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four fingers from top to bottom.
    I still remember the first time I did this exercise for Ordé. I held up my hand and felt that most familiar and exquisite sensation. The air cooling my finger, drying it and moving on into the sky with the moisture of my life.
    I was desperate back then.
    “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Ordé asked.
    Many nodded.
    “It’s like the cold kiss of a spirit beyond your ability to see. You can feel her only for a brief moment and then she’s off.”
    We nodded some more.
    “You are lost,” Ordé said.
    He stepped off his rock, walked into the crowd, cleaving the congregation, and went up into the trees. Feldman and Alexander, two of Ordé’s larger acolytes, blocked the way to anybody who wanted to follow him. He would be gone for the rest of the day. He’d probably go down to San Francisco, in the secondhand brown suit I’d bought him, to look for a woman.
    It was time to look for a mate again.
    Many of the Close Congregation followed him up to the point of the large carob trees into which he disappeared. They pressed up against the large bodyguards and called out, “Ordé! Teacher!”
    I didn’t go running after him.
    I had been with Ordé for nearly four years by then. I’d left everything behind me and joined the Close Congregation. Ordé and his words were my only connection left to life. The day we met I’d intended to kill myself. I’d been with him ever since. I knew he’d be back. I was one of the few who knew where he lived in town. I collected donations from the Close Congregation, kept his bank accounts, and paid his bills.
    Ordé had a lot of money in the bank, the large donations he collected himself in private interviews, but he spent very little of it. I controlled the checkbook, but all I craved was his truth.
    Ordé’s words were the truth. You could see every image, feel every sensation he described. His metaphors (what we thought were metaphors) took on a palpable reality that hung in our nostrils, stuck in the back of our throats. Halfway through any sermon I would notice that I was no longer listening to his words but instead experiencing the phenomena he described.
    “Hello, Chance,” Miles Barber said.
    He had come up behind me while everyone else drifted after Ordé.
    “Detective Barber.”
    “Where’s your boss gone?” the policeman asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t check in with me every time he splits.”
    “He go off like that often?”
    “You know as well as I do,” I said. “You come up here enough.”
    “He always go alone?” Detective Barber asked.
    “We’re never alone, Officer.”
    Barber’s hair was thick and black, but his eyes were light gray. He wasn’t tall and he always wore an odd-colored suit. That day it was an iridescent gray-green two-piece suit with a single-button jacket.
    He looked and sounded as if his entire life were just off the secondhand rack.
    “I don’t care about your blue light bullshit, kid. I wanna know if your boss disappears with people from this group into the woods.”
    “You asked me that before,” I said.
    “I can arrest you anytime I want, kid.”
    “Yes, you can, Officer.”
    Barber took me in with his eyes. I had known many policemen. Ever since I was a child they’d been rousting me. I knew when a cop hated me — my big frame, my black skin. But Barber didn’t have time for that kind of hatred. He had a job to do, that was all.
    I would have liked to help him. But I could not.
    I couldn’t, because helping him would have condemned the dream. Barber was a cop, that’s all. He found out who did wrong, uncovered the evidence to prove it, and sent the wrongdoers to jail. He wasn’t concerned with the subtleties of truth and necessity. He couldn’t see above the small laws that he worked for.
    I wondered, as he interrogated me for the fifth time, if he knew how close he stood to his precious truth. Did he know that three and a half years earlier I had been summoned