For the past two and a half weeks he’d been focusing on the preparations in a way he never had before. There were trips to the supermarket and the liquor store, the acquisition of paper plates, plastic utensils, charcoal briquettes, the rental of folding chairs, Canadian fireworks purchased on the sly, acrylic paints for the mandala he was decorating his bedroom door with and the mural he was contemplating for the ceiling over his bed, and there was always a car available and somebody who wanted to tag along. If he was sleeping alone, if Lori was elusive and back to spouting poetry and he was going deep more times than he could count, that was all the more reason to plunge in here. Joanie was at her parents’ house, at the shore, and Corey was there with her as if none of this had ever meant a thing to them. He’d spoken to her exactly once, long-distance, for exactly three minutes, and it hadn’t been a pleasant experience. The Castalia Foundation was $50,000 in debt according to the latest accounting and nobody was supposed to use the phone except for local calls, and Paulette, her face set, had let him know as much. He’d had three minutes of expressing himself in full sentences while Joanie replied in monosyllables, and no, Corey couldn’t come to the phone because he was out somewhere with his fishing pole. Love you. Yeah, love you too.

He was wandering the halls and drifting out across the lawn and back again, a coffee mug of brandy and soda in one hand, a cigarette in the other, enjoying himself—enjoying the spectacle—when Maynard and his fourteen bandmates started up with “Blue Birdland,” a tune he’d heard before and disliked on principle, a flabby tune, a tune that had nothing to do with modern jazz and everything to do with what was unhip and uncool and tied to a dying era, and he realized the afternoon was getting on and it was time to drop his tab of acid (as people were referring to it now, verb and noun) so he’d be soaring for the fireworks.