​Last night, after putting the finishing touches on that twelfth and final story, I couldn’t sleep.And it wasn’t because of the fact that I’d remembered, with the help of what Mom used to call my “overactive imagination,” that things had turned out badly. It was because the whole thing still didn’t hang together. Months ago, when I’d sat on that Gomorrah motel bed, surrounded by the ghosts from my old attic—the books, the family history, and the photographs—I figured I’d be able to find the pattern. But as I lay there awake with my wife sleeping happily at my side, I was just as puzzled as I’d been when I came up with the idea of writing a dozen stories about my Inverness life.What was the point of it all? Or as Uncle Edgar would’ve put it, what had been God’s plan for my life?

Wielding my cane, I sallied forth into the world beyond my private quarters.

I turned left and proceeded down a long hallway, where I continued my meditation on “Miss April,” pleased that the enigma of my sexual orientation had been resolved.
 
Narrator’s note to reader:
My pleasure came, not from my discovery that I was heterosexual, but from the fact that I had solved the enigma of my erotic orientation. Had I discovered that I was homosexual, I would have been equally pleased.
 
Description of hallway:
​Similar in color to the walls of my apartment. Neither too broad nor too narrow. Concrete floor camouflaged by an industrial-quality rug. Equipped on each side with a hand railing of inferior and delicate construction. Empty, save for a pair of elderly white females, one in a wheelchair, the other pushing her charge along with great difficulty, both of them approaching me.
 
Limping down the hallway, supported on my right by a hand railing and on my left by my stout cane, I could see from the presence of intermittent doors that my own apartment was part of a larger complex. From this I surmised that I was a resident in some kind of institution, a conjecture consistent with the appearance of the two elderly ladies.

As I advanced, I involuntarily compared the Miss April of my recent meditations with the approaching pair of Miss Decembers. This comparison elicited in me an audible chuckle, which grew by degrees into a mammoth guffaw, which, in turn, caused the two ladies, now but fifteen feet away, to look up.

Imagine my bafflement when, after the briefest of glances at my person, these same ladies emitted a pair of long, concerted shrieks. These shrieks were attended by a sudden change in their itinerary, from a slow but steady advance toward me to a rapid flight in the opposite direction.

The ladies’ reaction to my presence gave me pause. I stopped to consider the cause of this reaction. In my careful and methodical way, I recalled, standing in that hallway, the events of the day, beginning with my awakening, proceeding through my various discoveries, and ending with my act of crossing the threshold of my apartment door into the larger world. I was quickly able to discount as possible causes of their incredulous reaction a substantial number of those events, and, by the process of eliminating most of the others, to settle on the simple fact that I had, during my initial foray into the bathroom, neglected to locate the Old Spice deodorant and apply it to my person.

That neglect, I hastened to assure myself, was not my fault. Indeed, it was quite understandable, in view of the fact that immediately after locating the Old Spice, I had learned to my chagrin that I had no teeth. The shock of noting a resemblance between my face and the ghastly visage depicted in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, I concluded, was the culprit. This shock had caused me to neglect to apply the long-lasting deodorant, an omission that had caused the malodor, which, in turn, had caused the ladies to take exception to my presence in what they might have regarded as their own private hallway.

​Upon further search through the corridors of my short memory, however, I came to discount this theory explaining their excessive reaction in favor of a theory I found stronger, simpler, and more compelling, a theory based upon a newly-discovered fact.
 
Nature of newly-discovered fact:
I was still naked.

It was in the latter stages of his stint as a prophet that she entered his life.

One morning, as she was walking to her job as a waitress at the local camel stop, she happened to notice him in his back yard, dressed in his sandwich board and hammering nails into boards. Curious, she stopped to kibbitz.

He ignored her and continued his pounding.

​“What are you doing?” Elsie finally asked.

“Building a boat,” said Noah gruffly.

“Yeah?” She smiled at him. “Taking up boatbuilding, huh?”

“What’s wrong with being a boatbuilder?” he asked defensively.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s just that this is the middle of the desert.”

He put aside his hammer. “There’s a lot of job satisfaction in building boats,” he explained. “A recent survey showed that 90 percent of the boatbuilders rated their job satisfaction—”

“Wouldn’t that be a hundred percent? You’re the only boatbuilder around.”

He stopped to recalculate. “Right,” he finally agreed. “One hundred percent rated their job satisfaction as either ‘good’ or ‘excellent.’ But only 66.8 percent of the camel drivers rated their—”

​“So they get a little sand in their eyes.” It was her turn to be defensive. Some of her best friends were camel drivers.