The “tour around the world,” taken from the comfort of the vinyl couch, went on for hours. Leora recognized Ghiberti’s reliefs from the Baptistery doors in Florence, illustrating the Binding of Isaac; in the slide, Abraham stood arched over his son on a mountaintop as the hand of an angel reached out to stop him, a moment frozen twice, first on the bronze relief and then in Bill Landsmann’s slide. “And Abraham saw the mountain from afar, and the two of them walked on together,” Bill Landsmann quoted from Genesis, reading from his script. He blinked a picture of an archaeological site below where the ancient Temple once stood in Jerusalem, but in the slide you couldn’t see the mosque on the mountain or even the tourists visiting the site, just the rubble of fallen stones as Bill Landsmann read another line: “How the city sits alone, desolate, she that was once full of people, how like a widow!” He showed a slide of goats gathering in a flock alongside a cliff, a picture taken somewhere in central Asia, where one goat had a red cord tied around its horns. “This goat is the scapegoat,” Bill Landsmann read aloud, following along with his finger on his script. “We learn about the scapegoat in the Book of Leviticus. The high priest ties a red string around the goat’s horns, just like this, and then the goat is pushed off a cliff, to atone for the sins of the people. I myself am a cohen, a descendant of the high priest.” Poor goat, Leora thought. She imagined Bill Landsmann as the high priest, arranging for the goat to be pushed off a cliff. But before she knew it, they had abandoned the goat to its fate and snapped to the next white-framed slide, and the next, and the next.

The concept was brilliant, in a way: the Bible on film, its greatest moments recorded in stop-action photography, with Bill Landsmann’s elegant stage voice reading off relevant verses from his well-rehearsed script. But somewhere around Deutoronomy Leora found herself experiencing a particular sensation familiar from the last eleven months, a hollow nausea in the back of her throat. Naomi had been an artist, in secret. While watching the parade of slides, Leora remembered against her will how Naomi would sometimes allow her to look at her drawings: perfect replicas in gray and white of paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, or, on rare occasions, an original work of her own. Naomi loved to tell Leora about the histories and contexts of the paintings she had copied, the tiny framed world of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and places like it. Leora had suspected this was a sham on Naomi’s part, that Naomi was in fact copying other people’s paintings simply to avoid talking about her own work. But now, listening to Bill Landsmann’s voice, Leora felt as if she were going blind. The tour continued, even reaching the infamous waters of Babylon, where the exiles of Israel apparently laid down and wept in a giant pile of deciduous leaves (“Of course, this is not actually the river in Babylon—it is a stream at East Mountain Reservation, right here in our own town. But it always makes me think of the river in Babylon”), and by then Leora could no longer see anything clearly, no matter how hard she looked. When the lights came on, her eyes screamed shut against the brilliant light, like a newborn baby’s. Bill Landsmann offered them all coffee, which Anna promptly brought out without a word.