He pushed the mower into the high grass and it sputtered and choked and spat out the two halves of a tennis ball in a slurry of yellow-green weed and he tipped back the mower to clear the blades, then dropped it and pushed again. He could feel the strain in his shoulders, but that was good, that was what he wanted—pain on his own terms—because otherwise he was left to face the fact that Joanie wasn’t there on the lawn with him and she wasn’t painting stones or planting flowers either. No, she was on the other side of the house, dressed in pedal pushers and a halter top and with her hair pinned up like the housewife of the month, making one trip after another up the stairs to their bedroom and down again to the car.

This process, brisk, efficient, up and down, the two suitcases, the steamer trunk, was the end result of a series of reversals and misunderstandings that had reached the tipping point just over a week ago. He’d been up early that day, long before the alarm, and he’d slipped out of bed without waking her and gone down to make himself a cup of coffee and sit by the phone, fervently hoping Dave Jacobs would call—he needed the thirty dollars—while just as fervently hoping he wouldn’t. Sitting there in the hall in the soft trembling light, sipping yesterday’s warmed-over coffee and lighting his first cigarette, he felt something come over him, not a break with reality, but a slippage, certainly a slippage, so that what had seemed so definite—wall, table, glass, cup, sun—was undermined by a whole new presence seething beneath it. He saw himself as from a distance, a partially dressed great ape with a tube of tobacco in one hand and the concentrated residue of a caffeinated plant in the other and knew that he knew nothing whatever of this or any other world. It wasn’t a flashback. It had nothing to do with the drug. It was a glimpse of something else, something numinous that underpinned the cardboard cutout that was the world he pretended to know, and it made him feel such a surge of joy it brought him up out of the chair, to his feet, to the window, to the light. The phone rang. The phone rang again. And again. And he let it ring till Dave Jacobs gave up and the house fell back into silence.