“Sit down and I’ll get you a drink.”

Very Lowry, but you don’t sit and you politely decline the drink, staring out at the shore, the sea. It’s a gray, crappy day and the weather reports say it may even snow. The water has an oily quality from offshore pollution, the dull light creating rainbows across its still surface.

“No? Well, I’ll make you one anyway.” Also very Lowry, and you’re tenser than you were a moment ago.

The room is narrow, and you’re standing at the window, behind you a long, low lime-green couch with a steel frame covered by psychedelic orange pillows. Shaped like crude downward-diving breasts, porcelain light fixtures hang in rows of twenty from a ceiling slanted to the curve of the hill. Their glow melts across the couches, tables, and wooden floor in soft overlapping circles. The whole back plate of glass sealing off the room from behind is a mirror, projecting your images and protecting you from the truth that this isn’t really a lounge and you’re here not by invitation but by order. That this is an interrogation room of sorts.

The refined Lowry, so unlike the uncouth Lowry—leaning forward from a chair catty-corner to the couch—has been spending a deliberate eternity prying ice cubes from a bowl on the glass table in front of you into the glasses, one by one, clink by clink. He opens a bottle of scotch with care, and, with a tap of the bottle neck against glass, pours out two fingers.

Lowry, bent over his task, letting the moment elongate further. The mane of golden hair now silver, grown long. The determined, solid head on a thick neck, the landmarks of features upon a face that had served him well: craggy good looks, people say, like an astronaut or old-fashioned movie star. People who have never seen the photographs of Lowry after the first expedition into Area X, that dehydrated unshaven face still imprinted with an encounter with the horrific unknown, Lowry gone somewhere no one else had ever gone. “An honorable guy” back then, charismatic and direct. Even gone to fat a little, a thickness around the stomach, he retains some charm. Even with a left eye prone to wandering as if a tiny planet is straining out of alignment, being pulled to the side by the attraction of something just out of the frame. Those bright, piercing blue eyes. One scintilla more brilliant and all of his charisma would be wasted—the determined nose, the resolute jaw almost a parody, like the coastline of a confident country—undermined by a stare too glacial. But there is just enough warmth in that gaze to preserve the rest of the illusion.

“There, done,” he says, and you’re nervous to the inverse of his calm and reverential care for the drinks.

Lowry’s replaced the bunkers hidden in the adjacent hills with secret labs. Full of higher-order animals, is the ridiculous rumor, brought here to bear the brunt of Lowry’s imagination, as if to punish nature for having punished him. Experiments on neurons, neural linkage, synapse control. Boring, impossible things like that. You doubt he ever brings his fourth wife here, or his children, even though the family’s summer house is conveniently nearby. No tours of Daddy’s workplace.