All went well, deep into the heart of the Michigan winter. They made love on December 3, in his apartment, on clean, starch-smelling sheets. She went home to her apartment, which was upstairs from a small tavern, and said her absolutions and prayers—for in her own private quarters, alone, she was devout, bending down, her arms folded on the soft poplin bedspread. While she was thus prone she heard a small, shivery, choking voice coming through the wall over the din of the tavern below. It was Christ speaking. He called her. She floated up to heaven and he was there, seated in an armchair. His looks were plain. His nose was that of a boxer’s, broken at least once, with a small shift of cartilage. She tried not to stare. His eyes were agate-colored. His skin sallow. He had a slight lisp. On his head the crown of thorns dug into a mop of yellow-blue hair, as fine as silk, cut in a bowl cut. He spoke carefully, to frame his thoughts.

“My dear,” he began. “This man you’re seeing. This one X,” he said. “I must discuss this case with you.”

“Yes, my Lord,” she said, looking directly into his eyes.

“I have brought you here to protect you. To grant you my grace. To provide you with, well, ah, with some information.”

“Yes,” was all she could say. She hadn’t expected him to be so human, so natural. He reached up to wipe his nose, caught himself.

“There is darkness there in front of your eyes, and before you witness violence, are violated, I wished to bring it to, ah, to your attention. In his trunk, his footlocker, whatever it’s called, you should look. Take great care. It will come to you. And then you must return to me and we’ll discuss our—how should I say it?—next course of action.”

He dropped her back to earth, her fall softened by the cheap boardinghouse mattress. The roar from the tavern, the thump of a bass line from an old Eagles song (“Hotel California”), rose from below along with that chalky aftermath of a hundred burning cigarettes and the occasional hard click of pool balls being broken apart.

The next afternoon she stole the extra key to his apartment from the hook behind the door in the storage room. Her lover was meeting with a canned goods supplier and was out front, clipboard in hand, checking stock when she left under the pretense of needing to go to the drugstore for something personal. His apartment was stuffy with steam heat. The afternoon sun burned through the windows. The footlocker, painted military green with his name stenciled along the side in white block letters, was already open and she saw them immediately, magazines unfolded. Young boys with older men, legs splayed wide open, mouths agape with what amounted to pain, violation, screams that met the afternoon silently but rose in her ears and in the afternoon dust floating up into the sunlight. One boy was gagged. Another had his hands tied behind his back. Oh, oh, she said, falling to her weak knees. The isolation of this part of Michigan took hold of her. She felt everything that X had filled up, all that solitude, the loss of her parents, her soul, empty out again. Her bowels shifted. She clawed her hair in grief. She didn’t go back to the store but walked to her room and lay down. Downstairs it was silent, an afternoon at the bar, only a couple of drifters sipping beers, watching the smoke rise from their cigarettes. She lay for a long time. The phone rang in the front room and her answering machine came on, clicked, beeped, and she heard X’s voice—soft-spoken, concerned. The phone rang again—she rose out of sleep to listen; the machine beeped and the voice that came over it, shivery-cold, bloated, was the voice of the devil. She recognized it immediately. It twirled around the tongue. It hissed. It was static and energy discharge. It was the wind off Lake Michigan at two a.m.