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shape or the shape of her stuffed-animal toucan, Gabriel Puffalump. Her upper bunk looks higher than it did when we hooked up in it last week.
    I cross the room and start climbing up to her. There are dresses and clothes hangers in my way as I climb, and I swat them aside. The hangers clatter.
    A female voice gasps in the dark below. “Oh my God, who’s there?”
    I arrive on Mara’s bunk. She’s not there and neither is Gabriel Puffalump. Instead there are textbooks and women’s hats. In a rush I throw these off the bunk, worried that Mara is trapped beneath them. The textbooks slap the floor below.
    â€œWhat the fuck?” cries the same female voice. The voice isn’t Mara’s. “Who’s there? What the fuck!”
    â€œWhere’s Mara?” I finish clearing books off and lie down and close my eyes. The bunk feels hard, like a plain wooden slat, and it’s thinner across than I remember, and there’s no mattress, no blankets, no comfort.
    â€œMara,” I wail.
    â€œWait . . . Dave?!” The female voice turns accusatory. “Dave Schickler?”
    â€œMara’s not here,” I moan.
    â€œOf course she isn’t! You’re on the top shelf of my closet, you fucking idiot!”
    The slat gives way under me. I fall through clothes hangers and hit the floor. Lights come on. I’m at the feet of Mara’s housemate Melanie. She’s standing in a long green nightshirt with her hands on her hips. There are textbooks and hats everywhere.
    â€œYou’re in the wrong room. And you just scaled my closet. Are you on drugs?”
    Mara comes in from the hall, from the direction of her bedroom, the one I thought I’d entered. She looks sleepy and beautiful. “Dave?”
    My back is killing me. Mara lets me pass out in her bunk beside her.
    The next day Melanie tells the whole campus about my closet climbing and I get mercilessly mocked. I vow to straighten up and fly right and be the kind of college student my father was. I try to put Mara from my mind, to crack down and study.
    As a School of Foreign Service student, I’m learning German and taking required classes in diplomacy and economics. But these classes bore me. The only class jazzing me is sophomore honors English. We’re reading
King Lear
, which I love. It’s elemental and urgent. When I read about Lear sprinting out alone into a dark wilderness to face the truth there, it feels like a sign.
    So I start going to Father Prince’s late Masses again. Each of his sermons is like a pail of cold water to my face. One night he talks about a time in his past during which he felt very self-satisfied.
    â€œMy classes and Masses were standing-room-only,” he gasps. “Students hung on my words. They’d begun to see me as blessed and prophetic. And I’d begun to agree with them.”
    All of us in the pews laugh.
    â€œThen one night I had a dream. I was teaching a class when the door blew open. Through the door I could see an immense darkness that all but poured into the room. I stopped teaching and stared into it, afraid.”
    None of us is laughing now.
    â€œFrom out of the dark I heard a booming voice. Like a trumpet blast and a growl all at once. It said, ‘
Michael Prince . . . Michael Prince . . . The Bottom would like a word with you
.
’”
    The flesh on my arms prickles.
    â€œThat voice was God’s, I’m certain of it,” says the priest. “He was calling me out on my pride, urging me back to humility. But He was also revealing a frightening name for Himself. The Bottom. The Bottom.”
    This sermon hijacks my heart. I go about thinking of it nonstop. I know in my gut that the darkness that spoke to Father Prince was my darkness, the darkness of the path. And I know that the darkness, the Bottom, wants a word with me, too. God wants me to join a seminary, to pull a wild King Lear–like