He expressed enormous admiration for her for having given birth, which he described as something mystical. He was sweating and gray. He could not talk well. I gave him fifty dollars, which left me with twelve. He promised to pay it back in a week. His red cowboy hat hung limply down his back from its string, forgotten.

I waited a while. The coffeehouse paid me once a month. After eleven days had passed without a word from Sam, I spent forty-five minutes in the corner grocery deciding what to spend my last half dollar on.

I bought chocolate and went back up to my room to eat it. It wasn’t very filling, so I walked over to Sam’s house to see if he was back.

The door had Xs on it, made with white chalk; they must have been visited by the gypsies. The stairs creaked beneath the ragged carpet. The kitchen radiated cold. Clancy seemed to have given up cooking. The cats were gaining ground. The whole house seemed like it looked, like it shouldn’t have been standing.

Sam was glad to see me.

“I came back,” he said. “We went to a party and Belle left with another guy. She always said she’d go her own way. I guess I’m supposed to be glad.”

His shoulders were back, but he was standing like the weight of his own body was a little too much and he was giving out at the knees.

“Anyway I brought back some peyote. Have you ever tried it?”

At the same time, we both noticed smoke was coming from the little kitchen. Sam rushed in, flung the oven door open, and snatched out a pan.

“They’re mushrooms, see? You dry them and crush them. I got a mortar and pestle from the chemistry lab. And here are the capsules.”

He dumped the little buttons out of the pan to cool.

“I will keep the burned parts. They’re probably still good. The Mexican Indians use them in religious rituals, but I hear they make you sick to the stomach if you take them straight.”

We sat on the floor and traded off grinding the pestle. We delicately tapped the gray-green dust onto a page of notebook paper and guarded it from drafts.

“I really think I ought to start meditating seriously. Things have been happening that I can’t account for. I’d like to just sit still for a while and let history catch up with me.”

“Did you ever have a girl before Belle?” I asked. “Seems like you don’t talk about it, but you don’t go around with that frantic freshman gleam in your eye, either.”