deliver myself of some noble message, immediately.
I have nothing to offer you but the Four Biles: blood and sweat and
tears and W.C.
A doorman appeared from behind a fern that had been handed down from
Pharaoh.
"Something funny, Mac?"
"Not very. It's just that I've lost my mind."
"People have lost everything else in this damned hall!"
He went away.
Out in back, I suppose he had a boat to ferry people across the Styx.
Soon I stumbled to the skirling thoroughfare and waved at cabs until
one stopped.
Or maybe it was a hearse.
Or maybe it was a singsong boat plying in the rain alongside the
doorman's draped dinghy.
Certainly it was occupied by a multitude of people, many of them dead
and many of them trollops.
Want Immortal Life?
Want me?
My reaction would come--next week--next month--never.
I'd already had it.
Since Thursday, I had been consumed by my reaction.
This was robust information.
My heart resumed its job.
The infinite, posterior brain relaxed.
The small, frontal analogue took sensible direction.
Our house in Florida would go on building now--for us. The
flower-filled patio and the white roof with bunting vines abloom--the
cypress bedroom up among the branches of live oaks, melaleucas, orchid
trees, and sweet frangipanis--the workroom with books all around, a
raised fireplace and a rail to put my feet on while someday, perhaps, I
marked the typed pages of the long-projected Explanation. I could write
it. I could devote all my time to it: twenty-four thousand dollars were
going--not into my estate--but my account.