One day I sent a prayer from my terrace—Manhattan Plaza, 43rd and Tenth, 45th floor, facing the Hudson River, New Jersey, and the rest of the country—and aimed it roughly toward the object of, or subject of, the prayer, who was the one person in the world I should wish dead. His murder, I had planned for years. If your blood’s red and you believe in fairness, you would agree that in this I was justified—the murderous impulse, not the prayer. Thank God I did not execute this fantasy. (I really mean thank God, by the way!) For this nemesis had not been in my life for several years.

I said these words out loud, as I recall: “Wherever you are, if you’re still alive, I hope you’re working out whatever it is you’ve needed to work out that made you such a mean and violent S-O-B to me.” Not that I thought that there was any reason in particular that this sociopath would be searching his soul to make improvements. No, folks are folks.

Anyway, two hours later, as I lay down to read, all of a sudden I felt a weight, a light weight, or a weight of light—of love?—lying on top of me. From head to toe and everywhere between. I shivered and perspired but did not fear. It was as if I was attended by a spectral presence bathing me in—God: goodwill, bonhomie, pureness, acceptance, even applause. Like the Bernini statue of Maria Theresa in her ecstasy: the only words which might approximate what happened to me was a visitation by an angel. In twenty minutes I started to write about it, so I would not later fool myself that I’d merely dreamt the whole experience. I had to know it happened. Twenty minutes after that, the tears of joy, the ecstasy, subsided. It lasted a total of forty minutes.

I wondered if my former nemesis had died without my having heard, and he, now ghost, received my prayer, and was responding. When I checked with his family, though, I found out he was still alive. Whatever presence “visited” that day—ghost, angel, or whatever you want to call it— the person in my prayer clearly wasn’t it.

Fifteen years later, from out of the blue, I got a phone call from—you guessed it—him. He wanted to tell me that how he acted, those years ago. He’d lately come to see . . . he must have in his DNA or bloodline certain sociopathic tendencies. He introduced these terms himself, not I!

I did not want to talk to him, but could not hang up. So I just listened. It felt like doing battle with an angel, attending a devil that was no more. Not that he said, “I’m sorry.” Sociopaths can’t say I’m sorry. Still, it was not nothing and totally unexpected. He went on for forty minutes. Then I had to hang up, since I was expecting an important call that evening for which I had promised to be available. But as I write these words, more than a decade later, forty minutes does seem just about right.

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James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest three being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance won a Choice magazine award.