“I love you, Maggie,” I said. And ever so slightly she loosened her embrace.

“I couldn’t marry Jakan without—I couldn’t let you go without—without letting you know.”

“He knows, Maggie.”

Then she really pulled away.

“Biff?”

“Uh-oh.” I thought she might scream, that she might leap up and run away, that she might do any one of a hundred things to take me from heaven to hell, but after only a second she nuzzled close to me again.

“Thank you for being here,” she said.

We left at dawn, and our fathers walked with us as far as the gates of Sepphoris. When we parted at the gates my father gave me a hammer and chisel to carry with me in my satchel. “With that you can make enough for a meal anywhere you go,” my father said. Joseph gave Joshua a wooden bowl. “Out of that you can eat the meal that Biff earns.” He grinned at me.

By the gates of Sepphoris I kissed my father for the last time. By the gates of Sepphoris we left our fathers behind and went out into the world to find three wise men.

“Come back, Joshua, and make us free,” Joseph shouted to our backs.

“Go with God,” my own father said.

“I am, I am,” I shouted. “He’s right here.”

Joshua said nothing until the sun was high in the sky and we stopped to share a drink of water. “Well?” Joshua said. “Did she know it was you?”

“Yes. Not at first, but before we parted. She knew.”

“Was she angry at me?”

“No.”

“Was she angry at you?”

I smiled. “No.”

“You dog!” he said.

“You really should ask that angel what he meant about you not knowing a woman, Joshua. It’s really important.”

“You know now why I couldn’t go.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“I’ll miss her,” Joshua said.

“You have no idea,” I said.

“Every detail. I want to know every detail.”

“But you aren’t supposed to know.”

“That’s not what the angel meant. Tell me.”

“Not now. Not while I can still smell her on my arms.”

Joshua kicked at the dirt. “Am I angry with you, or happy for you, or jealous of you? I don’t know? Tell me!”

“Josh, right now, for the first time I can remember, I’m happier being your friend than I would be being you. Can I have that?”

Now, thinking about that night with Maggie behind the synagogue, where we stayed together until it was nearly dawn, where we made love again and again and fell asleep naked on top of our clothes—now, when I think of that, I want to run away from here, this room, this angel and his task, find a lake, dive down, and hide from the eye of God in the dark muck on the bottom.

Strange.

I should have had a plan before I tried to escape from the hotel room, I see that now. At the time, dashing out the door and into the arms of sweet freedom seemed like plan enough. I got as far as the lobby. It is a fine lobby, as grand as any palace, but in the way of freedom, I need more. I noticed before Raziel dragged me back into the elevator, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process, that there were an inordinate number of old people in the lobby. In fact, compared to my time, there are inordinate numbers of old people everywhere—well, not on TV, but everywhere else. Have you people forgotten how to die? Or have you used up all of the young people on television so there’s nothing left but gray hair and wrinkled flesh? In my time, if you had seen forty summers it was time to start thinking about moving on, making room for the youngsters. If you lasted to fifty the mourners would give you dirty looks when they passed, as if you were purposely trying to put them out of business. The Torah says that Moses lived to be 120 years old. I’m guessing that the children of Israel were following him just to see when he would drop. There was probably betting.

If I do manage to escape the angel, I’m not going to be able to make my living as a professional mourner, not if you people don’t have the courtesy to die. Just as well, I suppose, I’d have to learn all new dirges. I’ve tried to get the angel to watch MTV so I can learn the vocabulary of your music, but even with the gift of tongues, I’m having trouble learning to speak hip-hop. Why is it that one can busta rhyme or busta move anywhere but you must busta cap in someone’s ass? Is “ho” always feminine, and “muthafucka” always masculine, while “bitch” can be either? How many peeps in a posse, how much booty before baby got back, do you have to be all that to get all up in that, and do I need to be dope and phat to be da bomb or can I just be “stupid”? I’ll not be singing over any dead mothers until I understand.

The journey. The quest. The search for the Magi.

We traveled first to the coast. Neither Joshua nor I had ever seen the sea before, so as we topped a hill near the city of Ptolomais, and the endless aquamarine of the Mediterranean stretched before us, Joshua fell to his knees and gave thanks to his father.

“You can almost see the edge of the world,” Joshua said.

I squinted into the dazzling sun, really looking for the edge of the world. “It looks sort of curved,” I said.

“What?” Joshua scanned the horizon, but evidently he didn’t see the curve.

“The edge of the world looks curved. I think it’s round.”

“What’s round?”

“The world. I think it’s round.”

“Of course it’s round, like a plate. If you go to the edge you fall off. Every sailor knows that,” Joshua said with great authority.

“Not round like a plate, round like a ball.”

“Don’t be silly,” Joshua said. “If the world was round like a ball then we would slide off of it.”

“Not if it’s sticky,” I said.

Joshua lifted his foot and looked at the bottom of his sandal, then at me, then at the ground. “Sticky?”

I looked at the bottom of my own shoe, hoping to perhaps see strands of stickiness there, like melted cheese tethering me to the ground. When your best friend is the son of God, you get tired of losing every argument. “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean the world is not sticky.”

Joshua rolled his eyes. “Let’s go swimming.” He took off down the hill.

“What about the God?” I asked. “You can’t see him.”

Joshua stopped halfway down the hill and held his arms out to the shining, aquamarine sea. “You can’t?”

“That’s a crappy argument, Josh.” I followed him down the hill, shouting as I went. “If you’re not going to try, I’m not going to argue with you anymore. So, what if stickiness is like God? You know, how He abandons our people and leads them into slavery whenever we stop believing in Him. Stickiness could be like that. You could float off into the sky any time now because you don’t believe in stickiness.”

“It’s good that you have something to believe in, Biff. I’m going in the water.” He ran down the beach, shedding his clothes as he went, then dove into the surf, naked.

Later, after we’d both swallowed enough salt water to make us sick, we headed up the coast to the city of Ptolemais.

“I didn’t think it would be so salty,” Joshua said.

“Yeah,” I said, “you’d never know it by looking at it.”

“Are you still angry about your round-earth-stickiness theory?”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said, sounding very mature, I thought. “You being a virgin and all.”

Joshua stopped and grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to wheel around and face him. “The night you spent with Maggie I spent praying to my father to take away the thoughts of you two. He didn’t answer me. It was like trying to sleep on a bed of thorns. Since we left I was beginning to forget, or at least leave it behind, but you keep throwing it in my face.”