Farrell had spent a good deal of his adult life hunting up a new place to stay. In any other city he would have set out with the fewest possible expectations. But his image of Avicenna was ten years old and full of big, sunny rooms and flowery, winy, rickety houses where all his friends lived. It took him a week to discover that almost every one of the dear places where he had been drunk and in love and floating were now either parking lots or university offices. The few that remained were happily unchanged, except that their rents had quadrupled. Farrell stood for a while in the fuchsia-blurred courtyard under the window of Ellen’s little room. He knew she was long gone from there, or he would never have made the visit, but it was a matter of continuity.

“There were so many good ones,” he said to Ben. “Sometimes you couldn’t remember whose house you were in, they were all so good.”

“They were dumps,” Ben said. “We were just too horny to notice at the time.”

Farrell sighed. “Was that it? So much for golden lads and lasses.” They were alone in the faculty locker room at the gymnasium, stripping to swim. Ben liked to go there at least twice a week, after his night class. Farrell said, “I miss them anyway, those times. Not me, you understand, just the times.”

Ben glanced briefly at him. “Hell, you were homesick for everything while it was all going on. You just wandered along backward, fastest nostalgia in the West.” He stuffed his socks into his shoes and put the shoes in his locker, and the compressed, delicate violence of the movement made Farrell think of a leopard floating with his ripped prey up to the fork of a tree. Ben had always been deceptively strong, the result of dutiful exercise, but his strength had seemed acquired, rented for the occasion, not a casual fire. He said, “Come on, drag you for beers.”