She grimaced. “I keep buying him flea collars, but did you ever try to keep a flea collar on a monkey?” She reached up and pulled the animal down from her shoulder, set it on the mattress and gave it an admonitory pat on the hind end. “Now shoo,” she said. “Go spread your fleas someplace else. You hear me?” Another pat, this time a bit more forceful. And then, as if it were a huge spider, it scampered straight up the wall, across the top of the wainscoting and shot on up the banister to disappear in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

He was seeing colors, which was usual, and he could feel the brandy as a complementary force, putting the brakes on the wheel cranking round in his brain, if ever so tentatively. “You didn’t have to get rid of him,” he said. “I mean”—and now he was just talking to hear himself—“he wasn’t bothering anybody.”

“No,” and she was laughing again, “just his fleas were.”

“They chew their fleas, you know that, right? Groom each other, bite them between their teeth? Nobody likes fleas.”

She gave him the full force of her smile. “The poor fleas. They’re just misunderstood.”

“Right,” he said, nodding vigorously, and he was going to say “Do you want to start the Millbrook chapter of the National Flea Protective Society or should I?” when a wave crested inside him and the words washed up on the shore, each syllable broken and fragmented like so many shards of porcelain, which really didn’t seem to matter because he wasn’t looking into Flora Lu’s eyes anymore—he was focused on an indistinct clump of shadow all the way across the room. Lori was part of that clump of shadow. He’d heard her voice—high, tinny, as if she were breathing Freon instead of oxygen—and now he heard it again and it made him rise to his feet in a confusion of pinwheeling shapes and colors and go right for it.

Lori was down on the floor, slumped in one of the low cutoff chairs, a blanket thrown over her legs. Her face was the face he saw every night when he closed his eyes, the face that had been revealed to him in the meditation house in a way no other face ever had, not even Joanie’s, not even Corey’s. He knew her. He knew her better than anybody, and now he was right there beside her, sinking into the floor, asking—and this was a routine between them, or had been—“You see God yet?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and she wasn’t looking at him but at the hunched-over shadow beside her, a shadow with a face, a guy—a boy—“we see Him all the time, right, Toby?”

Toby, predictably, said, “Right.”

“And what does He tell us? He tells us, I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah.”