The arrangement [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE I still haven't figured out my accident. I've gone over and over the events of that day, the day of the crash, with all the hindsight I've gained in the years since. I've gone over the events of the months leading up to the crash, the events that should account f or it. But there is still a mystery. The riddle is not that a man as successful as I was would try to kill himself. There were reasons why I might have. I had everything, as they say, but still there were reasons. The mystery is in the way it happened. I don't believe in ghosts. But even today, when I'm a totally different man and live in a totally different way, when I ask myself exactly what happened, I next ask myself what hand and whose it was that reached in out of the absolute blue, jerked the wheel of my Triumph two-seater around, and, des-pite all my strength and all my will, held the course that plastered me against the side of a speeding trailer truck. It all happened in a short second or two, but that is what I dis-tinctly remember. Success ought to provide somé protection against ghosts or the unconscious or whatever it was. That is the least you should be able to expect of success. Or of money. But they didn't, either one. I found myself helpless—I'll say it again—against the strength of that "hand" or whatever it was that wrenched the control of my Triumph TR 4 out of my grip, held it unswervingly on course, and finally packed it against the side of that trailer truck. The events leading up to my accident don't teli the reasons. True, eleven months before, I had given up a girl to whom I was very attached. But I had righted myself during these months; in fact I was doing great. My wife Florence and I were the envy of every other married couple in Beverly Hills and Bradshaw Park. The Golden Couple! That nickname was awarded us during those very eleven months between the day I gave up Gwen and the day of my accident. Besides, most of the men I know have faced a similar painful choice at somé time in their lives—made it and in time recovered, feeling deprived, perhaps, but much sounder.