![]() He didn't like it, but he liked to hear her tell about it. He had liked what she said about going out to sea about being alone on the bridge with the coffee in her hand, the wind howling past the wheelhouse. It was an easy exchange, deepening their knowledge of each other, and amplifying the intimacy they'd already felt. But he'd put back on the gloves, because he was getting all those random stupid images off everything - Graham, Ellie, and men, lots of different men, handsome men, and all Rowan's men, that was abundantly clear. She had just refilled the coffee for him, and it tasted good. And he rather liked the feeling of thinking clearly. He had not been this long without a drink all summer. 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. 'Do you think it was that power?' he asked. 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. He figured he ought to get up and help her no matter what she'd said, but she'd been pretty convincing on the subject: 'I like to cook, it's like surgery. He could hear her working in the kitchen. The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. '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. He had entirely lost sight of the fact that she was the woman who'd rescued him that is, a strong sense of her character had obliterated that vague impersonal excitement he'd felt on first meeting her, and now he was making mad fantasies about her in his head. It was like what was supposed to happen with sex, but seldom if ever did. He realized that he had never had his knowledge of a human being commence at such a pitch, and plunge so deep so fast. ![]() 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. 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. Maybe one step from the madhouse, but he wondered if some of the people in the madhouse were there because they took the patterns they perceived too literally? What did she think? And death, well, he had a lot of thoughts about death, but first and foremost, this thought had recently struck him, even before the accident, that the death of another person is perhaps the only genuine supernatural event we ever experience. 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. ![]() Why did this other thing have to be happening? Why did this feel like stolen time? '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.
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