looked like a dust cover for a couch. White and flowing, it swept the dirty floor as she approached us. It was the first time the floor had been swept in some time.
'This is Miss Chan, from the Times,' I said. 'She's here to see Dr. Wilburforce.'
Sister Zachary had a small dark mustache above tight, disapproving lips. She regarded Eleanor over it for a moment, then nodded reluctant acknowledgment and turned to me. 'And you are?'
'My associate,' Eleanor interposed, 'Mr. Swinburne.'
'That's an unusual name,' Sister Zachary said grudgingly. 'Are you related to the poet?'
'Very distantly. Not as distantly as I'd like, I'm afraid.' Eleanor knew that I loathed Swinburne above all other poets, and that was saying quite a lot.
'Dr. Wilburforce is waiting for you, although I must say he was only expecting one.' Her pursed little mouth turned down at the corners briefly and then she tugged it back up into a stiff, creaky smile of welcome. 'Still, I suppose it'll be all right. Will you please follow me?' She swayed left as a preparation for turning, swayed back to the right to overcome inertia, and then launched herself back toward the door. Eleanor scrawled a note; yikes, it said.
'Where's the congregation?' she asked Sister Zachary's back as the Sister slid the door open.
'We're between services,' Sister Zachary said without turning around. 'The next gathering is at six.'
'How many gatherings each day?' Eleanor pushed imperiously in front of me to go through the door first. I followed like a good dachshund.
'There used to be four,' Sister Zachary said. Her voice was a bit wistful. 'Now there are only two.'
'And why is that?'
'Faith is falling off, don't you know,' the fat lady said over her shoulder. We were trailing in single file down a narrow hallway with pasteboard walls, an obvious architectural gerrymander that skirted the large room to our left, where the worshipers, or what was left of them, gathered for devotions. Sister Zachary's ample hips brushed the walls on either side. 'It's not just the Congregation,' she added defensively. 'It's the national climate. Young people don't believe in anything anymore.'
'Are you hurt by not having a Speaker?' I tugged sharply at Eleanor's hair to slow her down. Speakers were supposed to come later.
'Oh, no. Certainly not. You mustn't think that. We don't need show business'-she made the words sound so dirty that they should have been printed, Victorian-style, in asterisks-'to keep belief alive. What's true once is true for all time. Anna was speaker enough for us.'
'But-' Eleanor said. I yanked her hair again, harder this time, and nearly got caught by Sister Zachary, who pivoted more rapidly than I would have believed possible. Eleanor rubbed the back of her head. I lowered my hand quickly, feeling like an elementary-school kid forced to palm an exceptionally large spitball. 'This is Dr. Wilburforce's office,' Sister Zachary said with tremendous dignity, knocking twice at a gray steel door. In my limited experience with religious leaders, it seemed that many of them preferred to work behind steel doors.
Something rumbled inside, and Sister Zachary pulled the heavy door open with no apparent effort. 'I'll leave you here,' she said. 'Dr. Wilburforce will answer all your questions.' The words were unequivocal but the tone was hopeful.
'Come,' someone growled, British-fashion, through the open door. We went. The door remained ajar behind us.
The room, although largely empty, was bigger than I'd expected. So was Dr. Wilburforce. He rose from behind a scarred and notched wooden desk positioned strategically in front of a rainwashed window, laying down a thick book. We were obviously supposed to have interrupted his reading. Dr. Wilburforce had a generous expanse of stomach confined rebelliously inside a tweed vest, a none-too-clean shirt with curling collars, and an intriguing map of veins to guide the determined pilgrim from one of his wine-spotted cheeks to the other, across the Himalayas of the biggest, reddest nose I'd ever seen. He topped it all off with a high forehead, long, lank, straight brown hair, and disconcertingly wary black eyes.
'So you're the reporter from the Times,' he said to Eleanor, summoning up a respiratory eruption that fell somewhere between a chuckle and catarrh. 'I must say that I didn't know journalists were so pretty these days.'
Eleanor waved an apologetic hand at me. 'You should see him before he washes his hair,' she said. 'I'm Eleanor Chan, Dr. Wilburforce. This is my assistant, Algernon Swinburne. Have a seat, Algy.'
Ignoring the demotion and the new first name, I sat. 'Related to the poet?' Dr. Wilburforce said with leaden geniality.
'Intimately,' Eleanor said.
'The song of springtide,' Dr. Wilburforce said, smiling to expose a breathtakingly white set of false choppers. 'Psalms of innocence and hope. They have so much to tell us, especially in this age.'
'Don't they just?' Eleanor said. 'Algy knows them by heart.' She sat down next to me, dodging my kick without missing a beat. 'It's so kind of you to find time for us.'
Dr. Wilburforce gestured with vague regret at his book. 'Ah, well,' he said. 'We can't scorn the media. It's the lubricant of a free society.'
Eleanor flipped open her notebook and wrote swill. 'May we quote you?' she asked.
'But of course, my dear. I know that nothing is off the record these days.' He raised a hand to pluck at the hairs that joined his eyebrows over the bridge of his formidable nose. 'At any rate, we have no secrets here.'
'Really?' Eleanor said. 'Most religions have their mysteries.'
'Mysteries are the refuge of a weak belief,' Dr. Wilburforce said with the air of one who'd just successfully steered the conversation to a long-planned punch line. He laced his fingers together over his vest, rose suddenly onto his toes, and then plopped down onto a corner of the desk. It groaned.
'No mumbo-jumbo?' Eleanor said.
He gave us the polyethylene smile again. 'Whatever little bit of mumbo we may have here,' he said playfully, 'it isn't jumbo.' He watched his bon mot float across the air toward us and then collected his features into an expression of High Seriousness. 'You understand that I'm being completely frank with you. People like a little theater with their religion.'
'Why is that?' I said, just to say something. I was beginning to feel like an extra chair.
'Ah, Mr. Swinburne. You, of all people, you, with the poet's blood flowing proudly through your veins, should understand. Religion itself is a mystery, an attempt to penetrate the veils of time and mortality and impose reason upon them. Do you, as we say, play the market?'
I was surprised in spite of myself. 'Only on paper.'
'Then you listen occasionally to the analysts. Stocks are up, they say, because we're headed for war. Stocks are down because people think we're headed for war. The analysts are wrong most of the time, but investors, or even would-be investors like you, listen to them because they provide the market with a mystique, one that you believe you eventually may learn to understand. Without them, you wouldn't dare to invest-I don't mean you personally, of course, since I hardly know you-because you'd have to face the fact that the market moves irrationally and at random, without any reference at all to human factors. Like the universe. The universe may or may not know we're here, but it certainly doesn't behave as though it cares.'
'So you're in stocks?' I said. 'What looks good?'
'If the Universe moves at random,' Eleanor said, cutting off what I'd thought was an interesting line of inquiry, 'then what possible good is religion?'
'It can prepare us to face the present,' Dr. Wilburforce said. 'We're not talking about heaven or hell, purgatory or past lives in this Congregation.' He twiddled his thumbs in a satisfied fashion. 'That's part of what I mean about no mumbo-jumbo. One life is one more than most people can deal with. There's a Zen koan with a memorable payoff. You may already know it,' he added charitably. 'The supplicant asks his master what he should do to improve his life. 'Have you had your dinner?' the master asks. 'Yes,' says the supplicant. Then wash the dishes,' his master says.' Dr. Wilburforce arched his eyebrows meaningfully. ''Wash the dishes.' So simple. And yet many people can't even do that. But until you've finished washing the dishes, cleaning up the clutter you've left, you haven't dealt with your immediate past. And until you've dealt with your immediate past, you're no match for your more remote past, your Embedded Past, as we call it.'
'Your past is your enemy,' I said.
He unlaced his fingers in order to flop a dismissive hand around. 'Dogma,' he said. 'Useful dogma, but dogma
