He works his glasses across the mass, the crowd, the movement, the membership, the flock, the following. It would make him feel a little better if he could find her.

"You know what it's as though?" Maureen says. "Let me concentrate."

"It's as though they designed this to the maximum degree of let the relatives squirm."

"We can do our moaning at the hotel."

"I'm simply stating."

"I did suggest, did I not, that you stay at home."

"How could I not come? What's my excuse?"

"I see a lot of faces that don't look American. They send them out in missionary teams. Maybe they think we've sunk to the status of less developed country. They're here to show us the way and the light."

"And make sharp investments. After, can we take in a play?"

"Let me look, okay. I want to find her."

"We're here. We may as well avail ourselves."

"It's hard for the mind to conceive. Thirteen thousand people."

"What are you going to do when you find her?"

"Who the hell thought it up? What does it mean?"

"What are you going to do when you find her? Wave goodbye?"

"I just need to know she's here," Rodge says. "I want to document it, okay."

"Because that's what it is. If it hasn't been goodbye up to this point, it certainly is now. "

"Hey, Maureen? Shut up. " From the bandstand at home plate the Mendelssohn march carries a stadium echo, with lost notes drifting back from the recesses between tiers. Flags and bunting everywhere. The blessed couples face the infield, where their true father, Master Moon, stands in three dimensions. He looks down at them from a railed pulpit that rides above a platform of silver and crimson. He wears a white silk robe and a high crown figured with stylized irises. They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are. This is a man of chunky build who saw Jesus on a mountainside.