I sat on the only chair in the room, a desk chair on wheels, and contemplated my next move. I then remembered a strange, eccentric acquaintance I had made some years back, an alcoholic Catholic priest who was in fact an atheist. He had at one time taught at Georgetown, but had since moved to Catholic University, a lesser school, but the administration fairly ignored him. I couldn’t remember the man’s name, only that he, being an atheistic nihilist, showed some interest in my study of nothing. He was at once reserved and without boundaries. I suspected that, like me, he was somewhere on the spectrum. Enough to make him awkward and unwanted, but not enough to have his behavior be excused. He in fact had had some ideas on the subject, ideas that amounted to, well, you guessed it.

“Wala?” Eigen opened her eyes and found me. She reached down and found Trigo’s fat face. “How long have you been up?”

“Just awhile.”

“I must have been really exhausted,” she said. Panting, grunting, and wall slapping came from the adjacent room. “Did that go on all night?”

“I believe so,” I said. “If not from that room, then from others. Things seem to have slowed down a bit. Getting close to checkout time.”

“Are they hookers?” She whispered the last word.

I nodded.

She laughed. “Cool.”

I nodded.

“What do we do today?” she asked. She sat up. “Let me give the boy a nice caress.” She stroked Trigo’s belly and one of his nubs shook.

“That’s it,” I said.

“What’s it?”

“The name. Karras, that’s his name. Damien Karras.”

“Who’s that?”

“He might be able to help us. He’s a priest. But he’s also an astrophysicist.”

“I don’t like priests,” she said.

I was surprised by her remark. I had never heard her say she disliked anything or anyone. “Why do you dislike priests?”

“Because of what they do to children.”

“Not all priest are pedophiles,” I said.

“No, but they all teach them lies. When I was a child and my parents weren’t around, a priest told me to pray and everything would be all right. It wasn’t all right. When I was depressed and needed help, another priest told me that God would take care of me. God didn’t. Priests lie to children.”

“You might be relieved to know that this priest doesn’t believe in God or Jesus or the Mother Mary.”

“What does he believe in?”

“He believes in gin. He believes in rum. He believes in bourbon. He might believe in beer and wine.”

Eigen stared at me.

“He believes in nothing.”

The Holiday Inn was relatively quiet now. The whole structure seemed to snore. We walked past the sleeping desk clerk and out onto Massachusetts Avenue, where we grabbed a taxi. The campus of Catholic University was larger than I thought it might be. We asked brother after robed brother and student after student and not one of them knew of a Father Karras. Then I remembered something I’d learned years earlier: if you want to know about a place, ask a custodian. And so I did.