Two nights before he was to leave he told her he was sorry. She said he was being foolish. He didn’t answer. In the next days they seemed further away from each other than they had been at the start, and at the railroad station the last afternoon, there was the feeling that nothing had been accomplished. She knew it as well as he did, and she broke down and wept bitterly. Holding her, he could not help thinking that there was a limit to what people could take, and that they had reached it. The discovery gave him no satisfaction, because he could not tell how much of the damage they had done themselves, separately and together. He kissed her again and held her tightly. The act itself became its own meaning, and he could not let go of her. He held onto her as if she were the only luck in his life, not knowing if she could feel what was happening to him, not caring, either. He held her until the desire, for that was what it was, was fulfilled. She stopped crying, and after she kissed him in return, she smiled.

He was assigned to transporting one of the new long-range P-51 Mustang fighters to England. It put him on his guard. The Mustang had the capability to protect the bombers all the way to Berlin, and to him, who believed at least in the inevitable effectiveness of saturation bombing, the turning point of the war had come. The war would end soon after the creation of the second front. He had to be careful. At the start he had set out to live, and if he returned to the fighting not remembering that because he could see the victory, he would be dead.

The nature of the war in the air changed very quickly, and even the 161st, one of the last squadrons to be equipped with the Mustangs, was able to feel it. The Thunderbolts, loaded with bombs and rockets, were sent across the Channel to attack small targets in France and the low countries. The formations were smaller and the successes greater. The enemy was less formidable, and the old hands were the ones who could see it best. The only answer was that the finest that Germany had been able to put in the sky were dead. It was horrible.

Something had come over him. If he relaxed he went numb—static. When it happened he had to use his strength and will to get going again, and a mission required hours of preparation inside himself. He was not flying less well; he could judge that. He was doing something wrong while he was in the air, omitting that thing that had made him an ace. What it was, he did not know. He knew he was not right, and he had to wait for the mood to pass, like a sailing ship waiting for a wind.