Fitz hadn’t moved, though everything was so heavy inside him now. He said, “This is crazy,” and his voice cracked. “Look at yourself,” he said. “Look at me. I mean, what are you doing?”

Her eyes were open but whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t him. Finally she said, “Living. Living, Fitz. On the planet Earth. Or no, that’s not right: the planet Millbrook.” She smiled then, her big smile, the one that transported her from the plane of the conventional to the exalted. “How about you, Fitz? What are you doing?”

Chapter 4

4.

A June morning, the air heavy as a wet sock and the sun hanging unencumbered overhead. He was right out in the middle of it, mowing the lawn, aware only of the roar of the mower, of the way it sparked and rattled when it chewed up a handful of pebbles or took a long wheezing breath over the hidden twigs and branches the kids were supposed to have raked up and tossed on the pile for the solstice bonfire. Everything in his field of vision had taken on a hard white edge, as if traced in light, the sun glorious and reigning supreme, the trees in freeze-frame, the house a stage set. He was wearing tennis sneakers, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt he’d sweated through an hour ago—and his sunglasses. They were the essential piece of equipment here. He’d taken a microdose after breakfast—everybody had—to get him through the task at hand, to enliven things a little as the twigs jumped and the mower roared and the sky bore down on him.

What they were doing, collectively, was sprucing the place up with two goals in mind: the renewal of the weekend seminars and the big blowout Fourth of July party they were planning for some two hundred guests, which was to feature a barbecue pit, clams on the half shell and Maynard Ferguson’s fifteen-man band set up under a white circus tent on the front lawn. Tim and a few of the others—Charlie, Alice, Paulette—were crouched over the rounded stones lining the long driveway with wet brushes and buckets of white paint, trading Tom Sawyer jokes. Ken and Fanchon were overseeing the weeding and replanting of the flowerbeds and Suzie, Richard, Ronald and a couple of the other kids were taking clippers to the mad growth of shrubbery that was threatening to engulf the house till Tim had begun to joke it was like the Beast’s castle in the Cocteau movie, which, as Charlie pointed out, was a whole trip in itself.