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Climbing higher made it harder to breathe. I entertained the idea that the dense foliage had sipped oxygen out of the atmosphere rather than carbon monoxide, a theory that collapsed when the forest became a microdesert in the clouds. The landscape shifted from green to beige. Dry, stunted shrubs replaced the trees. There was no sign of moisture, and the air thinned so much, my lungs struggled to inhale enough of it. The sunburned rocks reminded me that I had neglected to carry water. Now you know why I never made Eagle Scout— you can count on me to arrive unprepared.

Halfway up the mountain I could not continue any further. My back ached, my legs had gone spongy. I felt sticky. I felt tired. I felt thirsty. I felt one hundred years old. A weird clicking noise nagged at my ears. I could not identify the sound at first. Something slowly opening and closing. Then I got it: the valves of my heart working overtime.

A little switchback trail cut away from the path and continued along the side of the mountain. The day before, a villager had told me that it led to a wealthy German community hidden deep within the rocks. Outsiders never visited the town. No one knew who had built it or how the inhabitants brought in supplies, though some locals reported seeing helicopters hovering in the vicinity.

Stereotypes offend me, but I conjured this image of a futuristic metropolis filled with blue-eyed blondes in steel helmets driving Mercedes. On their dashboards: pictures of Laurence Olivier playing that lethal Nazi dentist from the movie Marathon Man. What did he keep asking Dustin Hoffman’s character? Is it safe? Don’t think so, tiger. I had no intention of going near the place.

Instead I sat on my haunches and waited. Dawn had long passed. The event I had come to witness had to happen soon. My mind entertained no doubts.

I knew the world would end that morning.

Sounds crazy, huh? Not to this left-hander. George Orwell’s 1984 had made a profound impression on me in high school. It seemed probable that something momentous would occur on the first day of that year, so I imagined the ultimate disaster. Just my nature, though I rarely reveal it to anyone. An anonymous fear colors my perspective of everything and has haunted me nearly all my life. At the age of four, my favorite TV program was Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. One of the characters was a fierce, fire breathing dragon. Whenever it appeared on-screen, I ran to hide behind the living room couch. I have hidden behind that couch ever since.

A strict Catholic upbringing exacerbated my childhood anxieties. My first memory of church is of a priest fulminating from a pulpit during a sermon. He resembled a fierce Moses with his long beard and flowing white hair. Every syllable thundered when he spoke. Lightning flashed behind him and blood dripped from his eyes as he warned the congregation of the penalties God extracted when sinners incurred His wrath. I spent the entire service cringing behind a pew.

That priest’s god was a tyrant who ruled with threats. If that was religion, I wanted no part of it. When the time came to attend First Holy Communion practice, I locked myself to a bedpost with my Roy Rogers handcuffs and hid the keys. My mother could not release me until long after Communion practice had ended.

I escaped the church’s influence for only a day. My parents enrolled me in a catechism class where nuns taught small boys and girls about the devil, original sin, the nature of evil, and eternal damnation. The stuff of nightmares. I hated the course but my marks ranked among the best in our grade. The teachers could not take credit for that. No, someone else provided the motivation—that guy nailed to the cross on the wall above the blackboard. One look at him and I knew those nuns meant business.

I grew up thinking of God as something other than a benevolent deity. To me, he roamed heaven as a snarling Minnesota Fats playing celestial snooker with all the planets. I figured one of these days he would muff that bank shot and