When I returned to the kitchen to set the coffee-maker for seven A.M… I saw a new message in a new circle of magnets. It read blue rose liar ha ha I looked at it for a second or two, wondering what had put it there, and why. Wondering if it was true. I stretched out a hand and scattered all the letters far and wide. Then I went to bed.

I caught the measles when I was eight, and I was very ill. “I thought you were going to die,” my father told me once, and he was not a man given to exaggeration. He told me about how he and my mother had dunked me in a tub of cold water one night, both of them at least half-convinced the shock of it would stop my heart, but both of them completely convinced that I’d burn up before their eyes if they didn’t do something. I had begun to speak in a loud, monotonously discursive voice about the bright figures I saw in the room—angels come to bear me away, my terrified mother was sure—and the last time my father took my temperature before the cold plunge, he said that the mercury on the old Johnson 8: Johnson rectal thermometer had stood at a hundred and six degrees. After that, he said, he didn’t dare take it anymore.

I don’t remember any bright figures, but I remember a strange period of time that was like being in a funhouse corridor where several different movies were showing at once. The world grew elastic, bulging in places where it had never bulged before, wavering in places where it had always been solid. People—most of them seeming impossibly talldarted in and out of my room on scissoring, cartoonish legs. Their words all came out booming, with instant echoes. Someone shook a pair of baby-shoes in my face. I seem to remember my brother, Siddy, sticking his hand into his shirt and making repeated arm-fart noises. Continuity broke down.

Everything came in segments, weird wieners on a poison string.

In the years between then and the summer I returned to Sara Laughs, I had the usual sicknesses, infections, and insults to the body, but never anything like that feverish interlude when I was eight. I never expected to—believing, I suppose, that such experiences are unique to children, people with malaria, or maybe those suffering catastrophic mental breakdowns. But on the night of July seventh and the morning of July eighth, I lived through a period of time remarkably like that childhood delirium. Dreaming, waking, moving—they were all one. I’ll tell you as best I can, but nothing I say can convey the strangeness of that experience. It was as if I had found a secret passage hidden just beyond the wall of the world and went crawling along it.

First there was music. Not Dixieland, because there were no horns, but like Dixieland. A primitive, reeling kind of bebop. Three or four acoustic guitars, a harmonica, a stand-up bass (or maybe a pair). Behind all of this was a hard, happy drumming that didn’t sound as if it was coming from a real drum; it sounded as if someone with a lot of percussive talent was whopping on a bunch of boxes. Then a woman’s voice joined in—a contralto voice, not quite mannish, roughing over the high notes. It was laughing and urgent and ominous all at the same time, and I knew at once that I was hearing Sara Tidwell, who had never cut a record in her life. I was hearing Sara Laughs, and man, she was rocking.

“You know we’re going back to MANDERLEY, We’re gonna dance on the SANDERLEY, I’m gonna sing with the BANDERLEY, We gonna ball all we CANDERLEY- Ball me, baby, yeah,t”

The basses—yes, there were two—broke out in a barnyard shuffle like the break in Elvis’s version of “Baby Let’s Play House,” and then there was a guitar solo: Son Tidwell playing that chickenscratch thing.

Lights gleamed in the dark, and I thought of a song from the fifties—Claudine Clark singing “Party Lights.” And here they were, Japanese lanterns hung from the trees above the path of railroad-tie steps leading from the house to the water. Party lights casting mystic circles of radiance in the dark: red blue and green. Behind me, Sara was singing the bridge to her Manderley song—mama likes it nasty, mama likes it strong, mama likes to party all night long—but it was fading.

Sara and the Red-Top Boys had set up their bandstand in the driveway by the sound, about where George Footman had parked when he came to serve me with Max Devore’s subpoena. I was descending toward the lake through circles of radiance, past party lights surrounded by soft-winged moths.

One had found its way inside a lamp and it cast a monstrous, batlike shadow against the ribbed paper. The flower-boxes Jo had put beside the steps were full of night-blooming roses. In the light of the Japanese lanterns they looked blue. Now the band was only a faint murmur; I could hear Sara shouting out the lyric, laughing her way through it as though it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, all that Manderley-sanderley-canderley stuff, but I could no longer make out the individual words. Much clearer was the lap of the lake against the rocks at the foot of the steps, the hollow clunk of the cannisters under the swimming float, and the cry of a loon drifting out of the darkness.

Someone was standing on The Street to my right, at the edge of the lake.

I couldn’t see his face, but I could see the brown sportcoat and the tee-shirt he was wearing beneath it. The lapels cut off some of the letters of the message, so it looked like this:

ORMA ER OUN I knew what it said anyway—in dreams you almost always know, don’t you?

NOV&tar SPERM COUNT, a Village Cafe yuck-it-up special if ever there was one. I was in the north bedroom dreaming all this, and here I woke up enough to know I was dreaming. . except it was like waking into another dream, because Bunter’s bell was ringing madly and there was someone standing in the hall. Mr. Normal Sperm Count? No, not him. The shadow-shape falling on the door wasn’t quite human. It was slumped, the arms indistinct. I sat up into the silver shaking of the bell, clutching a loose puddle of sheet against my naked waist, sure it was the shroud-thing out there—the shroud-thing had come out of its grave to get me. “Please don’t,” I said in a dry and trembling voice. “Please don’t, please.” The shadow on the door raised its arms. “It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar/” Sara Tidwell’s laughing, furious voice sang…

“It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round/” I lay back down and pulled the sheet over my face in a childish act of denial… and there I stood on our little lick of beach, wearing just my undershorts. My feet were ankle-deep in the water. It was warm the way the lake gets by midsummer.

My dim shadow was cast two ways, in one direction by the scantling moon which rode low above the water, in another by the Japanese lantern with the moth caught inside it. The man who’d been standing on the path was gone but he had left a plastic owl to mark his place. It stared at me with frozen, gold-ringed eyes. “Hey Irish!” I looked out at the swimming float. Jo stood there. She must have just climbed out of the water, because she was still dripping and her hair was plastered against her cheeks. She was wearing the two-piece swimsuit from the photo I’d found, gray with red piping. “It’s been a long time, Irish—what do you say?”

“Say about what?” I called back, although I knew. “About this!” She put her hands over her breasts and squeezed. Water ran out between her fingers and trickled across her knuckles. “Come on, Irish,” she said from beside and above me, “come on, you bastard, let’s go.” I felt her strip down the sheet, pulling it easily out of my sleep-numbed fingers.

I shut my eyes, but she took my hand and placed it between her legs. As I found that velvety seam and began to stroke it open, she began to rub the back of my neck with her fingers.

“You’re not Jo,” I said. “Who are you?”

But no one was there to answer. I was in the woods. It was dark, and on the lake the loons were crying. I was walking the path to Jo’s studio.