“Wait. Be quiet. Four minutes, is that OK? Quiet for four minutes. Sit if you want. Don’t touch anything new.” I made it as close to an order as I could. “Do it!”

Quiet. Like a dream. Was four minutes enough? That was not the question. Nor the need. The need was to erase as much static as possible. Reduce things to their key elements. Then see how those items might march into the future along their diverging paths, drawing the multiplying paths as a child draws a tree, this branch takes us there, that branch the other way, each splits, and splits again. Where would actual futures actually go? Like a dream. A meditation. No path was absolutely perfect or foolproof. All had hazards. Nor was anything entirely up to us. The future had its own life. We would move. It would move. In concord or in conflict. In both.

“Well,” she said.

“Was I snoring?”

“No,” she said.

I didn’t respond.

She squirmed and complained, “Just sitting here is crazy.”

“Mind is like a mad monkey. Moving fast is crazier.”

“Are we having a Zen moment?”

“I live in Woodstock,” I said. “We have a lot of them. Most of our Buddhists started as Jews. We call them Jew-Boos. I prefer to call them Zen Cohens,” I said, looking down at Owen Cohen. We both started to laugh.

Back when I was in junior high in Brooklyn, I used to go to Junior’s, the restaurant, with my two best friends, and the three of us would order a banana split. This was way back when there were only four flavors of ice cream, ice cream sundaes were the ultimate extravagance, and the biggest and most excessive manifestation of that form was the banana split. Each of us would try to make the others laugh. Two of us would always dissolve into that hysterical laughter that makes it impossible to do anything but giggle, chortle, and cackle, while he who did not laugh, would sit there calmly devouring the remaining ice cream, whipped cream, fruit, nuts, and chocolate syrup.

It was that kind of laughter. Uncontrollable. Beyond reason. A release unrelated to the joke that launched it. It went on for a long time. It stopped several times as each of us tried to get our breath back, then started again, several times.

When the laughter ceased enough that we could speak, I said, “It’s at least seven minutes. The answer is, we don’t call the police.”

“Because?”

“If someone had heard the shooting and called the police, they’d be here now. At the very least, we’d hear the sirens, and even with the blinds down like they are, we’d see the lights flashing.”

“You’re sure? So soon?”