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Carmel, where a new ministry in the Church of Abiding Hope awaited him.

7
I-80 EAST MICHIGAN, OHIO APRIL 13–14, 2006
    Take my hand, he said.
    But the child would not.
    I say to you, son—
take my hand.
    When the quivering child did not lift his hand, did not obey, Daddy Love seized the hand, and squeezed the little fingers with such force, the smallest finger audibly cracked.
    Inside the gag, the child screamed.
     
    On I-80 east a continuous stream of vehicles.
    On I-80 east Daddy Love drove at just slightly below the speed limit taking care that the white-painted wooden cross on the roof of his vehicle wouldn’t be shaken by wind and blown off. He was a patient driver who took little note that vehicles were constantly passing him. In the wake of enormous trailer-trucks, the Chrysler minivan swayed slightly.
    Like souls passing, Daddy Love thought. The stream of vehicles.
    He was among them and yet elevated. It was Daddy Love’s particular destiny that amid the mass of humankind only a very few like him were possessed of the power to
see
.
    Eastern religions believed in the “third eye”—in the forehead, just above the bridge of the nose. Through meditation, through zealous religious practices, the “third eye” opened and vision flooded the brain.
    Daddy Love was one of these. From boyhood he’d been gifted with such visions. Like the power of X-rays to see through flesh. Daddy Love
saw
.
    It was a particular insight of the brain. An activated and excited area of the brain just behind the eyes. The frontal lobe, it was called. Neurons
fired
in mysterious surges like heat lightning soundless in a black summer sky.
    But such scientific terms, mere
words
, meant little to Daddy Love who understood how
words
were purely invented and how if you were a master of
words
, you were a master of men.
    Ordinary individuals could not understand. Ordinary individuals comprised somewhere beyond 99 percent of
Homo sapiens.
    You had to suppose that the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and so Nirvana—(or maybe that was the Hindu heaven not the Buddha heaven)—at about the age of Daddy Love when he’d been, in that long-ago lifetime, a gangling boy named Chester Czechi who’d first
seen
.
    He’d known he was a special case. He’d known that he would be forever a pilgrim in his life, embarked upon a (secret, thrilling) pilgrimage, utterly unguessed-at by others.
    Even his family. Especially his family.
    (Daddy Love smiled, recalling. He had not seen his fucking “family”—fucking “relatives”—who’d betrayed him to the Wayne County, Michigan, juvenile authorities, aged twelve, in twenty-six years.)
    Now on the interstate highway what the ordinary eye saw wasn’t the Chrysler minivan but the luminous white cross secured to the van’s roof.
    The cross was approximately four feet in height. The horizontal plank was approximately three feet.
    The cross did shudder in the wind. But Daddy Love, who was a natural-born carpenter, a visionary with a talent for
using his hands,
had secured it tight, with both wires and rope.
    The cross was a curiosity: some observers might smile. (In recognition of the sacred cross, or in condescension that a cross might be so awkwardly affixed to the roof of a minivan.) Some might try to read the crimson letters hand-printed on the cross.
    Most would lose interest and look away after a few seconds.
    State troopers looking for a
beige, battered
van on the interstate would take little interest in this iridescent-purple minivan in the service of the Church of Abiding Hope.
    Also, the van’s license plates were New Jersey. The child had been taken from the Libertyville Mall in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
    Daddy Love loved to be
invisible
. In the eyes of ordinary mortals and fools, the superior man can make himself so.
    Spray-painting the van iridescent purple and securing the white cross to the van’s roof was a means of rendering the van
invisible
.
    Daddy Love had cultivated such strategies in