We're going to stop here and pick up some guy we threw off the other day, said the conductor. I hear he's got more money now, or at least some blueberries.
Rice Lake, next stop! shouted the conductor, and there was a lake with grasslike tufts and clutches of wild rice, some sky-spaced pines. .
He saw nothing but a one-row station and grass — maybe a town, maybe not.
How many twentieth-story windows can you throw yourself out of? he wanted to ask her. That has sometimes been my life. But unfortunately when I aim for concrete the ground always turns out to be Jell-O and goose-down and rubber. That's why you got the cancer and I didn't. Nobody can kill me. Not even I can kill me. You had already been married for years the time the bullet jammed.
Suddenly he wondered what would have happened if he had left college that last year and hitchhiked those two thousand five hundred star-edged miles in order to make her truly know and believe that he wanted to be with her forever. At the time he used to sleep with her letters under his pillow. He was still a virgin.
Probably she was already seeing someone else.
And now, which everybodies, somebodies and nobodies didn't he see?
But he had to know. The telephone slept like a tiny white shark. He seized it by the flanks, lifted it from the plastic it dreamed in, and dialled.
Mrs. Teitelbaum is sleeping, said the nurse. Is it important? Should I disturb her?
No, it's not important, he said. I'm an old friend. I just wanted to know how she was doing.
I want to know that, too, said the nurse warmly. Let me go upstairs and check to see if she's taken her medication.
He waited and then he heard the receiver being lifted on the other end and he knew that it was his love and even five years before his heart would have soared but now his hair had begun to turn gray and his heart never soared except when he smoked crack, and anyhow it was only the nurse who said: She says she'll call you, maybe next week.
