Patience gave way to drowsiness. The Old Man’s head lolled back, and at once his heavy breathing expanded into a robust and resounding open-mouthed snore. The others, long accustomed to the Sage’s lapses, managed to maintain their convivial but silent meditations, punctuated at regular intervals by the Sage’s guttural commentary.

An outburst of laughter at a nearby table apparently disrupted the Sage’s intense concentration, for suddenly his mouth slammed shut and his eyes flung themselves wide open. Leaning forward, he cast a disoriented gaze around the Pret. A long draught from his glass seemed to reorient him completely.

“Yes, well, of course, as I was saying,” the Old Man erupted, apropos of nothing: “The ‘critical’ modifier excises the real from realism, does it not? If something is real, it should matter not one whit whether we apprehend it as real. If the tree falls in the forest and all that. Agreed?”

The others, having learned the futility of interrupting the Old Man’s oratory, nodded but said nothing.

“So, let us suppose that our elegant Western friend has indeed disappeared off the face of the earth. We may sense his spectral presence and whatnot; we may suspect dark conspiracies; we may believe he has gone into hiding; we may even conclude that he has forsaken us for more prestigious and influential companions. None of this matters in the slightest: the man’s actual whereabouts are unaffected by our ignorant speculations.”

The smug look on the Sage’s deeply-lined face persisted even as he appeared to drift back into somnolence, leaving us, the readers, to wonder: what distortions of place and time are these, where the itinerant cadre of theologians seems simultaneously to occupy an al fresco London café and the lounge of an Alpine hostelry? Could those effervescent green tablets have affected the Sage’s perceptions of reality? Or did they alter reality itself, bifurcating it in this disconcerting way? Has the mysterious conspiracy, about which there had been considerable speculation, taken an even more insidious and confusing (not to mention silly) turn? Or have the authors of this motley narrative simply failed to synchronize their imaginations?