“Lydia, you’ve got to believe me,” Lawrence said.

“If the trailer’s a hallucination, how come you aren’t taking your eyes off the road?”

“Habit. Just habit,” he said.

“All right, for the sake of argument I’ll go along. But if it isn’t real and you know it, then you wouldn’t believe in it and it would all go away. Isn’t that how hallucinations work?”

“I don’t believe in it.”

“Hush. Don’t you yell at me, Larry. I’ve never heard you argue like this or raise your voice before in your life, much less over an esoteric point of philosophy.”

“But you believe it,” he cried. “And as long as you do, it’ll all keep happening. Besides, that old man, Oversoul Seven, is maintaining it for you too—”

“Why, how nice of him!”

Lawrence shut his mouth and went on driving. After a while he said, “You know how young you’ve grown. Look in the mirror. You look thirty. That should convince you, if nothing else.”

“There, that’s something else. What makes you think I’d be alive and getting younger if I were dead? If I were dead, I’d be a corpse, and I wouldn’t be getting anything. I wouldn’t dream, either, if that’s what you’re going to say next.”

“No, you aren’t dreaming—”

“Of course I’m not.”

He groaned.

“I just don’t understand what’s happening at all,” Lydia said. “I admit it. And how come you still look near sixty?”

“So you’d recognize me.”

“Honestly, Larry. That’s plain silly. You aren’t sick, are you?”

“If not, I don’t know why not. Lydia, I’m not sick. I’m dead. I’ve never met anyone so stubborn in my life.”

“Honestly, I’m getting fed up, Lawrence. I just don’t understand you at all. If we’re dead, prove it.”

“All right, I will,” he said. He thought about being young, tried hard to remember what he’d looked like. Beside him, Lydia shouted with astonishment.

“You did it, just like I did! You look fantastic. Oh, Larry, what on Earth have we hit upon? If scientists find out, we’ll be famous.”

Lydia’s tone caught him off guard, then he realized that her consciousness wasn’t quite … together yet. She wasn’t functioning with her complete reasoning faculties. He suspected she wasn’t because she was afraid that she’d discover the truth. And the truth was against her belief in the nature of reality. This was all quite new to Lawrence, too. He tried to figure it out.

“What will we have for lunch?” she said.

“Anything we want will be in the refrigerator, I suppose,” he said dryly.