It’s not that Loudermilk is suddenly successfully doing the Groucho voice or moving his eyebrows or anything like that, but he seems momentarily so much more convincingly Groucho-esque than ever before. It’s as if he’s leaning, like, a mile out of the fake glasses. It’s as if he, too, is experiencing this weird plane of private mental ecstasy along which all of Groucho’s characters seem, magnetically and maniacally, to float. Or: the analogy holds for a second, but then it’s gone, because Loudermilk is off, bobbing through the party like he is the best friend a party ever had.

Other revelers seek comfort at the bar. They are reaching around and muttering and giggling. There is a black cat with grease-paint whiskers, an Olympic gymnast, a dude with a potbelly dressed as a bumblebee. Harry shuts his eyes and backs away from the table.

Harry’s not paying very good attention, obviously he’s not, there’s just a lot going on that he could process if he cared to, that he could make sense of, perceive, if he wanted to, if he cared to involve himself in any of it. But all of this, the party and its din, its chatter, has no use for him. It has never understood a word that Harry’s said, so why should Harry, in a room full of strangers, suddenly want to tamper with it? This—this floaty and vaguely inebriated misery that Harry’s currently in—is just the way things work.

Harry is still moving backward when his head contacts a wall with a painful crack Harry is certain must be audible throughout the room. He stays standing exactly where he is, skull throbbing, and prays that everyone else is so wasted plus self-absorbed that they are either going to be uninterested in the event that produced this noise or assume that it is a result of their own Seminars-approved imaginations.

Harry groans, as waves of pain slosh ominously up the back of his skull. Stillness, he reasons, may be the only first aid available. There’s the additional unpleasant fact that Loudermilk’s university health insurance will cover only the body of Loudermilk, no matter what happens to this body’s rather more compound mind, a significant portion of which is housed in Harry’s dome.

This is when Harry hears, at his left, a low voice, a female voice: “That had to hurt.”

Cautiously, Harry nods. He feels tears form at the corners of his eyes.

“Wow. I bet.” The speaker is not exactly sympathetic, but at least her assessment is accurate.

Harry wants to turn and examine the source of these words, but he knows that motion will lead to additional cascading signals of trauma, so he stays put.

“Don’t move. Maybe I can get you ice,” the voice says.