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permeated by such a sense of wholeness, of connection to everything happening as it happens, that he transcends his fear. So fear isn't the only thing he feels. Maybe in that moment, when he knows it's all out of his hands anyway, like when we're on a roller coaster and it starts that great and long descent and we can't do anything but give ourselves over to it and scream and scream, he experiences a kind of gratitude for the Void and is even glad he's in it.”
    “Wait, wait,” I said, not very professionally. “I can't follow this. I haven't spent a year thinking about it. You have to help me. How could he possibly be glad , plummeting into nothingness and completely out of control?”
    “I don't know this. This is just where my thinking takes me sometimes. I try to stay positive. He could be thinking that if this is the way it's all going to end, better with a bang of a feeling than a whimper. Better to ride such an incredible high that you're thankful to have experienced this level of knowing and feeling of yourself.
    “I think of those men who went beyond the charted courses, because somebody did, who sailed to what they thought was the edge of the Void, and came back less afraid and were willing to do it again. And some of those women who endured countless hours of childbirth and who could choose, kept having babies, with no assurance that they or the baby could manage it or would always survive it.” Miles got up off the porch swing and paced as he talked.
    “I can understand the act of child bearing as some kind of biological imperative, and you have relief when you act according to it,” I said, “but, glad ?”
    “Well, what about that feeling—that excitement and aliveness he feels the moment he jumps and feels his feet leaving the ground, knowing he's made the commitment? Doesn't it sound like a kind of happiness? It does to me. The kind that's heart-poundingly, breath-shorteningly real ? The kind you know is brief, and more precious because of that? The kind that makes you feel as if you've suddenly entered territory, in and outside of yourself, that you didn't know existed? And you like it?”
    I saw his face lit by this discussion, from the inside, where his passion is, and I was moved. I know that his passion is driven by sadness and longing, too.
    I was caught up for a moment in the force of his description. Then I said, “But we usually know the ending of those kinds of jumps. We have a parachute, or others have done it before us and survived, or we know it's supposed to be fun, not life threatening.”
    “Oh, he knows there might be a crash, into oblivion, or something worse, some pain and horror. He's taken a big risk here. He could die. But I'll tell you what I really believe, what I think made jumping possible for him, despite his knowing how it might end. I think the alternative scared him more.” He turned from his pacing and looked at me intently, watchfully.
    “Alternative? What alternative?”
    “I think Duncan Robert had always been fascinated by the potential of what we can't or don't know and often bored by or disappointed in the reality of what we think we can and do know. You know, those commonly held beliefs we're all expected to use to navigate our lives by—untried, untested, unfounded by us, personally. Who you can and can't love, when, where and how; when, where and how to live; when, where and how to die. Maybe that's why he jumped—looking for the excitement of acting on his own decision, that sort of aliveness, before he died. Not just to purchase, through your own hard work and sweat equity, a facsimile of someone else's life, by the book. He looked for a way to live his life as his own.”
    He turned to lean his hands on the porch railing and stare out into the dark, watching as a car drove by on the road at the end of his drive. I thought about what he's said for a moment, trying to think how I can be clearer about my confusion. “Why do you think he felt that way,