"Any note?" Paddy wondered.

I shook my head and breathed deliberately, trying to regain composure before Scott. "No note. She burned a letter in an ashtray, but they couldn't tell who it was from. The envelope was on the table, though. It was still intact."

"Who was it from!?" he said, but actually it was more of a demand.

"Marcus said he didn’t know. He changed the subject when I asked him about it, and I've never had the heart to ask again," I said. "But it's fairly obvious, isn't it?"

There was a long silence on the other end. Then the music came beating back through his system -- a Big Band sound, or maybe Broadway show tunes -- it was hard to be sure.

"I'll see you Tuesday morning, won't I?"

"See you then," I told him, and hung up. I could tell just by looking that Scott had been adopted into the Tribe in my absence, christened by St. Leary himself. "How're you doing, pro?"

"Screaming down the vortex!" was his thunderous reply. His eyes were moist, as if he were bearing witness to something beautiful, and his natural wonderment made me mostly forget about the phone call.

For the next two hours, he sat on the couch, saying very little, his face contorted by a grin that appeared to be permanently sculpted into his facial elastin, while I sat in my reclining writer's chair with the scuffed wooden arms, about five feet away, combing the grey fissures of my addled brain for any number of weird anecdotes that I knew would make us both howl like jackals until sunrise ushered in its own harsh realities.

At four-thirty, he began to level out, displaying signs of confidence. "Let's go upstairs and look at my stuff now," he said, his eyes glittering like neon signs.

I was only too happy to get up and unlock my spine, which seemed to have atrophied suddenly. We walked up to Scott's bedroom, which was heavily decorated in a sort of Hindi-Japanese: a lot of bamboo and pots and woven textiles, which trapped the lingering scent of incense that he explained he burned ritually each morning before leaving the house. His artwork, mostly airbrush portraits of women, reminded me of Nagel, only less deliberate. They were exquisitely good, and I told him so.

"Why don't you show these things?"

He shrugged and kicked at the ground with a socked foot. "I tried once," he complained, "but my art teacher in junior college hated them. I think she was a lesbian. She just couldn't stand anything I did. That's why I dropped out of school. That's why I'll never get promoted," he said, and I caught him before he wound himself into an irrescuable loop.

"I've got a friend whose parents own two galleries in Scottsdale. I guarantee you can unload five of these a month. This stuff’s great," I said, admiring the alien cobalt-and-rose of one of the pieces.

We sat upstairs, listening to Kate Bush for the rest of the night, talking about Scott's erstwhile-girlfriend, who used to share his very bedroom, but who was now suffering from candida, a bizarre aversion to yeast that he claimed transformed her over a period of months from a mild, sex-crazed thing of utter perfection into a screeching nut. He showed me a couple topless photos he had taken of her with a Polaroid the previous summer, and I had to agree she looked like an angel.

At 5:45 AM, the door of the other bedroom opened quietly and a bearded man in his early-forties popped out, clad in leather riding gear. "See y'," he said, in a clipped Welsh accent, and walked down the stairs and out the front door. Out in the carport, we heard the sound of a motorcycle sputter to a start, then roar away.

"We don't see much of Jeremy," Scott shrugged. "I moved in five years ago, and he's been here about three-and-a-half. He's kind of like you were. Are . . . I guess," Scott muttered, realizing that before midnight, he had never spoken ten words to me, aside from the interview, and at nearly dawn, we had become brothers in some strange, psychedelic way. "Were you ever going to get to know me?" he wondered.

I shook my head. "I took a weird job last month: as a technical writer for an aircraft company that does work with the Defense department. It's a ten-hour shift, and we're not allowed to leave the hangar. Everyone eats at the cafeteria. But it really works out to about three hours of work and six hours of writing time. I come back here and stay up all night typing those yellow pads into the hard drive," I said, pointing downstairs, at where a pile of handwritten yellow paper lay next to my computer. "But then you came downstairs tonight and fucked everything up."

We both laughed, but mine was more from nervous exhaustion. It had been more than thirty-six hours since I had slept, and my heart was starting to fibrillate. "I've got to crash." I saw the pained look on Scott's face, but there was no other way. "You'll make it. It's been fun," I said. "We'll have to do it again soon." Then I walked downstairs and dismantled my liveaboard sofa and went comatose on the flimsy mattress.

I didn't see Scott for the next few days, but when I did, he told me that he had seen me that night, after the LSD had taken hold, as some kind of tribal figure whom he called King Storyteller, and that the perfect spectrum of colors trailed out of my hands when I spoke, and that it had been one of the most entertaining nights of his life. He also said that he had worked through all of his problems with his family after I had gone to bed, and had even forgiven his father for molesting his younger sister; something he thought he would never be able to do.

That Tuesday, Paddy said he had discovered what was wrong with my fiction; it was something I said on the phone the night he had called so late. "The kitchen sink," he chuckled. "Throw it in. You're too spare. Add the goddamn kitchen sink. If that won't do it, I give up."