In his dream, Owen is back in Middle Falls, moving between his house on Partridgeberry Road and his central desk at E-O Data and the little retreat room, with a DEC PDP-8 and a CRT and a desk and telephone and an imitation-leather sofa, that he rigged at one end of the old arms factory on the Chunkaunkabaug. Between these stations of his life lay a network of village streets and vendors—the three restaurants, the two banks, the Woolworth’s, the dry cleaner’s, the shoe-repair shop, which was beginning to do a nice business in hippie-style leather sandals and clogs. The town, pre-CVS, had multiple drugstores, the oldest of them, Amory’s Pharmacy, on the hill, still holding some back shelves of patent medicines with faded Victorian labels and displaying in its window the two traditional oversize vials of emblematic liquid, iodine-red and litmus-blue, that since medieval times have advertised pharmacological healing. On another, more personalized level of the net were the family dentist; the doctor, taciturn and unsympathetic with any but the most dramatic complaint; the pediatrician, for the children’s many minor ills; the eye doctor, a tall bald Jew who winced with back pain when he leaned over to administer his pupil-dilating drops twice-yearly; and, at an annual appointment, the tax accountant, a pointy-nosed mole of a man who waved his hands in agitation when Owen threatened to confide information he didn’t want to hear. There were the schools—the public schools until Gregory turned thirteen—which involved periodic teacher conferences and recitals, playlets, choral performances, and team-sport events, usually in the rain. And there were committee meetings—the Chamber of Commerce and the School Building Needs Committee for Owen, the Garden Club and the Downtown Betterment Society for Phyllis, along with her madrigal group and yoga classes.