"Because," Gloria said, "everyone wanted me to do it. I'm tired of doing what other people want me to do."

"Don't kill yourself," Fat said. "Move in with me. I'm all alone. I really like you. Try it for a while, at least. Well move your stuff up, me and my friends. There's lots of things we can do, like go places, like to the beach today. Isn't it nice here?"

To that, Gloria said nothing.

"It would really make me feel terrible," Fat said. "For the rest of my life, if you did away with yourself." Thereby, as he later realized, he presented her with all the wrong reasons for living. She would be doing it as a favor to others. He could not have found a worse reason to give had he looked for years. Better to back the VW over her. This is why suicide hotlines are not manned by nitwits; Fat learned this later in Vancouver, when, suicidal himself, he phoned the British Columbia Crisis Center and got expert advice. There was no corrolation [sic] between this and what he told Gloria on the beach that day.

Pausing to rub a small stone loose from her foot, Gloria said, "I'd like to stay overnight at your place tonight."

Hearing this, Fat experienced involuntary visions of sex.

"Far out," he said, which was the way he talked in those days. The counterculture possessed a whole book of phrases which bordered on meaning nothing. Fat used to string a bunch of them together. He did so now, deluded by his own carnality into imagining that he had saved his friend's life. His judgment, which wasn't worth much anyhow, dropped to a new nadir of acuity. The existence of a good person hung in the balance, hung in a balance which Fat held, and all he could think of now was the prospect of scoring. "I can dig it," he prattled away as they walked. "Out of sight."

A few days later she was dead. They spent that night together, sleeping fully dressed; they did not make love; the next afternoon Gloria drove off, ostensibly to get her stuff