I was trying to get calm. My eyes were closed. She nudged me and handed over a piece of stick. I looked. A perfectly carved head of me about three inches high. Perfect coloring, too – my gray hair, blue eyes. I dropped it and unconsciously wiped my hands on my pants.

"Come on, boy; lighten up! It's funny. Ask me some questions, and let's get going on this."

It was my turn for narrowed eyes. "How can you be God and have cancer?"

"Good shot, Professor. Now we're cooking! I guess I should begin from the beginning, huh? She was about to go on, when she saw something behind me and stopped. Standing up, she cupped both hands around her mouth and shouted, "You go back to the house, Annette! I'm not fooling, and I'm not telling you again!"

I didn't turn, because I had no desire whatsoever to see A. Taugwalder again anytime soon.

"That damned girl. I told her, you know? I told her she could have her say, but then she had to back off so I could explain things to you. But she's headstrong and so used to getting her way. Are you all right, Scott?"

"No."

"Too bad. Where was I? At the beginning O.K. I was born in McPherson, Kansas. My father owned a hardware store, and our whole family worked there. One day, when I was behind the counter, a man I'd never seen before came in and asked for a pair of pliers. We got to talking and he told me his name was Gilbert, Nolan Gilbert. I was fifteen years old. Do you know anything about the mystic Jewish?"

"You mean Jewish mystics?"

"Right, that's them."

"Well, something. I've read –"

"They came closest. Ever heard of the Lamed Wufniks?''

"Beenie, what are you talking about?"

"These mystics believed in Lamed Wufniks. Thirty-six righteous men whose job is to justify the world to God. Or, looking at it another way, they're supposed to explain to God why man has a right to be here. Now, if one of these thirty-six ever discovered who he was, he immediately died, and somebody else, in another part of the world, took his place. Because, you see, even though they don't know it, they're the secret pillars of the universe. Saviors. Without them doing this justifying God would get rid of the whole bunch of mankind."

"Wup –"

"Wuf. Lamed Wufniks. Which is not so far from wrong. The big difference is, we don't do any justifying, because we are God."

"You're a 'Wufnik'?"

"No, I'm God. Or one-thirty-sixth of Him. They got the number right."

A bird flew in over the water and out again. I looked at Beenie, the ground, Beenie, the ground. What was I supposed to say?

"You don't believe me. And what about Annette? You need more miracles? I can give them if it'll help, but I thought she'd be enough. You're a tough audience, Professor Silver. Here." With her left hand, she pulled a silver dollar from behind my neck. With her right, she held something up. In her palm was one of those plastic, dome-shaped doodads you shake up, and fake snow flutters and falls over a scene like Paris or the North Pole. Only, in this one, real life tiny people were sitting on a bench, moving –and after staring I realized it was us in there, doing what we out here were doing move for move. "For God's sake, stop it!"

"O.K." She closed her hand around the snowy dome, and it disappeared. I half-stood. "What do you want from me? Why are you doing this?' She pulled me down again. "Just sit back and listen to the rest of my story. I was fifteen when I met Nolan Gilbert. He was about seventy. First he told me, then showed me, who he was, like I'm doing with you. Then he said he was dying and I was supposed to replace him.

"That's how it works, see. You live your life normally, even after you know. But like everybody else – and you are like everybody else, Scott; you got to know that. Sooner or later, our time to die comes, too. A normal lifetime – sixty or seventy years, usually. But the difference is, when our time comes, we have to find a replacement. Some are luckier than others – they know who it is that they want years before they die. Like me with you."

"You knew me before?"

"Sure. I've been cleaning your room at the university for years, but you never really saw me, because I worked night shift. Sometimes we'd pass each other in the hall if you worked late."

"You're telling me God is man?"

"No, no, no! I am not saying that at all. Man has God in him, but he's not God! No, the absolute simplest way to put it is this: man is man, but there are thirty-six chosen men who, together, are God. That's why normal people feel close to Him – because He's them in many ways. Nolan told me about the Greeks. You know about that. They believed there were lots of gods, which is kind of right, and that they all had human feelings. They were interested in sex, got angry, and did unfair things, stuff like that. So the Greeks were close, too, in guessing right, but they also thought gods lived up on special mountains away from the rest of the world. Wrong. We're here – just all over the place, and not looking like people'd expect, you know? I'm one, and I'm sure not impressive, huh.? But I'm only a thirty-sixth of the big puzzle. Fit me together with the other parts, and you've got ONE IMPRESSIVE GOD , all right!

I'll tell you something else, too – the world is full of puzzle pieces. Know how you feel lonely and apart sometimes? That's because you're not connected up the right way. People who find out that secret spend the rest of their lives trying to find their matching other parts. But I'm not here to talk about that with you. We don't have time for it. There's so much else I gotta tell you."

AS I mentioned earlier, before that wondrous afternoon with Beenie Rushforth, I was beginning to believe more and more in God, but one along the lines of Emily Dickinson's 'God is a distant, stately lover.' One who is fully aware of us and what we are up to every minute of our lives,' but one who has the love and respect to allow us our own fates. When we die and reach whatever other side there is, He will go over our lives with us page by page, like an essay written for school, an essay having on it many mistakes that must be identified and corrected before the essay is put away. Once the mistakes have been brought to our attention, we will recognize most of them, and He will point out others. By the time we get up from His desk we'll fully understand what we did wrong. Did I believe in reincarnation? No. Why would we repeat third grade if we fully perceived all of the mistakes we'd made there? I believed in an afterlife, but not on earth. I hadn't a clue as to where we went, and I did not want to guess.

However, when I arrived at my own front door again many hours later, my understanding of the world, of life, of death, of God … was a quintilIion miles away from what I had thought before. For this loud, sweet, dying woman had proven without question that what she had told me was true. As she said, I was a hard case and wanted proof even beyond Annette. Proof that transcended the transcendent. I cannot tell you what she did, but I can say she took me where I wanted to go, and showed me the impossible.

I wanted to see Melville and Hawthorne alive and in the flesh, wanted to hear their voices and the kind of words they used outside their books. I wanted to see Albert Pinkham Ryder at Christmastime, brewing up his own private brand of perfume and giving it away in little jars to children. I wanted to visit Montaigne in his tower, circa 1592, and look over his shoulder while he wrote, "Though we may mount on stilts, we must still walk on our own legs, and on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own bottom." These were my heroes, the people I'd thought about my entire adult life. If Beenie was God, and time belongs to God, then she could clap once and give me these people for a moment. She did. She took me wherever I wanted to go, and affably said stay as long as you like. Funny thing was, I didn't need or want to stay long. Only a few minutes to breathe their air, see how they held their pen or formed words with their lips. That was all I needed, and she gave it to me.