It might have been how hungry I was after days of meager food, or how tired I was after herding, how torn up by all the newness, or his soft, urging, repetitive words, or something remaining from his fingertips against my brow, but I began to feel a tingling in my fingers and toes. I was no longer cold or hungry on an unfamiliar mountain farm, I was awestruck under a wild star-smeared sky. Dice’s voice was an incantation, guiding me down a gravel path. “You are passing a stream,” he whispered, “and now you are on the edge of a quarry.” I could see the quarry on the Eno in Durham, green-flooded and eternally deep. “You stumble, and begin to fall down the sheer side, against the rocks.” I could feel the immense pain in my ribs. His voice was a hush. “Now you disintegrate. You sublime into particles and loft into the air. You become one with the whole world.”

I came to in a gust of cold air, and my eyes seemed to reattach to my brain. My ears rang. We had stopped to sit on rocks by the crushed lanes of a vegetable garden. Half of it was covered in white sheets, insulating against the unseasonable cold. Collards and kale showed faintly like huge black flowers. I felt slightly embarrassed. Dice said, “Sometimes you are so fully seen that you disappear.” Later, on the edge of sleep, I thought this through and did not understand it, but at the time it was a revelation, a key: if only we all knew this, there would be no war, no warming crisis, and no extinction.

He stood. “Look at you,” he said. “So open.” He laughed. I was glad he laughed; I was tired of being so serious. “Let me tell you about the family rules. Not my rules,” he said. “I don’t have rules. Rules from the people who live here.” I could just see the white dogs in the distance, wearing each other out running up and down the slopes, snapping at the spaces between each other’s mouths. We began to walk again, but it felt different, as though I were sailing over the ground, frictionless. He said, “I know Bay has your wallet, and I know there’s nothing in it. But utopias often fall apart from lack of funds, so new arrivals sometimes choose to donate to the family.” I was trying to keep track of each new piece of information. I tripped—a branch, or a bone—and he pulled me up; it was like being winched up by a crane, irresistible. He cupped my elbow in his hand.