She sat on a blanket with Fanchon, Alice and Susannah, sipping a beer and shading herself with a parasol Carlos had provided, and though she felt a bit queasy, whether from the heat or the excesses of the night before or a touch of turista, she didn’t know. The party had kept on accelerating and accelerating, as if the earth were a big baseball rocketing high into the deepest reaches of space, and what she’d done or where she’d been was a mystery, though she remembered Corey and Nancy popping up out of nowhere wearing big grinning lizard faces and the Mexicans throwing up pyramids block by massive block till they were all buried under them and that she’d gone up to the lifeguard tower with somebody—Ken—and watched the full moon scrawl its icy script across the face of every wave in existence. Persistent waves. Waves that never stopped.

But this was baseball. All right. Fine. She liked baseball well enough, so that wasn’t the problem. Fitz liked it too. And Corey lived and breathed it. She’d wanted Corey to sit with her but he preferred the company of the other kids, who settled in on their own blanket up the right-field sideline, where they were well supplied with Soldado de Chocolate, Naranja Crush and the taquitos one of the village women was selling for what amounted to a nickel apiece. The beer only seemed to make her stomach clench, but she finished the first and had Corey go get her another—another round for everybody—because she was here and this was their last day and she needed something to make her forget about the trip back to a place where she’d have to face the uncertainty of no job and no apartment all over again.

The visitors were up first. Tim led off himself, and while he cocked the bat over his shoulder and made a parody of menacing gestures, he never swung at all and wound up with a walk. The same thing happened with the second batter, Fitz, and then Ken, who was up third. Nobody swung at anything, but you could feel the intensity of their concentration, which Alice said was almost Zen-like, and here was another proposition: Did LSD enhance athletic prowess? Did it eliminate the psychological element and bring the randomness of the world under control? Maybe. Maybe so. Tommy Hitchcock—twenty-two, lean, boyish, quick as any lizard—hit the first pitch presented to him over the center field fence for a grand slam and suddenly she was on her feet, leaping and dancing and cheering as if she were in high school all over again. Baseball, they were playing baseball in Mexico, and wasn’t that something? Alice shrieked, “Go, Crimson!” and everybody mobbed Tommy when he cruised across the plate.