I looked at the chair, but didn’t sit on it. “You were going to give me a little hit first.”

“So I was.” He produced the brown bottle, considered it, then handed it to me. “Since we can hope this will be your last, why don’t you do the honors?”

He didn’t have to ask twice. I took two heaping snorts, and would have doubled down if he hadn’t snatched the small bottle away. Nevertheless, a window on a tropic beach opened in my head. A mellow breeze wafted in, and I suddenly no longer cared about what might become of my brainwaves. I sat down in the chair.

He opened one of several wall cabinets and brought out a pair of battered, taped-up headphones with crisscrosses of metal mesh over the earpads. He plugged them into the amp-like device and held them out to me.

“If I hear ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ I’m taillights,” I said.

He smiled and said nothing.

I put the headphones on. The mesh was cool against my ears. “Have you tried this on anyone?” I asked. “Will it hurt?”

“It won’t hurt,” he said, not answering the first question at all. As if to contradict this, he gave me a mouthguard of the type basketball players sometimes wear, then smiled at my expression.

“Just a precaution. Pop it on in.”

I popped it on in.

From his pocket he took a white plastic box no bigger than a doorbell. “I think you’ll—” But then he pressed a button on the little box, and I lost the rest.

 • • •

There was no blackout, no sense of time passing, no discontinuity at all. Just a click, very loud, as if Jacobs had snapped his fingers beside my ears, although he was standing at least five feet away. Yet all at once he was bending over me instead of standing beside the thing that wasn’t a Marshall amp. The little white control box was nowhere to be seen, and my brain had gone wrong. It was stuck.

“Something,” I said. “Something, something, something. Happened. Happened. Something happened. Something happened, happened, something happened. Happened. Something.”

“Stop that. You’re all right.” But he didn’t sound sure. He sounded scared.

The headphones were gone. I tried to get up and shot one hand into the air instead, like a second-grader who knows the right answer and is dying to give it.

“Something. Something. Something. Happened. Happened, happened. Something happened.”

He slapped me, and hard. I jerked backward and would have fallen over if the chair hadn’t been placed almost directly against the metal side of his workshop.

I lowered my hand, stopped repeating, and just looked at him.

“What’s your name?”

I’ll say it’s something happened, I thought. First name Something, last name Happened.

But I didn’t. “Jamie Morton.”

“Middle name?”

“Edward.”

“My name?”

“Charles Jacobs. Charles Daniel Jacobs.”

He produced the little bottle of heroin and gave it to me. I looked at it, then handed it back. “I’m good for now. You just gave me some.”

“Did I?” He showed me his wristwatch. We had arrived at midmorning. It was now quarter past two in the afternoon.

“That’s impossible.”

He looked interested. “Why’s that?”

“Because no time passed. Except . . . I guess it did. Didn’t it?”

“Yes. We spoke at great length.”

“What did we talk about?”

“Your father. Your brothers. Your mother’s passing. And Claire’s.”

“What did I say about Claire?”

“That she married an abusive man and kept quiet about it for three years because she was ashamed. She finally opened up to your brother Andy, and—”

“His name was Paul Overton,” I said. “He taught English at a fancy prep school in New Hampshire. Andy drove down there and waited in the parking lot and when Overton showed up, Andy beat the living shit out of him. We all loved Claire—everybody did, I suppose even Paul Overton did in his way—but she and Andy were the oldest, and they were especially close. Is that what I told you?”

“Almost word for word. Andy said, ‘If you touch her again, I’ll kill you.’”

“Tell me what else I said.”

“That Claire moved out, got a protection order, and sued for divorce. She moved to North Conway and got another teaching job. Six months after the divorce became final, Overton drove up there and shot her dead in her classroom while she was correcting papers after school. Then he killed himself.”

Yes. Claire dead. Her funeral had been the last time what remained of my big, brawling, usually happy family was together. A sunny day in October. When it was over, I drove to Florida just because I had never been there. A month later I was playing with Patsy Cline’s Lipstick in Jacksonville. Gas prices were high, the climate was usually warm, and I traded my car for a Kawasaki. Not a good decision, as it turned out.

In one corner of the room was a small fridge. He opened it and brought me a bottle of apple juice. I drank it down in five long gulps.

“See if you can stand up.”

I rose from the chair and staggered. Jacobs caught me by the elbow and steadied me.

“Good so far. Now walk across the room.”

I did, at first weaving like a drunk, but when I came back, I was okay. Steady Eddie.

“Good,” he said. “Not a sign of a limp. Let’s go back to the fairgrounds. You need to rest.”

“Something did happen,” I said. “What?”

“A minor restructuring of your brainwaves, I believe.”

“You believe.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t know?”

He considered this for what seemed like a long time, although it might only have been seconds; it was a week before anything like a real sense of time returned to me. At last he said, “I’ve found certain important books very difficult to obtain, and I have a long way to go in my studies as a result. Sometimes that means taking small risks. Acceptable ones only. You’re fine, aren’t you?”

I thought it was too early to tell, but didn’t say so. After all, the thing was done.

“Come on, Jamie. I’ve got a long night’s work ahead of me, and I need rest myself.”

When we got to his Bounder, I tried to reach for the door and once more stuck my hand straight up in the air instead. The elbow locked; it was as if the joint had turned to iron. For one terrifying moment I thought it would never come down, that I was just going to spend the rest of my life with one hand raised in that Teacher, teacher, call on me gesture. Then it let go. I lowered my arm, opened the door, and got in.

“That will pass,” he said.

“How can you know, if you don’t know exactly what you did?”

“Because I’ve seen it before.”

 • • •

When he was parked in his usual spot at the fairgrounds, he showed me the little bottle of heroin again. “You can have this if you want it.”

But I didn’t. I felt like a man looking at a banana split minutes after polishing off a nine-course Thanksgiving dinner. You know that sugar-loaded treat is good, and you know that under certain circumstances you would gobble it greedily, but not after a heavy meal. After a heavy meal, a banana split is not an object of desire but just an object.

“Later, maybe,” I said, but later hasn’t come yet. Now, as a going-on-elderly man with a touch of arthritis writes of those old days, I know it never will. He cured me, but it was a dangerous cure, and he knew it—when one speaks of acceptable risks, the question is always acceptable to whom? Charlie Jacobs was a Good Samaritan. He was also a half-mad scientist, and that day in the abandoned auto body shop I was his latest guinea pig. He could have killed me, and sometimes—many times, actually—I wish he had.

 • • •

I slept the remainder of the afternoon. When I woke up, I felt like an earlier version of Jamie Morton, clearheaded and full of pep. I swung my legs over the side of his bed and watched him put on his show clothes. “Tell me something,” I said.