I woke up on the sixth day. The night before, we had talked of whether we would go back soon, whether we would make the travel. I had asked her about it, and she had had little to say — only, as you like. I am not ready yet, she might have said. When I am a little stronger, or something like it. I had misgivings, I think. I believe, I told the interlocutor, that as I fell asleep, I had misgivings about staying there any longer. I had suddenly come to believe that she was not affected by the altitude at all, that she, as a mountain-person, would never have been affected by it. Just as I was dropping off to sleep, I told him, my thoughts led me to believe that she was not affected by the altitude, but was instead very sick, that she had been all along — the whole time I’d known her, and that I somehow hadn’t seen it. But, it is easy to think that now — to believe I had thought that, when, in fact, it is quite possible that I didn’t think it at all, but rather, as we so often are, I was on the edge of thinking it, and never came wholly into the thought. However it was, however it might have been, I woke that morning in a bed overlooking the stream as it fell through a sort of gorge, the bed that she had chosen for us to sleep in, and I turned over and tugged at her. I spoke to her. This terrible and inconceivable thing had suddenly come to be completely and unutterably true: I found upon waking, that she had died in the night, at some point in the night, and I had kept on sleeping, knowing nothing.
That it could have happened — this dreadful thing, that I could have kept on sleeping while she was dying, and not noticed, not woken up, I felt a momentary hope in it. It couldn’t be true, and if it wasn’t true, then maybe she was still alive. But she was not alive. I thought of the condition of our night’s sleep and her passing. Maybe she had even tried to wake me. She must have. She who was so perceptive, it could be, it could have been that she had noticed her own death approaching and that she had tried to wake me to speak some final thing into my ear, and that I, instead of waking, instead of acceding to her very last wish, had kept on sleeping, dumbly, vacantly, sleeping on, so I told the interlocutor. He handed me another cloth, and when he did so, our hands touched and he pressed my arm with his other hand. She did not believe, I thought at the time, I told him, that she was going to die. But now, I believe, I said to the interlocutor, that she knew all along, and that she didn’t tell me in order to give us the maximum possible time of happiness. If it could be that our last days were spent weeping and carrying on — they would simply have been a blur. They would have bled into one another. She was stronger than that, and her strength manifested in this way: she would not tell me, did not tell me, and we instead spent the time planning a life that we could never live. Where she was in the bed, curled against me, one leg actually wrapped around a leg of mine — it hurt my heart to feel and see it. It was clear that while dying she had clung to me, had pushed as close as physically possible. And all this while I slept, insensible. I lay there for hours, not moving, actually afraid to move at all, and I felt that I wished I could not move. But, eventually I rose. I straightened her out, and laid her hands across her body. I shut her eyes, and pulled a blanket partway up over her legs. Then, I felt strange about it, and pulled the blanket down. I looked at her, there in her nightgown, and I cried and didn’t know what to do. So, I dressed her in some of her clothes, what clothes I could fit over her, and then I went to the telephone and called her parents. Although I did not want to, I did it, I told the interlocutor. I called her parents, and her mother answered the phone. She recognized me, and the first thing she said, in a terrible voice, was, where are you. I said, I need to tell you something, and she said, you don’t tell me anything. Where are you, that’s all. I told her where I was, and she hung up. That same day, they must have driven for fourteen hours straight, her parents arrived with others, and they took her away. They took me back to the city, and actually dropped me off at the outskirts. They did not want to take me into the city. There was a feeling, I came to understand, that I was to blame. No one said, she would have lived longer, but I knew that they felt, every last one, that I did not deserve to have her last week to myself. They had never understood why she had taken up with me. They understood it completely, why she had been able to be so free with me — that my not knowing about her death was the whole of it. But why it should have been me, it was actually unfathomable. I was special merely because of my ignorance. That was what she had seen in me, so they thought. Her father said to me, get out of the car, please, and pulled up at the curb. I got out, and the car sped away. It had stopped for the briefest moment, and then it sped away again. I was deep in my thoughts, in the backseat of the car, and then I was watching as the car drove off. In the car, as we drove in the car, I noticed that her parents spoke with the mountain accent. It was apparent to me as I heard them speaking, as it had not been apparent to me at our previous meetings. We had been driving, all the way back, straight, fourteen hours again, with her body in the car, laid out in a coffin. The car had been turned into a sort of impromptu hearse, so I told the interlocutor, and I listened to them speak, and they said things pertaining to her treatment. They grieved in a very plain way with one another, there in the car, in my hearing. My presence was a difficulty for them, and they overcame it by simply believing that I was less than nothing. Always, one would begin to say things, to make regrets about her treatment, or the decisions that they had made in recent months, and then the other one, whichever one had not spoken, would cut in and say, enough of that. It is useless. And then twenty minutes or an hour would pass, and the very one, the same one who had said that it was useless to speak so, would begin to say again, but I think we could have sent her to this hospice, or perhaps that doctor could have done more…and the first one would interrupt, saying, it is useless. There is no use to speaking like that. And all the while I felt that, although I was in the car, although she was in the back of the car that I was traveling in and we were riding along mountain roads back toward the city, I still felt, surely and completely, that I was lying in the bed in the house with her wrapped about me. I felt that more than anything I wanted that immediate feeling to overwhelm me: the sense that she was totally and endlessly wrapped about me. And simultaneous to that, I could see, as if from above, the room in which I had set her, and the place where she lay, with her hands folded, and her face looking up at the ceiling, straight up, through the ceiling. I was standing on the side of the street, some street I had never been on, at the outskirts of the city, and I sat down. I didn’t even go to the curb, I just sat in the street. I was wearied, completely wearied.