His hut stood on the outskirts of Coproliabad, windowless and conical according to custom but larger than its neighbors. He sat cross-legged on the dirt-packed floor, studying a spread of tarot cards on what I first perceived in the gloom as a thick, low table. He greeted me and then spoke a few words to the table, which promptly levitated and changed, as if it were the thrall of a prestidigitator, into a prodigiously fat woman. The cards went flying off her ample rump. It was another rump, not that of the lady on the hill. Dewey Lipgloss, it seemed, was simply awash in steatopygous women.

“I hear you have your doctorate,” he said, gathering up the cards.

“No, you were misinformed.”

The girl sat silently on her haunches in the deep shadows. Now she had become something like a miniature tank.

Lipgloss frowned. “But you did graduate work at Yale?”

“Unsuccessfully.”

“What was your field?”

“English lit. But…”

“Rats!” With that lame expletive the Reverend achieved a facile blend of vexation and resentment. “I had hoped,” he went on, “it was theater arts or cinema or… Let me show you.”

He got up, lit the wick of a tarnished brass lamp, and replaced the cracked chimney. Squat acrobatic shadows danced on the walls. I was aware of the sweet-sour reek of yesterday’s flowers wilting in a tin can, tinged with the sharp decomposition of mildewed paper.

He picked up the lamp and led me into the adjoining room. A congestion of notebooks, stenographers’ pads, and legal tablets rose in packs and piles from floor to ceiling.

“For more than twenty years,” he said, “I’ve been doing an ethnography on the Coprolian people. Assamans, from the time they quietly broke off and established, so to speak, an independent fiefdom from Iraq. It covers just about every area of their culture. It could make a sensational documentary, a series that could play on TV forever, with somebody like a young Bette Midler narrating. I was hoping you’d help turn it into a screenplay.”

“The man you should see,” I said helpfully, “is Derek. He knows all about theater and film and—”

“I don’t like him,” he said forthrightly. “I don’t think he knows all about anything.”

He reached for the topmost legal pad, flipped it open, and pushed it toward me. I looked at the constipated little ciphers crowding the yellow page. They were faded by time, foxed by nature, stained by beer.

“I can’t read it.”

“Suppose I dictate? You’ll find it fascinating and instructive.”

It was a fanciful and presumptuous statement. “I really don’t have the time,” I said.