He was down on his knees, probing beneath the broken seat with a screwdriver, when he felt a tremor run the length of the veranda and looked up to see Ken Sensabaugh standing over him with a cold beer in each hand. “I thought you could use this,” Ken said, handing him a beer and easing down beside him.

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Hell of a party, huh?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. Tell you the truth, I could use a little less party and a little more purpose—whatever happened to that? Remember the way it was in Mexico? Or Newton? Remember Newton?”

No one wanted to admit there was anything wrong—they’d come too far for that—but there was a dawning sense that they were losing sight of what really mattered. More and more, they seemed to be going outward rather than inward, the parties become a raison d’être in themselves, as if they’d created all this for the benefit of celebrities, fashion models and Village types, as if they weren’t a community of brothers and sisters anymore but a kind of performing troupe—and the weekend seminars, which had started up again, were a case in point. And worse, if this was an experiment, if it had anything to do with the discipline of psychology, then they had to admit that increased dosages, both in terms of frequency and potency, were proving problematic. Tim’s son—Jackie—seemed barely able to speak anymore and he’d stopped going to school altogether back in May, Paulette was exhibiting signs of clinical depression and if she was taking incrementally larger doses of the drug it wasn’t for enlightenment but escape, no different from what people were doing with Dilaudid and heroin on the street corners in Harlem. Joanie was on hiatus. And Lori had gone so deep inside herself nobody could fathom what she was thinking—or even, half the time, what she was saying.

“I don’t know,” Ken said, “I guess it’s a work in progress.”