“You bet,” the man said, and followed her into his apartment, grateful that he had made his bed.

On a beautiful spring Saturday afternoon nine months later the man sat squirming at his desk. He had been laboring steadily, and now it seemed about to pay off. But making a book had been a host of troubles. Perched on the edge of the chair for eight hours everyday, his buttocks seemed to have gone permanently numb as if he had been administered a series of spinal blocks. His belly was as round as a globe; the burden of the thirty five pounds he had gained strained against his Sansabelt slacks. His wrists were swaddled in leather braces so that he could keep pecking away at the keyboard of his Macintosh IBook even with carpal-tunnel syndrome. And when he peered down at the computer screen, it was through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with lenses thick as the bottom of a Hellman’s mayonnaise jar. They magnified everything and gave him a splitting headache. He pulled back his right hand, groped the trackpad, and pulled down the file menu. He clicked the print command and sighed as his Hewlett Packard Deskjet 5550 began to deliver the manuscript of IT’S A MIRACLE at seventeen pages per minute. The man giggled with anticipation, imagining himself a famous author featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Suddenly he discovered that by raising one cheek and then the other, he was able to rub some feeling back into his tired butt. Miraculously his headache was disappearing. He felt thinner by the minute.

One gray April morning a year later the writer sat at his desk looking through a thick folder of reviews. Thunder rumbled over the rooftops. The black enamel fire escape looked dangerously slippery. The heavens had opened up. Literary critics had loved It’s a Miracle. Oprah Winfrey had selected it for her book club. But he was depressed. There had been no royalties, and he had been forced to return his modest cash advance to the publisher. Hollywood had declined optioning it for a screenplay. An executive with International Creative Management in Burbank had told him brusquely: “Too much dialog; too few explosions. Too much love; not enough sex.” The novel had sold only fifteen hundred copies—not even enough to cover printing costs. His agent would not return his phone calls. And Oprah was stunned. Her imprimatur on It’s a Miracle had not made it an instant best seller. The National Inquirer had reported that she was rumored to be in therapy over her apparent inability to improve the reading taste of her otherwise devoted followers.

Except for his desk and chair, there was practically no furniture left in the writer’s apartment. All his appliances had been sold, replaced by a hot plate, paper plates, and plastic utensils sitting on a sagging card table in the corner. He had given up his day job with Zerox and eaten his way through the apartment. Frankly, he was puzzled. How could God grace him with talent that touched the hardest critic’s heart and yet allow him to fail so dramatically in the market place? Was it too much to ask that God Almighty elevate the literary taste of every man, woman, and child in the United States of America? Was God testing his commitment to his new vocation? There was a knock at the door, a hollow sound that echoed through his study.