“The God is among us!” the falling man shouted out on his way down.

Then thump.

“Ouch!” someone nearby exclaimed, reflexively, as Max made contact. His thud accompanied by porcelain launched clattering across the floor. Porcelain bursting into smaller fragments. Skidding under chairs.

“Good Lord,” said a voice.

“Doctor!” called another.

And from far away in the rear of the mob blocking the door, the high voice of dear, sweet Milton, the channeler, asking anyone and everyone, “What happened?”

The bottleneck in the doorway broke up. A half dozen fellows cleared into the room. Curious others followed. More filed in to sit or stand gawking at Max.

“He freaked out,” Siegfried told Milton. In Siegfried’s callused hands were further remains of the busted lamp. Now the sculptor peered warily down at this glass he carried—as if it might somehow be hazardous, might hold the power to bring him harm. He explained to Milton, “Max tripped on a light cord and broke this light, no big deal, right, and Stephen and I were helping clear the mess. All of a sudden Max takes off chasing after people.”

“He tried to assassinate me!” wailed Hiram from over by the fireplace. Hiram heaved up an arm. He displayed his swollen hand. His face showed pain.

“Us, too!” chorused twins Winston and Charles in unison from their sanctuary behind a leather sofa.

By this time Barry’d made it to Max’s side and was kneeling in doctorly fashion, attending to the toppled man. Max lay flat on his stomach, not moving at all. Barry reached out to examine him; he pressed for heart’s cadence above Max’s collar. There was a hush. Shuffling of feet. A cough. A chair cushion sighed beneath somebody’s shifting. Silence, and in the silence that vaguely familiar, low whirring sound that had seemed to come, moments earlier, from the vicinity of the fireplace. What could it be. Oh, of course. It was Fielding with his eight-millimeter home-movie camera. He was zooming in, adjusting the focus, finding the light, getting everything on film.

“Give me a hand here, someone,” Barry said without looking up at anyone in particular.

Nobody moved. Eyes met eyes as the camera’s motor softly, metallically purred. The camera panned across floor and Max’s still back; its bluish lens pulled in tight over pair after pair of shoes nestled beneath cuffed and uncuffed trousers worn by men standing close. Fielding’s camera’s gaze passed right up those trouser fronts, up over the pleats and the plackets covering zippered or buttoned closures, up to check out the pockets stuffed with hands rammed down into them, playing absently with gum wrappers and balled-up money and keys and lint and change and receipts from purchases.

Playing, as well, with genitals. Our ninety-nine, not counting George’s, sets of underwear-enshrouded nuts.

“Put that goddamned thing down,” some brother or other told Fielding, who was at that instant raising his camera to take in, in steady lateral progression, our faces in sequence.

It was one of our everyday eternal moments of collective, mute indecision—in this instance over who would do what, if anything, to help Barry help Max.