He remembered Lori peeling an orange, the way her fingers slid in under the shield of color to isolate and annul it, and he remembered the chessboard and the bowling alley in the basement, how she perched over the ball and the pins clattered and they kept score and battled for dominance and how it came to him that the game was a metaphor for life itself, the ball a planetary sphere hurtling through space and the pins emblematic of the flesh, of mortality, of the roar and crash of annihilation. It was bleak. It was naked to the dregs. And it wasn’t a game, most definitely not a game.

Joanie’s voice, his wife’s voice, then Susannah’s, new voices altogether that flitted and chased each other round the room, no sense yet, just sound. Then he was up and moving and the world was spinning back at him, the big black ball slicing across the gleaming strip of the alley under the lights that were too bright until it landed with a thump in the gutter and he had hold of her hand, Lori’s hand, and she was moving too.

There was sunshine, right there, right on the front porch, and it was painful, so they fished out their sunglasses, and it was only then that they let go of each other because they needed both hands to pat down their pockets, dig out the glasses and fit them over their ears. Joanie, her eyes lit like holy fire, said, “Jesus, you look like shit. You both look like shit.”

He didn’t know how to respond to that because he wasn’t quite back in his body yet and wouldn’t be till he’d slept through the rest of the morning and the afternoon and found himself crouched over the carpet in the library with a sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other, waiting for Tim to dip his hand into the hat while the monkey screeched from somewhere upstairs and the next couple, the next voyagers, waited to discover who they were.

Chapter 2

2.