The high-tech quality of his reveries made him ashamed but happy, especially the flicker of his own surprising image, for there he was in his old red cardigan, still at the kitchen window, indolent, sipping cold coffee to damp down the dust, staring happily at a rectangle of sky. His desk and his word processor, it seemed, had vanished. There was nothing there but a poor old idle duffer-himself-smiling.

On their second-to-last day in Portugal, Meershank and Maybelle came across something odd. This was in the old city of Braga, in the famous cathedral. There, on the altar of one of the side chapels, they saw dozens of human parts molded in wax. “They’re called ex votos,” whispered Maybelle, quoting from the merciless guide book. “They’re sort of like concrete prayers, you might say.”

Among the clutter Meershank saw wax legs, wax ears, wax hands, wax breasts, kidneys and hearts. Presumably these pale yellow bodily facsimiles had been placed at the feet of the Virgin in the hope of invoking miraculous healing. Some of them were gray with dust and fly dirt and looked as though they had lain there for years. Meershank stood well back. He found something hideous, but also innocent about their naked abandonment. He stared, then touched. The deposition, stiffened and discolored, had nothing left of original pleading, but only a candid, almost careless resignation. He found himself wanting to dive into that carelessness, to merge with it. To throw up his hands in the old classic gesture of defeat, open-palmed: so be it.

The next day, leaving Portugal, stepping with Maybelle aboard the Boeing 747 and allowing himself to be strapped in by a strapping air hostess, Meershank felt, happily, that he too had left something behind; his hands lay majestic and idle on his lap. Then the bulk of his body rose in the air, carrying with it its new lightness and sudden tight band of silence.

He loved his writer’s block. Back home he found that the affliction fit him perfectly, the way a chestful of air fills a baritone’s lungs. This was a silence that could be settled into. Some of life’s essence stirred in it. He embraced it wholly, though for Maybelle’s sake he put on a stricken face, especially in the mornings, meeting her agitated concern over the coffee pot.