Okay. Here he is. He’s alone, on his own, in his own home. What should he do? He thinks aloud: “When you change your life, when you’re a carbrain suddenly free of the car, off the track, what do you do? You don’t have the slightest idea. What do you do if you don’t have a plan? You make a plan. You make the best plan you can.”

Okay. He’s wandering the living room, making a plan. He walks around aimlessly. He’s lonely. He wants to be with his friends—the shields between him and his self, perhaps. But they’re all gone now, scattered by some force that Jim feels, obscurely, that he initiated; his bad faith started it all.… But no, no. That’s magical thinking. In reality he has had hardly any effect on anything. Or so it seems. But which is right? Did he really do it, did he really somehow scatter everyone away?

He doesn’t know.

Okay. Enough agonizing over the past. Here he is. He’s free, he and he only chooses what he will do. What will he do?

He will pace. And mourn Tashi’s departure. And rail bitterly against … himself. He can’t escape the magical thinking, he knows that it has somehow been all his fault. He’s lonely. Will he be able to adapt to this kind of solitude, does he have the self-reliance necessary?

But think of Tom’s solitude. My God! Uncle Tom!

He should go see Tom.

He runs out to the car and tracks down to Seizure World.

On the way he feels foolish, he is sure it’s obvious to everyone else on the freeway that he is doing something utterly bizarre in order to prove to himself that he is changing his life, when in reality it’s all the same as before. But what else can he do? How else do it?

Then as he drives through the gates he becomes worried; Tom was awfully sick when he last dropped by, anything can happen when you’re that old, and sick like he was. He runs from the parking lot to the front desk.

But Tom is still alive, and in fact he is doing much better, thanks. He’s sitting up in his bed, looking out the window and reading a big book.

“How are you, boy?” He sounds much better, too.

“Fine, Tom. And you?”

“Much better, thanks. Healthier than in a long time.”

“Good, good. Hey Tom, I went to the mountains!”

“Did you! The Sierras? Aren’t they beautiful? Where’d you go?”

Jim tells him, and it turns out Tom has been in that region. They talk about it for half an hour.

“Tom,” Jim says at last, “why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me about it and make me go up there?”