Chapter 11 Chapter Eleven

"I especially hate April rain." In spite of Arthur's mutterings, the man seemed determined to talk to him.Arthur wondered if he would get up and go elsewhere, but the whole cafe looked like no one else was free.He stirred his coffee vigorously. "Fucking April rain. Hate hate hate." Arthur frowned and stared out the window.The thin drizzle sprinkled on the road like sunshine.He has been home for two months.Fitting into my former life was ridiculously smooth.People's memories, including him, seem to be particularly short.Eight years of crazy travel across the galaxy now seemed like a daydream, like something he'd taped from the TV and had put it in the back of a cupboard and didn't bother to watch.

The only influence still at work was his ecstasy at being back.Since the Earth's atmosphere would cover him forever, he thought wrongly, everything in the atmosphere made him very happy.Looking at the silver-white splashes from the raindrops, he felt that he had to oppose this man. "Well, I like the rain," he said suddenly, "for obvious reasons, they don't fall very hard, and they're fresh. I like the spray, too." The man snorted mockingly. "That's what they say," he said, glaring as he sat in the dark corner. This man is a truck driver.Arthur knew this, for at first, out of nowhere, he said:

"I'm a truck driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic, huh? Fucking ironic." What was the logical connection between these words, Arthur couldn't understand, so he grunted, friendly but not encouraging. The man didn't stop there then, and he doesn't intend to stop now. "That's what they say about her goddamn April rain," he said. "It's goddamn good, goddamn fresh, goddamn lovely weather." He leaned forward, twisting his face, as if about to say something about the government. "What I want to know," he said, "if there's going to be good weather," he almost shouted, "why can't it be good weather when her mother doesn't rain?"

Arthur surrendered.He decided not to have coffee either, it would be too hot to drink quickly and it would be too difficult to wait for it to cool down. "Oh, you're leaving." The man said without standing up, "Goodbye." He stopped at the gas station store, then walked back across the parking lot, enjoying the rain on his face.He noticed even a faint rainbow flickering over Devon Hill.He loves this too. He climbed into his beloved battered Golf GTi, started the car, past some gas pumps and onto the slippery road. He mistakenly thought that the Earth's atmosphere had finally closed above him and would cover him forever.

He mistakenly thought he could put the mess of Galactic Journey behind him. He mistakenly thinks he can forget that this huge, hard, greasy, dirty, rainbow-hung earth he inhabits is but a tiny point on a tiny point in the infinity of the unimaginable universe. point. He was humming as he drove, but he was all wrong about these things. For the wrong reasons, he is now standing on the slippery side of the road with a small umbrella. His mouth was wide open and his jaw was about to drop.He sprained his ankle when he hit the brakes, and the car braked so hard that it nearly rolled over. "Fanny!" he cried.

His car narrowly avoided Fanny and did not hit him.But as he crawled over to open the car door, it hit Fanny once. The car door hit Fanny's hand and knocked the umbrella off.The umbrella rolled frantically across the road, "Oops!" Arthur yelled as friendly as possible, jumped out of his car door, was almost run over by a big truck, and stood there watching in horror as Fanny's umbrella got into the truck instead of him. under.The truck then drove off along the road. The umbrella is like a long-legged uncle who has just been smashed flat, lying on the ground dying, twitching slightly in the breeze.

He picked up the umbrella. "Er," he said.Giving this thing back to Fanny just like that didn't look right. "How do you know my name?" said Fanny. "Uh, that," he said, "well, I'll pay you for an umbrella." He stared blankly at her. She was tall, with wavy black hair that fell on either side of a pale, serious face.When she stood quietly by herself, she looked sad, like a respected but somewhat unpopular statue in a stately garden.She seemed to be staring at something, but actually looked at something else. She laughed, and when she laughed, she seemed to come back from somewhere suddenly.Vitality and vigor flashed across her face, and her body moved in unbelievable grace.It would have the bewildering effect, and Arthur was evidently affected by it now, transfixed.

She smiled, threw her bag into the back seat of the car, and sat in the passenger seat. "Forget about that umbrella," she said as she got into the car. "It's my brother's umbrella. He sure doesn't like it, or he wouldn't have given it to me." She smiled and put on her seat belt. , "Aren't you my brother's friend?" "no." Every part of her body except her mouth said, "That's great." She was actually sitting in the car now, in his car, and the situation was unbelievable to Arthur.As he slowly started the car, he felt like he couldn't think or breathe, and he hoped these problems wouldn't kill him for driving, or they would be in trouble.

It now seemed that when he returned to Earth exhausted and disoriented after eight years of nightmares among the stars, in another car, Fanny's brother's, that night, it was not a loss of control at all.In other words, even if it was a bit out of control at the time, the current situation is at least twice as bad as it was then. "Hmm..." he said, wishing he could find something better to say. "He said he was coming to pick me up, my brother, but called and said he couldn't come. I went to find out when the bus was, but the guy I asked didn't look at the timetable, he went to the calendar , so I decided to hitch a ride. So."

"so." "So here I am. What I want to know now is how you know my name." "Maybe what we should figure out first," Arthur said, looking over his shoulder, slowing in the traffic, "is where I should take you." Close, he hoped, or far away.Close means that she lives very close to him, and far means that he has a reason to send her all the way there. "Take me to Taunton, please," she said, "if it's convenient. It's not far. You can have me at--" "You live in Taunton?" he said, trying to keep his voice under control, sounding more curious than ecstatic.Taunton was very close to his home.he can……

"No. London," she said, "there's a train in less than an hour." This is the worst possible situation.Taunton is a few minutes further down the road.He was considering what he should do, and as he was thinking he heard himself say to his horror: "Oh, I can take you to London. Let me take you to London..." --idiot!Why did he say "let me" in such an idiotic way?It's like something a 12-year-old would do. "Are you going to London?" she asked. "No," he said, "but . . . "—fool! "It's very kind of you," she said, "but it's really not necessary. I like the train." Then she left abruptly.In other words, the part that brought her vitality and vitality left.She looked into the distance through the car window and muttered to herself in a low voice. He couldn't believe it. But after 30 seconds of chatting, he had already screwed up everything. The innumerable evidence of adult behavior accumulated over the centuries, he said to himself, showed that adults would not do this. 5 miles from Taunton, sign says. "Fanny," he said. She turned sharply to look at him. "You haven't told me how you..." "Listen," said Arthur, "I'll tell you, but there's something odd about this. Very odd." She still looked at him, but said nothing. "listen to me……" "You said so." "Did I tell you? Oh. There's something I have to talk to you about, something I have to tell you...a story I have to tell you, maybe..." He didn't know what to say.Gotta have some clues.All things are entangled. "...probably can't finish it in the remaining five miles." He finally finished, but worried that he was too stuttering. "Ok……" "Assume, please," he said, "assume," he doesn't know what's going to happen next, so he thinks he should sit back and listen, "that in some strange way you mean a lot to me, and , you don't know yourself, I'm very important to you too. But it's all in vain because we have five kilometers left and I have something very important to say to a man I just met, Also be careful not to hit big trucks, and I'm an idiot for that. So you say..." He stopped helplessly and looked at her, "What should I...how?" "Look the way!" she screamed. "Oops!" He narrowly avoided a German truck loaded with a hundred Italian washing machines. "I think," she said, relieved, "you should buy me a drink before my train leaves."