Time elongated. Nobody was standing anymore. The pitcher of martinis on the counter went untouched, as if everybody’d had their fill of that particular form of stimulus, and when he glanced up at it—he kept glancing up at it, he couldn’t help himself—it seemed to glow like a crystal ball, as if the flame of the candle Tim had set beside it were in the liquid itself now, in the gin, transfusing it with light. “You see that?” he murmured, sitting there beside his wife in their dark, dark corner and reaching out a finger to point to it, where it was whirling now, not on the counter or of the counter, but in the space above it, ginfire, whirling.

“What?” she said and turned her face to him, her eyes gone huge as goggles.

“Ginfire. The martinis.”

Bach’s voices braided themselves, separated, braided again.

She laughed. “I’m not thirsty.”

“No, no,” he said, “that’s not what I mean—I mean, look at the pitcher, don’t you see it?”

“I see it,” she said.

“You see what it’s doing?”

“Yeah,” she said, “oh, yeah,” her voice soft and distracted, barely there at all. “And the puppet,” she said, “you see the puppet?”

He didn’t see the puppet, not that he didn’t want to, but now all at once every ordinary object in the room came alive just as if it had a heart inside it pumping blood—highboy, bookcase, Persian rug, rocker, armchair, the nautical scene hanging over the mantelpiece—everything stirring, buzzing, fracturing the room with light, and he said, “I think it’s coming on,” and she said, “Yeah.”

Time must have passed—time always passes, the globe spinning through its diurnal cycle, elliptical orbit, axial tilt, clocks ticking, Big Ben, horology, Greenwich mean time—but he had no more sense of it than if he were locked deep in a dreamless sleep. Except that this wasn’t sleep but its opposite, a kind of hyper-alertness that set all his senses on fire till the MJQ replaced Bach and became his heartbeat all over again and every note had its own particular and individuated color shining through it and Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso, and he wanted to tell her about that but he was pre-verbal now or maybe post-verbal. If he was speaking, if he could have spoken—or even wanted to—he would have said ineffable, would have said discontinuous, would have said wow.