“Yes, it is.”

“No, more than beautiful,” she said and squeezed his hand, nestling against him. “It’s perfect.”

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So, at the last, a story.

A child is born into this world. She is lost, alone, in due course both befriended and betrayed. She is the carrier of a special burden, a singular vocation that is only hers to bear. She wanders in a wasteland, a ruin of grief and tormented dreams. She has no past, only a long, blank future; she is like a convict with an unknown sentence, never visited in the cell of her interminable imprisonment. Any other soul would be broken by this fate, and yet the child abides; she dares to hope that she is not alone. That is her mission, the role for which she has been cast at heaven’s cruel audition. She is hope’s last vessel on the earth.

Then, a miracle: a city appears to her, a bright walled city on a hill. Her prayers have been answered! Shining like a beacon, it has the aspect of a prophecy fulfilled. The key turns in the lock; the door swings open. Ensconced within its walls she discovers a wondrous race of men and women who have, like her, endured. They become hers, after a fashion. In the eyes of this wordless child, the most prescient among them perceive an answer to their most persistent questions; as they have relieved her loneliness, so has she relieved theirs.

A journey commences. The world’s dark arrangement is revealed. The child grows; she leads her companion to a glorious victory. By her hand, seeds of hope are scattered over the land, promise bubbles forth from every spring and stream. And yet she knows this flowering is an illusion, the merest respite. There can be no safety; her triumphs have but scratched the crust. Below lies the dark core, that great iron ball beneath all things. Its compressed weight is fantastic; it is older than time itself. It is a vestige of the blackness that predates all existence, when a formless universe existed in a state of chaotic un-creation, lacking awareness even of itself.

She falters. She has doubts. She becomes indecisive, even fearful. Hers is the greatest of all errors; she has grown attached to life. She has dared, unwisely, to love. In her mind a contest rages, that of one who questions fate. Is she merely a lunatic’s puppet? Is she destiny’s slave or its author? Must she turn away from all the things and people she has grown to love? And is this love a reflection of some grand design, a taste of an ordered and divine creation? Is it truth or a departure from the truth? Romantic love, fraternal love, the love of a parent for a child and the love returned in kind—are they a mirror to God’s face or the bitterest gall in a cosmos of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

As for me: there was a time in my life when I put aside all doubt and supped at the flower of heaven. What sweet juice was there! What balm to all suffering, the soul’s holy ache! That my Liz was dying did not countermand my joy; she had come to me like a messenger, in the hours when all is laid bare, to reveal my purpose on the earth. All my days, I had scrutinized the tiniest workings of life. I had gone about this task blandly, never fathoming my true motive. I gazed upon the smallest shapes and processes of nature, seeking divinity’s fingerprints. Now the evidence had come to me not at the end of a microscope but in the face of this slender, dying woman and the touch of her hand across a café table. My long, lonely hours—like yours, Amy—seemed not an exile or imprisonment but a test that I had passed. I was loved! Me, Timothy Fanning of Mercy, Ohio! Loved by a woman, loved by a god—a great, fatherly god, who, measuring my trials, had found me worthy. I had not been made for nothing! And not just loved; I had been charged as heaven’s escort. The blue Aegean, where ancient gods and heroes were said to dwell; the whitewashed house one climbed a flight of stairs to reach; the humble bed and homespun furnishings; the workaday sounds of village life, and a terrace with a view of olive groves and the wild sea beyond; the soft white light of eternal mornings, growing brighter and brighter and brighter still. In my mind’s eye I saw it, saw it all. In my arms she would pass from this life to the next, which surely existed after all, love having come to me—to both of us—at last.

Not an hour would have gone by, her body grown cold in my embrace, before I would have followed her from this world. That, too, was part of my design. I would take the last pills, the ones I’d saved for myself, and slip away in silence, so that together we would be bound eternally to each other and to an invincible universe. My resolve was implacable, my thoughts lucid as ice. I possessed not an iota of doubt. Thus at the anointed hour of our rendezvous I took my position at the kiosk, waiting for my angel to appear. In my suitcase, the instruments of our mortal deliverance slept like stones. Little did I know that this was but a foretaste of the wider ruin—that the hurrying travelers flowing around me possessed no inkling that death’s prince stood among them.

Thrice have I been fathered; thrice betrayed. I will have satisfaction.

You, Amy, have dared to love, as once I did. You are hope’s deluded champion, as I am sworn to be its enemy. I am the voice, the hand, the pitiless agent of truth, which is the truth of nothing. We were, each of us, made by a madman; from his design we forked like roads in a dark wood. It has ever been thus, since the materials of life assembled and crawled from nature’s muck.

Your band approaches; the time grows sweeter by the hour. I know that he is with you, Amy. How could he fail to stand at your side, the man who made you human?

Come to me, Amy. Come to me, Peter.

Come to me, come to me, come to me.

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