“Do you even believe in God?” She was sitting up now, her legs crossed beneath her, her voice echoing as if she were talking from the bottom of a very tall and very deep urn. “Or anything? Beyond this?” She swept her hand to take in the room, the cold ash of the fireplace, the morning at the windows.

“I believe in breakfast,” he said.

“Don’t talk down to me,” she said. “Do anything, but not that.”

“I’m not talking down to you. I’m just—it’s early, that’s all.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? We’ve only got a week—we can’t waste it.” She drew the comforter up to her throat. It was very still. A framed picture on the wall concentrated the light. There were beams, high ceilings, vases of dried flowers. “So do you believe in God or not?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, what about you?”

“These drugs are entheogens,” she said. “Did you know that? Do you know what that means?”

“Of course I do—I’m the one who should be telling you.” He was beginning to feel irritated—rinsed clean, as after any session, but ready to move back into the world, move on, recalibrate. “I’ve been with Tim from the beginning, or almost the beginning, and you’ve been here, what, a couple of months?”

“Don’t talk down to me.”

“I’m not.”

She shut her eyes, as if in concentration or prayer, and began reciting: “‘I never saw a moor, / I never saw the sea; / Yet know I how the heather looks, / And what a wave must be. / I never spoke with God, / Nor visited in heaven; / Yet certain am I of the spot, / As if the chart were given.’”

The house was utterly silent. The fruit sat untouched on the table, free of imprints, simian or otherwise. He needed to get up, needed to piss, start the fire, see about coffee, but there was something here that hadn’t been here before and the weight of it held him in place.

She smiled at him then and it was like a leap into another dimension. “You want to go deep?”

“Now? Again?”

Her eyes were scorched, cored out, the blackest eyes, the deepest. “Think about it,” she said, “—we’ve only got a week.”