Doctors who were believers astonished Bahr. Didn’t they see the elephant in the room? Medicine’s an atheist, he would say. By its very nature! How else to explain the errors in creation? The mistakes that stemmed from the source, bred into the bone—the faults in construction that prevent these bodies of ours from carrying their miserable tenants through even the handful of decades allotted to them?

“If a doctor must have faith,” Bahr said, rolling a cigarette, “then it should be in his own divinity, in himself. He’s spent a lifetime fixing this shoddy design, giving those creatures another, better chance at existence. Doctors’ practices are licensed repair shops that honor the warranty on the products of Our Lord.

“If medicine isn’t an atheist then there’d be no need to fight so hard against microbes and viruses, all those cells that suddenly turn on themselves. You could fight half, a quarter, as hard and leave the rest to God.

“That said,” Bahr went on, “I have seen a god. I’ve seen many gods abroad in this world. A young doctor was the first, a woman I met not more than a month after arriving in the land of ice and snow. I was hungry, without shelter. Seif, I would pick through the garbage till I found something unspoiled to eat. But Seif...their garbage! Finer than the food in half the restaurants here. Only, that day I’d been unlucky, or maybe the fault lay in this faulty body of mine. I had eaten a doughnut which I’d found still wrapped in white paper, just two bites taken from its edge; two little snips from—so I imagined—the pretty teeth of an angel, like those that passed me on the street. So I ate it, and my belly briefly quieted, but then this tremendous pain ignited inside me, like a dog was worrying at my guts. The sweat was dripping off me, turning instantly icy in the cold, and the world was spinning.

“I woke to the face of a god.

“She was leaning over me like the sky, smiling, and talking to me in their language. I could hear only heavenly sounds. Then she laid her milk-white fingers on my shoulder and spoke in other tongues, now in English and now in French, and I saw that I was dressed in white, in a hospital gown, and all the while this young doctor—she must have been in her mid-twenties, no more—kept on talking to me and smiling.