What Henry wants to be is an actor, but in the meantime he teaches a course called “Great Plagues.” What I want to do is play for the Lakers, engineering the break while Kareem signals for the lob. For now I sit in an office at City Hall with PLANNING ASSOCIATE stenciled in black on the door, which means that I spend my time trying to figure out where to hide thirty thousand tons of garbage each week. I really don’t have anything to say on the subject of plagues, major or minor, but I agree to guest-lecture because Henry has an audition for a lawn mower commercial and wants to save his voice.

I met Gary Blake at the meditation hall. It was a place of silence, but Gary Blake was not a silent man. At an evening sitting, he sat next to me and whispered about how his knee hurt, then how he wished he had a ham sandwich, and how he wanted to have a black robe like the Roshi’s. I tried by turns to ignore him and then to put my finger to my lips and whisper, “Shhh.”

“Where are these gods you speak about?” a skeptic asked the Lord Shantih. “I have lived many years and have traveled far, and I have never seen a god. They must be very well hidden.”