City of God

Everett hears from Tom Pemberton and meets him for drinks. Tom has read Everett’s story about him so far, and he takes issue with any author’s ability to render life accurately, noting that facts are wrong as well as his motivations for getting in trouble with church leadership. Tom has not left the church, but he’s been reassigned to a hospice ward. He reveals that he got in trouble because he asked what possible response Christianity could offer to the Holocaust.

Everett keeps thinking of his affair with Moira as a movie plot, and in it, the main character undergoes plastic surgery to resemble his mistress’s husband. Together, he and the mistress usurp the husband’s life, calling the police on the husband when he arrives at his own home. Everett conflates his narrative and his own life, realizing that the only thing to do with all that power would be to leave the woman, as well, thereby ruining everyone’s lives but his own.

After a brief contemplation of crows on the dock, Everett returns to his imagined Einstein monologue, who holds up the bending of starlight as a religious sacrament. Concerned with Tom’s protests against his story and perhaps moved by his argument to church leadership, Everett pivots to another fiction: a retelling of Sarah Blumenthal’s father’s experience in a Jewish ghetto (modeled on Kovno, Lithuania) during World War II.