Perhaps a year, a year and a half, had passed since the article in the Guardian, when Jasper Gwyn began to feel ill, from time to time, in a way that he would describe as a sudden vanishing. He would see himself from the outside—so he related—or rather he lost every accurate perception that was not perception itself. At times it could be terrible. One day he had to go into a telephone booth and with a great effort dialed Tom’s number. He said, stammering, that he no longer knew where he was.
“Don’t worry, I’ll send Rebecca to get you. Where are you?”
“That’s the problem, Tom.”
In the end the fat girl drove around the whole neighborhood until she found him. In the meantime Jasper Gwyn had stayed in the booth, spasmodically clutching the receiver and trying not to die. To distract himself he talked on the telephone—he improvised a phone call to protest the cutting off of the aqueduct, no one had informed him and it had caused enormous damage, economic and moral. He kept repeating, “Do I have to wait until it rains to shampoo my hair?”
He immediately felt better, as soon as he got into the fat girl’s car.
While he apologized, he couldn’t stop staring at the fat hands that gripped—but the verb wasn’t exact—the sporty steering wheel. There was no coherence, he thought, and that must be the experience that at every instant of the day the girl had of her own body—that there was no coherence between it and all the rest.
But she smiled her lovely smile and said that in fact she was honored to be able to help him. And anyway, she added, it had happened to her, too, she had had a period when she was often ill in that way.
“All of a sudden you thought you were dying?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you get better?” asked Jasper Gwyn, who at that point would have begged for a cure from anyone.
The girl smiled again, then she was silent, looking at the street.
“No,” she said finally, “that’s my business.”
“Of course,” said Jasper Gwyn.
They rolled. Probably that was the right verb. They rolled around the steering wheel.