“My fraud came first,” he said. “And what goes around comes around, right?” He turned his eyes back to the billboard. “You were right, Antsy,” he said. “I’m the tree.”

“What?”

“The tree. The one that falls in the forest. The one that no one’s there to hear.”

“I hear you!” I told him. “I’m in the forest!”

“You won’t be tomorrow.”

I clenched my fists and growled. He was making me so angry, so frustrated. “What do you think—you’re gonna wake up one morning and not exist? Are you really so crazy that you actually think that?”

He remained calm, like a monk in meditation, as he sat there cross-legged on the road. “I don’t know how it will happen,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go to sleep and just won’t be there anymore when the sun comes up. Or maybe I’ll turn a corner in school and vanish into the crowd, the way my mother vanished into the crowds at the supermarket.”

“Your mother!” I had almost forgotten about Gunther the butcher. I clenched my fists and kicked a clump of asphalt out of a pothole. This wasn’t the time or place to talk to him about it. In his current state of mind, he wouldn’t hear it anyway.

“You know, this kind of makes sense,” he said. “I see that now. It didn’t work because I’m not supposed to be visible. If I bought a full-page ad in the New York Times, there would have been a newspaper strike. If I made one of those dumb infomercials, the communications satellite would get hit by a meteor.”

“What, do you think God has nothing better to do than mess with you?”

“He’s all-powerful; it’s not a problem for Him.”

I was about to open my mouth and tell him how stupid that was, but I thought back to what Crawley had said. Although I didn’t agree with the old man’s jaded point of view of how the world worked, there was one thing Crawley said that had made sense. We don’t get rewarded for going about things the wrong way.

“Are you just gonna sit there all night?”

“You go,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

“You’ll get mugged.”

“How could I get mugged? There’s no one here.”

And so he stayed there, sitting in the middle of that lonely road, staring up at his own giant face, which no one else was going to see.