So he extricated himself and found a use for his legs again. The hallway was a conduit, a tube, and he made his way down it, guided by the murmur of voices—or no, it was a single voice now, Lori’s—until he found himself leaning into another doorframe and peering into another candlelit room. Lori was there. On a mattress, propped up on one elbow beside Royce, an unzipped sleeping bag thrown over them both. Lori was reading aloud from a paperback—Steppenwolf; he recognized the cover, with its mysterious shadows and the figure of a brooding man, the thinker, the traveler, the one who goes deeper than anyone ever has and finds not enlightenment but nothingness—and Royce, his eyes closed and his head thrown back, was listening. Or not. His eyes were shut, his baldness gleaming in the candlelight. “‘Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business,’” Lori read in her strange canned whoop of a voice, “‘he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.’”

He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to clap, give her a little applause for her effort, but instead he said, “Storytime,” and she looked up and saw him there where she hadn’t expected him to be or anybody else either. Her face gave nothing away. Was she glad to see him? Irritated? Was this what she’d thought the third-floor experiment would be like—reading aloud to a deep-diving bald-headed thirty-something man while another thirty-something man, the one she knew best, stood looming in the doorway?

“Oh, hi, Fitz,” she said, without missing a beat. “You want to join us?”

When he didn’t say anything, she went on, the words coming in a nervous rush, which tipped her hand: she wasn’t made of ice, after all. “We were just reading to each other, like our favorite passages, Royce started off and then I got into it and it’s, it’s”—she waved a hand, searching for the word—“amazing.” She patted the bed beside her. “Come on. Sit down. Do you want to listen?”

It was a narrow mattress, full-size or maybe even a single. He could have squeezed in beside her on the floor and that would have been better than nothing, and he saw that she was wearing a sweater, her black turtleneck, which was all right, which was fine, but the sleeping bag was pulled up to her waist and whether she was wearing her jeans or not, her panties, he couldn’t say and because he couldn’t say and because he was drunk, he said, “I don’t know. Do you want me to?”

She shrugged. And Royce, responding to the sound of his voice from some faraway place, flashed open his eyes, looked directly at him and said, “Wow,” then closed them again.