Thank god, he was almost home. Hunter could see the lights and the outline of the house against the crest of the hill and felt immense relief at the prospect of dissolving into sleep in his own bed, after the luxurious but shattering vagabondage of the last ten days. His apartments in New York and London didn’t feel like home; Apocalypse Now was home. Once he arrived, he hurried away from his solicitous staff to the inner den, the ultimate sanctuary: a red lacquered sitting room with no windows, adjacent to his suite of private rooms, which occupied half the Pacific side of the first floor. He washed down his sleeping pills with some bourbon. After pouring himself another shot, he placed his glass on the low brushed-steel table in front of him, sank back into the soft turquoise leather of an art deco sofa, puffed out his cheeks theatrically, to signal to himself that he had made it, even if he hadn’t shaken off his sense of encroaching insanity. He was intending to have a word with Jade while the sedatives took effect, but instead found himself drawn into the brilliant surface of the golden screen in front of him, an exquisite sixteenth-century Japanese painting of a gnarled pine branch on a ledge of rock, its swirling bark and dark needles reaching into a gold-leaf canyon of indeterminate depth. Hanging opposite this masterpiece by Tˉohaku was a video screen of exactly the same size, on which an artist had made an animated version of Hokusai’s famous wave, programmed to curl and crash, in slow motion, over the course of fifty minutes. When Hunter was in California, he could stretch out comfortably on the second sofa of the pair, opposite the one he was now on, and turn on the Hokusai video by remote control, so that it completed its cycle at exactly the moment that his daily conference call with his two New York psychotherapists came to an end.