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Win or lose, the cover story would be the same: I was crazy of course, in a hospital of course. The department will deny all knowledge of your mission.

“I’m here to stop the war,” I explained. “I don’t really care that much about free-market economies.” It seemed like I was getting dragged into disputes of less and less caliber. Free markets? Next they’d be summoning me to settle zoning disputes.

The voice of God is in the wind.

There’s nothing in the world to be afraid of. There’s nothing that’s not in the world.

You are in the palm of God.

“Does that mean I don’t have to wear seat belts? What about saving for college or retirement? Could it all be just silly?”

Beguiled again, a child again, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

I was on a quiz show again.

“John Coltrane was from South Carolina. High Point, I believe.”

Why aren’t there more questions about early Christianity?

It wasn’t so much the voices, but I wished everyone wasn’t dying and going away forever. I wished I didn’t have the feeling there was something I was supposed to do about everything. I wished we could go back to not having everything be so important. There’s always an earthquake somewhere.

Someone could no longer remind me of someone without actually becoming that someone. The difference between hearing something that sounded like my name and hearing my name was the difference between sleeping in my own bed and waking up in that windowless room where big people come and give me shots.

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

Why is there so much meaning when the mind breaks? Why isn’t it just static or nonsense? I became convinced that my being willing to wrestle the Russian Bear could avoid a nuclear exchange and save millions upon millions of lives, not to mention the planet, from nuclear winter. The content of the voices and visions constitutes a hazardous nuisance to someone like me who so likes to figure out puzzles.

The first time I went crazy I thought that good things might come out of it. I looked forward to learning whatever it was the voices knew and how they knew it. I thought it might be possible to acquire powers that could be used for good. I was asked to save human existence and wanted to do my part.

In the seclusion room I was riding a pendulum that would swing from the past through the present into the future and back again, though that wasn’t all there was to it. There would be times, very brief times, when I was okay and could understand and make myself understood and where it wasn’t all lurching gobbledygook. Before I swung out of the present and was really nowhere again, I wanted to wake people up and tell them I was okay so that they wouldn’t give up on me.

I was a late entry in a very complicated battle of the beatitudes, in lieu of war, where the poor the hungry the sick the naked the meek of all cultures and nations could settle arguments and avoid bloodshed. I didn’t argue as much as maybe I should have, but my capacity for faith and supposition and quick connections was a lot of why the job had fallen to me in the first place. I had handlers who packed me in cotton and foam and smuggled me across borders. It was important that I be very still and quiet and keep my eyes closed.

What do you have in there?

There were passwords.

“You don’t want to know.”

Where’s the princess?

“Okey-dokey.”

The eagle has landed.

The bear doesn’t want to talk about it.

“You want me to do what?”

They would put me next to someone else from somewhere else, and I, or they, would win. It had something to do with depth of human feeling. It was like we were in a stadium full of utterly quiet, meek, sick, poor, hungry people who decided to back either me or the other quiet, packed-in-cotton-and-foam person.

“So the meek really do inherit the earth,” I thought.

When I won, I went forward to the next round with the backing of all the people who had backed the person I had beaten. The losers went back to doing whatever they had done before after having their memory