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 that I was doing it wrong again. But I did it right, didn’t I?” The remote chill stars swung over them, and the decaying disc of the moon, over the empty world in which they clung by their hands, side by side. “I’m pretty near all in,” she admitted.

“It’s pretty hard,” he agreed, “until you’ve practised a lot. I’ll hold you up until you get your breath.” He put his arm around her under the water.

“I’m not all the way winded,” she protested, but by degrees she relaxed until he supported her whole weight, feeling her heart thumping against his palm, while she clung to the gunwale resting her bowed head upon her hands; and it was like he had been in a dark room and all of a sudden the lights had come on: simple, like that.

It was like one morning when he was in a bunch of hoboes riding a freight into San Francisco and the bulls had jumped them and they had had to walk in. Along the water front it was, and there were a lot of boats in the water, kind of rocking back and forth at anchor: he could see reflections of boats and of the piles of the wharves in the water, wavering back and forth; and after a while dawn had come up out of the smoke of the city, like a sound you couldn’t hear, and a lot of yellow and pink had come onto the water where the boats were rocking, and around the piles of the wharf little yellow lines seemed to come right up out of the water; and pretty soon there were gulls looking like they had pink and yellow feathers, slanting and wheeling around.

And it was like there was a street in a city, a street with a lot of trash in it, but pretty soon he was out of the street and in a place where trees were. It must be spring because the trees were not exactly bare, and yet they didn’t exactly have leaves on them, and there was a wind coming through the trees and he stopped and heard music somewhere; it was like