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this time beside Dave’s floor mattress forgetting that he’s not even there.

But a strange thing happened that morning I remember now: before Cody’s call from downvalley: I’m feeling hopelessly idiotically depressed again groaning to remember Tyke’s dead and remembering that sinking beach but at the side of the radiator in the toilet lies a copy of Boswell’s Johnson which we'd been discussing so happy in the car: I open to any page then one more page and start reading from the top left and suddenly I’m in an entirely perfect world again: old Doc Johnson and Boswell are visiting a castle in Scotland belonging to a deceased friend called Rorie More, they're drinking sherry by the great fireplace looking at the picture of Rorie on the wall, the widow of Rorie is there, Johnson suddenly says “Sir, here’s what I would do to deal with the sword of Rorie More” (the portrait shows old Rorie with his Highlands flinger) “I’d get inside him with a dirk and stab him to my pleasure like an animal” and bleary with hangover I realize that if there was any way for Johnson to express his sorrow to the widow of Rorie More on the unfortunate circumstance of his death, this was the way—So pitiful, irrational, yet perfect—I rush down to the kitchen where Dave Wain and some others are already eating breakfast of sorts and start reading the whole thing to the lot of them—Jonesy looks at me askance over his pipe for being so literary so early in the morning but I’m not being literary at all—Again I see death, the death of Rorie More, but Johnson’s response to death is ideal 70