His parachute failed to open; also his reserve chute. And his instructor was on the plane banking toward the Rio Grande, returning to the landing strip on the mesa, where they had met in the spring. A man in a free fall, spread-eagle on a cushion of air between two mountain ranges, is not a metaphor for anything beyond the fact that things end, sometimes spectacularly. This he had known since summer, when she had warned him that it could not continue like this, and now on a cool autumn morning the diver had never seen such a rush of colors: the cerulean sky; the red soil with which his wife threw pots for the craft shows; the green of the piñon pines. There was smoke on the wind from a burning field, flecks of blue sparkled in the brown river, and he could almost taste the juniper berries about to be plucked by the magpies. His life did not flash before his eyes as he plummeted toward the earth, his arms flailing like a swimmer dragged out to sea. What came to him instead was a moment in the kitchen with his mother, after a school trip to the zoo. She set out on the table a plate with a peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of cider, lit a cigarette, and said, Did you see anything interesting? Book jacket.