“But where are they now that he’s down and going out?” Rowena Magruder Rawlings asks him. “Hmmm? Where are all the people he cured, all the newspaper feature reporters who called him a genius? Where’s Jane Pauley? She interviewed him on theToday show, you know. Twice! Where’s that fucking Mother Teresa? He said in one of his letters they were calling her the little saint when she came to Home, well he could use a saint now, my brother could use a saint right now, some laying-on of hands, so where the hell is she?”

Tears rolling down her cheeks. Her bosom rising and falling. She is beautiful and terrible. Callahan thinks of a picture he saw once of Shiva, the Hindu destroyer-god.Not enough arms, he thinks, and has to fight a crazy, suicidal urge to laugh.

“They’re not here. There’s just you and me, right? And him. He could have won a Nobel Prize for literature. Or he could have taught four hundred students a year for thirty years. Could have touched twelve thousand minds with his. Instead, he’s lying here in a hospital bed with his face cut off, and they’ll have to take up a subscription from his fucking flophouse to pay for his last illness— if you call getting cut to pieces an illness— and his coffin, and his burial.”

She looks at him, face naked and smiling, her cheeks gleaming with moisture and runners of snot hanging from her nose.

“In his previous other life, Father Callahan, he was the Street Angel. But this is hisfinal other life. Glamorous, isn’t it? I’m going down the hall to the canteen for coffee and a danish. I’ll be there for ten minutes or so. Plenty of time for you to have your little visit. Do me a favor and be gone when I get back. You and all the rest of his do-gooders make me sick.”

She leaves. Her sensible low heels go clicking away along the hall. It’s not until they’ve faded completely and left him with the steady beeping of the machines that he realizes he’s trembling all over. He doesn’t think it’s the onset of the dt’s, but by God that’s what it feels like.

When Rowan speaks from beneath his stiff veil of bandages, Callahan nearly screams. What his old friend says is pretty mushy, but Callahan has no trouble figuring it out.

“She’s given that little sermon at least eight times today, and she never bothers to tell anyone that the year I took second in the Beloit, only four other people entered. I guess the war knocked a lot of the poetry out of folks. How you doing, Don?”