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tea bag in his paper cup looked like a blouted trout. “What you describe sounds like an aleph, a point in space that contains all points. The most famous one on record was in 1938. A boy living with his mother in an apartment in Barcelona claimed he saw the night sky swarming with tiny lights whenever he rolled up his mother’s bread bin.”
    “Just the one scene?”
    “My guess is that the poor boy confused what he was seeing—the entire world from every angle simultaneously—with a meteor shower. You can understand his mistake, all those light sources swirling at once.”
    “So other people have seen it?”
    John nodded and blushed from the rim of his hairline all the way out to his earlobes, and Mary saw that the scar overhis eyebrow was shaped more like a raisin than a sunflower seed. She looked over to his notebook where he had drawn a star configuration. “Canis Major” was written out at the top and there were little arrows pointing to Sirius and Aludra.
    The baby slept sprawled out on John’s futon as he carried the bottle of brandy over to the table. He was not as handsome as her husband. John’s face was plain, but there was something behind it, not light exactly, though light’s focused beam was part of her understanding of his appeal. As she laid out the details of her life—baby, husband, how she wanted to write poetry but had become a schoolteacher instead—she took in the décor of his apartment, the futon, chest of drawers, marble fireplace. No television or radio, just a dozen books on the window ledge. Hanging over the mantel was a crucifix; a wasted wooden Jesus on a metal cross.
    “That’s the only thing I brought from my cell.”
    Mary felt her jaw drop and her mouth fall open. His thick upper arms, his crew cut; she glanced at his hands for jailbird tattoos.
    John laughed. “No. No. No. It’s not what you think. I use to live in a monastery.”
    “With the monks?”
    He set two teacups on the table and tipped the brandy bottle into each. “I was a monk.”
    Mary saw him in a long robe walking along a stone corridor. “What happened?”
    He sat back in his chair. “It’s a good question. I think if my dissatisfaction had been parceled out, things might have been different. But one day during the long silence in the middle of diurnum, I just realized that after fifteen years I was no closer to God than the day I entered.” He looked out onto the dark street.
    The baby began to cry, and Mary picked him up and pressed him against her shoulder. “I’m afraid he’s hungry,” she said. “I need to get back.”
    “You can nurse him. I don’t mind,” John said.
    Mary looked at him tentatively, but the baby was animated, agitating his head like a baby bird and crying so hard his face was red and his whole body trembled. She took the cloth diaper out of her pocket and laid it over her shoulder, unbuttoned her shirt and reached under to unlatch the flap of her nursing bra. Her face got hot as he slurped, and she stared down at the baby’s tiny elbows, his hands under the cloth cupping her breast.
    John held his body at an awkward angle, as if she wasn’t nursing but amputating somebody’s leg.
    “I can stop,” she said.
    “No!” he said fiercely, his expression drawn, his eyes flooding with water.

FIVE
     
    THE ORPHANS’ CHRISTMAS Party was in the East Village. Chili-pepper lights encircled the windows and the refrigerator was filled with beer. All the furniture was pushed back to the wall and there were sagging bodega roses around in coffee cups. About a dozen people had already arrived, all younger than her, and mostly women who worked at the production company with her husband. Her husband got her a glass of seltzer, and they leaned on the window casement and talked about the baby.
    He liked the goofy expression the baby made when he was angry and how much he loved that one leaf on the ivy plant in the living room. How he’d suck on anything, a dirty T-shirt, the side of