Thats what this guy looked like. With a clarity that was both surprising and somehow ominous he saw himself pulling the Camaro up to the drive-in window of the Boulder Bank the day before he had finished Fast Cars and dropping his check for four hundred and fifty dollars, made out to cash and endorsed on the back, into the tray (perhaps even then the guys in the sweatshops had been talking vacation?
Curds of foam flew everywhere. "GET OFF ME YOU COCKADOODIE BR " He stuffed paper, white bond and black charred onionskin, into that gaping, screaming mouth. He got his right knee under him, reached up clumsily with the coverlet (which was damp with champagne and striped with smeary black swaths of ash), and began to beat at the flames. As she came in, he was surprised to find himself able to say it, and say it with a certain amount of dignity: "Go ahead and kill me, Annie, if thats what you mean to do, but at least have the decency to make it quick.
The counsellor had had a stopwatch, and Paul Sheldons dozing mind saw it with brilliant clarity, although he had last held its honest silver weight in his hand more than thirty years ago. He had thought it was okay.
He crawled through the door, expecting her hand to settle around his ankle again at any moment, but that did not happen. It was the tide, his father had tried to explain, but he had always known it was the piling.