What he learned from his week in the Bowling Alley was that nothing was absolute, not his attachment to Joanie or his son or the consciousness he’d inhabited all the way back to the oral stage of infancy. He learned that imprints matter and that theses (which, in a kind of internal mantra, he kept rhyming with feces) were just a distraction from the inner life, the only life that counted, and beyond that, from love. Erotic love and agape too, which were indistinguishable if you went deep enough. He came back to the Alte Haus and sat beside Joanie while Tim fished in the sombrero and paired Royce Eggers and Alice and he felt nothing but joy for them. When he went up to bed that night, back to bed, Joanie was there with him, but she felt strange, her body all wrong, the way she moved and spoke and how her consciousness ebbed and flowed without him. She’d taken the sacrament—it was Saturday night—and if she lay there in the dark all wrapped up in herself he didn’t know it because he was asleep.

In the days that followed, he gradually came back to himself, back to the world of splitting and stacking wood, scrubbing pans, reading, writing, typing, talking, listening to Indian music, piano trios and jazz (and the Beatles, the inescapable Beatles, who seemed to be twanging and thumping through one speaker or another throughout the house from daybreak to the hour of the wolf). He put gas in the car, went to the bank, the drugstore, the diner, worried over the money he could no longer contribute to the communal pot for food and other necessities—brandy, scotch, gin—and how he was possibly going to find it. He drank too much. His personality shrank. His son was a ghost and his wife a cipher.