If it had been Parnelli alone, he could have understood the incident to a degree, much as one understood the casual brutalities of animals and children. But Parnelli had not been alone, in fact had not even been the thing’s creator. No, that honor belonged only to Douglas, for it was he who had called Parnelli in from the raft and leaned down to talk with him; it was he who had suggested Hook take his place at the ladder. In other words, it was Douglas who had almost killed him—Douglas who had performed the act of a madman. Yet Douglas was not a madman, and Hook knew it. So he could not deal with the incident in his mind, could not put a ring of understanding through its nose and hold it captive but had to go on being battered by it through the endless afternoon. For a time he thought of calling Sergeant Rider and telling him what had happened, but he could not think how to put it into words without sounding like a raving idiot. “They pulled me overboard, and I almost drowned before they rescued me.” Oh really? And what else was new? In his frustration Hook smashed his suitcase.

Finally he decided his only choice was to get drunk, to control through oblivion what he could not control any other way. Only the oblivion had never come, just this numbness that let him sit hour after hour watching motion pictures forming soundlessly in the dark. He had the television tuned to one of Los Angeles’s non-network channels and all evening there had been nothing but reruns of old series, Ben Casey and The Fugitive and The Invaders, a short history of a pathetic people’s pathetic myths, the TV seasons with which they had measured out their lives, happily surrendering the treasures of community—family, church, club, bar—for the narcotic of endless spectatorship. And it infected Hook with despair, almost an illness of despair, for he realized that he had come to despise so many things about his own country and its people, that they had settled for so little.

Often in the winter, when his work was caught up, he would walk in the woods on his farm and there were times when he would come to the top of a hill and rest for a while, stand there in silence looking down through the barren trees at the snow-covered ground, and he would find it difficult to believe that it was all only winter, only a temporary death, and that within a few short months those same trees and brush, that same earth, would burgeon again with life. Somehow it seemed too great a miracle, too fine a gift for his kind, and that the only seasons men truly merited were those of their own making—seasons like the kind he sat watching now, in a plastic electronic box in a motel room in a tourist city by the sea.

So he watched television and he drank, and the hours went by. And he had no idea what time it was when he heard the knocking on his door. He got up from the chair slowly, carrying not just the weight of the alcohol but an aching stiffness that had already set in from his swim that morning. When he opened the door he could not make out who it was for a time because the streetlights behind her made her appear as just a silhouette, a girl leaning back against the balcony railing in the rain, with long dark hair plastered down over her shoulders like a nun’s hood. And then he recognized her raincoat, the shiny black one she had worn on that first night, when they had had drinks together in the bar a few blocks down the street.