On the windshield of my car, at the hotel. And this man! I thought, suddenly energized by these thoughts, these connections, I had seen him before, too—on the flyer I’d found in my mailbox, advertising the lecture called “American Holocaust.” (And once before that, at my father’s open house—but that I did not recall until much later.)

“In the North America of the 1700s, this preoccupation with space takes on something of a different flavor,” he was saying now, and he, too, seemed suddenly invigorated. “What is necessary to remember is that for the Franciscans, once the soul was Christian, the physical form was more or less expendable.”

Now the slide showed two men hanging from a makeshift gallows, their bare feet dangling above the ground.

Yes, I thought, that’s right. The missions were furnaces of death—it was all part of the same demented thing. Now the man at the lectern spoke again.

“What a consolation, truly, to in death return to the bosom of God.”

The words fell on an eerie silence. The constant smacking noises my neighbor had been making suddenly came to a stop. These people, I thought, they were behind it all. The silver-haired man was the leader of this sinister bunch, and these—I looked around me now at the rapt faces shining palely in the darkness—were his followers. This conclusion struck me with the force of truth.

But what was the point? To be sure, if the missions really had been furnaces of death, that was unfortunate, but what did it have to do with any of these people? No one in this room was in any way responsible for any death at a mission; they had not even existed in the same century. I shivered and thought: This kind of preoccupation is like a disease, it is the saboteur of healthy living, I must get away from here at once.

“Oh,” said the silver-haired man, and it was as though the room’s acoustics had undergone a shift. The light was falling on his face in an unusual way, and he spoke with a soft, peculiar coldness. “I take it you think your hands are clean?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I must have misheard, I thought.

“Melissa,” he said. “Could we have a little light?”

I sat, frozen in place, as a spotlight swung from the back of the auditorium toward the front. It slowed as it came closer to the stage, then hovered in the first row, as if hesitating.

“I was under the impression,” he continued, “that it was you who said that they are dying out in a quick and easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race?”

It was difficult to dismiss the obviously irrational feeling that he seemed now to be speaking directly to me.

“And that the better classes have been overwhelmed by the unrestricted breeding of inferior racial stocks?”