“Well, it’s hard for me to keep in my mind. That’s why I like to have the notebooks, so I can refresh my memory. It has to do with a certain man and a certain woman. More than that. It’s about … you could say God? Or at least the Hypotheticals.” Hah-poe-thet-ickles.

“Did you write the story yourself?”

Peculiarly, Orrin blushed.

“I wrote it down,” he said finally, “but I don’t know I can say for sure I wrote it. I’m not much of a writer. Never was. A teacher at Park Valley school—that’s back in North Carolina—told me I don’t know a noun from a verb and never will. And I guess that’s true. Words don’t come easy to me, except—”

“Except what, Orrin?”

“Except those words.”

Sandra didn’t want to push it any harder. “I understand,” she said, though she didn’t. One more stab at it: “Turk Findley … is that someone in your story, or is he a real person?”

Orrin’s blush deepened. “I don’t guess he exists, ma’am. I guess I made him up.”

It was obvious he was lying. But Sandra left it at that. She smiled and nodded.

When she stood up to leave, Orrin asked her about the flowers growing in the small garden outside the window of his cinderblock room: did she know by what name they were called?

“Those? They’re called ‘bird of paradise.’”

His eyes widened; he grinned. “That’s their real name?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Huh! Because those flowers surely do look like birds, don’t they?”

The yellow beak, the rounded head, the single drop of crystalline sap that glinted like an eye. “Yes, they do.”

“It’s like a flower that has the idea of a bird inside it. Only nobody put it there. Unless you could say God did.”

“God or nature.”

“Maybe comes to the same thing. You have a nice day, Dr. Cole.”

“Thank you, Orrin. You too.”

*   *   *

Bose finally returned her call midafternoon, though his voice was hard to hear, coming through a background of what sounded like mass chanting. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m down at the ship channel. It’s some kind of environmental demonstration. We have about fifty people sitting on the railroad tracks in front of a string of tanker cars.”