In the morning, the bus was gone. He woke alone, in a prison of latticework shadows, the sheets, which could have been cleaner, smelling of mold and sloughed skin and of Lori, who could have been cleaner herself. She went around barefoot all the time, her feet calloused, toenails chipped, patches of grayish dirt caught in the hollows of her ankles, and each morning she slipped into the same shorts and top she’d tossed casually on the floor as she climbed into bed and never gave it a second thought. When they made love he liked to kiss her there, on the roughened skin of her feet and toes and work his way up first one leg, then the other, till all he could smell was her, the way she was in her essence, but they hadn’t made love the night before. In fact, unless he was missing something, she hadn’t come to bed at all, and that bothered him more than he would have cared to admit.

He found a few people sitting around the kitchen, looking fragile. Ken was there, hunched over his elbows at the table and staring into a cup of coffee, Fanchon on one side of him, Charlie on the other. Paulette was standing at the sink, mechanically working her way through the teetering piles of dirty dishes and crusted utensils that were the daily detritus of communal life, but then Paulette liked doing dishes because doing dishes was therapeutic—or at least that was what they all told themselves. He’d heard the hoots and jagged laughter of the carousal the night before, the sacrament circulating, the two tribes feeling each other out, but he’d stayed away from all that, from the commingling, the joints, the martinis, from dinner even (he’d taken himself down to the diner for meat loaf, mashed potatoes and wax beans, then to the local bar, where he’d lapped up generic brandy and watched a fuzzy baseball game on the television in the corner till things had had a chance to die down back at the Alte Haus and he could lurch up the stairs in peace and pitch blindly into bed). He had no use for these people. They weren’t advancing the research. The fact was they were delegitimizing it with every sunburst of paint they sloshed over the battered fenders of their bus, every shriek of their amped-up music and every frame of film they took.

“So they’re gone, huh?” he said, going to the cabinet to pour himself out a bowl of cereal, the Cheerios, Froot Loops and Lucky Charms they kept on hand for the benefit of the kids, basic nutrition, and who could argue with that?

Charlie nodded.

“Thank God, huh?”

“They weren’t so bad,” Charlie said. “They just think differently, that’s all.”

“Right, like let’s put on clown suits and dance around for the TV cameras.”