out more than he explained in order to brighten the impression he gave of himself. The hike, which at first in Bill’s bits of retelling, seemed to have been some kind of surreal event, like a landscape by Dali, with bizarre parts that didn’t belong together and a mad monster running everywhere, later shaped itself, in Stan’s mind, into an ordinary tale of human weakness. Although Bill made it seem like he was dragged against his will into an alien landscape and set upon by terror after terror, Stan eventually concluded that he was an equal participant. In fact, Bill was the necessary participant for what had transpired. Without him, there would have been no hike. In the unfolding of that day, he pictured Bill as a sort of apple-cheeked shepherd, in the manner of Boucher, chasing his cherubic shepherdess and taking a tumble through his own excessive cupidity.
On Bill’s first day back at work, the pain he suffered from performing his normal commuter travel to Manhattan was so great that he was forced to go home, after spending only the morning in the office. He had allotted extra time for his trip into the city and had walked slowly—that was the only way he could move. But since he had rarely moved from his bed, while he had been at home recuperating, and his back was still not fully healed, his usual commuting routine was unusually demanding and exceeded his endurance. Claire told him he should take a taxi home to prevent straining his back even more. “You could seriously disable yourself,” she warned, but the idea of paying for a taxi to his apartment building on Long Island had an instant salutary effect on his well-being. He walked out of the office with more vigor than he had shown even before the accident on some days.
When he left the office, Claire, Debbie, and Matt openly ridiculed what none of them had mentioned to Bill when he was there, although when they had first seen him, they had stared at it in amused amazement. Even Katie, who normally did not join in their discussions, had something to add. The irresistible subject of their ridicule was his hair. At one point, Debbie went so far as to call it something out of a horror movie.
The following day, a Friday, Bill worked until his usual finishing time. The energy and drive he had summoned the day before when leaving the office had deserted him and would not come back, as much as he wanted it to. He could only walk slowly, very slowly, to Penn Station to catch the train home. Commuters streamed past him on the sidewalk and in the underground passages to the Long Island Railroad track, where he needed to go. He had never walked so slowly in his life and felt like a seventy-year-old man, until a man, who looked like he was close to eighty years old, hurried by him with everyone else. Then he felt he had turned ninety years old. He tried to move a little faster, lest a centenarian race by him, too, leaving him to think he was the oldest person alive. Sadness settled upon him, as he wondered why he had fallen.
Due to his creeping pace, he missed his regular train and the one after that. The next one was already boarding passengers, when he arrived. He gently entered the first car and walked hesitatingly like someone unsure where to sit, although he wasn’t unsure at all. When he finally came to an empty row, he took the window seat. He had walked nearly to the end of the car, before coming to this empty row. He placed his briefcase in the aisle seat next to him. Normally, he set it on the floor near his feet, but today he wasn’t in the mood for company.
Moments before the train departed, his attention was arrested by the dazzling appearance of a tall, blonde woman boarding the front of the car. She seemed to be around thirty years old. Her exotic demeanor indicated that she came from somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe the Ukraine or Russia. Bill couldn’t pull his eyes away from her. She was attractive, slim with a large bust, and dramatically dressed in a miniskirt with a low-cut, short-sleeved top and sleek, high-heeled shoes. She was stunning, except for a noticeable air of hardness and determination in her behavior, which, along with her rather big bones, took away from her