Sometimes Caleb talks to make more room in his head. ‘They’ll find god one day and they won’t even realise.’ I picture the man who vents the gas chamber, distant eyes carrying heavy bags. ‘It’ll be an element or particle, an insistent function, something constituent and causal. Whatever existence needs to persist that can’t be seen or affected.’ I know this process isn’t for me, yet wonder if it continues in my absence. ‘In the beginning, a deity dying, its body breaking down into the natural order like cosmic fertiliser, decomposition composing life.’ Has it always been this way?