There came a point when he found himself alone on the couch. He was fully dressed, his tie still knotted, his wallet in his left front pocket, the car keys in his right. The candles had burned down to stubs. There were shapes scattered about the room, people there still—or some of them—but no one was moving. He was thirsty suddenly and so he pushed himself up through all the whirling lariats of color and made his way to the kitchen, where the light blinded him as if it weren’t a sixty-watt bulb but a klieg light fixed overhead. He couldn’t find a glass and so for a long while he just ran the faucet over his cupped palms and bent to drink, until finally—the waves receding—he heard a sound behind him and turned round to see Suzie there, Tim’s daughter, in a pair of flannel pajamas decorated with the figures of ponies and cowboys and prickling green cactus. She said, “Oh, hi,” and went sleepily to the cabinet to extract a glass, pour it full of clean white milk and shuffle back out of the room. He returned her greeting—“Hi”—but she was no longer there.

Sometime later—minutes, hours?—he made his way out the front door, into his car and down the street that took him to another street and another until he was home.

When he woke in the morning, Joanie and Corey had already left. The house was utterly still, the curtains drawn and the sun just barely making the faintest inroads. He was wrapped up in a tangle of sheets and a comforter that smelled of Joanie’s perfume—or no, the Noxzema she used to remove her makeup—and the instant he opened his eyes, he knew everything there was to know. Joanie, far from being angry, or demonstrating it anyway, had evidently tiptoed around him in the morning, and Corey, his model son, had gone his way without thumping around the living room and slamming the outside door behind him. There would have been dialogue, sotto voce: “Is Dad still asleep?” “Shhh, yes, he had that meeting last night.” Of course, when he’d finally got in it was past four in the morning, but he’d been stealthy about it, barely breathing, and who was to say he hadn’t come in at ten or eleven? Not from the meeting, which had been over by five-thirty, but the post-meeting, which—and the words were already forming on his lips—was really a kind of ad hoc strategizing session because the idiots in the Psych Department were all but shutting down the Psilocybin Project, can you believe it?