He didn’t say anything. He was shivering now too. He had to get up and start a fire and he had to make coffee and eat something—had Paulette or whoever dropped off their breakfast yet? Was that coffee he smelled? Or just the idea of it?

“Aren’t you going to join me?”

“It’s too early,” he said.

She pulled her feet up on the couch, slipped them beneath the cushions and arranged the comforter over her legs with a brisk snap of her wrists. “You didn’t answer my question. I mean, really? Because isn’t this what we’re supposed to be doing out here together? Pushing the limits, right? Making breakthroughs?” She paused, ran a finger across her lower lip. “And screwing. We’re supposed to be screwing too, aren’t we?”

“Yoni and lingam.”

“Right,” she said, and laughed.

He picked up the bottle and rattled it like a maraca and she laughed again. It was a strange moment in a strange cold house with this shivering girl right there beside him, spirit incarnate, her lips compressed and her eyes never leaving his face. He positioned the bottle over his palm, shook out a pill, lingered for just the fraction of a beat, and shook out another.

At the end of the week they both emerged, hand in hand. There was no welcoming committee, no applause, just Joanie and Susannah, who’d apparently delegated themselves to go bring them back and prepare the house for the next pair, to be selected that night. There had been a knock at the door, which he hadn’t answered. Then the door had opened and there was Joanie, there was Susannah. He was sitting beside Lori on the couch, the morning at the windows again, and there was a tray in the front hall with breakfast on it, right next to the tray from the previous night and the previous afternoon and the previous morning. He’d been fasting—they both had—but it wasn’t through any conscious choice because they weren’t anchorites in the desert and they weren’t abnegating the flesh, just the opposite. They were essential, clamped together, lock and key. He had no intimation that the week was up or that they hadn’t been eating or sleeping or that there was a world, a material world, outside the door of the meditation house.