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lonely and flawed, but longing now to return to that place he had briefly visited.
    He returned to the boarded-up storefront and banged his fist on the locked basement door. No one answered, and a passing policeman finally stopped by and shooed him away, thinking him tipsy, but harmless. He went back the next night and slept on the stones by the door, but no one came. Nor the night after that or the next one.
    Despondent and heartsick, he asked about Myriam, but the few people who admitted to knowing her said only that she moved around. Here a few days, then somewhere else.
    On the fourth day of useless searching, furious and frustrated, he picked up a hooker and took her back to his room, where he tried to recreate the experience he was seeking. When that failed, he found another young woman and did coke with her before they had sex. On coke, Nicholas could stay hard almost indefinitely. But nothing happened, except that both he and the girl were sore the next morning.
    His stay at the upscale Harbor Castle was becoming too costly, and he decided to move to a modest, inexpensive hotel near Queen’s Park. The phone rang as he was packing his suitcase. He hesitated, then picked it up. Wished that he hadn’t. The pain in Beth’s voice stabbed his temporal lobe like an icepick. Worse, though, was the fact that he had to jog his mind to recall the face belonging to that distraught voice. He felt as though decades had passed since he’d last seen her. Since he’d lain down with Myriam and everything changed.
    “I’m sorry, Beth, but I can’t come home yet. There’s a deal in the making, some more property that I want to look at –”
    “Stop lying to me, Nicholas.”
    “Beth, listen –”
    “I’m sick of excuses. I want you to come home now. Whatever’s happened, whatever you’ve gotten involved with, I can forgive it, but you have to leave now, just leave and come home. Can’t you do that?”
    He wanted to tell her,
yes, yes, of course, I’ll come home
, but what he heard himself say was, “No, I can’t do that. This deal is too important. Leaving here now is out of the question.”
    She gave a long moan that escalated into a wild wail, like an animal lost and wounded. He held the phone away from his ear, but the sound still reverberated chaotically through his body, ripping synapses with its discordant notes of anguish.
    “Don’t give me that bullshit, Nicholas. Don’t treat me like an idiot. What is it? Are you in love with someone else? Is that what it is? Are you leaving me?”
    “No, Beth, no, I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know I can’t come home yet, I have to stay here a little bit longer. I can’t explain. I want to, but I just can’t.”
    Then there was silence, which was scarier somehow than the grief-stricken wail of a moment before. “This has something to do with that Sonny Valdez character, doesn’t it?” she said finally, her voice flat and jagged, like ice chipped from a block with an axe. “He’s got you involved in something illegal, some drug scam. Jesus, Nicholas, are you that big a fool? Do you want to go back to prison?”
    “No, no, I don’t.” Tears started pouring out of his eyes, heartfelt and wrenching, but responding to her words in a way completely different from how she meant them. He didn’t want to go back to prison: that was the whole point. Prison was what his life had been like before, prison was his separate identity, his separate skin. Prison was his narrow, rigid identity as Nicholas Berringer. It was the same realization, the same awakening, that must have turned Sonny Valdez into a paranoid recluse. But how could he tell her that, how could he say it so she didn’t think he’d gone back to drugs, think him insane?
    “It’s
this
, Beth,” he said finally. “I know it sounds crazy, but I had – how do I put this? – some kind of experience. It was something spiritual, something so incredible – I can’t just walk away from it