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. Now he lay on the rug, thinking how much he liked her and how much her sadness and her aloneness disturbed him, and how much he didn't want to leave her, and that nevertheless, he had to go. He liked the look in her gray eyes he liked the simplicity of her easy, languid gestures. 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. 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. 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 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. Why do you think they come after us doctors with their lawyers?'
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. 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.
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