The following is from Robert P. Baird’s debut novel, The Nimbus. Baird grew up in Northern California, studied mechanical engineering and human biology at Stanford, and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has worked as an editor at The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Chicago Review, and Esquire and has published journalism, essays, and reviews in those magazines and other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.

He was on fire. Adrian’s son was on fire.

Article continues after advertisement

That, at any rate, was what it looked like the first time Paul Harkin saw . . . well, the first time he saw whatever it was. Luca Bennett, a burly, bubbly two-year-old with gray eyes that drooped a little in the corners and a rumpled haystack of yellow hair atop his oversized head, was sleeping soundlessly in a jogger’s stroller in the corner of his father’s office, and he looked like he was on fire.

It was not a big fire, to be sure. Not a bright fire. Certainly not a blaze or conflagration. More like the flame you see on the underside of a broiler, something low and close. At once lucent and translucent, it traced Luca’s baby-fat contours in three dimensions and extended a half inch or so into space, dissolving into wispy filaments that rustled according to a rhythm that appeared impervious to the motion of the air around them.

To Paul, that first time, the light appeared deep yellow. Later, others would say that they saw it as blue or pink or even clear, like the fumes from an open gas tank. One woman compared it to the radiant fuzz that clings to the outer edge of a lit neon tube. A college sophomore said it reminded him of a dense and luminous fog, of the sort that settles onto a city after a rain in the lamplit dead of night. A little girl said the glow looked like the stuff that seeped out when you popped a firefly open between the nails of your thumb and forefinger, while her mother said she was put in mind of the blue blur of atmosphere you see in photos of Earth taken from space. A man who’d lost his eyesight thirty years earlier in a boiler explosion swore up and down that he could see Luca in a sort of reverse silhouette as he moved. The boy’s entire tiny being, the man said, appeared to pulse, flare, and churn in tempestuous whorls like the movies he remembered watching that showed the roiling surface of the sun.

*

Around the Divinity School—where Luca’s father, Adrian Bennett, was an associate professor, and Paul was that lowliest of human entities, a graduate student—there was much debate about what to call it. This was hardly surprising. The faculty included experts on all five of the world’s major faith traditions, as well as scholars fluent in another dozen or so minor religions besides. There were more than a handful of professors and doctoral students at the Div School, in fact, who could speak eloquently, extemporaneously, and at considerable length on the visible charismata of the Gnostic pneumatics; the dazzling, variegated splendors of the Buddhist saints; Apollo’s glistering halo at Hadrumetum; the glamours of the Sumerian melam; the Uncreated Light of the Neoplatonic hierarchies; the swirling aureolae of the Tibetan thangkas; the mysteries of the divine kavod; and the gold-leaf almonds and fish bladders that enveloped the holy fools in medieval Christian manuscripts. They knew their archons from their arhats, their saints from their tzaddiks, their wali from their kami. Being scholars of religion, they also, of course, knew their share of charlatans, cons, and infamous frauds: the golden plates buried on a hill in upstate New York; the mass hallucinations in Medjugorje; and the collective pareidolia that saw Hanuman in a mahogany tree in Singapore.

For a time, Adrian tried to get everyone to call his son’s glow a khvarenah. As a professor of religious studies and a specialist in comparative mythology, he knew, as most people did not, that the word was Avestan, that Avestan was the sacred language of Zoroastrianism, and that Zoroastrianism was the world’s oldest extant monotheism. He knew, too, that according to Zoroastrian scripture and tradition, khvarenah described a divine radiance bestowed upon the righteous and the holy—and most of all upon the ancient Persian kings.

Of course Adrian also knew that his two-year-old son was not a Persian king—any more than he was, by any definition, ancient. Nor did Adrian count himself among the 150,000 or so remaining devotees of Ahura Mazda, the benevolent and wise creator of the world, whose gift the khvarenah was traditionally understood to be. He was, rather, by his own account, the product of a secular upbringing in Southern California, the only child of an overworked aerospace engineer and a high school librarian who’d flatly and finally rejected her parents’ Presbyterianism at the age of sixteen. The nearest Adrian had ever come to any formal religious affiliation was nine months on the trail of the Grateful Dead in 1992, and behind that, in high school, a brief flirtation with a nondenominational youth group that had put him off institutional religion, and especially Christianity, for good.

And yet for all that Adrian couldn’t bear the banalities of American religious life at the turn of the second millennium, he felt an almost equal abhorrence for his parents’ desert-dry rationalism. He liked to say that he believed in belief—the odder and more esoteric, the better. The only point of studying religion, he told his students, was to examine it in all its bizarre profusion. Forget what you know or think you know. No one cares if you grew up Catholic or Jewish or Southern Baptist. No one needs to read the six hundred thousandth dissertation on Augustine or Spinoza or John Calvin. Why not make yourself a world expert on the Etruscan religion, or the Nahuatl pantheon? Or if you must study Christianity, why not address yourself to the majestic Valentinian cosmology, which posited a vast pleroma full of aeons and syzygies, along with a Christ so inhumanly perfect that his holy rectum was never convulsed by the flutterings of even a single urgent bowel movement?

Paul had heard this little speech enough times that he initially wondered if Adrian’s insistence on the khvarenah’s Zoroastrian provenance was a private joke. Later he would learn better. At some deep level, Adrian had always been a serious person, though it was not always obvious to those who knew him casually. He was friendly and direct, but also often aloof in a way that suggested a certain fundamental laxity of character. Handsome, in a San Diego sort of way, he gave the impression of a person who didn’t watch himself too closely, largely because he’d never had to.

In recent years, however, the people closest to Adrian had noted a change of timbre, a tightening of his attitudinal tone. He was not immune to humor or lightheartedness, and he did not lose his talents for banter and light teasing that composed an essential part of his inoffensive charm. But as he approached fifty he’d become increasingly suspicious of anything that smacked of whimsy or uncomplicated glee. More and more he seemed like the kind of serious person who speaks seriously about the importance of being serious.

Yet despite his best efforts, no one took Adrian up on khvarenah. The word was too hard to pronounce, the notion too bizarre to comprehend. This was frustrating, he admitted, but it was not entirely unforeseeable. He’d been around academia long enough—he’d been around life long enough—to recognize how warily most people, especially the sort drawn to the life professorial, reacted to any sort of anomaly. They liked what they knew and rarely took the trouble to get to know anything they weren’t going to like. As Frege once said, an academic confronted with novelty is like an ox confronted with an unfamiliar gate: it will gape, it will bellow, it will try to squeeze through sideways—anything to avoid going through.

Adrian was therefore disappointed, but in the end not all that surprised that it wasn’t khvarenah that people used to describe whatever was happening to Luca. Instead it was another word—one that, thanks to Harry Potter, even Max, Adrian’s other son, had heard before. Instead they called it the nimbus.

*

The ay Paul first saw the nimbus, which was the first time anyone saw it, was an ordinary Thursday in mid-October. It was a few weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday, a little less than a month after the start of a new academic term. By some measures it was not all that long ago, but it was far enough back that Paul and his friends still had every reason to believe that George W. Bush would be the worst president they’d see in their lifetimes.

That fall, Paul was arcing high in the weightless apogee of life. He was in his sixth year as a graduate student at the Divinity School of a well-respected but not particularly well-known university on Chicago’s South Side. Six years—call it five, even, if you only wanted to credit time served—was longer than anything else he’d done in his life: longer than high school, longer than college, far longer than all of his postcollegiate jobs put together. Five years was serious business, the length of world wars and Soviet economic plans. Five years is what it took Justinian to build the Hagia Sophia, or Flaubert to write Madame Bovary.

Paul had done nothing nearly so impressive with his time at the University. Nevertheless, he wore all the marks of an able young man at the peak of life: dense black hair that crowded close to his dense black eyebrows, sturdy shoulders and calves traversed by visible, vigorous blood vessels, joints that never ached for no reason, and a bladder that let him sleep unmolested for ten long hours at a stretch. He had dark eyes that still glistened under thick lashes, a bright face that neither sagged nor sank. His skin, a firm Sicilian fawn in the coldest months, was burnished to a fine copper hue after a long summer of early-morning runs and late-afternoon beers. Not once, not even for a second, had he forgotten the name of his best friend, or for that matter what to call the kitchen utensil he was just then holding in his hand.

Paul had been in graduate school long enough to know that the first rule of being a graduate student, at least a graduate student in the humanities and soft social sciences, was that one must always insist on the horrors of quaternary education. It must be nice, people liked to say, when they heard how Paul spent his days, as though getting a PhD were like taking an extended beach vacation in Bali. And who could blame them? Any time grad students featured in a book or a TV show, their occupation tended to serve as a placeholder, an excuse to let a character wander around the city all day thinking deep thoughts or doing expensive drugs or having complicated polyamorous affairs, without the narrative drag of a job or other ordinary adult responsibilities.

No, no, it’s not like that, Paul was supposed to say. Grad school’s not like

that at all. He knew the whole spiel, could rattle it off without thinking: the work was limitless, the hours were awful, the pay was atrocious, the stress was enormous, the whole system ran on bureaucratic caprice and professorial whim—and now there were no jobs on the other side of the gauntlet to redeem all that torment. Possibly you could justify grad school in the name of pluperfect desire, which was to say that for some people it was, like chemotherapy or learning German, something worth wanting to have done. But no one in their right mind looked forward to actually doing it.

To complete a PhD in the humanities, after all, was to forfeit the best decade of your life to a state of quasi-monastic abstention, to spend years writing a thesis that ten people in the world would understand and four people in the world would ever read, to take on a small nation’s worth of student debt, and to come out of it at the end—if you were lucky!—with a degree of such mind-boggling inutility that it would make you less employable than you were when you started.

And yet.

And yet for all his very real gripes, for all that he spent most of his time feeling unripe and overspent—somehow simultaneously both wet behind the ears and past his prime—Paul also often felt like the luckiest person on Earth. The secret was that he loved being a graduate student, loved it so much that he sometimes wondered if being a graduate student was, in fact, his true calling in life.

This was absurd, of course. He understood that. The point of graduate school was that you weren’t supposed to stay forever. The idea was to take your courses, do your exams, write your dissertation, and then, five or ten or a hundred years later, to get on with your life. But Paul didn’t want to get on with his life. He didn’t want to leave.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The Nimbus: A Novel by Robert P. Baird. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2025 by Robert P. Baird. All rights reserved.