The missing link in all this was Nancy—if anybody knew where she was, it would be Nancy. But nobody seemed to know where Nancy was either, and yet that was all right, that calmed him—you didn’t have to be Philip Marlowe to deduce that they’d gone off on an adventure together, a hike, clothes shopping, sharing a burger and milkshake at the diner or driving into Poughkeepsie. To the record store. For the Beatles, and who else now? The Beach Boys. The Animals—just try turning on the radio and escaping them. Eventually, he went up to his room, sat at his desk and tried to work, or at least read, but he couldn’t seem to focus on anything except the bloated green bottle fly trapped against the windowpane and buzzing angrily, futilely, frustrated by the wall of glass interposed between it and a hospitable place to deposit its eggs, and what was this world coming to when you couldn’t fulfill your destiny? Where was the next generation of maggots going to come from? Was nothing right? Nothing possible?

For a while he was the fly, and then he was inside the fly, an egg waiting to take nurture in a pile of dung, and Lori wasn’t there and the afternoon was as bright as the open door of a furnace and he understood that if work, the notion of it, the need of it, had ever meant anything to him, it meant nothing now. The bed was right there, not ten feet from him. It only seemed natural to stretch himself out on it, close his eyes and listen to the decelerating buzz of the fly till it fell away to nothing. When he woke it was late afternoon. He didn’t think of Lori, or not right away—he thought of brandy and soda in a tall glass and he went down to the kitchen (Hey, what’s up; Not much; You?), poured himself a drink and took it out on the veranda. There was no one there, nothing moving, not even the dogs, the day stuck like flypaper to everything visible and the sun stalled in the trees.