When St. Vincent went in, he was sealed off from the world, save for a small slit of a window left over from the time the space had been an executive toilet. Now, to use the facilities, St. Vincent was obliged to pad down the hall.

He shrugged off his suit jacket, stripped off his shirt and tie. Bare to the waist, he sat on the edge of the Spartan bed and stared at his hands, wrists placed on knees. Then his gaze drifted along the blue lines of his veins to the small tattoo on the inside of his left wrist: a triangle with a looped tail—the alchemical symbol for sulfur, one of the most important elements in the arcana, the secret of all life, according to Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century Swiss-born physician, birth name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who viewed medicine as being chemical in nature and believed that the key to human life, therefore, was alchemical.

St. Vincent’s thumb rubbed back and forth over the symbol, as if to release some of its latent power. His stomach was growling but he would not eat; he was a man used to deprivation—savored it, even, as his mother had before him. He switched on the old black-metal gooseneck lamp he’d had since he was a kid, his bed then a bunk in the Streamline trailer parked behind the revival tent with its huge crosses, shining as if to impress themselves onto the sky.

He remembered sitting on the edge of his bunk, time after time, listening to the finale of his mother’s sermons—her voice lifted to the very crosses painted on the tent top, worked to a fervent crescendo. In the eerie silence that would follow, the natural sounds of crickets and birds seemed soft, muffled, as if his mother’s words had cowed them as well as her congregants.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the tent slowly emptying, the people filing past his mother who had stepped down from the platform to shake hands, accept both praise and prayer, while her acolytes, who flanked her on either side, raked in the money. Then they, too, melted away and his mother, still covered in holy sweat, a fragrant dampness under her arms, between her thighs, mounted the steps of the Streamline, and entered the world made up of two inhabitants.

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still sparking the holy scripture as she sat down beside him and said, “How’s my little man?” She put a hand on his thigh. “It’s late. You’re not asleep yet?”

“I was listening to you, Mother.”