by Jim Marino

Elvin’s first mistake was letting Sister June handle the dude in the bowtie. They’d found him standing outside a diner at West 108th wearing a checkered jacket two sizes too big and a little Clark Gable mustache like some woefully unhip swashbuckler, his hair dyed the shining petroleum black of a vinyl record. Still in denial about those crafty white hairs gentrifying his sideburns, though. Here, all too obviously, was the High Exalted Head Nerd in Charge of the Upper West Side. June was only nineteen, baby-pink and freckled and uncertain, and it was her first day, but the Living God was proof of every human being’s infinite potential, so Elvin gave her a try to build her confidence before he saw something was off, the man’s look too obvious after all. Deliberate. Studied. Dude wasn’t who he looked like.

“Did you know the Golden Crusader loves you personally?” June asked in her appeasing voice, and Mr. Bow Tie’s features set into a polite mask.

“I’ve never really been sure.” He took a leaflet between cautious fingertips and squinted at the illustration as if his hornrims were no longer strong enough. The picture of the Living God, sadly, belonged on a refrigerator door. The perspective was off, the muscles out of proportion, and the artist couldn’t quite manage the cape, because the Temple of the Golden Crusade was too small to have even one member who could draw. Elvin’s solution was simple: more converts, with more talents.

“Do you know how often he’s saved your life?” June’s voice rose, aggrieved that this needed explanation. “Why worship a god who promises to save you someday, after you’ve died? When a real god saves you right now?” The man’s deadpan expression held, but Elvin sensed private amusement glimmering behind it. Oh, June, he thought. Never play the Jesus card in New York until you know who you’re talking to. He brushed her sleeve with a fingertip, as if by accident, but saw Bow Tie notice.

“We apologize for disturbing you,” Elvin said, “but you look like a man searching for something.”

“Twenty-three across.” The man raised a folded Herald-Tribune. “Been nagging me all morning.”

“‘Crepuscular.’” Elvin took out his prize Montblanc. “Need a pen?”

Then June said, “Dr. Siegel?” with a puppyish smile, and Elvin no longer had Bow Tie’s attention. The man’s gaze turned to a forty-something white lady, her dark cascade of hair crested by pale surf. Striking old-world cheekbones, heirlooms from some great-grandmother in a lost ghetto. Vintage leather bag. A little artsy for an MD but a bit upscale for the professoriate. Maybe she’d been June’s therapist.

“How are you, June?” Something lightning-swift flashed between this Dr. Siegel and Elvin’s mark. Whoever these two were – not a couple, exactly, or all that happy to see each other – they had private code. He knew what that precise angle of her eyebrow meant. She counted on him knowing.

“I can see you’re a thinking man,” Elvin said, “who’s going to make up his own mind. But why does the Crusader spend his days rescuing the helpless and his nights foiling the wicked, if not for your happiness?”

“Excellent question, Elvin.” Bow Tie was too subtle to smirk, but Elvin felt the man humoring him. “I’ll take it up with my rabbi.”

“How’d you know my name is Elvin?”

The stranger looked mildly puzzled. “Didn’t you say it?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Then how could I know?” Bow Tie asked reasonably. Now Elvin knew this dude was a hustler, and was about to press when Dr. Siegel stepped in.

“Finally,” she said. “Another religion telling us to worship a white man.”

“He’s not the god I’d imagine if I could choose,” Elvin told her. “He’s the god I’m not imagining.”

She didn’t hide the smirk, and Elvin didn’t need a decoder ring to understand her raised eyebrow. “Not the first time you’ve used that, is it?”

“Not the first time it was true.” He saw her patience give out and realized it had been lacquer-deep. She’d come primed for a fight.

“Sorry, gang.” Bow Tie slid in to take his – ex-wife? co-conspirator? CIA handler? – by the arm. “I promised to buy the professor lunch. Interesting to meet you.” Elvin caught at his wrist but he was already almost gone. Elvin barely plucked the hem of his sleeve.

“He flies because he believes he can,” Elvin said. “You could fly too, if you believed.”

Dr. Siegel’s dark eyes gleamed with electric wrath. “I have a profound religious conviction,” she said, “that I cannot fucking fly.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Bow Tie said cheerfully. The not-quite-couple vanished into the diner, leaving Elvin on the sidewalk with dewy-eyed June and a prickle on the back of his neck. Something very weird had just happened.

“I’m sorry,” June was saying. “You gave me an easy one, and I blew it.”

“He wasn’t easy.” Elvin always got paired with the greenest walking partners; this was part of the process. He gave June his second-most-encouraging smile. “My fault for reading him wrong.” He started up Broadway toward Columbia, a bit slower than his standard pace. June needed practice walking, too.

“I suck,” she said.

“No, no.” He touched her elbow in reassurance, and kept it brief enough to be reassuring. “You should have seen my first day.” Elvin had made three converts his first day, but knew June would misunderstand. “Was that your doctor?”

“Dr. Siegel? No.” June scrabbled at her punk-rock-short hair, as if to twirl something already shorn away. “She’s like a professor. She interviewed me for this book.”

The tentative April sun had clouded over, but Elvin believed in making his own sunshine. Things would only get harder on campus. “You were interviewed for a book?” he said. “That’s great.”

June blushed as if someone were trying to fill the spaces between her freckles. “It was this book about sue-sues.”

Oh. The super-Susies. There was a formal medical name, superhuman-related paraphilic obsession: sexual fixation on the Golden Crusader. There were super-Stus, too. Elvin had met some. “Sister June,” he said, “we all reach the Temple by our own path. And hey. It’s not like you were one of the sign people.”

June looked at the sidewalk in front of her feet.

“No one’s path is easy,” Elvin assured her. He was curious without knowing why, the best, most fruitful curiosity. When he got next week’s twenty minutes of internet, he’d research this Professor Siegel and her book.

“What was your path like?” June asked.

“Difficult,” Elvin said, without elaborating. They were literally walking back up his path now, toward the place he’d left to join the Crusade. A year ago next month. Elvin didn’t much like the symbolism, but a small, guilty part of him, always short of books, yearned for his university library privileges.

“Can we really fly?” June asked. “I mean, has anybody …?”

“Faith makes all things possible, Sister,” Elvin said, needing it to be true. “But first we have to learn to walk.” Then Elvin was back inside the belly of the whale: Columbia’s walled urban garden, College Walk and Low Plaza and the grand facades of libraries where his student ID might still have worked if he hadn’t shredded it. Somewhere on a nearby rooftop, teams of physicists with advanced instruments continued their futile effort to explain the Golden Crusader through science. Students ambled by in their Saturday torpor, faces like bolted doors. It would be better on a weekday, in the rush between classes, but the Grand Master had already had enough of Elvin’s suggestions. Alma Mater’s statue gazed down, bronze and unblinking, and Elvin saw the owl lurking in her skirts, a reminder of his first day, when glimpsing the hidden bird was supposed to foretell academic glory. He’d spotted it instantly but would never graduate.

People walked past as if the Crusader’s followers shared his power of invisibility, and Elvin felt June’s spirits deflate. He clung to his policy of good cheer, hoping it would rub off even as the place recalled his lost past self, diffident Elvin wandering this plaza without the nerve to say hello. He’d never known how to put himself forward and still didn’t. He was putting someone else forward now, and that was the easiest thing in the world. But here was Horacio coming down the library stairs, relaxed and pristine and beautiful.

“You’re back,” Horacio said. “You came back.”

“No. Just for the day.” Columbia never let you quit on paper, calling you unregistered or on leave unless they’d booted you themselves. But Elvin had dropped out. Why deal with people who refused to accept straightforward facts? “I’m a messenger of truth.”

“I didn’t believe it.” Horacio looked at Elvin and his leaflet with naked pity. “You don’t have to do this.”

Elvin hardened his face and his smile. “On the contrary. This is the only thing that matters.”

“Don’t make it like this, Elvin. Call me.”

“I don’t have a phone. Come to an open house. Tuesday nights at seven.”

“I’m sorry.” Horacio walked away, leaving the drooping leaflet in Elvin’s hand.

“Was he your friend?” June asked.

“We used to be close.” Elvin looked at the lonely plaza and unimpressed Alma Mater and the dirty-gray gauze of the clouds. “Let’s do the other side of Broadway.” The Temple of the Golden Crusade was an old storefront and tenement on East 39th. They’d work the sidewalk back to Columbus Circle and then the 1 train to Grand Central.

A few blocks south they saw Dr. Siegel leaving Book Culture with her unruly hair tied back. She peered into her bag and shuffled three new purchases, provoking Elvin’s envious longing. He immediately recognized the old, burning question, Which will I read on the bus? And there in the shop window was Love in the Air: Manhattan’s History of Erotic Manias, new in hardback by Marlo Siegel.

Then Elvin and June witnessed a miracle. Out of the dull sky came the Golden Crusader, New York’s resplendent Living God, in his green tights and mask and billowing yellow cape. He flew a slow loop over Columbia, either giving the Physics Department a good look or taunting their ongoing failure, and extended his left hand to draw lightning from sluggish clouds. Electricity danced around his body until he raised an arm toward heaven and cast the lightning back, focused like a welder’s arc. The clouds flickered briefly. The Crusader executed a last aerial roll, flourished his golden cape, and vanished from mortal eyes. This happened every day, all over the city, but grew no less miraculous. Elvin felt blessed to see it. The Living God never spoke to his worshipers. The mere fact of His existence was encouragement enough. Elvin had faith that one day the Golden One would break His silence at last, and Elvin would be there.

When his gaze fell earthward, he saw Marlo Siegel a block ahead, looking ruefully at the vacant air where the Crusader had been. She shook her head with something between regret and resentment and then continued downtown, turning out of sight at the next corner. Still, Elvin knew they’d speak again. He had a feeling.

• • •

But it was Bow Tie they saw next. Elvin gave the Temple his dishwashing paycheck and any extra money his parents sent but was allowed by special permission to keep forty-one dollars and sixty-five cents a month for books. That privilege had been suspended twice for heresy, and Elvin had blown this month’s allowance on one hardcover, so he was happy whenever their route took them by the Public Library. They walked through noisy, budding Bryant Park in guardedly optimistic sun, with Midtown’s traffic streaming around the island of green space and the majestic Main Branch in sight ahead. “If we make just one convert a day,” Elvin was telling June, “we could triple the Temple’s size in a year.”

“But almost no one listens.”

“Read the Bible. Jesus can feed five thousand people and still only have eleven followers worth a damn. People would rather have their golden calf.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Moses leads the Israelites through the bottom the Red Sea, right? Doesn’t even get their sandals wet. Then those same people turn around and worship this shop-class farm animal made from their own jewelry. Everyone donates their personal bling to build this pointless fake-ass god.”

“That’s insane.”

“People like their false gods, Sister. Cling to them. A god that isn’t real will never make demands on you. But an encounter with the Divine? Then you have to step up, whether you want to or not.”

“Look,” June said.

There was Bow Tie sitting at one of the little tables near a tree, wearing an enormous corduroy jacket like a hand-me-down from Goliath. He appeared lost in troubled thought, holding a hard-boiled egg in one hand and a crumbling paperback in the other. A second book lay on the table, and a sheet of paper anchored by a steaming takeout cup.

“Haven’t we met?” Elvin said.

“Maybe we have.” Bow Tie looked up with weary blue eyes, as if he’d been expecting them. The torn page under his coffee cup was a handwritten list of cities, Chicago and San Francisco, L.A. and Boston. He’d been reading John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, with The Basic Writings of Kant on deck. Both looked as if they’d been rescued from the dollar bin and read and annotated and re-read until their bindings were held together mostly by willpower. Elvin could relate.

“You’re the crossword fan,” Elvin said, sitting down to join him. “But a serious reader, too.” He extended his hand. “I’m Brother Elvin.”

“I think you mentioned that last time.” Bow Tie gave Elvin a dead-fish shake, his free hand cradling the egg as if it were merely a shell. June perched nervously on a chair a yard from the table.

“What draws you to the great books today?” Elvin asked.

“I’m thinking of changing my life.”

Elvin felt himself grin. It was too easy an opening, like a chess master laying a trap. He didn’t know who this guy was, but he liked him. “You know my recommendation. But let’s put that aside.” Elvin wasn’t about to underestimate the man. Anyway, this was interesting. “Why Herr Kant and Mr. Mill?”

“I’m considering a career move,” Bow Tie said, as if against his better judgment. “To a new city.” He picked up Mill. “My old friend J. S. thinks I should go where I’ll do the most good for the most people. Sounds like a simple proposition.” He put down Mill and hefted Kant. “But then here’s Uncle Manny, forbidding us to treat anyone as a means to someone else’s end, so am I treating myself as just a means? Are some sacrifices morally impermissible?” He grimaced in self-deprecation. “Or am I making excuses to evade responsibility?”

Elvin let out a deep Hmm of appreciation. “Beautiful questions.” And so very revealing, the man’s guilt shining like gemstones in a cave. Anyone suffering a moral crisis because he might be moving to Chicago was in dire need of Elvin’s services. “But why are we reducing the majestic spectrum of philosophy to two options?”

“Because I keep three books in my desk, and Aristotle’s not relevant.”

“Excuse me. Aristotle is always relevant.”

“But if virtue’s built by repeated exercise, I can exercise Aristotelian virtue anyplace. It’s not about circumstances.” He raised his palm before Elvin could object. “Or not about geography.”

Elvin turned to beam at June. “Isn’t New York great?” The world’s most magnificent city, guarded by history’s first and only superhero, where no one was ever murdered and strangers debated philosophy in parks. Who needed college? June forced a smile, trying to show how enjoyable this hyperliterate chatter was. “Can I ask if you’ve considered Nietzsche?”

Bow Tie tapped his egg one exquisitely soft blow against the table’s rim. “I think it’s fair to say that I have considered Nietzsche.”

“You’re a pretty conscientious guy,” Elvin said. Who’d probably never displeased his parents. Who craved absolution. “What if how much good you do is about strength of will? What if, instead of answering the world’s demands on you, you made a moral demand upon the world?”

Bow Tie started peeling his egg as if a wrong move might detonate it. “That’s never worked before.”

“That is working right now, in this city. The Golden Crusader shows us faith doesn’t obey gravity. Gravity obeys faith.” Let Him fix your troubles, brother. Lay your burden down. “You’re fretting over your duty, when you’d do more good increasing your power.”

Elvin saw the man’s attention dissipate like clearing fog. “I’m not interested in more power. How about you, June?” A kindly uncle’s smile. “What do you think?”

“Oh.” June’s posture folded in on itself, as if she were dismayed to be visible. “Um? What about, I guess, love?”

Elvin hadn’t seen that coming. Bow Tie nodded benignly. “What about love, June?”

“Well,” she said, “doesn’t that matter? Where the person you love is?”

“Ah.” The man’s smile grew distant. “I think it doesn’t.”

Elvin shifted uncomfortably. Some things were important enough to give up everything, and love was a sore topic for him. Traffic passed, and gossiping strangers, and Bow Tie sat as if listening to something they couldn’t hear.

“That’s sad,” June said at last.

“It is,” Bow Tie agreed. “But it was a smart question.” He resettled his eyeglasses. “I’ll love the same person wherever I go.”

“Oh.” Elvin saw June grip that news tight, afraid to lose it.

“The love of the soul,” he murmured. “Like gold to airy thinness beat.”

Bow Tie cocked his head, and his eyebrow, and his smile. “Where’s that from?”

“John Donne.”

“Thanks.” Bow Tie scribbled Donne (sp?) by San Francisco and swished his coffee cup, weighing what remained. Then, as if in afterthought, he added Minneapolis/St Paul. “You should change your life, too.”

“Already have,” Elvin said. “What if I said you could be more like the Golden Crusader?”

“I don’t think I could.”

“Because you doubt yourself.” Bow Tie’s not-a-smirk returned, and Elvin said, “I see you have some objection.”

“My boss will object if I don’t get back to work. It’s been a pleasure.”

“Always a thrill conversing with the wise.” Elvin pumped the man’s limp hand up, then down. “Till next time.”

“Next time?”

“We know where you eat lunch.” Elvin eased off toward Sixth Avenue, looking for the next opportunity for connection. Just one new convert a day. “Do you know who that guy is?”

“No. Something’s scary about him?” June said. “Not mean, but …?” She grimaced.

“Huh.” Elvin hadn’t been scared, but there was something he was missing. “Still. Might be good to find out.”

“You think he works around here?”

Elvin considered the details Bow Tie had let drop, his impatient boss and office desk, and how far those apparent facts could be trusted. “Not necessarily,” he decided.

• • •

What got Elvin in trouble was talking to Marlo Siegel without permission. She interviewed June for a book about the Crusade, and June didn’t know those requests had to go through the Grand Master personally. Then June passed Marlo’s invitation to Elvin, who knew the rule but was too curious not to go. He brought his copy of Love in the Air to a coffee shop near NYU, thick with carefree undergrads and the scent of Arabica, and found Marlo Siegel there already, her abundant hair hanging like a jungle plant over a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

“Ah,” he said. “Still interested in mortals consorting with gods.”

She looked at her paperback, suddenly suspicious. “Maybe,” she said. “Or in why it’s a bad idea.”

Elvin spread his hands. “I don’t mean to offend. Seeing people read the classics is a delight.” Ovid was a bright shard of memory from his first semester’s misery, and he was nervous. He missed talking with professors and could not yet afford to admit how much.

“I’d forgotten most of it.” Her bookmark was a Golden Crusade leaflet on which someone had written Conrad K., Herald-Tribune and a phone number. “Call me Marlo.”

She wasn’t especially warm or remotely maternal, but for just those reasons reminded Elvin of his mother. Marlo dressed with the same impeccable taste, albeit in the East-Coast white-lady idiom, possessed the same steely handsomeness, and spoke in a similar no-nonsense alto. She asked hard questions and listened skeptically. But unlike his mother she wanted honest answers. He could speak freely, and Marlo wouldn’t buy bullshit. She asked about the Grand Master’s history of anti-Semitism, which was by no means only history, and Elvin didn’t repeat the party line. She asked if he believed the Crusader could “cure” homosexuality, which Elvin didn’t think needed curing. He hadn’t joined the Temple to live more lies. He could have gone home to Atherton for that, like his father. Marlo asked about the Grand Master’s obsession with medieval Crusading orders, and Elvin could only shrug.

“Just an analogy,” he said. “Actually, reporters made up the ‘Crusader’ name. He’s never used it.”

She smiled to herself. “I think I’ve heard that. So, listen. A friend of mine recently compared your faith to Rastafarianism. Worshiping a person who’s never claimed to be a god.”

“He’s no Haile Selassie. Omnipotent living gods don’t lose wars to Mussolini.”

“Fair enough.” A twist-of-lemon smile that nonetheless included Elvin. “You’re obviously very smart. So I have to ask. Why believe in someone who doesn’t believe in himself?”

“Only God is incapable of faith. Theology 101, week three.”

Her eyes lit with amused exasperation. “Seriously?”

“America may have dumbed itself down till there’s no room for Aquinas, but don’t put that on me. The real question isn’t why I believe. I’ve witnessed the supernatural. The question is why you don’t.”

“Who says it’s supernatural?”

“With due respect, the more science you know, the less explicable he is. He’s not just defying the laws of physics. He’s mocking them. How does he read your thoughts?”

“Has anyone proved he reads thoughts?” Debates over the Crusader’s exact powers were never-ending.

“Okay. But then how does he hear things further and faster than sound will carry? Two boroughs away sometimes, with no physical vibrations for him to hear? How can he smell fire where there isn’t any smoke?”

She looked sober. “We can’t abandon rational explanations.”

“How is it rational to deny what we see? I’m not asking you to have faith in something otherworldly. I’m asking you to accept what’s happening.” He softened his voice. Marlo was looking strangely wrung out, considering him from some bleak private refuge. They’d gotten past the initial defenses of denial and anger to the crisis, where each soul wrestled alone against the impossible, inescapable Truth: not just the Truth of the Living God who existed when he should not but all the denied and unwelcome truths He stood for, the multitude of routine self-deceptions on which people founded their daily lives. Elvin spoke gently because the convert’s last step was the hardest. “A body that can move through space at any speed, that nothing can obstruct or harm, is not a body. He’s an embodiment of pure mind, an idea in a suit of clothes. Not the outfit I’d choose, but I’m only His humble servant.”

“Mysticism.”

“Mysticism with twenty-four centuries of philosophy backing it. Evidently, Plato was right. The physical world’s a shadow in a cave.”

She nodded, as if hearing a dread message confirmed, and he saw her phrase her next sentence in her mind. He had her. Then she let out a breath like a diver returning to sunlight and offered her business card instead. “If you ever leave the cult and think about grad school, let me know.”

• • •

The next day the Grand Master suspended Elvin from street work, condemned him to three months’ silence, and canceled his book allowance forever. First, he spent two hours elaborating Elvin’s crimes. Had he not known the rule against speaking to the press? Or speaking without a companion present? How often had he been warned against appointing himself spokesperson, how often disciplined for heresies that the Grand Master called, with bleary distaste, his “history of deviation?” Elvin sat mutely, taking his punishment, and went upstairs to lie on his cot.

Elvin would not break faith. He was not leaving the Temple. There was nowhere else to go that recognized the Living God or what His existence meant for the world. Elvin was not going back to college or California or the company of the spiritually blind. He was not bowing to any golden calf. The Grand Master was a fallible human, and Elvin accepted his authority as the Crusade’s founder, but it was not eternal. Minds changed. Movements grew. Elvin could wait. That was what faith was.

So he ate meals in silence and did extra toilet duty and trudged back and forth to the restaurant kitchen, forbidden to tell passersby good news. June tried to apologize with her eyes, but it wasn’t needed. She hadn’t known the rule, and he had, and it was true. He’d done it before. He read all his books one more time before selling them to The Strand for store credit. Every time he did that he’d come home with less until he had nothing to trade, but when nothing remained Elvin would endure. Everything but the Living God changed eventually.

The last time he saw Bow Tie was between crammed bookshelves in The Strand, the man holding guidebooks for Portland and Minneapolis and New Orleans and a vinyl album, Exodus.

“Hail, fellow philosopher!” Elvin wasn’t supposed to talk, but Bow Tie didn’t count. Elvin couldn’t explain why not or help feeling giddy. He’d found Martin Buber and the Mahabharata used, anticipating the delight of digging into them, and he was away from the Temple and its punitive silence. It was his sole quarter-hour of happiness in the last ten days.

“Hello, Elvin,” the man said, sounding unsurprised, as if they had a standing appointment at 6:38 every Saturday in the Travel aisle. “Nice to hear your voice again.”

“Still leaving New York?”

“Any day now. As soon as I go to the bank.” His clothes were no more rumpled than usual, but his eyes looked like he hadn’t slept since Elvin had seen him in Bryant Park.

“Careful. Other cities have crime.”

Bow Tie smiled, or gestured at smiling. “I think I’ll be all right.”

“So you’re a Bob Marley fan?”

“Oh, I listen to everything,” Bow Tie said vaguely. “I met him once. In Central Park.” That memory seemed mysteriously sad, like meeting a celebrity had broken a little of his heart.

“Don’t leave New York.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t leave the city. Don’t distance yourself from the divine.”

“A guy in a cape doesn’t solve everything. The world is still broken.”

“We don’t live up to his example. But that’s on us.”

“But he’s just a band-aid. Sterile.” Bow Tie spoke with a low urgency Elvin hadn’t heard before. “Scurrying around trying to head off trouble. He heals nothing.”

“He’s the best we’ve got.”

“A pity.” The man sighed, rebuking himself, and turned to go. “Sorry. There’s something I forgot.”

“Don’t run,” Elvin said. Bow Tie stopped, his shoulder blades tense as steel under pressure. “Whatever it is. You’ll regret it.”

Bow Tie didn’t look back. “Good luck, Elvin. Thanks for the talk.”

Elvin’s brief cheerfulness had evaporated, and he walked the sidewalk in a cold spring rain, holding the bag with his precious books under his denim jacket. He wouldn’t be allowed to read them until late, because he had to accept silent treatment in the Temple common room until eleven. He wanted to slow his walk home but was afraid of getting his books wet. Someone called his name and Bow Tie was there, sheltering Elvin with his umbrella. He reached into a canvas tote bag and pulled out a second tote wrapped and looped around the brick of a hardcover.

“Never sell an autographed copy.” He left the book in Elvin’s hands and disappeared around a rainy corner. Elvin didn’t need to unwrap it to know he was holding the personally inscribed copy of Love in the Air he’d traded in last Wednesday.

• • •

On the thirteenth day since Elvin had been condemned to silence, Marlo Siegel was invited to a Crusade meeting. Elvin had to sit silently in the Temple storefront but he had to sit, because the Grand Master wanted the greatest display of numbers possible, one-hundred-and-seventy-seven strong, only two fewer than last month. Craving intellectual recognition and wanting to make an impression on the writer he considered his biographer, the Grand Master had combed thinning hair over his liver-spotted scalp and donned his medallion and yellow robe, which made him look like the host of a Surrealist toga party. Marlo sat with a notebook, recorder, and unflinching expression while the Grand Master emphasized his most complex and esoteric teachings. There was a good deal about alchemy and the Knights Templar, including an eighteen-minute digression on the 1565 siege of Malta. Thunder bellowed overhead. Pitiless rain pelted the front window. “Then,” the Grand Master was saying, “the sulfur-nature, in its hatred of the mercury-nature, took the form of the Satanic Jew.” Marlo’s face betrayed nothing. Elvin stared straight ahead and thought about the Mahabharata.

The Grand Master was halfway through a sentence about lust for Gentile maidens when a fist pounded the door. He narrowed his pouchy eyes and scowled. Another knock. The Grand Master began speaking about the circumcision of Baal, and the door was flung open to the keening rain. The Invincible, New York’s Living God, the Golden Crusader, stepped into His Temple.

“Stop this,” he said. “I forbid it.”

He was tall and broad-shouldered, though not as tall as Elvin had imagined, and soaked with rain. It ran off him in streams, darkening his cape to a drab shade of mustard. The tights and mask were sodden to the color of a bruise, and widening circles of moisture spread through the carpet at every squelching step. He had a voice that should have been beautiful but wasn’t, distraught and out of tune like a cello with fraying strings. “I never asked for this.” Elvin saw Marlo rise, shaking her head.

The Grand Master’s jaw worked, and then his damp lips, and he rasped the word, “Imposter.”

The costumed figure strode toward the Grand Master’s seat, damp footsteps loud in the silence. Dimming lights sank the room into brownish dusk while electricity haloed the caped man’s body like St. Elmo’s fire. He said, “Your teachings are lies,” and reached for the Grand Master’s medallion. The nimbus dispersed, the lights returned, and the ornamental chain snapped. The Crusader turned to face the assembly with the circle of silver lightning bolts dangling from his hand. He squeezed the medallion between forefinger and thumb, reducing it to shapeless ore.

“I am not a god,” he said, and thunder rumbled above.

Elvin saw bereaved, unblinking faces, tears flowing on June’s cheeks like rain into a gutter. Where would she go, and what would she do? Or the others, his brother and sister castaways with this shore washing away beneath them? Where, for that matter, would he go himself? He could not picture tomorrow. The Temple would be gone. Only Marlo, silently appalled, seemed to know what to think.

Elvin stood up.

“Pardon my question, Lord.” His disused voice cracked on the first syllable before carrying through the silent room. “Are you accepting your divine authority?”

“No,” the Crusader said. “Absolutely not.”

“Then by what right do you command us?” Elvin saw a corner of Marlo’s mouth hook upward – He walked into that one – and felt obscurely encouraged. No way left but forward.

“Wait, what?” the Crusader said. “If you say I am a god, how can you disobey me?”

“With due respect, Lord, I’d hardly be the first.” He spread his arms in a theatrical shrug. “I am your unworthy servant. Forgive me the sin of my belief.”

The Crusader groaned and brought a gloved hand to his masked forehead. “Your mother is right. You should go back to college.”

Elvin laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. “God answers to my mother,” he said. “I knew it.” He wiped tears from his eyes and saw a few faces stir. June was watching with something not yet brave enough to be hope. Elvin took a step closer to his idol.

“I applaud your humility, Lord. But you can’t discourage my faith by showing me miracles.”

“I’m trying my best. But I’m only a man.”

“Oh come now,” Elvin scoffed, confidence flooding back. “You’re not a man.” Lightning turned the room white and Elvin blind. When eyesight returned Marlo was giving him a sympathetic wince and the Crusader slowly unclenching his fists. Two Mississippi, three Mississippi, and the laggard thunder growled. The Crusader spoke in a milder voice.

“Please don’t deny my humanity, Elvin.”

“My apologies, Lord.”

“I’m no one’s creator. Not like he says.” He waved the back of his hand at the Grand Master. “Or a redeemer. I can’t undo wrongs I’m too slow to stop. People I let die stay dead.”

“You’re not the Creator or Redeemer, no,” Elvin said, and heard the Grand Master mumble Heretic. “You’re the Sustainer. You uphold the world.”

“But can’t fix it. I’m like the god of gaffer’s tape.” The Crusader looked quickly at Elvin. “Forget I said that. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“As you wish, Lord.” Elvin tried to keep the cheerfulness out of his voice and failed.

“I prayed to Jesus my whole life,” one Sister said in a voice colored by a hundred thousand cigarettes. Her hair was bottle-bronze, her face wrinkled like a newspaper that had soaked and dried. “But you pulled me out of the burning car. You took me to the emergency room. Jesus didn’t come for me. You did.”

“What was I supposed to do, Donna? I couldn’t leave you there.”

“Other gods would,” Elvin said. “Other gods do.”

“Every god does,” Marlo Siegel said. “He does these things because he’s human. Because he’s decent and kind.”

“You’ve met before,” Elvin said, realizing something.

“I’ve known him for years.” She grazed the Crusader’s arm with her fingers. “This is not the world he would make. Frankly, we should be so lucky.”

“I’m trying to live with myself,” the Crusader said, shoulders bowed. Marlo patted his upper arm, and there was no sound but the rain.

“How will we live?” June asked in the silence, voice muddy with tears. “How can we go on, if you deny us?”

“June.” The Crusader’s voice was cracked and gentle. “I’m trying not to mislead you. I would never deny you.”

“Then don’t deny us,” June said.

The Crusader stepped toward her and rested his wet glove on her hair. “I know you, June.” Then he put his hand on the next forehead, and the next. “Raul. Donna. Anthony.” And as Elvin watched his idol laying hands on his flock, he saw a miracle. Tears welled in the Golden Crusader’s eyes but did not flow, so that Elvin mistook them at first for rainwater. But the tears swelled and became irregular wobbling bubbles with no gravity to pull them, until fragments of His tears broke away and floated above the worshipers’ heads, catching and refracting the electric light like little prisms. “Esteban. Marcus. DeLeon. Janine.” Elvin watched his God’s tears illuminated in the air, a wonder, and then his God was standing before him, tired and hoarse. The Golden Crusader put his palm on Elvin’s forehead.

“Elvin,” he said. “I am not a god.” He turned away, holding his dripping cape in one hand so it would not drag, and Marlo waited for him at the door. Elvin saw her mouth Are you happy now? as the Living God took her hand and said, “Let’s go.”

• • •

“Forgive me, Lord.” Elvin was alone in his room after midnight, whispering into cupped palms. “Please, please don’t leave our city.” He hid Marlo’s business card atop a dusty lintel and went down to the basement, where the others were waiting.

The meeting in the basement was June’s idea. June’s faith made it happen. In later years, Elvin would remind people that it was the little sister who had held them together. Even the electrical tape was her inspiration. But June asked Elvin to be the one who spoke.

Their first thought had been candlelight, but what they had were flashlights, and their God was lord of electricity. There were twenty-nine of them, and June, and Elvin. Some had walked the streets with him, his old partners and apprentices. Others he’d recruited, finding them on subways and sidewalks and plazas and park lawns. Their flashlit shadows loomed above and behind them like a crowd of prospective ghosts, the shades of sisters and brothers yet to come. Elvin raised the roll of black, sullenly gleaming tape in one hand.

“Do you believe?” he asked, and each time he got an answer he wrapped the gaffer’s tape three times, one-two-three-rip, around an elevated left wrist. At last there were thirty-one of them holding up their wristbands, their Amazonian bracelets, their badge of faith. Thirty-one souls holding together in the darkness.

“Never give up hope,” Elvin said. “We know our God hears our prayers.”