While Bobbi Anderson was tracing a titanic shape with a compass and thinking the unthinkable with a brain more numbed with exhaustion than she knew, Jim Gardener was doing the only work he seemed capable of these days. This time he was doing it in Boston. The poetry reading on June 25th was at BU. That went all right. The 26th was an off-day. It was also the day that Gardener stumbled – only stumble didn't really describe what happened, unfortunately. It was no minor matter like snagging your foot under a root while you were walking in the woods. It was a fall that he took, one long fucking fall, like taking a no-expenses-paid bone-smasher of a tumble down a long flight of stairs. Stairs? Shit, he had almost fallen off the face of the earth.

The fall started in his hotel room; it ended on the breakwater at Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire, eight days later.

Bobbi wanted to dig (although she would be at least temporarily diverted by the odd things which were happening to her beagle's cataract); Gard woke up on the morning of the 26th wanting to drink.

He knew there was no such thing as a 'partially arrested alcoholic.' You were either drinking or you weren't. He wasn't drinking now, and that was good, but there had always been long periods when he didn't even think about booze. Months, sometimes. He would drop into a meeting once in a while (if two weeks went by in which Gard didn't attend an AA meeting, he felt uneasy – the way he felt if he spilled the salt and didn't toss some over his shoulder) and stand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Jim and I'm an alcoholic.' But when the urge was absent, it didn't feel like the truth.