He had orated around a thickened purple tongue, reminiscent of the buck that had attacked the Tercel’s grille. To dress for dinner, Golly had wrapped himself in a filthy tunic that might have once been saffron, and Fanta had remembered the allusion from his recorded rant: the Buddhist martyr Thich Quang Duc, the self-immolating Vietnamese monk.

“But infected prions,” Golly had declared, “can be replaced.”

Of course Fanta had no appetite. He had felt concussed and sick. Unable to manage utensils, the diseased man across the table had eaten with his hands in the manner of a blind old circus bear, balling and dabbing and scooping with his jittery, tumescent fingers.

“Replaced like this,” Golly had said, demonstrating, and one minute later an entire foot-long steamed zucchini had disappeared down Golly’s warty throat.

“See?”

“I see.”

But Fanta had not understood, not yet. He had not been able to stop the trembling caused by something, he thought, in his few sips of wine. Now and then, beneath the table, the mighty dog had licked his burning feet and gone back to sleep.

“There are alpha and beta prions,” Golly had at some point asserted.

Nonsense, Fanta had said to himself.

“We humans have the alphas. The ungulates—the deer, the cattle—have the beta prions. Unless one is afflicted as I am, this is the natural hierarchy of nature. Alpha over beta, in all things epidemiological.” He mashed the word but continued as if he hadn’t. “This prevents horizontal transfer. Shepherds don’t get blackleg. Cat ladies don’t get feline distemper.”

True and not true, Fanta had said to himself.

Something prevented horizontal transfer, as a rule of thumb. Something saved humans from goat pox, porcine brucellosis, bovine pleuropneumonia, et al. But that something was not the alpha-beta nonsense hallucinated by Golly.

“A chronic-wasting man,” he had raved on, meaning himself, “can replace his bad betas by tapping fellow humans for more good alphas, which can be consumed indirectly in the zucchini, the tomato, the melon, in any vegetable or fruit that has been properly farmed.”

There had been a pre-dinner tour. Golly grew the vegetables he was eating in small rectangular plots seemingly hidden in tall grass and wildflowers across the narrow coulee bottom.

“Horizontal transfer,” he pronounced, “can be undone by vertical transfer, from lower human to higher human.” He pawed up sweet corn, stripped by Faith from the cob. “As you see.”

Fanta still had not seen.

Tapping fellow humans?

Lower humans?

He had filled his lungs and spoken.

“May I have my glasses back, Jim, please? And my car keys and wallet? You can keep the shoes.”

“Faithy, the man is asking for more wine.”

By then, Golly had swallowed at least a gallon. Yet he was not so much drunk and oblivious as he was effortlessly dismissive of reality. He was completely at ease with his delusions.

“It’s time for me to go, Jim.”

“Faithy’s getting us more wine.”