“In the sky there’s the llama and baby llama, toad, fox, partridge, and rainbow snake. Oh, rainbow snake! They keep the world in order, at least according to my mom. I miss her, Vivi. It’s unbearable. I miss you. I’m so sorry. I was wretched to you.”

Vivi didn’t hear him. Alfonzo sniffled in the rain.

“You know, the animals aren’t constellations, they’re anti-constellations. Rainbow snake! Dark spots instead of stars. They think the South Americans knew both stars and the spaces between stars.” He hiccupped. “We knew about dark matter so long ago. I say, of course ancient animals understood things! Why do we always assume that there’s been progress? It’s the modern animals who are regressing, forgetting. Progress is such an absurd fantasy. But I digress.”

They’d swerved from a main road onto a path that wound between indistinct dunes, black forms rising up against a black sky. His toes sank in the sand.

“Sky llama is very important because of the trip she makes each night. She descends from the mountains to the ocean, takes a big drink, and carries the water back to share gently in the form of rain. It’s a story of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. I mean, it’s true, or anyway it’s an accurate metaphor.” He blinked rain from his eyes. “Of course, when the colonizers came, they disrupted the transmission of those stories, called them blasphemous. We can’t even know how much the Europeans burned. I think of all the string records lost, the plant notes and woven wisdom. I wonder what these continents would be like now, if they hadn’t come. All that living knowledge lost. We’ve dug ourselves into ignorance.”

Vivi glanced at him. She’d pulled the drawstring on her raincoat so that Alfonzo could only make out the tip of her pointed nose. They came to a new fork in the path, but rather than taking either branch, she went straight on.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is”—Alfonzo giggled again to himself as the rain ran down his muzzle—“we’re all in the hole, but at least some of us are looking at the stars.”

Through the gloom Alfonzo made out they were coming to a wooden door in a wall of boulders. Vivi took out a key and opened it, and they entered with a rush of wind.

Alfonzo found they were sputtering beside a long indoor swimming pool in a room made of blue-gray stone. There were piles of towels and neon breathing masks and flippers. Vivi motioned for him to follow. She showed him to a dark bedroom.

27.

Alfonzo woke to the sun, consciousness’s accomplice, prodding his eyelids. He ached between his ears and felt the sour acidic pressure of undigested beer gas in his stomachs. He couldn’t remember falling asleep.