For a few hours, he’ll stay behind the steering wheel, watching the yellow rectangles in her building go out, one by one, the first and only time he’s been on a stakeout for himself.
This passage was inspired by one of the saddest parts of a very sad play — King Lear. At the end, the old king is doomed to die but doesn’t know it. And he speaks wistfully to his daughter Cordelia about their imagined future together, a future they will be denied by fate and the cruelty of men. Lear says to her: “Come, let’s away to prison. / We two alone will sing like birds in the cage. / When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh…” Lear is, finally, a better person than he was at the start of the play. But it’s too late. And this sad little imagined future will never come to pass.
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