In hindsight, it was easy to blame the angel’s trumpet. Yes, they’d all drank the tea they’d brewed out of the flower, but it was only Jack who’d scooped out the guts and eaten it whole. He’d always been a dumpster for drugs, or at least that’s how Dayton told it. The night was frenzied and feverish, fragmented by scattershot bursts of color and light, but everyone could recall Jack taking off into the desert like a beast unchained, yipping and yowling, racing out into the unknown as if it were the only home he’d ever known. He was gone for a week. They assumed he’d died out there of thirst or starvation or the like, but he came crawling back like a babe returning to the nest. He just didn’t stop crawling.