The House of Lazarus

In Caravaggio’s “The Raising of Lazarus,” Lazarus appears to fall: body taut with rigor at a forty-five degree angle to the stone floor, caught in the arms of a bystander, who wonderstruck, looks away from Jesus and into the victim’s face, as do Lazarus’s sisters who set the story in motion out of grief, with the best of intentions, as if this dead man alive still could be their brother and not a stranger shadowed by tomb-stench and bad luck, a stranger they must feed and dress. And who never sleeps. They hear him at night pouring out the jar of lentils, one by one dropping each in the jar, counting out loud, pouring them out again, counting again, the number different each time although nothing’s changed at all, except the hour which gets late until it’s early, when everyone else in the house gives in, gives up on sleep.