“Group mind,” Tim was saying, addressing the table, “that’s what we’re going to get into here—and Mexico was just a foretaste of it. You remember Dick’s toe?”

She did—and she had to smile at the memory. It was in Mexico, back in early June, shortly after they’d got there, and everyone was gathered round on the patio one evening, just as they were gathered now, when Dick, coming up the steps from the pool, let out a sharp cry, followed by a volley of curses. He’d inadvertently stepped on a scorpion and the scorpion had stung him in retaliation. In the next moment, here came Dick, hopping on one foot and cursing still, till she and Paulette rushed to him and each took an arm to support him so he could limp into the torchlight and sit heavily in the midst of them. It might have been comical, a Laurel and Hardy moment, except that his toe, red as a cherry pepper, had already begun to swell and somebody—Royce—said that of over two hundred species of scorpions in Mexico, only the Centruroides are really dangerous, and she asked, “Well, what does that mean?” and he said, “They’re not going to kill you, most likely, but they do deliver a neurotoxin that can cause convulsions—and a serious inflammation of the pancreas, which is no joke. He really should have a doctor.” And then, to Dick: “Did you get a look at it? Was it a pale brownish color?”

“You kidding me?” Dick said, clenching his teeth against the pain. “I barely saw the thing.”

Somebody went for ice and a bar towel to use for a tourniquet and Corey and Tommy Eggers got a flashlight from the desk and went looking for the thing, as if it could possibly matter. Susannah telephoned for the doctor, but the doctor was off somewhere delivering a baby, and in the end they all just sat around watching Dick’s face and the bright swollen afflicted toe till Tim said, “Why not just close our eyes—all of us—and think it away? Focus, people, just focus. On Dick’s toe and on dissolving the negativity this little—what is it?, arachnid—has brought into our circle. Think healing thoughts, radiate outward, we are all one, Om.”

By the time they went to bed, Dick was up and about—nearly paralyzed with tequila, maybe, and walking with a limp, but the crisis had passed, and when the doctor finally did come the next morning, Dick just waved him away.

“That’s what we’re capable of,” Tim said. “And if we could do it then, in Mexico, with all those nasty little black shirts breathing down our necks, think what we can accomplish here—”