“Some other time.”

But Douglas would not take no for an answer. He opened the door and pulled Hook out of the car onto the grass parkway with him. “You got to see this,” he insisted. “Maybe it’ll help you understand me.”

Hook pulled his arm free. “Why should I want to understand you?”

“Know thy victim. It’s an old Socratic principle.” Douglas lurched toward the front porch.

“You’re so drunk you can hardly stand,” Hook told him.

“Then help me. Come on, Hook old buddy. I need your help.”

Not knowing why, Hook followed him up the porch stairs and stood waiting while Douglas leaned on the out-of-order doorbell for a time and then began to pound on the door with his fist.

“Would you believe it?” he asked. “My home. Where I grew up, where Mom served tea and oatmeal cookies. Now it’s just tea.” He gave Hook a conspiratorial wink.

Hook did not respond.

“Where are the snows of yesteryear, huh?”

And Hook heard himself intone, “Où sont les neiges d’antan?”—heard it and knew he was drunker than he had thought.

Grinning, Douglas shook his head. “Some kind of shitkicker you are. Parlez le français and everything.”

The door opened and a young woman in a sack dress stared out at them, a girl who could have been a twin of the one whose lover had overdosed in Cold Spring Canyon. This one did not even ask them who they were or what they wanted but simply opened the door further and turned away, zombie-like, admitting them into a world of incredible filth and chaos. There was an attempt at dissident decor—battered art nouveau posters advocating Maoism and fornication and grass; a prayer rug; a mobile made of inflated condoms—but to Hook it was all negligible, overmatched by the cloacal stench that hung in the air like lines of drying fish. There was food on the floor and fecal matter and dogs and naked squalling infants importuning three youths—two boys and a girl—rooted in front of a small Sony TV as if it offered not the tepid black-and-white images Hook saw there but some resplendent riot of color and sound and significance. They did not even look up.

“He’s upstairs,” the girl said, and headed back toward the kitchen, where food was burning on a stove.

Hook asked Douglas who was upstairs, and Douglas shrugged.

“Let’s find out,” he said.

As they went up the stairs Hook felt the alcohol reach some vital center in him and spill over, so that as he came to the second floor it was as if he had arrived at a different level of consciousness as well, a level at which time began to move past him like a speeding passenger train at night, a series of windows flashing past, all dark and dimly seen except for a special one every now and then which would burst brightly in his mind and remain, floodlit, a tableau.

He remembered being blocked with Douglas in a narrow corridor by a neat, cleanly dressed young couple who smilingly railed at them that Jesus had died for their sins and that only by accepting this fact and by purging their lives of alcohol and drugs and by loving their fellow man could they hope to attain the kingdom of God. Hook kept wondering if the couple lived there, and if they did, how they felt about the graffiti in the place, especially the poster that proclaimed Jesus sucks. Then out of nowhere a filthy bearded smiling youth appeared and began to blow pot smoke on the couple, smiling as they smiled back at him, everybody happy and loving and unreal.