The hilltop rescue: choosing to love the skull-less woman

pivotal · UNDATED (Marathe's early-twenties depressive years, B.S. era)

• When: UNDATED (during Marathe's post-maiming "moribund" years; the Swiss story dates it to "the top of Switzerland's Mont Papineau")
• What: In his legless early twenties Marathe was clinically depressed and suicidal ("moribund"), rolling drunkenly about, twice failing to make himself go over a hilltop, unable to will his own death — "chained in a cage of the self, from the pain." Cresting a hill above a Provincial Autoroute he saw a small hunched woman in a metal hat frozen with terror before an oncoming truck; without thinking he released his brake, "schüssed" down the slope, swept her into his chair and across the road just ahead of the truck. The woman had no skull (born skull-less from the enemy's toxic "paper invasion"; her head hung "like the half-filled balloon"). Marathe frames this as the founding event of his doctrine: the un-thought choice to value another over his own pain broke his "moribund chains" and made him, then, adult. He insists it was not passion — "The unclamping of the brakes of the fauteuil and schüssching to the Autoroute — this was the love."