There was a word for what Nick was feeling as he gazed out at the fields the next day and Teddy prepared to take the fatal shot, and that word was ambedo: a melancholic trance in which one could become so completely absorbed by the sensory details of their surroundings—the wind massaging the green hills so that they undulated like sea anemones or the red-gold chiaroscuro sky lending palette and poetry to everything or the sun glaring over the horizon like a burning but indifferent god—that they forgot what they were doing or even why they were there. That’s what had happened to him the first time he’d watched Silent Jim so intently across the field (and then proceeded to completely miss his target) and it’s what was happening to him again now—that is, until Teddy squeezed the trigger, and
