The meditation house was warm, hot even. The fire had been stoked, candles lit, there was a bowl of fruit set out on the coffee table and a joss stick burning in the ashtray beside it, steadily converting itself into a fine pale ribbon of ash. He unbuttoned his coat and looked round him for a place to put it, a hook on the wall, a closet, the back of a chair, but that wasn’t really working for him so he just let it drop from his shoulders to the floor and eased himself down on the couch, facing the fire. She was there somewhere, Lori, just out of his range of vision, but he didn’t turn his head because all at once he was fiercely busy deciphering the message of the flames that kept grabbing and releasing the belly of the log laid out there across the andirons that weren’t solid inanimate things anymore but beings in themselves that never winced or complained no matter the heat or fury of the fire. At some point she appeared beside him, not on the cushions but on the floor, her legs drawn up to her chest and her back propped against the edge of the couch, and she wasn’t wearing the socks or shoes she must have put on for the trek across the yard. Her feet were right there before him, naked and glistening in the firelight, an understated miracle of skin, bone and tendon, her toes gripping the carpet as if she were high up in the canopy of a tree, and where was the monkey when they needed him?

Neither of them said a word. Worlds collided, glaciers calved, civilizations marched across the landscape erecting temples and tearing them down and starting all over again. He heard voices though no one was speaking, watched the universe shrink to the size of a hard black rubber ball he could hold in one hand and then spit itself back out again. Then the images became the ghosts of images, the night deepened, the candles flickered out, the fire settled. And when he woke, at first light, she was curled up asleep on the couch beneath a knit comforter, her head resting on his shoulder as if they’d spent the night in a narrow seat on a Greyhound bus in the middle of nowhere.

He was trying to extricate himself without waking her when her eyes blinked open and she asked, “Did you see him?”

Her pupils were dilated still. She was inches from him. “Who?”

“God. Did you see God?”

He shook his head. He needed to piss, needed to find a bed—and what time was it anyway?