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along too well together, and instead had mounted a piece of sheet metal above the sink. The metal was scratched and bent, and when I turned around I saw my own distorted reflection, floating in a silver cloud. I began to tremble. The image of the naked monster in the night came back full force, an image that my mind had managed to lock away for the day. Even though the memory was vivid (so vivid that I could almost hear the music that accompanied it, the heart-twisting “Vocalise”) I was uncertain as to whether it had actually happened or whether it was some fabrication of the booze. “Oh, fuck,” I moaned aloud. Our little blue world was flying through space, and I felt as if I’d found the cockpit, there in The Willing Mind’s John.
    I began to search for the radio, muttering over and over again, “Mayday. Mayday.”

Part Two
     
    The Veiled Lady
    Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1846
    Regarding the career of Hope, we know the following: that he received his Licence to Preach when he was twenty-two years of age; that at least one of his Instructors had been reluctant to award it; that his thinking was generally thought to be A Tad Maverick
.
    Joseph Benton Hope had a way of scurrying about—furtive, hunched-over and almost panicky—as if a giant rock had been lifted, and a beetle disturbed. One autumn’s day in 1843 he scurried down Brattle Street, took a corner (keeping his frail body very close to the stonework) and entered a small private auditorium. This was the eighth occasion in the past two weeks that Benton Hope had entered this establishment, shoved some coins at the old woman in the booth, and taken a seat in the twenty-fifth, and last, row.
    Joseph Benton Hope was very early, forty-five minutes, and all alone in the theater. He opened up his gilt-edged Bible (a huge thing with four generations of Hopes listed inside the cover) and read a line. Truth to be told, he only read two or three words. Then he tilted his head backward, shooting his Adam’s apple outward and shutting his tiny eyes (he still had two at the age of nineteen), and allowed the passage to sound somewhere within.
    Joseph Benton Hope was the prize student at the Harvard Theological Seminary—at least, he had been up until a year or so back. Scholastically speaking, he was still, excelling in such disciplines as eschatology and hermeneutics, possessing an unprecedented knowledge of the Bible, but his thoughts had lately taken a turn that most of his instructors found unsettling. When Benton Hope had first entered the school at age fifteen, he had been heralded as a prodigy, a young boy perhaps blessed with the gift of prophecy. He had lectured to his fellow students passionately and convincingly—convincingly, for in those days his thoughts were of an immediate Second Coming. “Lookabout,” Joseph Benton Hope had screamed, his voice hoarse, his blond hair slick and matted, “and know that His time is nigh!” His listeners, students and instructors alike, had nodded.
    But the Second Coming had failed to materialize, and Hope seemed suddenly to tire of waiting on it. Joseph began to dream of Perfection.
    Joseph Benton Hope realized that Perfection—“If by Perfection we mean a purity of heart, an absolute communion with our Heavenly Father, and a complete inexistence of sin”—was simply, even easily, attainable.
    Joseph came up with the following regimen, designed to help purge sin from the spirit: repeated fasting for two days (only grains and nutmeats allowed on the third); continuous self-denial (three and one half hours of sleep nightly); exercise (a four-mile walk in the forenoon, six miles in the evening); prayer (five times daily, no small or petty entreaties); three hours of spiritual activity (Bible study and the reading of works of acknowledged theological merit) and contemplation. Joseph Benton Hope found this very effective; emptied of sin, his soul was purged of everything earthbound and sullied.
    His teachers and peers