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“Did you or did you not assign me an article about Albertine?”

Tara said, “Just set me up and let me get out of here.”

And then Bertrand, the guy who doled out the habitable spaces in the armory, he got into the act too. Standing in the doorway, covered in grime, like he’d just come from his job at a filling station, except that as far as I knew it was just that Bertrand was an addict and had given up on personal hygiene, he gazed at me with a make-believe compassion.

“Kevin, listen, we’ve given you chances. We’ve looked the other way. We’ve been understanding for months. We’ve made excuses for you. We pulled you out of the gutter when you were passed out there. But people living here at the armory are afraid to walk by your apartment now. They’re just afraid of what’s going to happen. So where does that leave us?”

And even Bob, my early source, was standing behind Bertrand, hands on his hips. Trying to push past the throng of accusers, to get to me.

This was a moment when thinking carefully was more important than hallucinating. But because of the extremely dangerous amount of Albertine that was already overwhelming both my liver and my cerebral activity, reality just wasn’t a station that I could tune very well. What I mean is, I went down under again. Right in front of all those people.

Soon I was hanging out on some sun porch in a subdivision in Massachusetts. All the houses, in whichever direction I turned, looked exactly the same. I bet they had electrical fireplaces in every room. It was like CAD had come through with a backhoe, bulldozed the whole region into uniformity. I could remember each tiny difference, each sign that some person, some family, had lived here for more than ten minutes. Serena’s folks had a jack-o’-lantern on the porch. And over there was a guy with one arm mowing the common areas. That intoxicating smell of freshly cut grass. The sound of yellow jackets trying to get in through the screen.

Serena was reiterating that I had said something really scary to her at school today, and she needed to know if I’d said what I had said because of the panic thing. Were my symptoms causing me to say these crazy things, and if so, wouldn’t it be better if I told someone what was happening, instead of carrying it around by myself? She knew, she said, about really serious mental illnesses, she knew about these things and she wanted me to know that I would still be her friend, her special friend, even if I had one of those mental illnesses, so I was not to worry about it. And now would I please try to explain?

“Listen, I know what I said, and there’s no reason you should believe me,” I tried, “but the fact is that the only reason I can explain to you about the future is because I’m in the future. And in the future I know how much you mean to me. In the future, this four months that we’re close, they keep coming back around, again and again, like that day we were in the Boston Commons. It keeps coming back around. I could tell you all this stuff about the future, about New York City and how it gets bombed into rubble, about drugs, about the epidemic that’s coming, I could tell you how strung out I’m going to get. But that’s not the point. Somehow you’re the point. Serena, you’re the trompe l’oeil in the triptych of the future, and that’s because you know that guy. Paley. So you have to believe me, even though I probably wouldn’t believe me, if I were you. Still, the thing is, you have to tell him what I’ve told you. Maybe none of this will happen, this stuff, I sure hope not. Maybe it will all turn out different, just because I’m telling you. But we can’t plan on that. What we have to plan on is your telling Paley that he’s in danger.”

“Actually, Kevin, what I think we need to do is talk to your mom.”

The jack-o’-lantern on the porch, of course. It was autumn, which was bad news, which meant I was on the comedown, and badly in need of a boost, and the whole scene was swirling away into an electromagnetic dwindling of stories. Serena was gone, and suddenly instead of being back in my room at the armory,