He stood there, his madness confessed, silent for a moment, but I knew that he would say more, whether I would understand it or not. Did I do more than twitch? Was the uneasiness so plainly written on my face? So it would seem.

"Don't you believe that people talk like that?" As if I had any chance to doubt this, with him doing so before me - but was that the point? That he wondered if I was as uncertain as he, another madman with whom he might commiserate? I knew that I ought to assert my own sanity and say something, at least nod, but could not do so.

"You really don't believe it?" How cleverly he had phrased that. If I said yes, I believed it, I would sound like I was in agreement with him, and if I said no, by disbelieving what was before me, agreeing with him through my disagreement. This had to be wrong, but how would I ... what would I say to explain that wrongness, to avoid falling into his trap? But he blustered on, before I could gather a single thought, in an almost apologetic way.

"Listen", he said, "once, as a child, just waking up from a short afternoon nap, not really awake, I heard my mother calling down from the balcony. 'What are you doing? It is so hot.', to which another woman, unseen, answered 'reveling in the grass'. No insistence or much expression in her voice, just a comment tossed out as a thing to be taken for granted."

"As it ought to be", I thought. Was he going to come to some sort of point? Or did he even know that he hadn't? But there it was, that mysterious wound of his. I wondered if that, along with the mystery of his mystification, could explain what I had seen in church.