None of that mattered. I had to do everything. Only in the mountains could the prayer be heard. I would need the fetus of a llama to build the mesa, the altar of sacrifice. We took a bus to go deeper into the mountains, deep where the roads were dangerous, isolated, where safety was forgotten.

The priest was to perform the ritual. He was clothed with the authority of many faiths, he had tried many of them, tested them, but he trusted only a few. He had been to Makkah for the hajj, he had raised his hands in faith to the words of Christian preachers, he had taken private communion from a ciborium purchased in a specialty shop in Manhattan. He had cast out demons at the request of a Dominican woman who found out too late that she had summoned spirits of the dead; the rite was physically demanding even if you doubted the existence of evil; it was doubt they preyed on.

Studies took him to pre-Christian times, the ways of shamans who knew that a llama fetus was a substitute for a human child and there in the mountains those things that could not happen happened still. Finally the priest conceived his own faith, a faith built on diverse practices, for it is no coincidence that the Divine shows itself in more than one way.