He doesn’t offer his hand, and I don’t extend mine, but he opens the door that is decorated with beads, a small bleached animal skull and tin star and moon shapes that look like they’ve been hammered out of empty Coke cans. Inside is shadowy but the restricted ingress of light shivers dust motes so it almost feels as if a fine rain is sifting down. A woman with long silver hair – the woman in the video – stands in front of an open fireplace where half-burnt blackened logs litter the darkened space. She comes forward and offers me her hand whose every finger seems to wear a silver ring and as she stretches it towards me I hear the soft clink of her bracelets.

‘Welcome,’ she says. ‘You must be thirsty. A cold drink? Tea, beer … ?’

‘Give Mikey a beer,’ Donovan says. ‘He was always a hard-drinking man.’

‘You’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ I say, ‘but I’ll take a beer.’

He signals me to sit down and I take a place on a blanket-covered settee that has a dog sleeping soundly at the other end who goes by the name of Charlie. We are in a room that, like the building itself, is a mixture of many different and seemingly disconnected objects and styles sharing only a relentless shadowy shabbiness. On the walls at intervals are abstract paintings but with a range of other materials added to them – stones, dried seed heads, animal bones, emblazoned hand prints. In other places there are crudely made masks with missing eyes. One wall is covered with old yellowing maps but I can’t decipher where they depict. I feel disorientated again, not in possession of the calm self-confidence that I assumed would prevail, but when Melissa returns with the beers I affect a relaxed composure and make some small talk about my problems finding the ranch.

‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ Melissa says.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Donovan says. ‘We’re all being watched now. Every second of the day. Isn’t that right, Mikey?’ But before I can reply he continues, ‘Our phones, computers, everything we say, all being fed into rooms to be logged and analysed. You know something, Mikey? There are nights, when the world is sleeping, I can hear the voices singing in the wires, carried in the hum of electricity across the empty stretches of the darkness.’

‘And can you hear what the voices are saying?’ I ask, trying not to smile.

‘There’s no way of hearing the words because it’s so many voices. It’s the world’s babel, Mikey. A confusion of tongues. But they’re always there, spinning and coursing through the darkness.’

‘Maybe the voices come from inside your head?’ Melissa offers.

‘Sure they do – everyone’s got voices in their head,’ he says. ‘But these aren’t my voices, the ones I recognise, but a flow out of the universe, the world speaking in tongues.’

He sips his beer and stares into space as if contemplating something more important than me, and in those few moments I’m compelled towards a startled reassessment. I have come – foolishly of course – with an impression of the Donovan I knew in Saigon, seemingly fixed permanently in my memory, and yet already I am looking at someone a world away from those ingrained images. But it isn’t just about the passing of time, even though if he resembles anything at all it’s some New Age hippie, or even one of the original Haight-Ashbury crew trapped in aspic, washed up by the tide of history and beached in this nowhere place that seems to exist without recognisable coordinates or any connection to the person I once knew.