A third supernaturalist argument could be that belief, with a pinch of salt (that is, short of self-mutilation, a martyr’s suicide, or murder of one’s children as a surefire, low-cost relocation to Heaven), benefits the health; repeated medical studies bear this out. An anxiety-relieving faith conduces to worldly efficiency and success: this argument to Owen seems crassly pragmatic. Optimism tends to succeed, but does this refute the majestic truths of pessimism? The human animal, evolved in trees and then dropped down to run in the grasslands of Kenya, arrived at a highly conscious position awkward beyond any easements of philosophy. At three in the morning, our brains churn within the self, trying to get out of what we know to be a sinking ship. But jumping out of the self is not a Western skill. The walls of the skull stay solid, sealing us in with our fears.

They cling to each other, he and Julia, in what has become their dotage. “I hate it,” she tells him, “when you’re not in the house, even when you’re just off for golf.”

“How dear of you, baby. I hate it when you play bridge all afternoon. The house seems so large. When you’re here, it seems rather small.”

This is not entirely a compliment; Julia laughs at the jab, acknowledging that, yes, when he is in a room she finds an excuse to enter it; when he is closeted with his murmuring CPU, matching wits with the circuitry as it twirls an algorithm, at the rate of two hundred twenty billion cycles a second, through the AND and OR gates toward the conclusory IF … THEN … ELSE, she enters with a question about their health insurance or the yew and euonymus bushes waiting for him to trim them, as only he can do it, with his artistic eye—the lawn boys hack away, like bad barbers. They don’t take enough; they create holes and bald spots that never grow in. Or else she disturbs him on the terrace while he is trying for the hundredth time to render, with flake white, cobalt blue, ivory black, and a touch of Roman ochre, the look of rain clouds approaching above the sea’s horizon, their maddening near-colorlessness and their simultaneous elaborate structure and chaotic vapor, a mere brushstroke on wet paper in watercolor but in oils a labored accumulation of minutely three-dimensional touches that will be dry tomorrow. Since early childhood, Owen has sheltered from reality’s pressure and misalignments by focusing closely on a paper page, a plywood cutout, a blob of clay, or, under Buddy Rourke’s laconic guidance, a copper connection within a braid of color-coded wires. Julia sets up a human clamor against her husband’s exclusionary absorption in the inanimate.

He tells her, teasingly, of the house, “Maybe it’s too large and we should sell it.”

“Don’t torture me; you know I love it here. And love you. At times,” she tells him, “I look at you when you don’t know I’m looking and I get this shiver, a physical shiver.”