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and listened to the rain’s soft stitching of despair into the hardness of the stubborn, unwon streets.
    On the following morning, the 20th of March, Vlora ordered the Prisoner moved to a cell that was crowded and cramped and yet dimensionless, a haunted, lightless sea infested by moans and ceaseless whispers eerily drifting above the sounds of restless shifting on straw-filled pallets, of sobbing and litanies of better times lost. Here a light bulb dangled by a wire from the ceiling, painting the blackness with an amber haze, while food was scraped and pushed through slots—cold poppy-seed noodles and moldy bread—while at random a tap would gasp and bleed water. With the Prisoner’s arrival the cell contained thirteen men and six women, but guards would come often to drag someone away and by March 22nd only five were left, among them the Prisoner and a seemingly half-madone-eyed priest who apparently remembered that it was Sunday. “Before the Big Bang,” he started preaching to the cell, “the entire universe was a point of zero size and infinite weight. Then the point exploded, creating space and, with it, time and its twin, disorder. And yet for the cosmos to come into existence the force of that primal outward explosion needed to match the force of gravity with the accuracy you would need for a bullet to hit a one-inch target at the opposite side of the observable universe seventeen billion miles away.”
    Here a fist lashed out from the darkness, striking the priest on his cheekbone with the crunching sound of gristle and flesh. “I told you I wanted to
sleep
!” snarled an angry, deep male voice. The priest listened to the ringing and the rushing in his ears and the pad-pad-pad of hands slapping at stone as the priest’s assailant crawled away, a brawny and extremely irritable Muslim who had announced to the cell upon his arrival that although he had “murdered many others” he was “totally innocent” of the “outrage” that had brought him to this horrible place, the brutal and ultimately fatal beating of a bicycle repairman in Shkoder Square.
    “Then along came the living cell,” dared the priest with stubborn defiance, although prudently lowering his voice. “But how? Ah, yes, there was a chemical soup, we are told, wherein by the usual and much-loved ‘chance’ a virus finally happened to form. And then another and another. Need I go on? But never mind that this soup, we’ve since learned, did not exist, or that the odds against even
one
such virus appearing in as much as a billion years is more than the odds against flipping a coin and having eagles turn up six million times in a row. The beloved reply is, ‘A unique event.’ Is it rude to suggest that at such magnitudes the distinction between the unique and thesupernatural would appear to have lost its utility, if not its insouciant je ne sais quoi?”
    From somewhere came the gasps of a couple making love.
    The priest glanced toward the sound.
    “Coition brings the keenest of pleasures,” he noted. “And why? To ensure continuation of the species. That is purpose. But purpose is the business of a
mind
! And so we see that—”
    The blow struck the side of his head. The priest swayed, fought to hold himself erect, then fell, and for moments he lay on his back, unmoving, his breath flowing labored and sputtering with blood. “I have made this a Mass upon the Universe,” at last he murmured dazedly, “and my preaching this Sunday—Is it Sunday? No matter. In any case, we haven’t any wine.” And then feeling the light being squeezed from his eye, he lifted a quavering hand into the air as if about to give a blessing to an infant or a barn and with blood trickling down from the side of his mouth he murmured, just before losing consciousness: “Go! The Mass is ended.”
    Minutes later—or perhaps several hours or days, who can tell, for the arms of pain crush time as they will—it was the silence that awakened the priest with a