The Church of the Seven-Pointed Star had an actual confessional box for sinners. For a long time Lake stood outside the church’s modest wooden doors (above which rose an equally modest dome), torn between the need to confess, the fear of reprisal should he confess, and the conviction that he should not be forgiven. Finally, he moved on, accompanied by the horrid, gnawing sensation in his stomach that would be his burden for years. There was no one he could tell. No one. Now the Religious Quarter, too, confounded him, for it provided no answers, no relief. He wandered it as aimlessly as he had the city proper the night before. He thirsted, he starved, his leg tremulous with fatigue.

At last, on the Religious Quarter’s outskirts, where it kissed the feet of the Bureaucratic Quarter, Lake walked through a glade of trees and was confronted by the enormous marble head of Voss Bender. The head had been ravaged by fire and overgrown by vines, and yet the lines of the mouth, the nose, stood out more heroically than ever, the righteous eyes staring at him. Under the weight of such a gaze, Lake could walk no farther. He fell against the soft grass and lay there, motionless in the shadow of the marble head.

It was not until late in the afternoon that Raffe found him there and helped him home to his apartment.

She spoke words at him, but he did not understand them. She pleaded with him. She cried and hugged him. He found her concern so tragically funny that he could not stop laughing. But he refused to tell her anything and, after she had forced food and water on him, she left him to find Merrimount.

As soon as he was alone again, Lake tore apart his half-finished commissions. Their smug fatuousness infuriated him. He spared only the paintings of his father’s hands and the oil painting he had started the day before. He found himself still entranced by the greens against which the head of the man from nightmare jutted threateningly. The painting seemed to contain the soul of the city in all its wretched depravity, for of course the man with the knife was himself, the smile a grimace. He could not let the painting go, just as he could not bring himself to finish it.

Sometimes what the painter chooses not to paint can be as important as what he does paint. Sometimes an absence can leave an echo all its own. Does Bender cry out to us by his absence? Many art critics have supposed that Lake must have met Bender during his first three years in Ambergris, but no evidence for this meeting exists; certainly, if he did meet with Bender, he failed to inform any of his friends or colleagues, which seems highly unlikely. Circumstantial evidence points to the stork-like shadow in “Invitation…,” as Bender had a well-known pathological fear of birds, but since Lake also had a pathological fear of birds, I cannot agree. (Some also find it significant that it is Lake’s apparent wish, upon his death, to be cremated in similar fashion to Bender, his ashes spread over the River Moth.)