In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain -- sketches for stories, accounts of his love affairs, riffs on the meanings of popular songs, ideas for movies, obsessions with cosmic processes. He is a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of his age. But now he has found a story he thinks may become his next The large brass cross that hung behind the altar of St. Timothy's, a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, has disappeared...and even more mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism, on the Upper West Side...