On the screen is a fifteenth-century altarpiece by Jan van Eyck from a cathedral in Ghent. Its name is The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Twice—in winter when there are no tourists—he’s been to see it. It is probably his favorite picture in the world.

Gillem is examining van Eyck’s full-length portraits of Adam and Eve. They stand on the outer edges of the altarpiece, Adam on the far right, Eve on the far left, in a kind of banishment, a state of extreme privation. The painting’s palette—the emerald greens and flame oranges that bedeck its angels and prophets and emperors—is brilliant, new-washed as countryside after a hard rain. Only Adam and Eve are condemned to puritanical gray, brown, black. Each stands, naked, alone, in the mental purgatory of his shadow-world.

Each is electrifying in the fullness of his interiority, his self-awareness, which is why to Gillem these two portraits symbolize the very essence of what it means to be human in a fallen world.

Eve is holding an ugly wrinkled little citrus fruit. She is holding it aloft, as the priest holds up the sacrament, her expression, to Gillem’s mind, defiant, mildly challenging. She will outcountenance God or anybody else, too, so poised is she, so whole. You feel if she had the choice again, knowing the sequence of expulsion, pain, mortality entailed, she would still eat the fruit. Because she’s ready to grow up, move into a world where people fend for themselves.

Adam is less stable, more deranged, a brown-bearded naked man, wild, primitive, sinewy, with a weather-beaten face and springy shoulder-length hair. If you saw him on Kensington High Street, he’d be a mad homeless person.

Adam is in motion. His right foot is raised; he is stepping forward out of the picture frame, into the future, into our world. And yet his left arm crosses his chest as if to shelter a private heartache. His dark brown eyes express a kind of beaten, harrowed acceptance of sin, a dogged cognizance of all the world’s suffering that he’s unleashed and all that lies in store.

Gillem has tried hard to purge his youthful sins and make himself into a decent reliable man. But those sins, it turns out, won’t stay purged. They have come creeping out of the past in search of him. And now his family, too, will have to suffer for them.

He feels as if the home life he and his wife have so painstakingly constructed for themselves and their son is a fraud. The only thing that seems real right now—real as the ugly wrinkled yellow fruit seems real, compared to the unreality of the angels’ psychedelic wings—is the rocky cove in Collioure, where one night he had sex with a local girl he’d picked up in a nightclub.

He clicks a series of keys on his computer, and the altarpiece vanishes. What scrolls up in its place is the e-mail message he was sent a week ago, and which he’s been unable to answer.