A Dialog About a Dialog

Z:
Rapt in wrangling(s) with regard to our dispute on immortality,
we had borrowed my neighbor’s skiff and had rowed out to
the heart of the lake without a thought for the day, which
had lost all its light and, for that matter, in the dark, we could
not see the joyful scowls, which we had, unbeknownst, skew-
ed to each other’s faces. With great fervor that went beyond
the heated passions of excitement, Dante Alighieri’s voice said
more than thrice that the soul was evergreen, phoenix-like, sem
piternal. What’s more, he had persuaded me that the debt and
trial of the body is, in-toto, nihil ad rem, extraneous and wide
of the point, and that at the nadir of one’s respective rope, when
one respectively passes from earthly frame … into the supernal,
this given event is most trivial, trite, as valueless as breathing is
to a newborn. I was fiddling with Dante’s pocketknife, closing
then opening then closing its corroded blade, when Thomas Pyn-
chon’s accordion began its dispatch of eternal wavering speedi-
ness, that bewildering gravity of wobbly, quivering notes. I pro-
posed to Dante that, God willing, upon finding again the shore,
we hang ourselves, so we could continue our row without all
the profuse noise.
A:
(caringly) But I suspect that at the final moment you reconsidered.
Z:
(now in a playground, deep in the act of swinging)
Quite plainly, I don’t recall if we killed ourselves that night.