Marathe and Kate at Ryle's (p. 778)
‘But the great gift of this time today at the hilltop above the Provincial Autoroute is I do not think of me. I do not know this woman or love her, but without thinking I release my brake and I am careening down the downhill, almost wipe-outing numerous places on the bumps and rocks of the hill’s slope, and as we say in Switzerland I schüssch at enough speed to reach my wife and sweep her up into the chair and roll across the Provincial Autoroute into the embanking ahead just ahead of the nose of the truck, which had not slowed.’
Context
The catalogued sighting and the rescue in one arc: the small hunched woman in the metal hat, frozen mid-Autoroute — her body's transfixed terror "identically" his depression's paralysis, the deformed woman on the road as his inner state made visible — and then the fauteuil, all scene long the emblem of restriction, becoming the instrument of the book's purest unselfish act. "I schüssch" and "wipe-outing" as written; "my wife" arrives a beat early, the story's end already inside its middle.