He awoke sometime later with a savagely sour taste in his mouth and a rush of blood in his ears. He felt not so much awake as ejected bodily from sleep; his mind felt beaten clean. Flyers, how he’d slept. He lay motionless, savoring the feeling, floating in it. He realized he’d heard voices downstairs, Gloria’s and someone else’s, deeper, a man’s; he thought it might be Jimmy or Ian or maybe Galen, but as he lay and listened he realized more time had passed, and the voices had gone away. How nice it was, simply to lie there. Nice and a little strange, because in fact it seemed to him that he should have gotten up some time ago; night was falling, he could see this through the window, the whiteness of the summer sky pinkening with dusk, and there were things to do. Jimmy would want to know about the power station, and who should ride down in the morning (though Sanjay couldn’t, at that moment, recall precisely why this had to be decided), and there was still the question of the boy, Caleb, whom everyone called Hightop for some reason, it had something to do with his shoes. So many things like this. And yet the longer he lay there, the more these concerns seemed distant and indistinct, as if they applied to someone else.

“Sanjay?”

Gloria was standing in the doorway. Her presence touched him less as a person than as a voice: a disembodied voice, calling his name in the dark.

“Why are you in bed?”

He thought: I don’t know. How strange I don’t know why I’m lying in this bed.

“It’s late, Sanjay. People are looking for you.”

“I was … napping.”

“Napping?”

“Yes, Gloria. Napping. Taking a nap.”

His wife appeared above him, the image of her smooth round face floating bodiless in the gray sea of his vision. “Why are you holding the blanket like that?”

“Like what? How am I holding it?”

“I don’t know. Look for yourself.”

The effort, imagined in advance, seemed huge, nothing he wished to attempt. And yet somehow he managed it, tipping his head forward from the sweat-moistened pillow to troll the length of his body. It appeared that in his sleep he had pulled the blanket from their bed and twisted it into the form of rope, which he was now holding across his waist, clutching it tightly with his hands.

“Sanjay, what’s the matter with you? Why are you talking like that?”

Her face was still above him and yet he could not seem to focus on it, to bring it fully into view. “I’m fine. I was just tired.”

“But you’re not tired anymore.”

“No. I don’t think so. But perhaps I will sleep some more.”

“Jimmy was here. He wants to know what to do about the station.”

The station. What about the station?