It was during the ebullient stage of his drunkenness on this automobile ride, after he had tired of needling his friends, that a striking thought occurred to him: what if he decided not to go to the boat at all? His mind fogged at the thought. But how could he not be on that boat October ninth? He had, in a sense, already been there. That part of his future was a part of his past, and you couldn’t change the past. But you could change the future, couldn’t you? He could not understand it He drank more whiskey and tried to forget about it; it wasn’t important anyway. What was important was his twelve-hundred-dollar platinum wristwatch, his two-hundred-dollar shoes, his cashmere jacket, his bank accounts. He had come a long way in those two months. One of the girls, whose name was supposed to be Lili, snuggled up to him. He began playing with her and tried to forget about time paradoxes.

The boat looked to George like something out of a Man of Distinction ad; it was big, sleek, polished, and beautifully equipped. His heart swelled with something resembling pride when he surveyed its lines, standing drunkenly on the dock, with a disheveled Lili hanging on his arm. They went aboard, and Lili giggled, and whistled at the mahogany bar, the innerspring mattresses, the hi-fi, the impeccable little stainless steel galley. George, suddenly pensive, left Lili fixing drinks at the bar for the party and went into the boat’s little air-conditioned cabin, to look around.

Somehow the sight of it shook him: sitting on a small table, next to a tan leather armchair, was a bright, glossy red telephone. He walked over to it slowly and read the number on the dial. The man from the company had been there, for it read MIAMI: BE-8-5883. Outside on the deck the girls were laughing now, and there was the sound of ice clinking in glasses. Someone called out drunkenly, “Come on out, Georgie, and have a bon voyage.” He didn’t answer, still looking at the phone.

A pilot had been hired and he took them out that afternoon. They fished in a desultory way, too drunk and noisy to care. George drank continuously, bullied everyone loudly, made no attempt to fish. A restlessness, an impatience, was eating at him; in his mind telephones were ringing faintly all day. By sundown of the first day they were spent with liquor, sex, sunshine and quarreling. George passed out across the deck, near the one fish that Lili had, miraculously, caught: a small, wide-eyed bonito with a white, flabby belly. The last fleeting thought to enter his mind before he fell into smirking unconsciousness was Why can’t that lousy son of a bitch call me early? Why should I wait?…