This time, though the drug took hold of him with the same propulsive rush of color and image as if a movie were playing in his head at double speed—two movies, three—he wasn’t afraid, or not primarily, but just . . . expectant. There was the first phase, people laughing, everything convivial, hilarious, Fanchon leaning forward to light a cigarette and the smoke spinning her head round on her shoulders as if she were riding a carousel—as if she were a carousel, a human carousel, whirling and whirling—and he laughed at the sight of it, laughed aloud, and Fanchon laughed right back at whatever she was seeing in him, and Alice . . . there was Alice way out there at the end of the couch that was like the far end of a pier, and she was laughing along with them.

Then it was the second phase, the phase that could go either way because the laughter died and the shared experience too and everybody went deep, the drug like a firm hand at the back of your neck, pushing you deeper, and all he could think about—all he could see—were the depths at the bottom of the lake back at home after he’d left the diving board and driven himself down into the cold and the blackness, ever deeper, yet it wasn’t mud down there, not today, but a whole glittering gilded city, faces in the windows, carnival time, a cheer rising—for him, for him!—and then he was coming up for air and there was a woman right there beside him, flesh to flesh, arm to arm, thigh to thigh, and she was exquisite, insuperable, soft and hard at the same time, and he was feeling her, running his hands over her, and she was feeling him and she parted her lips and found his tongue and he went diving all over again.