He had even gone into his crazy talk about the movies, and the recurrent images of vengeful babies and children, and the way he felt when he perceived such themes - as though everything around him was talking to him. 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. 'Well, it was luck for me, all right,' he'd responded, and he had felt an extraordinary sense of well-being when he said it, and he wasn't so sure why. He understood about ghosts in houses, because houses were more than habitats, and it was no wonder they could steal your soul. He told about houses and how he loved them about the kinds that existed in San Francisco, the big Queen Annes and the Italianates, the bed-and-breakfast hotel he had wanted so badly to do on Union Street, and then he had slipped into talking about the houses he really loved, the houses back there in New Orleans. Talking about his life here had been a little easier - explaining about Elizabeth and Judith, and the abortion that had destroyed his life with Judith explaining about the last few years, and their curious emptiness, and the feeling of waiting for something, though he did not know what it was. But the point was, he hadn't lost her with his crazy rambling. He had started kissing her, and that was how that particular segment of the conversation had come to an end. She had smiled so beautifully at him then. 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. ![]() 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. 'It's when you've got one of those dead bodies lying on the deck of your boat, and you're slapping it around and talking to it, and suddenly the eyes do open, and the guy's alive.' 'Well, let me tell you about one other supernatural event,' she'd said, smiling. And it made him sad suddenly, sad and almost desperate, as if they were somehow doomed, he and she. ![]() They never even see a dead body Why, they think when they hear somebody's dead that he forgot to eat his health foods, or hadn't been jogging the way he should have been.īut the point was, he had to leave, and he didn't want to. Why, California in this day and age is a whole civilization of people who never witness a death. 'And you have to remember, for most of us we see that maybe once or twice in twenty years. well, it's a first-class supernatural event, and just probably the only supernatural event you ever get to see.' and you're not a doctor, or a nurse, or an undertaker. They don't believe they're going to die Why, I have been to California memorial services where nobody even mentioned the dead guy But if you really see it. 'Exactly, but it's deeper even than that. Why do you think they come after us doctors with their lawyers?' Why did this other thing have to be happening? Why did this feel like stolen time? 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. He didn't tell her about the weeds in the gutters, the men sitting on the steps with their cans of beer, the smell of boiled cabbage that never went away, the riverfront trains rattling the windows.Īs for her having been born down south, it had nothing to do with it.
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