying nothing of the size of his heart.

He grew up in a mining town where his father, a Dane, worked in the pit. At night, Peter stood guard in front of his sister's room to block his father from entering. Stood there all night if he had to. That's Peter.

"Ever since I was 21," he said, "I've experienced a kind of pain on Good Friday and all through Easter. It's hard to explain. I think of Jesus and I shiver. He was human, fully human."

I heard Peter tap his pipe against the table. Then he laughed. "I have my own stigmata scars on my hands—from a psychotic episode in 1997, when I burned a hole in each hand with a cigarette."

There was a silence and then he said, "I'm nobody, I'm a nobody. But I want to be this person who can see everything."

"Peter, I said, "I have to ask you again. Do you feel…an actual pain in your hands? A physical pain?"

After a short pause he said lucidly, calmly, with no fearful static at all around the spoken word:

"Yes."