“I can’t tell you the date of the Eleventh Coming,” the Reverend said, his deep voice sounding radioed in, “because I don’t know it yet. But it’s wrapped up in a package they placed in my brain, and they put it there on purpose. I didn’t pick them, they picked me. Just like they picked you. They came and showed me the deception and whoredom going on in my life so I could get pure enough to be on the list.”

Inches from Frankie’s nose was a struggle, or rather, a single moment of a struggle: frozen in time, miniaturized, rendered in intricate detail. Seven blue-bodied aliens handmade out of clay, with black almond-shaped eyes, held tight to the twisting figure of a man wearing a blue baseball cap. They surrounded him, holding on to his feet, his arms, the back of his head. The man’s face was a tortured grimace rendered with what must have been a single bristle torn from a brush. The scene was enclosed on either side by silver walls, each cut with a portal-like doorway. Frankie shifted his gaze—and his body—to the right, where in a second room the aliens held the man in a kind of dentist’s chair. He seemed to be sleeping. In the next room, each of the aliens stood around him, holding instruments.

“They didn’t cut me,” the Reverend said. “What nobody understands is that these beings don’t have anything to learn from us. What’s to be learned from a species of whores and thieves who’d just as soon destroy each other and their own planet as scratch their noses? They come here to teach. They come here to save us. Some of us. They take your own situation and they use it to show you what you need to know. They illuminated my life, and in that same moment, they gave me a vision of the end of this world. I’ve just got to get the right information so I can do the math and find out when.”

“What math?” Frankie asked. His voice bounced back at him from the inner walls of the craft.

“Haven’t you been listening? The math gives you the when, son. Everything that’s going to happen, that’s ever happened before, only matters if we know when. I need to figure out the exact date of her first betrayal. I’ve got everything else: our birthdays, old phone numbers, Social Security numbers, anniversary, number of years we were together, number of months, number of days. If I get the exact date of her first betrayal, I’ll be ready to put numbers on all these calendars, and then I’ll be able to tell you the date of the Eleventh Coming.”

“You can’t ask her?” Frankie chanced.

“She’s not talking to me anymore,” the Reverend said in a tone that was both frustrated and disappointed.