Idea: Write it from an angel’s perspective, like Michael or Gabriel, intercepting the messages and decoding them, and then reporting on all of this Upstairs (to St. Peter??) . . .

Dan stood up and went to the window. The sky was a slate line and held the quiet disappointment of the day after Christmas. The lit-up reindeer on the Peñas’ front lawn now seemed gaudy and gloomy. Dan put The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in his Sanyo cassette player. He had found the tape in the Nice Price bin at Musicland and it felt like a sign. He fast-forwarded the A side to the seventh song. A response to Screwtape was fine, but he wanted to write something inspired. He grabbed his journal and pen with its chewed cap, and sat there on the edge of the bed waiting for this to happen.

The guitar starts with a strum, and then it’s driving, looping, repeating—a basic Vedic circle of sound—and just as Dan gets used to it, there’s a chord change and the song opens up and explodes.

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,

I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways . . .

Dan listens closely. The verses haunt him, and he tries to wrap his head around each image. He pictures each democratic vista—the highways, the forests, the oceans, and the graveyard—the song cataloging and expanding at a dizzying rate. He thinks for a second—the mouth of a graveyard—and then scribbles in his journal:

Teeth crooked like an old cemetery.

He can picture it, like a jack-o’-lantern, or his grandmother’s lower jaw without dentures. Okay, a line. Not bad. He falls back into Dylan’s incantations. Each line assaults him—wild wolves, a highway of diamonds—like the roar of a wave that could drown the whole Dan. It is intensely overwhelming and infuriatingly beautiful. Dan closes his eyes, soaring along with each line, his blue Scripto tapping manically.

How do you write like that? he wondered.

Dan opened his eyes and retrieved Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home off his dresser and flipped to the chapter on Freewheelin’. He liked how ridiculously serious the biography was, calling Dylan Orpheus a lot, which seemed very serious indeed.

An apocalyptic vision in a series of grotesqueries foreshadowed by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It opens with a paraphrase of the classic ballad “Lord Randall.”