I took a long sip from the canteen at this point, if only to assuage Duncan’s remembered heat. The starfish now served as an exotic, glowing ear, eclipsing flesh and blood. It hummed a little as it worked. A smell like fresh-cut orange surrounded it.

I offered Duncan the canteen. He used the opportunity to pour more water on his pet. I was about to prod him to continue when he pulled the starfish from his ear, sat up, and said, looking down at the compass as it sucked on his fingers, “Do you know the first sentences of the Truffidian Bible?”

“No,” I said. “Do you?” Our parents had treated religion like a door behind which stood an endless abyss: better not to believe at all, the abyss revealed, than have it be closed over, falsified, prettied up. (And yet, there is something in my skin now, after all these years, that hums of the world in a way that predicts the infinite.)

“Yes, I do know them. Would you like to hear them?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. Those words are ‘The world is broken. God is in exile.’ Followed shortly thereafter by ‘In the first part of creation, God made light and made vessels for the light. The vessels were too fragile: they broke, and from the broken vessels of the supernal lights, the material world was created.’”

Something very much like a void opened up inside me. A chill brought gooseflesh to my skin. Each word from my mouth sounded heavier than it should have: “And what does the creation of the world have to do with the gray caps?”

He put a finger to his lips. His face in the sour light gave off a faint glow, pale relative to the illumination of the starfish. His skin winked from behind the mushroom dust. He looked so old. Why should he look so old? What did he know?

He said: “A machine. A glass. A mirror. A broken machine. A cracked glass. A shattered mirror.”

I remember now the way he used the phrases at his disposal. Clean, fine cuts. Great, slashing cuts. Fractures in the word and the world.

“Some things should not be articulated. Some words should never be used in exact combination with other words.” My father said that once, while reading a scathing negative review of one of his essays. He said it with a tired little sigh, a joke at his expense. His whole body slumped from the words. Weighed down with words, like stones in his pocket.

A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan’s journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully …