Complete silence. George held his breath. Josephine nervously scratched her stockinged leg. Window-Christ looked the most astonished of any of them. He started to speak, faltered, began again. “I’m not sure. I think my name is Monarch. Or I think it could be. Now and then I think to myself as this person.”

Monarch? Seven gulped. Of course. It was possible that, with psychological bleed-throughs, such a thing could happen. Josephine opened her mouth to speak, and Seven’s suddenly commanding glance stopped her. He said, “All right, Monarch, can you help Window or Christ?”

George and Gregory Diggs were so fascinated that they couldn’t take their eyes from Window’s face.

George muttered, “You mean he’s somebody else, too?”

“Shush,” said Gregory, urgently. “Listen.”

“I am Window and Christ,” Monarch said, in a distant voice. And suddenly Window’s face did have a “someplace else” look. “Or I was. Christ is a Window who heals.” Now the voice was hesitant, as if the words were coming from far away and had to be translated; and yet, again, each individual word was clear and oddly transparent—so transparent, Seven thought (too late), that they could all fall through the voice if they didn’t watch out.

No one was completely sure exactly what happened next, although Seven had a very good idea, but it was one that even he had trouble accepting.

First of all, there were changes in perception. The things in the environment remained the same. Yet to George, Josephine, Gregory and Seven, each detail in the restaurant seemed suddenly more emphatic, more itself, brighter, more separate on the one hand, yet impossibly more a part of the entire environment. George happened to be looking at a glass sugar bowl, for example, and his eyes widened as it seemed to attain a different reality than it had only the moment before. The sugar glistened—tiny dazzling crystals, each individual and somehow perfect, mixed in with each other; each crystal touching another, flowing into another while retaining its own sparkling apartness. Besides this, the reflections on the sugar bowl itself became almost dazzling, seeming to belong to the bowl, to stain the glass, while simultaneously dancing above or even within it. George felt as if he were being hypnotized.

Diggs had been looking at the toe of his right shoe. Suddenly he saw it as he never had before, as if it was the most significant thing in the world, simply because it existed. The shoe seemed planted in time, in space, solid leather resting on the wooden floor. Yet it also seemed composed of thousands of specks of light, each separate yet making up the entire structure; lights interlacing and dancing within themselves, and moving with the reflections from the restaurant lights, which also seemed somehow to belong to the shoe.