“You are many things, Lee,” she said, “but a failure isn’t one of them. The Spirit is your birthright—it’s in your blood, same as Jeremiah’s. It even flowed through your mother, though she rebelled against it.”

“Really?” I said. “The Spirit spoke to Mom too?”

“Yes,” she said, “though not in exactly the same way. Can I show you something?”

I nodded at her. Grandma left the room and came back with a big leather suitcase-looking thing with a lock on it. She dropped it on the bed and unlocked it with a tiny gold key from her pocket.

“Go on,” said Grandma. “Take a look.”

I flipped the thing open.

It was full of parchment paper, big sheets of it, on each one a painting.

“Your mother did these,” said Grandma. “I kept them hidden because they don’t bring back the best memories. But I thought you would like them.”

I took them out one by one. They were beautiful but strange, almost surrealistic: Shrouded figures gathered around a glowing campfire. An old woman with pink teeth and a third eyeball bulging out of her forehead. A garden of unbelievable brightness, swirling gyres of reds and blues and purples shining against utter darkness surrounding them.

“They’re visions, aren’t they?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “They’re Jeremiah’s visions. He spoke them to her, and she painted them as he told them. It was like they had twin minds sometimes, like the Spirit could flow between them in a curious way. The paintings were the only way Jeremiah allowed his visions to be remembered other than the recordings we made. He refused to ever let them be written down lest they become merely words and lose their power.”

I thought about my own attempts at writing poetry from my visions, how shitty they all turned out. “Why does writing them down make them lose their power?”

“Well, Lee, all of our beliefs spring from direct experiences of revelation,” she said. “We have no written canon, no fixed doctrine. What we believe is fluid, alive. You speak the words of the Spirit, and the Spirit moves. When you write something down, when you nail it finally to the page forever, you murder it, you suck the life straight out of it. Just the way that seeing the musical notation on a page cannot compare to actually hearing the song, to feeling the wind and air of it hit you right in the face, to breathing the music into your lungs and letting it filter into your blood. That’s why the tapes are acceptable, because Jeremiah’s voice has a power all its own. Your mother’s paintings show versions of Jeremiah’s visions, but they don’t fix their meanings down. And I have to hand it to her, they evoke the Spirit quite well.”