He jumped up and down to warm himself, he did deep knee bends until he couldn’t breathe, and then, clumsily, with stiffened fingers, he got a canister open and conveyed the saturated wads of toilet paper to his gums.

Though malign and sickening, the boost was a boost. Though everything was inverted, his rationality now reduced to a floater against a black infinity of death, the light hadn’t entirely left his mind. Stumbling, falling, dropping the flashlight, picking it up, he made his way back to the dirt road.

Where he’d formerly entertained a thousand thoughts while taking a single step, he now had to take a thousand steps to complete one thought.

His first thousand steps yielded the thought that he was walking only to warm up.

A thousand steps later, he thought that warming up would restore enough manual dexterity to take a proper whiff from his thumb.

Farther down the road, he thought he was in trouble.

Later yet, after reaching a fork and randomly bearing right, he understood that he couldn’t report his money stolen without revealing that he’d taken it from Clem.

Still later, he realized that he was tasting only toilet paper, which he might as well spit out.