“Try and imagine,” he had once said to Anna, “something like a horse’s skull. Not a horse’s head,” he had cautioned her, “but its skull.” The skull of a horse looks nothing like the head at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip. “Imagine,” he had told her, “a wicked, intelligent, purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak. A few ribbons or strips of flesh dangle and flutter from it. Even the shadow of that is more than you can bear to see.” It was more than he could bear to see, alone on the platform at Cathedral Parkway. He looked up for an instant, then broke and ran. No voice, but it had certainly told him something. Some time later he found himself stumbling about in Central Park. It was raining. Some time after that, he got back to the apartment. He was shivering, and he had thrown up over himself.

“What’s the matter?” Anna asked. “What on earth’s the matter with you?”

“Pack,” he told her.

“At least change your clothes,” she said.

He changed his clothes; and she packed; and they rented a car from Avis; and Kearney drove as fast as he dared onto the Henry Hudson Parkway and thence out of the city north. The traffic was aggressive, the expressways dark and dirty, knotted up into intersection after intersection like Kearney’s nerves, and after less than an hour Anna had to take over because though Kearney wouldn’t stop, he couldn’t see any more through his headache or the glare of oncoming lights. Even the inside of the car seemed full of night and weather. The radio stations out there weren’t identifying themselves, just secreting gangsta rap like a new form of life. “Where are we?” Kearney and Anna called to one another over the music. “Go left! Go left!” “I’m stopping.” “No, no, carry on!” They were like sailors in a fog. Kearney stared helplessly out of the windscreen, then scrambled over into the back seat and fell asleep suddenly.

Hours later he woke in a pulloff on Interstate 93. He had heard a Gothic, animal, keening noise. It was Anna, kneeling in the front passenger seat, facing away from the windscreen and tearing pages randomly out of the AAA mapbook they had got with the car. As she crumpled each one up and threw it into the footwell, she whispered to herself, “I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I am.” There was such a sense of rage and misery filling the cheap blue Pontiac—because Anna had been lost all her life and was never going to find herself now—that he fell back to sleep. The last thing he saw was an Interstate sign four hundred yards ahead, shifting and luminous in the lights of passing trucks. Then it was daylight, and they were in Massachusetts.