“Let him. Look at all that up there.…” Eliot’s hand swept the sky, so filled with stars that it was in places more white than black. “That’s a lot to look after, even if you’re God. Do you reckon He’s all worried whether you get a new bike, or that He takes notes every time you think about Constance and start playing with Fivefinger Mary?”

That caused Nathaniel to put another curl in the schooner’s wake.

“I don’t do that!”

“Oh, sure, you don’t.”

“I mean, I don’t think about Constance and do that.”

“Whoever you think about, God isn’t writing it down and telling the devil to get a room ready for you in hell. He’s too busy with more important stuff.”

Nathaniel mulled over this notion for a time and decided he couldn’t accept it. He much preferred the idea that he and all mankind were under the eye of heaven, but he didn’t want to argue the point.

“Well, as long as you think that God exists, I guess that’s the important thing,” he said, and with that they stopped talking. The sea at night sometimes turns sailors into chatterboxes—the sound of the human voice can be comforting in all that vastness—but there always comes the moment when it commands silence, commands that it be listened to, as it sighs and breathes and rolls on, more indifferent to the fates of those who pass over its skin than the God of whom Eliot had spoken.