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Show <23j make it to a doctor and so, carefully, hardly able to walk, I got to my desk and found the sheet of paper where I had written jfeb*** telephone numbers, home and work. I found a dime in my pocket and Itf held it sweating in my palm while I shuffled out into the hall to the phone. Then I could not remember whether it was night or day, whether to call her at home or.work, and I had to go back to look through the door of my room at the drawn shades to see that there was enough light for daytime. I walked by supporting myself along the wall, my back stiff and sore from the fall, a penetrating pain in my side. When I got back to the phone that girl was standing at her door watching me with implacable eyes. She must have worked at night or something. My black fate? I got the dime in the slot but then I must have mixed up the two numbers and got a wrong one. Wnat? Who? That person and I had nothing to say «J to one another. Coughing, I hung up, heard my dime drop, turned and inched back along the wall into my room. Fou^nd I did not have another dime. I searched as in a dream: no dime. I could not ask the girl for one; I felt I could read^her H««K ktir stern satisfaction^* my plight, %»^ntfn^-ft«fa^i^ Despair now seemed a part of my illness. I fell into a deeper dilerium. As I was sinking into it I saw the pale horse, pale and beautiful in the moonlight upon the snow-covered fields and meadows, a light palomino, or maybe it was white. Ghostly, it flowed so smoothly and easily across my lost fields and meadows that I half wanted to mount it, maybe more than half. Then I said No_.' I don't remember other dreams, I believe I blanked out, my self obliterated as I sank toward coma. |