"Yes."
"Maybe," he went on, "two people visualizing an abstract idea by means of the same allegory can make that allegory come to life.
Maybe, down through the years and without our being aware of it, we brought the River into existence."
"And then, when the time came, cast ourselves adrift on it? But where is the River?
Surely, we can't still be on earth."
He shrugged.
"Who knows?
Reality probably has a thousand phases mankind knows nothing about.
Maybe we're in one of them ... How long have you been on the River?"
"A little over two days.
I lost time today because I had to go on foot."
"I've been on it almost two days," Farrell said.
"I must have been the first to com—the first to cast myself adrift then."
She wrung out her stockings and spread them on the raft to dry. She placed her bedraggled slippers beside them.
She stared at the articles for some time.
"Funny the way we do such things at a time like this," she said.
"Why should it make any difference to me now whether my shoes and stockings are wet or dry?"
"I guess we're creatures of habit," he said. "Right up to the very end.
Last evening, at the inn where I stayed the night, I shaved.
True, there was an electric razor available; but why did I go to the trouble?"
She smiled wryly.
"Last evening, at the inn where I stayed the night, I took a bath.
I was going to put up my hair, but I caught myself just in time.
It looks it, doesn't it?"
It did, but he didn't say so.
Nor did he gallantly deny the fact.
Somehow, small talk seemed out of place.
The raft was drifting past a small island now.
There were many such islands in the River—bleak little expanses of sand and gravel for the most part, although all of them had at least one tree.
He glanced at the girl.
Was she seeing the island, too?
Her eyes told him that she was.
Still he was not convinced.
It was hard to believe that two people—two people who did not even know each other, in fact—could have transformed the process of dying into an allegorical illusion so strong that it was indistinguishable from ordinary reality.
And it was harder yet to believe that those same two people could have entered into that illusion and have met each other for the first time.
It was all so strange.
He felt real.
He breathed, he saw; he experienced pleasure and pain.
And yet all the while he breathed and saw and experienced, he knew that he wasn't actually on the River. He couldn't be on the River, for the simple reason that in another phase of reality—the real phase—he was sitting in his car, in his garage, with the motor running and the garage doors closed.
And yet somehow, in a way that he could not fathom, he was on the River; drifting down the River on a strange raft that he had never built or bought and had never even known existed until he had found himself sitting on it nearly two days ago.
Or was it two hours ago?
Or two minutes?
Or two seconds?
He did not know.
All he knew was that, subjectively at least, almost forty-eight hours had passed since he had first found himself on the River.
Half of those hours he had spent on the River itself, and the other half he had spent in two deserted inns, one of which he had found on the River bank at the close of the first afternoon and the other of which he had found on the River bank at the close of the second.
That was another strange thing about the River.
It was impossible to travel on it at night.
Not because of the darkness (although the darkness did impose a hazard), but be cause of an insurmountable reluctance on his own part—a reluctance compounded of dread and of an irresistible desire to interrupt his ineluctable journey long enough to rest.
Long enough to find peace.