The third time they met, she let him fuck her without a condom. Just pull out and don’t come inside me, okay? He came on her stomach and then told her all the things he couldn’t express the year before at a two-day ayahuasca ceremony in a hippie port town in the Olympic Peninsula. There had been so many middle-aged white people there, sobbing and speaking earnestly to an oily, lizardlike creature they had seen emerging out of their outstretched arms, but Merv couldn’t conjure up any kind of creature and could only sit there in an unnaturally stiff position, frozen with paranoia that maybe someone in the group recognized him and pitied him, for he was alone and hadn’t come with a partner or even a friend. Afterward, he decided to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife. They never got formally remarried, but they had a non-legally-binding commitment ceremony off the Amalfi Coast, and one month into being a changed man, he went back to his old standby, the online marketplace for “high-end escorts and modern-day courtesans.” He instantly went into a euphoric high followed by a flattening numbness—how many juicy tits and round bums could a guy see in a row? It all became as tasteless to him as caviar, literal caviar, he revealed to Julie. He yearned to taste something for the first time, to return to that childlike state of being guilelessly open to the world, before we armored ourselves against disappointment and danger. He wanted, essentially, to feel again.