Then I fell asleep again, leaning against the tile as Gretchen filled the tub. The steam felt sweet to me. I could see Mojo lying by the bed, the wolflike sphinx, watching me through the open door. Did she think he looked like the devil?

I felt groggy and impossibly weak and yet I was talking to Gretchen, trying to explain to her how I had come to be in this predicament, and how I had to reach Louis in New Orleans so that he could give me the powerful blood.

In a low voice, I told her many things in English, only using French when for some reason I couldn’t find the word I wanted, rambling on about the France of my time, and the crude little colony of New Orleans where I had existed after, and how wondrous this age was, and how I’d become a rock star for a brief time, because I thought that as a symbol of evil I’d do some good.

Was this human to want her understanding, this desperate fear that I would die in her arms, and no one would ever know who I’d been or what had taken place?

Ah, but the others, they knew, and they had not come to help me.

I told her all about this too. I described the ancients, and their disapproval. What was there that I did not tell her? But she must understand, exquisite nun that she was, how much I’d wanted as the rock singer to do good.

“That’s the only way the literal Devil can do good,” I said. “To play himself in a tableau to expose evil. Unless one believes that he is doing good when he is doing evil, but that would make a monster out of God, wouldn’t it?—the Devil is simply part of the divine plan.”

She seemed to hear these words with critical attention. But it didn’t surprise me when she answered that the Devil had not been part of God’s plan. Her voice was low and full of humility. She was taking my soiled clothes off me as she spoke, and I don’t think she wanted to speak at all, but she was trying to calm me. The Devil had been the most powerful of the angels, she said, and he had rejected God out of pride. Evil could not be part of God’s plan.

When I asked her if she knew all the arguments against this, and how illogical it was, how illogical all of Christianity was, she said calmly that it didn’t matter. What mattered was doing good. That was all. It was simple.

“Ah, yes, then you understand.”

“Perfectly,” she said to me.

But I knew that she did not.

“You are good to me,” I said. I kissed her gently on the cheek, as she helped me into the warm water.

I lay back in the tub, watching her bathe me and noting that it felt good to me, the warm water against my chest, the soft strokes of the sponge on my skin, perhaps better than anything I had endured so far. But how long the human body felt! How strangely long my arms. An image came back to me from an old film—of Frankenstein’s monster lumbering about, swinging his hands as if they didn’t belong at the ends of his arms. I felt as if I were that monster. In fact, to say that I felt entirely monstrous as a human is to hit the perfect truth.