Again he tries to persuade me that it is all his fault, and he hands me some photos as evidence. They are of Job suffering his cataclysmic afflictions, except this man is not asking why me. He already has an answer, which he devised long ago, when he went to church with his mother and the preacher struck him on the forehead:

"Abandon the abomination that is your life and let Christ heal you!"

But the disease could not be healed by belief; for he could believe that his was a life of abomination. Yet he could not un-make it. It festered like a terminal illness since the day he was born, and those pictures of the 50-year-old skeleton with boils and exploded belly button were simply the abomination come to incarnate itself in the body.