“Beyond what?” Stuart said, standing up so that he could watch and hear better; everyone had moved closer, now, so as not to miss anything.

“You know,” Mr. Crody said. “Beyond the grave. The after life. You can laugh, Stuart, but it’s true; when he has a beer he goes into this trance, like you see him in now, and he has occult vision or something. You ask Tony or Connie and some of these other people; they were here, too.”

Now Connie was leaning over the slumped, twitching figure in the center of the cart. “Hoppy, what’s the light from? Is it God?” She laughed nervously. “You know, like in the Bible. I mean, is it true?”

Hoppy said mumblingly, “Gray darkness. Like ashes. Then a great flatness. Nothing but fires burning, light is from the burning fires. They burn forever. Nothing alive.”

“And where are you?” Connie asked.

“I’m—floating,” Hoppy said. “Floating near the ground… no, now I’m very high. I’m weightless, I don’t have a body any more so I’m high up, as high as I want to be. I can hang here, if I want; I don’t have to go back down. I like it up here and I can go around the Earth forever. There it is down below me and I can just keep going around and around.”

Going up beside the cart, Mr. Crody the jeweler said, “Uh, Hoppy, isn’t ‘there anybody else?’ Are each of us doomed to isolation?”

Hoppy mumbled, “I—see others, now. I’m drifting back down, I’m landing among the grayness. I’m walking about.”

Walking, Stuart thought. On what? Legs but no body; what an after life. He laughed to himself. What a performance, he thought. What crap. But he, too, came up beside the cart, now, squeezing in to be able to see.

“Is it that you’re born into another life, like they teach in the East?” an elderly lady customer in a cloth coat asked.