The Sacramento church came too late to receive a passing grade on any of his assignments: although it allowed him to work in great detail, the fact that he’d failed to put together a team of fellow students to help with drawing up the plans meant that his urbanism project would be reduced to a single street and so could only be submitted for the baroque module of architectural analysis. But it was the one project that allowed him to continue his pursuit of his brother, who by then was visiting the church on a daily basis.

On his first two visits, he walked around the interior and approached the sacristy, which was completely silent. He wandered like a ghost, observing the parishioners, the unfussy Castilian baroque, the fresco at the entrance in which angels with phylacteries like DNA chains stood over a brown figure, something like a blotch or a dust storm. There were tapestries, one depicting a Crucified Christ and another a Virgin, each with the emblem of Christ of the Halbadiers: two halbadiers and a royal crown. They were horrendous.

He suspected that someone had driven Older Brother to this historic place of worship, but the galleries were unlit and the traffic muffled any other sound. During those first two days he was able to draw without interruption as his brother spent a long time in the building. He made several sketches of the church and the adjoining buildings, made notes for an urbanism study, and generally behaved as though he was going to pass this assignments, despite being sure to fail. He also did research in the library and discovered that the church had originally been constructed for Bernadine nuns, whose former convent had now disappeared without a trace. Apparently, the architect had fallen out of favor and so work hadn’t begun on the church until fifty years after its conception. None of the original plans had been preserved, but he noticed one remarkable fact: even though surveying equipment had been used on several occasions to establish the dimensions of the church, the resulting measurements had never tallied, as if the building moved, making it impossible to capture its form. That fact seemed coherent with his brother’s life, as did the story of the place being haunted by the ghost of an old man, decapitated by thieves in 1753. The headless old man first appeared shortly after his death to reveal the identity of his executioners.

He toyed with the unlikely hypothesis that Older Brother had become a priest, a crazy exorcist, but never the one wearing vestments or elevating the chalice. He couldn’t imagine him hearing confession either. The only change in the routine was that he stayed in the church a little longer each day, leaving at the crack of dawn, which led to the thought that Older Brother had dinner there and that the large granite and presumably sumptuous building abutting the church served food.