“Whatever men make,” she says, “what they felt when they made it is there. If it was made to make money, it will smell of money. That’s why these houses are so ugly, all the corners they cut to make a profit are still in them. That’s why the cathedrals are so lovely; nobles and ladies in velvet and ermine dragged the stones up the ramps. Think of a painter. He stands in front of the canvas with a color on his brush. Whatever he feels when he makes the mark—if he’s tired or bored or happy and proud—will be there. The same color, but we’ll feel it. Like fingerprints. Like handwriting. Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”

“What’s the point?” Nelson asks.

“The point is ecstasy,” she says. “Energy. Anything that is good is in ecstasy. The world is what God made and it doesn’t stink of money, it’s never tired, too much or too little, it’s always exactly full. The second after an earthquake, the stones are calm. Everywhere is play, even in thunder or an avalanche. Out on my father’s boat I used to look up at the stars and there seemed to be invisible strings between them, tuned absolutely right, playing thousands of notes I could almost hear.”

“Why can’t we hear them?” Nelson asks.

“Because our egos make us deaf. Our egos make us blind. Whenever we think about ourselves, it’s like putting a piece of dirt in our eye.”

“There’s that thing in the Bible.”

“That’s what He meant. Without our egos the universe would be absolutely clean, all the animals and rocks and spiders and moon-rocks and stars and grains of sand absolutely doing their thing, unself-consciously. The only consciousness would be God’s. Think of it, Nelson, like this: matter is the mirror of spirit. But it’s three-dimensional, like an enormous room, a ballroom. And inside it are these tiny other mirrors tilted this way and that and throwing the light back the wrong way. Because to the big face looking in, these little mirrors are just dark spots, where He can’t see Himself.”

Rabbit is entranced to hear her going on like this. Her voice, laconic and dry normally, moves through her sentences as through a memorized recitation, pitched low, an underground murmur. She and Nelson are sitting on the floor with the Monopoly board between them, houses and hotels and money, the game has been going on for days. Neither gives any sign of knowing he has come into the room and is towering above them. Rabbit asks, “Why doesn’t He just do away with the spots then? I take it the spots are us.”

Jill looks up, her face blank as a mirror in this instant. Remembering last night, he expects her to look burned around the mouth; it had been like filling a slippery narrow-mouthed pitcher from an uncontrollable faucet. She answers, “I’m not sure He’s noticed us yet. The cosmos is so large and our portion of it so small. So small and recent.”