Over the years it became easier. It had taken time, but now he could reflexively wrap up temptations or potentially troublesome urges and channel them off into oblivion before they could find purchase in his consciousness or his libido.

So why wasn't it working with Carol? Why hadn't he been able to keep her from wandering in and out of his mind since he had seen her last week?

Perhaps because Carol was from before. No woman could find a place in his feelings today, but Carol had lived in that private interior garden before he had erected the walls. He had thought his feelings for her long dead and gone, but apparently it wasn't so. There was still life in those old roots.

Isn't it all foolishness, this celibacy thing?

How many times had he heard that question—from others, from himself? A hostile someone had even quoted Marx to the effect that it was easy to become a saint if one did not want to be a man. Bill's answer was a shrug. Celibacy was part of the package, part of the commitment he had made to God—you give up power, wealth, sexual involvement, and other distractions in order to focus your energies on God. The self-denial tempers the faith.

Bill knew the depth of his faith. It infused his heart and soul and mind. He prided himself on being neither a heavenward-gazing ascetic nor an overgrown altar boy. Both his feet were planted firmly in the real world. His was a mature, intellectualized belief that cut through the fairy tales and myths and Bible stories. He had read the lives and works of the saints, and de Chardin, of course, but he had studied Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre as well.

He had handled them with ease. But could he handle Carol?

"I don't trust McCarthy," Jim was saying.

Bill had to laugh. "The return of Cynicalman!"

"He was never gone," Carol said.

"Seriously, though," Jim said, leaning forward, "I just don't trust one-issue candidates. In fact, I don't trust candidates, period. The political process seems to corrupt everyone who gets involved. The people who'd make the best candidates lack sufficient bad taste to run for office."

"I believe Eugene McCarthy's an exception," Bill said. "And I believe he's got a damn good chance of winning in New Hampshire. The Tet offensive turned a lot of the country against the war."

Jim shook his head. "We should clean up our own yards and tend to our own neighborhoods first, then worry about the rest of the world. If we all did that, maybe there wouldn't be so much in the world to worry about. Want another beer?"

Bill said, "I'd love one."

"Okay. We'll see what the next band sounds like. If they're awful, I know a quieter place we can go."

5

Monroe

Emma Stevens was roughly yanked out of sleep by the sudden movement beside her. Jonah had bolted upright in bed.

"What's wrong?"

"I have to go out!"

His voice sounded strained, upset. And that frightened her. Jonah never made an abrupt movement, never showed alarm. Everything he did seemed calculated. He seemed to have nerves of insulated copper wire.

But he was tense now. She could see him sitting there in the dark, his hand cupped over his good right eye, staring into the night with his blind eye as if he were seeing something with it.

"You've had a vision?"

He nodded.

"What's it about?"

"You wouldn't understand!"

He leapt from the bed and began to pull on his clothes.

"Where are you going?"

"Out. I've got to hurry."

Emma threw the covers back. "I'll come with you."

"No!" The word cracked like a whip. "You'll only get in the way! Stay here and wait."

And then he hurried from the room.

Emma pulled the covers back over her and shivered. She could not remember the last time she had seen her husband hurry. Yes, she could. It had been back in the winter of 1942… rushing to the orphanage.

6

Jonah raced down Glen Cove Road toward the LIE.

Something terrible is going to happen!

He wasn't sure how exactly, but the One would soon be in deadly danger. Whether through pure earthly happenstance or through the machinations of the other side, he could not say. He had to hurry, or all his life until now would be made meaningless.

He pressed a hand over his right eye. Yes… there, to the west, a red glow of danger in his left eye.

All my life made meaningless…

It seemed as if he had been preparing for this, for what was happening these days, forever. But it hadn't been forever. Only since he was nine. It was then that he had learned that he was different from others.

He remembered that day in 1927 when the floodwater had come roaring through their town in what the history books would later call the Great Lower Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster. Up until then he had thought of himself—when he thought of himself at all—as just another normal everyday farm boy. He had burned alive his share of beetles, torn the wings off his share of butterflies, tortured and killed his share of kittens, and enjoyed it all. His folks had been upset with him, and maybe even a little scared of him, but wasn't that what childhood was all about—learning, testing? He assumed all kids experimented as he did, but he didn't know for sure, because he had no brothers and sisters—and no real friends:

The Great Flood changed all his perceptions and preconceptions.

Luckily for him, he had been out by the barn when the water hit. The yard had been a sea of mud after days of heavy rain. He heard a roar like a great train rolling on a downgrade, looked up, and across the field he saw the onrushing wall of dirty brown water, swirling madly with debris as it raced toward him.

He had been able to make it to the giant oak tree that stood in the center of the yard just in time. With the water surging and lapping at his heels, he scrambled up through the lower branches. The thick trunk swayed and groaned at the onslaught of the surging water, but its roots held.

He heard an explosive crack and turned toward the house. As he watched from his high perch he heard one sharp, high scream from his mother and nothing from his father as his home was flattened and broken into kindling by the wall of water. The barn collapsed and was swept away along with the livestock and the splintered remnants of his house.

He did not escape unscathed, however. A particularly powerful wave caught his legs and knocked them from the branch that supported him. As he fell, clutching frantically at another branch, a protruding twig pierced his left eye. The pain was a jab of lightning into his brain. He howled in agony but held on, finding new footing and pulling himself beyond the water's reach.

He reached a high branch and straddled it, cupping the socket of his bloodied, ruined eye, rocking back and forth and retching with the pain that throbbed like a white-hot coal.

The water rose higher but the tree held firm. As the day faded toward night, so the pain in his eye faded to a dull ache. The torrent slowed to a steady southward current.

Things, living and otherwise, began to float by: a child screaming in lonely terror as it clung to a rooftop, a woman wailing from a log, drowning cattle, bellowing and gurgling, a man leaping from some floating debris and swimming for Jonah's tree, only to miss it and be carried away out of sight.

Young Jonah, high and dry, watched them all with his good eye from the safety of his perch in the oak. By all rights he should have been terrified, should have been racked with grief and horror at the loss of his home and parents, should have been speechless and near catatonic with his own injury and the scope of the death and destruction around him.