‘I most certainly am,’ boomed Larry, in the magisterial voice of the doctor. Betty squealed with delight, while T. Bone, stretched out on a recliner chair, the demiurge on his leather cloud, smiled beatifically, and made certain weary movements with his hand, as though blessing them.

Larry trailed Ranch across the drive to the garage. The air temperature had reached into the eighties, and the light, surrounded by shadows of impenetrable blue, trembled on the corners of windows, on hub-caps, even on the white flowers of the jasmine that had twined high around the drainpipe at the corner of the house. In the bathroom of 2714, Ranch had been favourably impressed by Larry’s still-athletic physique. He was softer than he had been, of course, was beginning to round out, so that in a few years, he thought, he would start to look almost womanly, but his body, despite his increasingly attritional lifestyle, had remained astonishingly loyal. He had depended on it so long, the excellent physical basis of himself, that it was hard to imagine how he would continue if it should fail him. He dreamed sometimes of a catastrophic collapse, some disaster like the amputation of a leg, or face cancer, or elephantitis. He did not believe he was someone who could ‘deal’ with such an event, the type who would ever be ennobled by suffering. At thirty-six (was this not one of the defining neuroses of the age?) he had begun to fear getting old, and could not share Kirsty’s vision of benign elders dispensing wisdom to the young and pottering around, glamorously weathered, like Fonda and Hepburn. He thought he would make a wretched old man. But he also wondered whether he might not be a completely different person at fifty-five or sixty, and that what seemed so complicated now, the great Rubik’s cube of moral dilemmas, might, from the top floor of his life, seem to have been nothing but the fruit of a temporary confusion, and that he had spent his prime like one of those circus clowns who, on all fours, can give the impression of two midgets wrestling together.

Ranch unlocked the padlock on a steel side door into the garage. The air inside was surprisingly chilly. There were no windows. He flicked the light switches. ‘We like to keep it simple,’ he said.