He saw Ken’s face then, the knowing eyes and ear-to-ear smile, the shaggy crew cut he’d grown out in imitation of Tim, the height of him, the power, and he saw Fanchon too, with her everted lips and her soft pink nipples he’d sucked till they were stiff and hard. He couldn’t be jealous—they were beyond jealousy here and besides which it wasn’t Joanie he wanted or Fanchon either, it was Lori, only Lori—but he was. “Come on,” he said, and he was on his feet now, holding her, pressing her to him, “I did miss you. And I want you. You’re my wife.”

“You don’t want me,” she said, and she pushed away from him. “You want her, that little slut, that child, that infant—isn’t that right?”

He could have said they were one big happy family, could have insisted it was a passing thing, the effect of the drug and nothing more, could have denied the accusation in no uncertain terms, but he didn’t. He didn’t say a word.

In the afternoon, in the wake of that scene and the living death of the work spread out on the desk before him, he pulled on his thermal underwear, slipped into a pair of jeans, a sweater and his hooded parka and went out for a walk. It was unforgivably cold, the twisted black branches of the trees rattling in the wind, the day low-ceilinged and sunless, a mockery of the memory of Mexico. He needed to clear his head, or that was what he told himself, but after his week in the meditation house, his week with Lori, the phrase had no meaning—he wasn’t even sure if he had a head anymore. A skull, yes, calcium-rich bone with an integument of skin and hair pulled up over it, but the brain inside didn’t seem to be his anymore, or not solely his. The wind blew. The snow crunched. The branches rattled. He walked, simplest thing in the world, one foot in front of the other, and before long, without intending it or even thinking about it, he was deep in the forest, where the snow, crusted and degraded, clung haphazardly to the trunks of the trees and the trees massed and thinned and massed again.