A man says: “It’s a wonderful Christmas day.” It is. The sun is shining. “It has shone for the past seven Christmas Days,” says Jack. It is wonderful. It is wonderful to him who says it. Wonderful to him who hears it. Any words that surface now are the real thing. In the other world they were meaningless. Now they are vital and amazing. The soul seated across from Jack who said the day was wonderful exudes wonder himself – that life should have accompanied him this far, given him mild weather, pills that balance him for a moment; he hears no children crying but knows they do, he knows people are dying on the upper floors of Castlebar General Hospital which sits across the grass verge; he may not like his own selfishness, his rancour, his innocence, but here in the clinic that runs along a lawn, much like an American chalet, he has got the far side of the moment when his consciousness seized up.

“It’s a wonderful day, Jack,” he says. “Anything might happen.”

That is why the man has declined to walk outside. He is alive by that window. He is the first man to say it: It’s a wonderful day. It is wonderful weather. Yes, and it was wonderful to have the words to say it, it was wonderful that the effort was made. A new planet is named. And the greatest wonder of that day was that the soul of the man beside you agreed and saw it as you did.

Then you knew it was no addiction. No high. Nor a search for a high that prompted this wonder. It was a blessing. It was enough. In Jack, the moment passed. But you could tell that for the man commanding the window what he’d seen would remain with him for some time. Some day, unbeknownst to him, it would return. In Bellagarvaun, the land flooded, fingers burnt from hot tobacco, a child sitting abstracted, a woman askew, a light would strike a cushion and the man would be visited by that wonder. On that day he might conceal it thoroughly as a sane man would, but for a second it would be there. Till the day be robbed of its wonder, the cliché regain the senses, language fail him, the respite go.

Jack sat there, considering the window and all the alternatives, and sadness stirred in him like an aphrodisiac. Not far off was desperation, the climax. He savoured the panic, the mild otherworld of absence, the beached self, the love blunted by nostalgia, and his sadness was increased by the self-conscious cheerfulness of Christmas Day visitors as they alighted from their cars.

“Does the west wind,” asked Jack, “blow to the west or from the west?”

“To its grief,” the Bellagarvaun man answered like a sage, “the west wind is known by where it comes from.”