She had smiled so beautifully at him then. He still had to go home and he had to determine the purpose. How could he continue to know her and maybe even get to love her, and have her, and do this other thing he had to do? And he still had to do this other thing. She had said only, 'I don't know how I reached the ladder, I honestly don't.'
Yet she had been pitched right into it, and she hadn't lost consciousness. She had said that a person loses consciousness almost immediately in very cold water. When she'd been describing the rescue to him in more detail, she had said a strange thing. Nothing scientific about this power of his might be physical, yes, and measurable finally, and even controllable through some numbing drug, but it wasn't scientific. Knowing her, yes, that was there, but even that was suspect, he still believed, because there was no profound recognition, no 'Ah yes,' when she told him her story.
Besides, on the deck of the boat last night, he'd caught nothing of that.
His head was full of too many images from his past, and the sense of destiny that united these images was too strong for it to have come from some random reminder of his home through her. And it made him sad suddenly, sad and almost desperate, as if they were somehow doomed, he and she.Īs for her having been born down south, it had nothing to do with it. What I'm saying is, when you look down at that body, and you realize all the life has gone out of it, and you can scream at it, and slap it around, and try to sit it up, and do every trick in the book to it, but it's dead, absolutely unequivocally dead.īut the point was, he had to leave, and he didn't want to. I'm talking about ordinary people in the modern world. In fact, when he considered it with this new clarity, he realized he'd been able to concentrate well since he'd been here, concentrate on their conversation and their lovemaking and their knowing of each other and that was something altogether new, because in all these weeks, his lack of concentration - his inability to read more than a page of a book, or follow more than a few moments of a film - had left him continuously agitated.
And it was such a relief to be thinking of someone other than himself. He was thinking that she was the first thing in all these weeks that really mattered to him, that took his mind off the accident and off himself.
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