It's a wish for God to be here, on earth, visible

"You seem upset," he says to me.  

"I am but I don't know why." 

"Those planes." 

"No, I was before." 

"I think I know why," he says.  

"Why." 

"You don't like thinking I have - had - ordinary feelings." 

"I do like it." 

"No, all of you lay people hate it. It makes you anxious, and angry at me. You would rather imagine me as uncontaminated, pure, innocent, whatnot." 

"I do like thinking that one person I know lived without violence," I admit. 

"It's bigger than that," Tom says. "It's existential. It's a wish for God to be here, on earth, visible." 

The war planes seem abandoned. The site they occupy is absolutely without a sign of human life. But the sound of one buzzing in the faraway cut in the air like the shape of a dog. "Don't worry. I won't tell you anything personal," Tom says and speeds up the car. "Give me that water."

-- Fanny Howe, Indivisible (2000)