Seven had to claim these rather uncharitable thoughts about Josef as his own; but as he told Cyprus later, that was before he realized Josef’s plight. For almost instantly he sensed the desolation of Josef’s spirit; even before he saw Josef’s body half frozen, huddled up on the mountain, and the vodka bottle which had rolled halfway down the first slippery hill. It would be difficult to find a more dismal scene. In a flash, Oversoul Seven took it all in. The events involved with Josef’s life collected, swirled, flew into Seven’s immediate experience—colliding, appearing, and disappearing, until finally they fell into their proper time-space relationships—and Seven could focus clearly in the present, according to Josef’s experience.

In the farmhouse hardly visible down the seventeenth-century hills, for example, Josef’s wife, Bianka, was approaching labor. Through Josef’s dimmed mental vision, Seven saw the scene: Josef had rushed through the house in a frenzy of agony and concern that he was unable to voice. The four fireplaces were all blazing so that the house would be warm for the coming birth, but (because Josef hadn’t cleaned out the flues properly) it was overheated, filled with fireplace smoke and the steam from water boiling in the iron pots. Josef kept yelling that the steam would ruin his canvases—sitting there unused for months actually, gathering dust, because he hadn’t been able to paint decently for what seemed like ages; but the smell of his turpentine rags had mixed in with the smoke and steam and made him ill. The women were all yelling—Bianka most of all, screaming in bed, so bloated he thought she’d burst; and his mother-in-law chased him out into the barn.

The sudden icy air made him dizzy. He glared back at the house with loathing and love (all twisted together), grabbed his vodka bottle from where he’d hidden it underneath the hay, and jammed his skis on his feet.

The first slopes had been easy. He sang to lift his spirits and pretended that he was twenty and unmarried—a roaming, frolicsome artist—instead of twenty-six and domesticated. He skied fast and drank faster, not noticing (or pretending not to notice) that darkness was falling; and trying to forget Bianka’s staring eyes; determined to run from the pleading screams that terrified him for reasons he couldn’t explain. If that was birth, well, damn the gods, if there were any! No wonder Christ wasn’t a father! The thought scared him; it was sacrilegious. No mention of Christ having a penis—“Oh God,” he moaned, bleary and horrified. Now where had that thought come from?