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it. He would not let himself see his own worries and even his own mind, she thought, was a strange territory to him and it always needed someone else to come along and sift through it and point out interesting or painful things to him. Often she would find him frowning, and, after due ques-tioning, he would say: 'ah, I think I must have a headache.'
    But she would not question him today. That slight contrac-tion of the brow could be caused by, probably was caused by, the fishy smell he would not acknowledge.
    'I'm going to die,' he said.
    'Why do you go on with that?' She didn't mean to snap, but she felt accused. There was no logical, medical reason for him to think he should die.
    'Don't be angry.'
    'I'm not angry.' Yet she was. Unreasonably angry.
    'You're frowning like a bulldog.'
    'You're only talking yourself into it. It's like your hives...'
    'I don't talk myself into hives.'
    'You always know when you're going to get them.'
    'I can feel them coming on. I can feel them before you can see them, that's all.'
    'You're not going to die.'
    'You don't understand,' he said, 'listen to me: I don't mind dying.'
    Why did he always give you the feeling that he knew things, that he knew she had dreamed his death a hundred times and now, meekly, he held out his throat to be cut. He would make himself die to show her how wrong she was. She looked at that long sinewy arm, the hairy wrist that emerged from the pyjama coat, and thought about its life and saw, before her eyes, how it would be dead, decaying. She saw maggots, crawling things, and looked up at his face.
    'I don't want you to die!' She said as if her secret wish were the core of the problem and once she had said this the problem was solved.
    He looked at her with astonishment.
    'Why don't you believe me?' she said.
    When he didn't answer her (he couldn't think of what to say) she lapsed into angry silence.
    'Do you believe in God, Bettina?' She winced. If she had been religious she would have believed in Satan and would have found him, in her terms, 'generally less boring'. But religion represented all the goody-goody two-shoes and she found it embarrassing even to talk about.
    'You won't die,' she said. She had torn the crutch of her pantyhose somehow.
    'Something very strange happened to me when I had the attack,' he said. 'I haven't told anyone.'
    'You should tell the doctor,' she said warily. If her panty-hose had torn...
    Bettina shifted in her chair.
    'I had a vision.'
    'It was lack of oxygen,' she said confidently.
    He had a distant look in his eyes like he did when he watched Casablanca on the television. 'I left my body and went up in the air.'
    She looked at him with alarm. 'Maybe you should see a psychologist.'
    But he did not appear to hear her. He began speaking very quickly, with none of the grace notes, none of the velvety drawl that he would bring to a story; he rushed through the events of his death and described to her, exactly, who had stood where on the lawn, who had carried his body, what the doctor had worn, the details of everything that had happened while he was dead.
    'It was a warning,' he said finally. 'I saw Heaven and Hell. There is a Heaven. There is a Hell.'
    'It was lack of oxygen,' she insisted, but he shook his head with uncharacteristic stubbornness.
    'I'll get him fired,' she said firmly.
    'Who?'
    'The doctor. He's a clumsy fool. No wonder you're frightened.'
    'It's nothing to do with the doctor.'
    'He's got sausage fingers.'
    'I know.'
    'He drops things.'
    'I know.'
    She moved her chair closer to the bed and patted his hand.
    'You won't go to Hell, Harry. You're too nice to go to Hell.
    If anyone’s going to Hell it'll be me.'
    And Harry, not for the first time, failed to recognize the resentment in her voice.
    When he was about to die in a foreign country, years later, Harry's son would tell his captors that he had been born in an electrical storm. Like so many of the things he had said throughout his short life, the story was not