Jehovah broke the silence. “Have you come to help Me?”

The sensayer waited, uncertain whether the words were meant for her. “Help you how?” she asked.

The stone-still Speaker did not turn. “To understand the God Who made this portrait of Himself.”

Carlyle looked to the altarpiece, the choirs of Heaven shimmering in their concentric circles of cracking paint and gold. “People made that, human beings searching for their own understanding.”

“If God made Man and Man made this, it is still a Self-portrait. And if, as some say, God made Man in His Image, and His Image then made this, it is a portrait’s portrait. And if Nature is the face of God, another Portrait, and Man is the spawn of Nature, it becomes a portrait’s portrait’s portrait. The Nature we see on Earth too is a microcosm, one might say a portrait of the Cosmos, and the Cosmos a portrait of the Laws of Nature, portraits spawning portraits like the spiral chambers of a nautilus repeating the face of God. Such a Creator seems desperate to show Himself to someone. And yet He hides Himself.” As sometimes in city parks clever sculptors create false merrymakers, a bronze person sitting on a bench or strolling by a lake, life-sized and eerie, just so Jehovah’s flesh sat frozen on the pew, the abstracted shape of a person without motion to make the person live. “Did you show proof of God’s existence to My Dominic, or did he show it to you?” He asked.

Carlyle’s breath caught. “Dominic told you about Bridger?”

“Bridger.” Jehovah repeated the name meticulously, sound by sound, not two syllables but a series of phonemes, segregated like steps in an equation. “I have not heard that as a name before. When you and I met four days ago you were a Deist. Nothing but your Clockmaker showing His Face could change you so fast, and Dominic would not stray from My side unless he has found That Which I most want in this universe, and seeks to hide from Me that he has found It.”

“Dominic, Mycroft, and Heloïse, they speak of you as if you were a god.” The words just came out, Carlyle tells me, unplanned, as when you rub your eyes and only afterwards discover you were crying.

“I Am.”

They are words Carlyle thought she was prepared for. She had heard them before, not just in textbooks, but in the wild like this, from another parishioner. Her training should have sorted the statement like any other, identified its proper label: Calvinist, Hindu, megalomaniac, and selected appropriate next questions to help a parishioner explore himself. But this was different, Jehovah’s ‘I Am,’ subtly yet absolutely different, for such was the conviction with which He said it that Carlyle believed Him. Yet at the same time, Carlyle says, she could not believe that she believed, as if she were split somehow, watching from some dream bubble another version of herself who had gone mad. “I don’t understand,” was all she could answer.