In the car on the way home—You sure you’re okay to drive? Tim kept asking, even following them out onto the frozen crust of the night before being waved off—he’d felt everything receding like a wave drawing back from a beach. The car was a coffin. Ice crunched under the wheels. He was moving, they were moving, and if he didn’t quite feel as if he was back in his body yet, his body knew what to do, gas pedal, brake, two hands on the wheel, navigate, stay in your lane, own the road. There were lights sparking at the margins of his eyes as if he’d been knocked unconscious and come awake again, but this was usual, explicable, nothing like the rhapsody of things that had danced through his mind all night long even as he clung fast to Joanie, his wife of thirteen years, his sweet sad beautiful fleshsack, and fucked her and fucked her as if there were no other thing in the universe but fucking. He thought about that, the streetlights the only lights now, the tires crunching, and realized he’d uncovered a universal truth, the universal truth, because if mind was everything and thought uncontainable and God a construct, then fucking—sex, reproduction, the generational reissuing of the body that allowed the mind to be—was the foundation of all there was.

A match flared. The smoke of Joanie’s cigarette rose up over the stale breath of the heater. He snatched a look at her, her profile, everything saturated in black but the glowing tip of the cigarette. “Well, that was really,” he began, the sound of his own voice strange in his ears and the words so elongated they didn’t seem to want to connect to one another in any rational way, “really, I don’t know—what did you think? You like it?”

She didn’t say anything. The night was a tunnel and they were right in the middle of it. After a moment she exhaled and brought the cigarette back to her lips. The tip of it brightened and a beat went by as the smoke circulated through her lungs and she exhaled again, then put a hand on his thigh to lean into him and pass him the cigarette, which tasted of wet tobacco and of her. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“I didn’t think it would be like that, I mean, I didn’t know, I didn’t—”

“Uh-huh,” she said.