Now, with a glass of brandy in one hand, a joint in the other and the drug beginning to channel its familiar messages through his veins and into the gaps between his neurons, he began to feel almost normal, even if his fingertips were glowing like flashlights and people’s faces took on a metallic cast, as if they’d been cast in bronze and arrayed round the room like so many masks in a gallery. The lights were low, the music strictly jazz (Coltrane reinventing the soprano saxophone on “My Favorite Things”), Joanie in a huddle with Fanchon, and Lori nowhere to be seen, but Flora Lu . . . right here before him, sitting on a mattress pushed up against the near wall, the monkey asleep on her shoulder. He didn’t say Hi or Mind if I join you? but just eased down beside her, his back braced against the wall and his legs splayed out before him. “Thank God it’s not rock and roll,” he said, indicating the big KLH speaker not two feet from her, and she acknowledged the sentiment with a quick dip of her chin and a smile that melted the bronze right off her face and brought all her beauty rushing to the surface.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“Charlie’s worse than the kids. It’s all he talks about, the Beatles-this and the Beatles-that—”

“The juvenilization of America. Ed Sullivan. Can you believe that? He used to have Maynard on, real music, not this, this crap.”

She was vehement, and in her vehemence, she awakened the monkey, which leveled an evil look on him and immediately sat up and began furiously scratching its crotch before settling back down again, its monkey face nestled in the silk of her hair and its tail lazily twitching at her left breast.

“Charlie used to be all about jazz,” he offered, “a real aficionado, you know? Not that he still isn’t, it’s just this teenage music seems to have taken over his brain like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers—you think he’s had his body snatched?”

Flora Lu liked the idea. She laughed. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “that explains it all—they’ve all had their bodies snatched, especially the Beatles, and who?—Ringo.”

He was thinking about taking her hand. There it was, curled casually beside him on the mattress, and he had an urge to experience the feel of the skin there, to engage it, stroke it, a companionable urge that had nothing and everything to do with the ascent of the drug, but then he felt the faintest tickle on the back of his own hand and saw that there was a flea there, a monkey flea, poised to bite him—or not just poised, it was biting him. He slapped at it, but it evaded him, making a mighty backward leap into its protectress’s lap. “Your monkey has fleas,” he said.