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PARTISAN REVIEW
it until their bodies felt so light and drifty they didn't feel like bodies
at all, and wouldn't until the dream suddenly came true. But it didn't
come true that way. And it wasn't because of that self-sureness she
had . Or because of the respect, or whatever it was she inspired. It
was because of something that happened inside of Jack Harrick.
He was drifting along in that communal dream, sucking his guts
in and feeling better than he ever had in his life.
As
his body was
dreaming that communal dream, the bodies drifted along with con–
siderable space between them. His left hand reached out in the
dark to hold her hand. They weren't even looking at each other,
drifting along. His hand held hers very lightly, just barely holding,
aware of its softness in his, of its smallness but good strength.
Occasionally he would put the slightest pressure on her hand,
not looking, and then wait for an answering pressure. He figured that
there was an answering pressure, but always after he had let up and
so slight you couldn't be really sure there had been anything at all.
She could certainly micrometer that pressure down till it would take
a jewelry store scales to tell it. So he tried cutting his down, down
to the barest, the barest you could with a hand like his.
So they drifted along, playing that game in their dream, and
his mind went emptier and emptier as the dream grew and seemed
not only to fill up his body, but the dark trees and the dark, barely
star-teased sky above the trees, and included not only now, this
minute, but all the times he had ever lived and walked in the dark.
He found himself sucking his guts tighter and tighter and wasn't
even sure he felt the soft sod under his feet. Then clear as a bell,
a voice seemed to say in his head:
I'm not ever going to die.
That was a moment of perfect joy. He had found the great
secret that everybody had always hunted for. He, Jack Harrick, had
found it. Then, suddenly, he didn't know whose hand it was he held.
That was absolute terror, like waking up in the dark and not
knowing who you are. Yet he was afraid to turn his head and find
out who was there, and therefore who he himself was. His head spun,
as in a kind of vertigo of all the past times he had walked in the
dark. He was afraid that if he turned his head he might find no–
body, nothing there at all, nothing because everything, all the past
there, which was nothing, nothing but whirling blankness. This mo–
ment was only a dream of the past, and it was about to whirl away
