The drug was coming up on him and if he’d begun to feel dissociated from her, from the shadows of the room and the grid of light trapped in the slats of the blinds, her voice brought him right back. This was a party. They were having a party. And here she was, at long last, right where he wanted her. He got up and tried to wrap her in his arms—to hug her, just to hug her—but she pushed away and he saw her face then, the look there, and it was the look the divinity student had given him back in Boston, Julius, the one who’d come unhinged and run out onto the street. That gave him pause. Sobered him. Lori was having a hard time, Lori was flipping out, hurting, hurting badly, and Walter Pahnke and his syringe were hundreds of miles away. “It’s okay,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t, and he reached out for her a second time, fighting through the pulsations of the drug that cut everything in half and then halved it again, but she dodged away from him, tore open the door and ran out into the hallway, screaming, “No! No! No!”

There was a couple just outside the door, leaning against the wall sharing a cigarette, a hepcat with a fringe of goatee and a skinny girl in a white beret, and the guy said, “Hey, what’s going on?” and tried to grab hold of his arm, but Fitz ran right through him, down the hall and across the front room with everybody standing around levitating cocktails and beers and somebody—Charlie—calling, “Where’s the fire?” Lori never hesitated. She darted through the crowd, shot out the front door and down the length of the porch till she was out on the lawn and past the tent and Maynard and the seismic heave of the band building to climax, and Fitz didn’t hesitate either. He was afraid suddenly, deeply afraid, great jarring blocks of the world thundering down before him, and what if she got to the lake, what if she tried to swim, what if the water took hold of her and never let go?