If you wanted to be a stickler for accuracy, you could say he was already losing it a little, to even think he needed to try such an experiment. But by then reality was starting to feel much like the ground underfoot: liquid and treacherous. He could not manage the simple trick of walking toward his sister’s voice, which came from the right when he was walking left and from the left when he was walking right. Sometimes from ahead and sometimes from behind. And no matter which direction he walked in, he seemed to move farther from the road.

He jumped and fixed his gaze on the steeple of the church. It was a brilliant white spear set against the background of that bright blue, almost cloudless sky. Crappy church, divine, soaring steeple. The congregation must have paid through the nose for that baby, he thought. Although from here—maybe a quarter of a mile off, and never mind that was crazy, he had walked less than a hundred feet—he could not see the peeling paint or the boards in the windows. He couldn’t even make out his own car, tucked in with the other distance-shrunken cars in the lot. He could, however, see the dusty Prius. That one was in the front row. He was trying not to dwell on what he had glimpsed in the passenger seat—a bad dream detail that he wasn’t ready to examine just yet.

On that first jump, he was turned to face the steeple dead-on, and in any normal world he should’ve been able to reach it by walking through the grass in a straight line, jumping every now and then to make minor course corrections. There was a rusting, bullet-peppered sign between the church and the bowling alley, diamond-shaped with a yellow border: SLOW CHILDREN X-ING maybe. He couldn’t be sure—he had left his glasses in the car, too.

He dropped back down into the squidgy muck and began to count.

“Cal?” came his sister’s voice, from somewhere behind him.

“Wait,” he shouted.

“Cal?” she said again, from somewhere to his left. “Do you want me to keep talking?” And when he didn’t reply, she began to chant in a desultory voice, from somewhere in front of him: “There once was a girl went to Yale—”

“Just shut up and wait!” he screamed again.

His throat felt dry and tight, and swallowing took an effort. Although it was close to two in the afternoon, the sun seemed to hover almost directly overhead. He could feel it on his scalp and the tops of his ears, which were tender, beginning to burn. He thought if he could just have something to drink—a cold swallow of spring water, or one of their Cokes—he might not feel so frayed, so anxious.

Drops of dew burned in the grass, a hundred miniature magnifying glasses refracting and intensifying the light.

Ten seconds.