The Signature of All Things

lying.”
    Alma pondered this. “I honestly do not believe I have ever felt insane,” she said. “I wonder if I’m telling a falsehood when I say that to you. I don’t think so.”
    Ambrose smiled. “Of course not. I should have made an exception for you, Alma. You are not like the rest of us. You have a mind of such solidity and substance. Your emotions are durable as a strongbox. This is why people feel so reassured around you.”
    “Do they?” Alma asked, genuinely surprised to hear it.
    “Indeed, they do.”
    “That’s a curious thought. I’ve never heard it expressed,” Alma looked out the window of the carriage, and contemplated further. Then she remembered something. “Or perhaps I have heard it expressed. You know, Retta herself used to say that I possessed a rather reassuring chin.”
    “The entirety of your being is reassuring, Alma. Even your voice is reassuring. For those of us who sometimes feel as though we are blowing aboutour lives like chaff on a miller’s floor, your presence is a most appreciated consolation.”
    Alma did not know how to respond to this surprising statement, so she tried to dismiss it. “Come now, Ambrose,” she said. “You are such a steady-minded man—surely you have never felt insane?”
    He thought for a moment, selecting his words carefully: “One cannot help but feel how closely one lies to the same condition as your friend Retta Snow.”
    “No, Ambrose, surely not!”
    When he did not immediately reply, she felt herself grow anxious.
    “Ambrose,” she said more gently. “Surely not, yes?”
    Again, he was careful, and took a long time to answer. “I refer to the sense of dislocation from this world—coupled with a feeling of alignment to some other world.”
    “To what other world?” Alma asked.
    His hesitation to reply made her feel as though she had overreached, so she attempted a more casual tone. “I apologize, Ambrose. I have a dreadful habit of not resting on questions until I have found a satisfactory answer. It’s my nature, I’m afraid. I hope you will not think me rude.”
    “You are not rude,” Ambrose said. “I enjoy your curiosity. It’s merely that I’m uncertain how to offer you a satisfactory answer. One does not wish to lose the fondness of people one admires by revealing too much of oneself.”
    So Alma released the topic, hoping, perhaps, that the subject of madness would never be mentioned again. As though to neutralize the moment, she brought out a book from her purse and attempted to read. The carriage was too jolting for comfortable reading, and her mind was much distracted by what she had just heard, but she pretended to be absorbed in her book regardless.
    After a long while, Ambrose said, “I have not yet told you why I left Harvard, those many years ago.”
    She put the book away and turned to him.
    “I suffered an episode, Alma,” he said.
    “Of madness?” Alma asked. She spoke in her customary direct way, although her stomach fell in fear at how he might reply.
    “It may have been. I’m not certain what one would call it. My motherthought it was madness. My friends thought it was madness. The doctors believed it to be madness. I myself felt it was something else.”
    “Such as?” she asked, again in her normal voice, although her trepidation was mounting by the moment.
    “Possession by spirits, perhaps? A gathering of magic? An erasure of material boundaries? Inspiration, winged with fire?” He did not smile. He was quite serious.
    This confession gave Alma such severe pause that she could not reply. There was no place in her thinking for the erasure of material boundaries. Nothing brought more goodness and assurance to Alma Whittaker’s life than the heartening certainty of material boundaries.
    Ambrose regarded her carefully before continuing. He looked at her as though she were a thermometer or a compass—as though he were trying to gauge her, as though he were choosing a direction in which to turn based entirely on the nature of her response. She endeavored to keep alarm from her face. He must have been satisfied with what he saw, for he went on.
    “When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?”
    Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had