Looking out the window, he felt a brief wave of doubt flicker within. Had he gone mad? Somehow slipped beyond the veil of right reasoning and gone off into some deep, unsettled land of fantasy? The very thought made him cringe. Of course he was not crazy, he told himself; his was a very rational mind, acquainted with science and mathematics. But he was also a believer in an unseen world full of archangels and prophets and folk rising from the dead, a world preached to him from the cradle on, and a world he was powerless not to believe in as firmly as he believed in gravity and the times table. The two contradicting worlds were not contradictions in his mind. At the moment it was not the world of digits and decimal points he required, but the world of messiahs and miracles. It was faith, not facts he needed; magic, not math; salvation, not science. Belief would save him, not only belief, but belief in belief. Like Daniel, like Isaac, like the woman at the well. I am sane, he thought, smoothing over any kinks in his reasoning and clutching fear by the neck. He had no alternative, he kept saying to himself. No other way out.

When he got home, he went straight to his room and closed the door. His grandfather was out, but he didn’t want to risk tipping his hand. His room, the entire house, smelled of hard pine and the lingering smell of paint and floor varnish, of cypress window frames and heavily oiled oak furniture and dust trapped in the curtains, the farmhouse dust from the dirt road and the fields—but more than anything there was the ever-present smell of pine. Heart pine, the old folks called it. The hardest there is. Better than oak. A seventy-one-year-old smell he had smelled all his life, through the many coats of antique white paint, through the well-coated floors, through the dust. In his mind it was the smell of prayer, the smell of childbirth, the smell of laughter, the smell of tears, dancing, sweat, the smell of work, sex, death.

On the white walls of his room hung his many friends. Over the bed was the Sorcerer—the Conjurer, the Supreme Magician. His eyes were a mysterious blue, piercing and all-knowing. Over his eyes hung a great shock of black hair, showing his virility; the hair at his temples was snowy white, showing his wisdom. His great red cape was caught in a wind, making it billow as dramatically as a thunderclap. His stance—you could tell he was commencing to cast a spell because his hands were surrounded by an electric blue glow—resembled a pouncing tiger’s. His body was well muscled and lean, covered in skin-tight blue leggings and a blue tunic with an Egyptian ankh on its chest. A huge amulet was suspended from a chain about his neck, a half-open eye peering through.