Cries? Nothing held together anymore. What did crying have to do with it?
“I didn’t know you liked a Niobe number.” It was important to stop shivering.
“I don’t. Please don’t be nasty, I can’t handle it. . . . Paul, it’s that you never truly let go, you never made me feel I was indispensable. I guess I’m not. But Mark . . . puts his head on my chest sometimes, after.”
“Oh, Jesus, Rachel, don’t!”
“It’s true!” It was raining harder. Trouble breathing now.
“So he plays harp, too? Versatile, I must say.” God, such a kick; he was so cold.
She was crying. “I didn’t want it to be. . . .”
She didn’t want it to be like this. How had she wanted it to be? Oh, lady, lady, lady.
“It’s okay,” he found himself saying, incredibly.
Where had that come from? Trouble breathing still. Rain on the roof, on the windshield. “It’ll be all right.”
“No,” Rachel said, weeping still, rain drumming. “Sometimes it can’t be all right.”
Smart, smart girl. Once he would have reached to touch her. Once? Ten minutes ago. Only that, before the cold.
Love, love, the deepest discontinuity.
Or not quite the deepest.
Because this, precisely, was when the Mazda in front blew a tire. The road was wet. It skidded sideways and hit the Ford in the next lane, then rebounded and three-sixtied as the Ford caromed off the guard rail.
There was no room to brake. He was going to plough them both. Except there was a foot, twelve inches’ clearance if he went by on the left. He knew there’d been a foot, had seen the movie in slow motion in his head so many times. Twelve inches. Not impossible; very bad in rain, but.
He went for it, sliced the whirling Mazda, banged the rail, spun, and rolled across the road and into the sliding Ford.
He was belted; she wasn’t.
That was all there was to it, except for the truth.
The truth was that there had indeed been twelve inches, perhaps ten, as likely, fourteen. Enough. Enough if he had gone for it as soon as he saw the hole. But he hadn’t, had he? By the time he’d moved, there were three inches clear, four, not enough at night, in rain, at forty miles an hour. Not nearly.
Question: how did one measure time there, at the end? Answer: by how much room there was. Over and over he’d watched the film in his mind; over and over he’d seen them roll. Off the rail, into the Ford. Over.
Because he hadn’t moved fast enough.
And why—Do pay attention, Mr. Schafer—why hadn’t he moved fast enough?
Well, class, modern techniques now allow us to examine the thought patterns of that driver in the scintilla—lovely word, that—of time between the seeing and the moving. Between the desire and the spasm, as Mr. Eliot so happily put it once.
And where, on close examination, was the desire?
Not that we can be sure, class, this is most hazardous terrain (it was raining, after all), but careful scrutiny of the data does seem to elicit a curious lacuna in the driver’s responses.
He moved, oh, yes indeed, he did. And in fairness—do let’s be fair—faster than most drivers would have done. But was it—and there’s the rub—was it as fast as he could move?
Is it possible, just a hypothesis now, but is it possible that he delayed that scintilla of time—only that, no more; but still—because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to move? The desire and the spasm. Mr. Schafer, your thoughts? Was there perhaps a slight, shall we say, lag in the desire?
Dead on. St. Michael’s Emergency Ward.
The deepest discontinuity.
“It should have been me,” he’d said to Kevin. You had to pay the price, one way or another. You certainly weren’t allowed to weep. Too much hypocrisy, that would be. Part of the price, then: no tears, no release. What had crying to do with it? he had asked her. Or no, he had thought that. Niobe, he had said. A Niobe number. Witty, witty, defenses up so fast. Seatbelt buckled. So cold, though, he’d been, so very cold. Crying, it seemed, had a lot to do with it, after all.