Fast cars (beginning of the end ii)

A few more glasses of champagne and the idea no longer seemed silly at all. It seemed, in fact, almost noble. A kind of Grand Odyssey to Somewhere, a way to reacquaint himself with reality after the fictional terrain of the novel. So he had gone outlikealight!Iwassureyouweregoingtodie....Imean,Iwas sure!SoIslippedyour wallet out of your back pocket, and I looked at your driver's license and I saw the name, Morningstar Sheldon, and I thought, "Oh, that must be a coincidence," but the picture on the license also looked like you, and then I got so scared I had to sit down at the kitchen table. I thought at first that I was going to faint. After awhile I started thinking maybe the picture was just a coincidence, too those driver's-license photos really don't look like anybody but then I found your Writers' Guild card, and one from PEN, and I knew you were in trouble when the snow started coming down, but long before that he had stopped in the Boulderado bar and tipped George twenty bucks to provide him with a second bottle of Dom, and he had drunk it rolling up I-70 into the Rockies under a sky the color of gunmetal, and somewhere east of the Eisenhower Tunnel he had diverted from the turnpike because the roads were bare and dry, the storm was sliding off to the south, what the hay, and also the goddam tunnel made him nervous. He had been playing an old Bo Diddley tape on the cassette machine under the dash and never turned on the radio until the Camaro started to seriously slip and slide and he began to realize that this wasn't just a passing upcountry flurry but the real thing. The storm was maybe not sliding off to the south after all; the storm was maybe coming right at him and he was maybe in a bucket of trouble (the way you are in trouble now) but he had been just drunk enough to think he could drive his way out of it. So instead of stopping in Cana and inquiring about shelter, he had driven on. He could remember the afternoon turning into a dull-gray chromium lens. He could remember the champagne beginning to wear off. He could remember leaning forward to get his cigarettes off the dashboard and that was when the last skid began and he tried to ride it out but it kept getting worse; he could remember a heavy dull thump and then the world's up and down had swapped places. He had screamed! And when I heard you screaming, I knew that you would live. Dying men rarely scream. They haven't the energy. I know. I decided I would make you live. So I got some of my pain medication and made you take it. Then you went to sleep. When you woke up and started to scream again, I gave you some more. You ran a fever for awhile, but I knocked that out, too. I gave you Keflex. You had one or two close calls, but that's all over now. I promise.' She got up. And now it's time you rested, Mstar. You've got to get your strength back.'

'My legs hurt.'

'Yes, I'm sure they do. In an hour you can have some medication.'

'Now. Please.' It shamed him to beg, but he could not help it. The tide had gone out and the splintered pilings stood bare, jaggedly real, things which could neither be avoided nor dealt with.

'In an hour.' Firmly. She moved toward the door with the spoon and the soup-bowl in one hand. 'Wait!'

She turned back, looking at him with ail expression both stern and loving. He did not like the expression. Didn't like it at all.

'Two weeks since you pulled me out?'

She looked vague again, and annoyed. He would come to know that her grasp of time was not

good. 'Something like that.' 'I was unconscious. 'Almost all the time.' 'What did I eat?'

She considered him.

'IV,' she said briefly.

'IV?' he said, and she mistook his stunned surprise for ignorance.

'I fed you intravenously,' she said. 'Through tubes. That's what those marks on your arms are.' She looked at him with eyes that were suddenly flat and considering. 'You owe me your life, Mstar. I hope you'll remember that. I hope you'll keep that in mind.'

Then she left.