“Hold on,” he admonished, “let’s not be hasty; do you know their story of Genesis? They have one, despite their absorption in animism. They believe somewhere out there a conglomeration of gods got together in a kind of celestial circle jerk and created the world and the Assamans by a few strokes of divine masturbation. They have an Eden myth, with a slight twist—their Adam and Eve were prisoners of the demon Snake, bowed down, quivering in a fiery pit, until they got the Snake shit-faced on beer, and escaped to the desert, where they and their offspring lived happily ever after. They believe that if you step on the shadow of the sheik, he dies. He’s supposed to be the descendant of the rooster deity; Balakar, the mother of the gods, was a chicken. That’s why, with all the chickens around here, the people won’t eat them, except in the performance of some kind of rite or other.”

He had an unsettling habit of punctuating his sentences with snorts, sudden little tic-like explosions, as though he were afflicted by a channel-blocking allergy. Even more repellant was his habit, following every snort, of wiping his nose on the crusty hair of a forearm before he launched yet another anthropological zinger.

“They believe,” he said, “that fireflies are the restless souls of infants who died before the rite of purification was performed. I could go on.” He snorted.

Please don’t, I thought, but the Reverend Lipgloss wasn’t one to short-stroke a sermon. “They’ve got a thing about snails,” he said, “you know about that? They eat raw snails with relish and trepidation, then they place the empty shell on a dish and pour out beer as an offering. They crave pardon of the ghost of the snail, beseeching him not to tell his brothers and sisters how he died. If he did, the family would dispatch a sick but heroic snail to tempt the man who upon eating the martyr would himself take deathly ill. Their word for ‘sick snail’ is razrustam, which is also a word for foreigners. They believe foreigners are rotten inside, each of them born with a hundred and ninety-eight evils within him, but how to dislodge them nobody knows. Prayer doesn’t do it.”

He ran his hands through his hair, as if he were plastering it down with water. “They might be right,” he said. “I tried.”

He moved to a prie-dieu, a relic presumably of his former life that he had transported to Assama. His hairy hands gripped the high straight back as if it were a pulpit. He was just warming up, I realized, for a long, chewy, confidential homily, the kind that he believed was just as fascinating and instructive as his unborn screenplay. The kind that, as it turned out, would have probably enthralled the bejesus out of his stateside parishioners.