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recent rain. The cobbled street glistened with wet. He stepped into the street and out of nowhere a rattling trolley rushed at him and a shrieking horn sounded and he hid his face so no one could recognize it afterward seeing its likeness in the local papers. For he knew the shame and desperation of his act would outlive him, and its courage would be obscured, but he did not care for it was time, God would never forgive him but God would grant him freedom. That was the promise of The Falls. Through the night he heard its murmurous roar and now in the open air he heard it more clearly, and could feel the very ground beneath his feet vibrating with its power. Come! Here alone is peace.
    What pride, what a fervor of triumph. Ten months before.
    On the telephone announcing in a tremulous voice I am engaged, Douglas . And his friend spoke warmly, spontaneously. Congratulations, Gil! And he’d said almost boastfully, Will you come to my wedding?
    They’re scheduling it for next June. D. said, Of course, Gil . Hey, this is great news. I’m very happy for you . G. said, I’m happy, too. I’m . . . happy. D. said, Gil? and G. said, Yes, Douglas? and D. asked, Who is she? and for a moment G. couldn’t think, and stammered, Who? and D. said, laughing, Your fiancée, Gil . When will I meet her?
    D. had been impressed (hadn’t he?) when he’d learned who his friend’s fiancée was. The daughter of. A music instructor, pianist and singer.
    At the seminary they’d been such opposite types. Yet they’d The Falls X 29
    talked passionately late into the night: of life and death, mortality and Life Everlasting. Never had they talked of suicide. Never of despair. For, young Christian men studying for the ministry, why should they despair? They were themselves the bearers of good news.
    Instead, they talked with the fervor of late adolescence of love—
    “mature love”—“love between a man and a woman”—“what a Christian marriage in the mid-twentieth century should be.” Of course they’d talked of having children.
    They played chess, which was D.’s game. They went hiking, and sometimes searched for fossils in shale-rich ravines and creekbeds, which was G.’s game since boyhood.
    D. hadn’t been able to attend G.’s wedding. G. wondered if he would attend his funeral. If there can be a funeral without a body? For maybe they’d never find his body. He smiled to think so. Sometimes, going over The Falls, a human being was lost forever. Even small boats had been known to disintegrate in such a way that their parts were never retrieved or identified.
    The peace of oblivion.
    G. had left no note for D. He’d left a scribbled note only for A., his wife. Out of a sense of obligation that suggested (he hoped, for he wasn’t cruel) none of the loathing he felt for the woman. But D.
    would forgive him. He believed.
    D., in the simplicity and goodness of his heart. A natural-born Christian. He would grieve for G., but forgive him.
    D. had his own, separate life now. For years. He was assistant to the minister of a large, prosperous church in Springfield, Massa-chusetts. He was proud husband and father of two-year-old girl twins. To make of D. an accomplice of a kind if only at second- or third-hand would be a sinful act. To make of D. a sharer of so shameful a secret. Unless it was so beautiful a secret. I can’t love any woman, God help me I’ve tried. I can only love you. D. had joined G. in his rambling walks in search of fossils. He’d begun as a boy collecting Indian arrowheads and artifacts but “fossils” came to fascinate him more.
    These delicate, leafy remnants of a lost and scarcely imaginable time before human history. Like mysterious artworks they were, skeletal impressions of once-living organisms from an era millions of years—
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    an unfathomable sixty-five million years!—before Christ. A world of slow time in which one thousand years was but a moment and sixty thousand years was