Outside, the sun had disappeared behind the Hendersons’ garage and silhouetted their Chinese Elm so it looked slightly monstrous, and Mrs. Lieberman shivered. When she fell asleep, at last, with the television rattling in the background, she dreamt of the tree. God’s face had taken shape in it, the branches and leaves twisting into bristly eyebrows, and crackling into a great beard. The trunk bowed forward into a nose, and the mouth was lost in the bushes below. What she’d taken to be the pink and silver swirls of the sunset visible between the leaves, she realized now were the defiant eyes. When he said hello to her, it wasn’t threatening or particularly pleasant, but she realized, in her dream logic, that she could talk to him and she could ask him whatever she wanted. So she asked him what she’d always wanted to know. Why is there something instead of nothing? That seemed to get to the heart of it. If she knew the answer to that, all the rest would make some sort of sense. She’d asked Fuddle what he thought once or twice but he didn’t quite get the question. He wasn’t the sort to think of things like that, even though he was very, very smart. Fuddle, when he thought of a bicycle, knew every part, could recite its history, and could talk at length about the various companies that made them, but if you asked him, as Sue once did, sitting on the front step at their summer home while Fuddle pumped the tires full with his foot, “How can there possibly be such thing as a circle? A bent line that never straightens?”, he would frown and blink and stomp pumping and say, “Huh? How can there be such a thing as a circle? Well…because there is such thing as a circle.” And that’s, she guesses, why he didn’t believe and knew for sure that he didn’t believe, and she didn’t know if she believed or not and didn’t think she could ever know for sure. And God, when he answered her in her dream, told her that he didn’t know why there was something instead of nothing, that when he’d first awakened, everything he’d ever needed was all ready there. When she asked about Fuddle, God said he was very sorry but he hadn’t seen him. Bestraught, she began to cry and the leaves came out and touched her shoulders in some sort of deciduous hug. The tree smelled of Fuddle as if he’d been all together swallowed up, and Sue woke up bawling.