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Lewis knew about AA, and not only from the meetings at detox. He’d had to go to six meetings after he got that DUI. He’d heard a few good stories about people shooting dope with famous musicians, stuff like that. Once, a leader had called on him to speak—or rather, to “share.” Would he like to share? No, he wouldn’t, but he didn’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings, either. He told that meeting he was impressed by the rigor with which they were trying to solve their problems. He had no doubt that their efforts would pay off. When he finished talking, the man next to him thumped Lewis on the shoulder. “Keep coming back,” he’d said.

“I’m not crazy about AA,” said Lewis.

Red shrugged. “We do have one requirement, and knowing it might save us both some time. The only requirement is a desire to stop drinking.”

Lewis had heard that phrase before, in the AA rules. His first impulse was to say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s just forget it then, but his present options were beginning to compute. Upstairs. Nuthouse. Remote drunk farm. He felt compelled to cry out against the mounting absurdity. “I’m just not so convinced I need any of this. It feels like a big mistake, as if I’ve been caught up in the system, like I’ve found myself in a tomato soup factory, only I’m not a tomato. I’m not a tomato, I tell all the machines, but they say, Well, you’re on the conveyor belt, you’re in the boiling vat—as far as we know you are a tomato.”

Red chuckled. “Oh, hell,” he said. “You can get out of here like that. Call a friend, anybody—that girl you were thinking about. Have her pose as your sister and sign you out. They won’t check. They just want a signature.”

Lewis focused on a few square inches of the brown plaid couch and thought about who to call. Sam, his philosophy professor, would probably come, but in a year or two, Lewis would be asking him for recommendations. He was a brilliant student, but I did have to bail him out of the drunk tank. As for the girl who’d been to Camarillo, she might not be so pleased to hear from him. He wished he knew the name of that girl at the party, the one with the bucket-of-milk face. And there was Sergei, a Russian physicist whose papers he edited, but with all the vodka Sergei swilled, Bobby would probably take one whiff and lock him in the rubber room.

Lewis couldn’t think of anyone else, anybody he wouldn’t be too ashamed to ask. Fear set in at a low hum. Dark winged things flickered in the corners of his eyes. Or maybe he was just glimpsing Red’s fingers drumming with impatience. Down the hall, someone was cheerfully whistling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Lewis reached for his knapsack and stood up. “Let’s blow this pop stand.”

Lewis’s abrupt lurch upwards startled Red Ray, and it practically made Lewis pass out. His blood still wasn’t moving at normal speed, and the room burst into bright squiggles.

“Easy now,” Red said, grabbing Lewis’s shoulders. They swayed, and briefly it seemed that they might go down together. Red recovered first, then righted Lewis. “I take it,” Red said, “you want to come with me.”

LEWIS slept all the way to Round Rock and through much of his first week there, or as much of it as he could. He was awakened for meals and also for AA meetings, where he stayed conscious long enough to say, during check-in, “Lewis, alcoholic.” In detox he’d learned it was easier to go with the flow than explain to a room of the newly converted that he personally was not a member of their tribe.

He shared a room with Carl, the snoring virtuoso. Carl was a high-school biology teacher; he had a wife and three towheaded little girls whose pictures occupied the nightstand between his and Lewis’s single beds. A binge drinker, Carl kept getting arrested with underage hookers he picked up at a bar in Oxnard called the Joy Room. After arrest number three, Carl’s wife had thrown him out of the house and he had come here, to Round Rock, presumably to wreck Lewis’s run on sleep.