She wasn’t in her room. He verified that, both audibly and visually, then slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind him. The room showed hardly a trace of her, as if it were a cell in a convent. She kept her clothes in a blue nylon backpack propped up against the wall inside the closet next to a cheap straw hamper for her laundry, and no, he didn’t sift through it for the scent of her—he wasn’t that far gone, or at least that’s what he told himself. The bed was neatly made. There were a few books, poetry mostly, on a bookcase she’d constructed of cement blocks and three naked planks of pine. From beyond the window, which didn’t afford a view of the side lawn or the circus tent or the smoke of the barbecue, he could hear Maynard’s trumpet rising over the blur of the other horns and the eggbeater of the drummer’s snare and tom-toms. At some point, he couldn’t say when exactly, the exhilaration he’d felt all day began to seep out of him and he pulled back the comforter and lay down on the bed. He didn’t sleep. The drug wouldn’t allow that. He just lay still, staring at the ceiling as the ceiling went through its permutations, maps there, cities, roads, trunk lines, spur lines, housing developments, trees, canals, tunnels, bridges, New York Central, B&O, and plaster, plain opaque plaster that didn’t want to give up its secrets except in the stingiest little packets.

Then the door swung open and Lori was there. All she had on was a bathing suit. Her hair was wet and she clutched a towel in one hand, as if she’d just come up from the pool. She didn’t seem to see him, or not at first, and she dropped the towel at her feet and went straight to the window to shut the blinds, her movements jerky and uncertain, as if she were dancing with an unseen partner. She was muttering to herself—or singing, maybe she was singing. Or reciting, that was it—she was reciting one of her poems, though the words were piling up so fast he couldn’t make any sense of them. He called her name then, softly, and she spun round on him in a panic, her eyes like holes drilled in her face, and said one thing only: “No!”