He didn’t believe in God, because God didn’t make any sense to him, and what he was hearing from some of the people in the Psych Department made even less, if that was possible. Rational people, grad students every bit as serious and committed as he was, suddenly seemed incapable of talking about anything but the oneness of being and the face of the Divine, as if they were mystics instead of scientists. He hadn’t come to grad school for God or mysticism or mind expansion or whatever they were calling it, but for a degree that would lead to a job that would pay his bills and get him a house and a car that actually started up when you inserted the key and put your foot down on the gas pedal. Unlike the piece-of-crap Fairlane he was sitting in at that very moment, which he’d coaxed to life with a judicious blast of ether down the throat of the carburetor and had to be goosed every five seconds to keep from dying, and that had nothing to do with any deities except maybe the ones sitting in the board rooms in Detroit. Of course, the car was eight years old, with tires worn as smooth as the sheets of Corrasable Bond he typed up his class notes on and rusted-out rocker panels and springs so worn you hit bottom every time you went over a bump, which was just another kind of humiliation, and where was she? Jesus. To be late—late for anything—was totally unacceptable, not to mention rude and unprofessional and about twenty other adjectives he could summon, but tonight of all nights?

It was cold, somewhere down around zero, but he was sweating because he always sweated when he was nervous—or worked up, as his father liked to put it—and he was nervous now. And late. He jerked his head around to stare up at the window that cut a glowing rectangle out of the void above him, no curtains, no blinds, everything open for everybody to see—and no Joanie and no babysitter either. The car sputtered, caught again, and he brought his hand down on the horn and hammered it, twice, till Joanie appeared in the window with her pale pinched face and gave him an irritated flap of her hand that could have meant anything from Go crawl off and die to I just broke my wrist, and then she was gone and he immediately hit the horn again and kept hitting it until a new face thrust itself through the blinds of the apartment next door—Mrs. Malloy’s, with her jaws clenched and her hair flattened to one side of her head—and he eased up.