Once, I would not care to say when, I would go to church every day to seek what I knew to be God's greatest blessing: the company of a girl who I knew would be kneeling in prayer for an hour and a half in the evening. I loved her, quietly, and there I could look on her in peace, gazing piously at the cross which, miraculously, always found itself behind her from my vantage point in the pews. Perhaps I might have said more to you of her, if I ever had known what to say, at all.

Evening came and the church's doors opened, but she wasn't there to step through them. I went in, anyway, having little excuse to do otherwise. Kneeling in my corner as inconspicuously as I had hoped, glancing reluctantly upon a gathering that did not offer me its usual reward, I noticed a young man in one of the aisles who had gained the attention of the other supplicants by throwing his whole length along the floor. There he lay, almost silently as the latecomers would step around him, signaling his presence to all in brief bursts, clutching his head in hand, sighing loudly as he pounded it into the rough stone floor. Maybe God was with him as he did so, as no blood was to be seen after one of these remarkable displays, but if so, I could not see why.

In the church, almost nobody else was to be found, other than a few old women, brushing their shawls with uncomfortable pleasure as they turned to watch the young man at his devotions. Their awareness of his actions seemed to please him, for as each of his outbursts was about to begin, he would cast his eyes about to see how many of them were looking. This, I found unseemly, and so I made up my mind. I would accost him as he left the church and ask him why he prayed in such a manner. Yes, I felt irritable because my girl had not come, but our young friend had given me ample reason to feel more irritable, still, with his theatrics, had he not?

An hour of this nonsense passed before he stood up, and slowly crossed himself as properly as anybody ever would, his fingers seeking to find just the right points of shoulders and forehead to touch, demanding of themselves a hairsplitting precision that one would imagine unachievable without some sort of measuring device. A minute passed before this task was done. He abruptly strode toward the basin of Holy Water, stiffly, awkwardly, as if at the start of each step he had to know in precisely which direction he should move, and toward the middle he would begin to worry for a while about the choice of when his movements in that chosen direction should end, reluctantly accepting that the time for change had come when, with a bump, his foot hold him that it had hit the ground. With such weighty matters to ponder, as whether his arm should shift to move at a 45 degree angle to his previous direction or 46, he could not move swiftly, but I could. Setting myself along the line from the basin to the front door, knowing that I would not let him pass without explanation, I waited for my quarry to fall into my clutches,hoping that he would be too proper to put the nave of the church to good use, and bypass me altogether. Collecting myself, I advanced my right leg, placing my weight upon it, balancing my left leg lightly and carelessly on the points of my toes, a predator waiting to pounce. My lips began to move silently into position, waiting for the stern words that would soon issue forth from them. Thus prepared to be as firm as the circumstances demanded, I watched the young man, waiting for his next move.

Perhaps he had already caught sight of me when he was annointing himself, or had noticed me sooner with some dismay, for he made a sudden unexpected dash through the doorway, the inner glass door banging shut behind him before I could utter a word. Rushing out in hot pursuit, I found that he was already gone, vanished along one of the several narrow streets that passed nearby, lost in the crowd. The defense of propriety would have to wait.

He stayed away for the next few days, but I hardly cared, because my girl was back. She was wearing her black dress, her otherwise bare, milky white shoulders covered modestly with a transparent lace top that she had inherited from her undoubtedly soon to be sainted mother, the delicate silk ruffle of her undergarment left visible, an oversight that I was sure would cause this delicate creature great distress on her return home.

In the presence of such beauty, I forgot the young man, and gladly continued to forget him even after he eventually returned to pursue his devotion in the usual manner. But he would not be forgotten. Whenever he passed me, he seemed to be in a great hurry, turning his face away from me as abruptly as he had begun his stalking of the baptismal font, just days before. Perhaps I could not think of him except in motion and so, even when he was standing still, he seemed to be slithering past me. Certainly, he was in the perfect position to do so. I imagined, for a while, that he would slither a little more closely each day, a python ready to engulf that panther that had threatened to devour it. Others seemed not to notice the peril, and perhaps might even have gone so far as to ask just how successfully a python could have stalked anything, least of all a creature capable of overtaking a racing automobile. Thankful that they would not have the chance to pollute this blessed house of peace with discussions of the finer points of mayhem, I relaxed, breathing deeply as I leaned back, and focused once more on the angel four pews ahead of me.

One evening, I stayed too long in my room. Even so, I still made my nightly trip to the church, hoping that somebody might have been as tardy in her nightly observances as was I. Much to my disappointment, she was not, and I was about to leave but there he was, putting his humility on display for all to see. Undistracted, I found my curiosity about the man restored.

On tiptoe, I went to the outer doorway, stepping just outside of the church, dropping a coin into the cup of the blind beggar who sat there every night. Squeezing in beside him, I sat behind the open half of the door, which had (as always) been thrown open wide by a hopeful pastor, greeting the crowd which would never come. Tucked into the wedge like space between oak and brick, even the faint light of the street failing to find me, I waited with my companion for the evening, perhaps with a crafty look on my face. The coin had bought the beggar's silence for the evening, if he even knew that it had to be given. A gentle bout of snoring a moment later left this open to doubt, but I didn't mind the thought that the poor fellow might have a little more to eat when he awoke. I made up my mind to return more often.

In the second hour, I began to wonder if I was being foolish, sitting there because of a man at his prayers. As the third hour began, I gave up on my efforts to brush away the spiders that kept finding their way out of woodwork that had been left rotting, untended, for generations. I breathed in, I breathed out, as my tiny friends scurried over me, leaving their children in my hair, I had no doubt, but I wasn't going to think about it.

Just as I began to question my own wisdom, he came out of the church, and I knew the time for confrontation was finally at hand.