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with a DB beer from the cooler.
    They drove on one dirt lane, cliffside around Lake Wanaka, then headed into Mount Aspiring National Park, whose snowy peaks, waterfalls, and massive evergreens surpassed everything Constantine had seen in the American West. It was a fine place to be while doing psilocybin. They picnicked at Davis Flat, then stopped near the Haast Pass, where Constantine slept shirtless in a bed of pine needles in the woods, thinking happily as he drifted off that there was zero chance of snakes. Afterward the road opened up to the Tasman Sea and an expanse of northern California-style coastline, complete with tropical fauna and white beach.
    Chris and Julie dropped Constantine at the foot of Mount Tasmin and moved on. There was a rainbow coming out of the clouds, reflecting off the mountain and its main attraction, Fox Glacier. Constantine watched it for a while and walked to Fox Glacier Motor Park, a campground in the middle of a meadow. He took a room there on the end of a cinder-block row, and settled in for the night. He could not have known then that he would sleep in that room for an entire year.
    What made him stay was hard to determine. He would tell himself that it was the white kitten who adopted him the next day, though he suspected it was the job he landed almost immediately (Constantine could never resist a no-tax restaurant gig) as a cook in the no-name local that sat on the edge of the campground. The pub housed two pool tables, kept a friendly staff, and had Speight’s and DB on tap. Most of the talk was about the glacier (the townies called it the “glaah-sheer”) and the daily stream of tourists it brought into town. Constantine only went up on the glaah-sheer once, led by a guide he knew named Kevin. He was surprised it wasn’t colder, standing on the ice.
    Mostly he spent his mornings walking in the woods and the mountains, his days at the local, and his evenings reading popular novels left by travelers in the bar. The white kitten grew to be a slow and heavy cat; beyond that, Constantine noticed little change in himself or his surroundings, though the feeling he had then was in general a wary contentment.
    That ended, too, one night behind the pub. Constantine was sweeping the kitchen when he heard a woman’s cries through the rear screen door. He walked out the door with the broom in his hand and saw a group of three young men raping a Dutch backpacker in the dirt. After that he recalled swinging the broom handle, and the sound of it as it collapsed the skull of the largest, smiling man. The pub’s staff got Constantine under control eventually, but not before he had taken the other two almost completely out, ramming one man’s skull flat into the cinder-block wall of the pub. Later, he remembered that the blood smelled like the jar of copper pennies he had kept in his room as a child.
    His expulsion from the country was political—one man’s father was a prominent landowner—but it was something he did not resist He never met the Dutch girl, and was never asked to identify her attackers. The authorities told him that the wall-rammed man was critical, and that Constantine was an alien working illegally in their country, and strangely, that they would pay for his ticket of departure. Constantine pictured a map in his head, selected a place at random, and told the men that he would like to go to Thailand. Before they escorted him to the plane that would wing him to Auckland, the one cop who had remained silent throughout the ordeal finally met Constantine’s eyes, and thanked him.
    Constantine had a night to kill in Auckland. He took a room in the Railton on Queen Street, a temperance hotel run by the Salvation Army that had the smell of old age and decay embedded in its lobby. After a bath he stopped at a place called Real Groovy Records, bought a pulp novel, and walked downtown with the paperback wedged in the back pocket of his jeans. He stopped at the Shakespeare Brewery and