At some point he became aware of a noise behind him, a faint rustling—one of the dogs, the cats, the monkey?—and turned round to see Lori standing there, perfectly still, just watching him. She was wearing cutoff blue jeans and one of the embroidered peasant blouses the women had got for a song in Mexico, which somebody must have given her—or she’d appropriated. Because she was like that: if she saw something she wanted, she took it. No matter, because it looked good on her, a canvas for the deep tan of her face, throat and limbs. She didn’t say hi. She didn’t quote a poem. She said, “You see what kind of day it is out there?”

He was at the window, everything shining, and he’d just gone out of his body without the assistance of Albert Hofmann or Tim or anybody else. “I do,” he said, and then he said it again, because this was the glory and the kingdom too: “I do.”

“You want to go for a walk? Before everybody gets up and spoils it?”

“Sounds like a plan,” he said, and she crossed the floor to him, took his hand and led him out the door and into the soft warm glow of the morning.

The grass was high, in need of cutting, and it held the dew so that his cuffs were wet through before he’d gone fifty feet. She had no such problem—she was barefoot, bare-legged, the blades of the grass swiping at her ankles and calves like brushes at a car wash, and she held fast to his hand, the first contact they’d had in weeks, which only made him float all the higher. Neither of them said a word—they didn’t have to. They were out in the morning, just that, and it made so much sense to him he wondered why he hadn’t been out here every day since the sun had come back, but that was complicated in a whole host of ways—Beacon, Dave Jacobs, late nights, late mornings. Joanie. His fecis.

Where were they going? Toward the lake. Of course, the lake, which was a sacrament in itself, spread out before them in a glaze of light. Soon they were out of the deep grass and on a path just wide enough for two that led down to the dock where the rowboat was tethered, and the minute he saw it there he knew what they were going to do as clearly as if it had all been planned in advance, as if lakes and rowboats had been created for just this moment. “You want to go out?” he asked, and she just nodded, let go of his hand and skipped down the length of the dock to drop into the stern of the boat and sit there looking up at him as he paused to roll up his pants and kick off his shoes.