“Not me,” Ed said. “I passed.”

“Now I’ll need to make another,” his wife complained.

“Not for me,” Phyllis said. “I feel funny.”

After what seemed quite an interval, Ed said, “You need air. Let’s go walk around.”

“How funny?” Owen asked.

There seemed to Owen to be a curious double quality to time in the room: very slow when people spoke, yet speeded up in the silences, with many hurried pulse beats crowded into seconds.

Phyllis refined her statement: “I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, and asked the air, “Who would have thought this country would wind up dropping napalm on a lot of Indochinese peasants and children?”

“That’s no worse than what we did to the Indians,” Stacey said.

“Is that all they are?” Owen asked Phyllis, as if at home they didn’t have time to exchange views, which in a way was true. “Or are they also Viet Cong, who are burying village chiefs, head-down, and trying to force a grotesque style of misgovernment on the South Vietnamese?” “Good question,” Ed admitted.

“Poor Owen,” said Stacey; her face seemed to swim in her hair as she sat on the floor at Owen’s feet, beside the glass coffee table, through which he could see one of her deeply tanned knees. “He’s such a patriot. He reminds me of the true-blue men in Texas.”

Phyllis stood, with a tumult of cloth and audible breath that brought back to Owen how sizable she was, what a catch she had been. “I need air, I guess,” she said, “and, Owen, we both need to go home and rescue the babysitter.”

“Right,” he agreed, but with no intention of moving. Life was too good here, with this hopeful new couple, in high bourgeois comfort. He wondered where the joint had gone and hoped it wasn’t burning a hole anywhere. He put the glass of weak whiskey to his lips and sucked, the glass’s rim making a cool brittle arc in his mind.

Ed had stood, laboriously, in delayed synchrony with Phyllis. There was a discussion among them as opaque and irrelevant to Owen as consultations among his parents overheard when he was three or four. He could have listened and understood, with the half of his mind that was clear and cold, but his attention was turned to the other half, which was experiencing an extraordinary happiness befalling him, permeating him like the fog of neutrinos that pour by the trillions out of the sun, even during, as now, nighttime. This was bliss: the slick texture of teak under his fingertips; the black and red and clay and cactus-green Navajo zigzags of thick wool under his eyes; the very grain of wood in the broad bleached floorboards, testifying to cycles of growth within a distant spruce forest; the clean white plane of the ceiling meeting the white-painted bricks of the Mervines’ exposed chimney; the horsey scent of Stacey’s damp hair, not far from where he was sitting; the soft, pecking sounds of adult conversation; the very feel of his awareness along the length of his body, as if consciousness were a silken robe tapping his skin wherever he chose to direct his attention; the enclosed air of this room, this parallelepiped clipped from the trillions of cubic feet of domestic space in America, snugly but freely full of human love, his for his wife and for his partner and now his partner’s partner, whose deeply tanned knee no longer showed beneath the glass coffee table because she had moved closer to his Danish armchair. These details, animate and inanimate, arrived on his neuronal structure with that lost purity, that flat enumerative wonder, of childhood illness, when one is confined to bed and relieved of every duty but the one to exist, to survive, to continue to be. How could he have so long mislaid so basic a treasure, this dimension of bliss in things?