Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/812511
T hey told me later I should have died up there. But somehow I managed to get off that ridge and make my way back down to Carly and Jane, who rushed me to the ER where the doctors somehow managed to pull me back from the brink. Three weeks after getting home from the hospital, I awoke in the middle of the night, still laden with questions, and when the answers began to filter in, I sat up on the edge of the bed and turned on the light and began writing them down in my old journal. The next morning I awoke in a stupor, vaguely aware that something had come to me during the night, without a clue as to what it might have been. But I knew from experience that I had best try to keystroke it into my computer right then and there, while I still had some chance of being able to decipher my terribly shaky handwriting. So I stumbled down the hall with my journal, fired up the laptop, began typing . . . and realized within the first couple of sentences that this was the continuation of the story I'd thought had dried up a few days before our fishing trip to Georgia and the subsequent cardio-adventure that had taken me out to the edge of the Eternal. And now, Mr. Gaddis, I offer that story here to you, that story that became the last chapter in the new book I had mistakenly thought was finished, as yet one more take on this whole business of life and death and life again—a story that admittedly challenges both the reader's and the writer's sense of logic, and comes from a place where reason and reality don't necessarily mesh. Sincerely, Mike Altizer INTO THE LIGHT "Behold I go forward, but he is not there; And backward, but I cannot perceive him . . . But he knoweth the way that I take, And when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold." – THE BOOK OF JOB, Chapter 23, Verses 8 – 10 I died on a cool autumn evening, a year after that first heart attack. I recognized it immediately when it returned, just as I'm sure my father had so many years earlier—that abrupt, hard- sticking pressure dead center in the chest, a were the finishing touches on a new book that I'd been working on for the past three years, and I was due to depart for the coast of Georgia in a couple of days to do a redfish story with my daughter. So she and I did our fishing trip, and the evening after we returned home we had dinner and then sat at the table for a long time talking about fishing and writing and life is general, until I belatedly excused myself to take my regular evening walk. Alone. I was 200 yards above my house, high on the crest of the ridge, when my chest detonated. the totality of which was still more or less a mystery to me. And then it all stopped—as though a great deluge had flowed out into some dry dessert place and been soaked up by the thirsting sands of something I couldn't yet understand. Oh, I thought about trying to force the piece and finish it all by myself. But I felt instinctively that this story was still in a very delicate and precarious state of being, and that if I were meant to see it through to completion I must be patient and wait for it to return in its own good time. Besides, I was still putting what I thought 60 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S