There were certain perceptions that pierced through the fug of day-to-day concerns and the confusions of time like message arrows through the dark, and one of those had just hit him in the forehead: a memory of a scene from a generic fantasy world, not Tolkien but something derivative of Tolkien, the kind of thing that a Devin Skraelin would have created. It had been painted on the side of a van that had picked him up in 1972 when he had been hitchhiking to Canada so that he wouldn’t have to get his legs blown off like John. In those days—strange to relate—there’d been a connection between stoners and Tolkien buffs. For the last thirty years it simply hadn’t obtained; the ardent Tolkien fans were a disjoint set from the stoners and potheads of the world. But he remembered now that they were once connected to each other and that the van-painting types used the same album-cover palette as these people—some Good, some Evil—groping out to find one another with their cobalt blue message arrows and their acid yellow scrolls.