 It wasn't the end when my girlfriend handed me the phone in the middle of the night and said, here, say hello to my husband. And it wasn't the end of anything. When another grabbed the wheel at 70 and screamed, I could pull this right off the road right now. I could do it right now. Those frenzies have passed into something like the memory of a good novel. Waited in one's lap when the day has cleared and there's nothing left to do. But look in on the Russians passing out at the feet of their superiors, emptying their wallets into the fireplace, throwing their brain-stuffed heads before the locomotive of history, rather than face the vivid memory of errors committed when the face was hot and stared into the eyes of that intransigent, that other face.