“This cabin belongs to Lichtenstein’s uncle,” Sam went on. “It’s like a square teepee. It’s one room with a fireplace in the middle. There’s a hood over the fire to catch the smoke and a chimney going out through the roof. I guess the place was never finished. There was no glass in the windows and the door hadn’t been hung. We nailed up blankets and draped a blanket over the door. We didn’t really need windows because a lot of light came in through the cracks between the boards in the walls. Early in the morning when we woke up the room looked like it was underwater, these thin pieces of light floating around. At night, Lichtenstein would put his blanket down on one side of the fire and we’d put ours down on the other side. We had a kerosene lamp. They give a weird light. You can write by it, but it’s very hard to read.

“Also it was a kind of revelation to me to be in real woods. That place is on the mountain, but below the timberline. Maybe you’ve been in real woods before, but I’d just piddled around on Long Island. And even the trees on our place by the river were more like park than wilderness. I hadn’t realized…”

Sam patted at his clothes with his square hands. He pulled out a dark pipe and a pouch of tobacco.

“I’d go behind a bush to piss and take half an hour to find my way back. It was really something. Anyway, we ran into these crazy problems. Like we’d drive into town every few days or so to shop. But the place didn’t have a butcher, much less a horsemeat butcher, so we kind of went vegetarian. But that meant we had to buy canned dog food for Angelina because she never developed a taste for rice. It was peculiar to sit on the front step watching squirrels and rabbits and hearing deer crashing around and still have to feed your dog canned whale meat. Also, we were short on money. Carlotta’s parents had started writing to my parents, and they each found out that the others were sending us an allowance, so they both cut back pretty sharply. Lichtenstein didn’t have any money at all. But then he was getting us the place rent-free, so…”

Sam thumbed around in the bowl of the pipe. I glanced at Carlotta with her bludgeoned hair and scabbed face. Did she look in a mirror when she did it? To make sure the scars would be lined up?

“How did you come to change your name?” I asked. “Why Han Shan?”