By now Tweety could get along without Lydia monitoring all of her motions, even though she fell down often and didn’t really walk properly yet, and Lydia stared across the fields, wondering idly if it was time for supper. She caught herself with a start; It wasn’t she, but Tweety, who was hungry and anticipated the mutton chops that Bianka had promised earlier in the day. On the one hand, Lydia thought, it was definitely exciting and fun … delicious … to anticipate the chops with Tweety—she corrected herself, as Tweety—and yet, well, it was also just as pleasant to be aware of Tweety’s feelings without identifying with them all the way.

As she sat, musing, she smoked, and she was just reaching for another hallucinatory cigarette when a young man appeared, looking rather surprised. She recognized him at once from the Buddha affair, but it was obvious that he considered her a complete stranger. By his clothes and manner, Lydia knew that he was from the twentieth century, and she sprang up with pleasure. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m dreaming and I must be traveling out of my body,” Will said a bit smugly. “Anyhow, in answer to your question, I’m life-hunting, though why I’m here particularly is beyond me. Where are we?”

“Seventeenth-century Denmark,” Lydia said.

“Great. That figures. I was looking for someplace exotic. What a dreary landscape this is.” Will frowned and glanced around rather disdainfully.

“Why, it’s lovely here,” Lydia protested. “I lived in the twentieth century once, too. That’s where you’re from. I can tell.”

“Wait a minute,” Will interrupted. “Then you’re dead!”

“No, you’re not born yet,” Lydia replied with a touch of anger. “Anyhow, you’re lucky to be talking to me at all. I’m on a recess, in a way. Actually I’m living my life as that child over there.”

Will was appalled. “Why, that’s like living backwards,” he said. “I mean, you’re an adult now, and you’ll have to be a child again.”

“That’s what happens,” Lydia said, thoroughly enjoying the company. She related to Will as a contemporary, smiling at him as a young woman at a young man.

He scowled at her. “Smoking is bad for your health,” he said.

She started laughing. “I haven’t got any health at all,” she said, between gasps. “I mean, I haven’t got a physical body in usual terms. I just take this form. Tweety has a body, but then, she doesn’t smoke. Besides they don’t have real cigarettes like these in the seventeenth century anyhow.”

“You’re absolutely and completely mad,” Will shouted.