Section 5: When I was sixteen, I knew I’d never love another girl like I loved Paula.

I’m guessing that Paula was an unrequited love, but loved with the devotion of an adolescent who never approached her.

When Dag wakes up, he’s traveling tied up in the back of a garbage truck on the way to the dump. There must be some symbolism or parallel in that. He will get dumped, manage to escape from his bonds and crawl out of the dump as it is about to be bull-dozed into oblivion. He manages to get to a phone and call his client who comes to get him. It’s when she throws herself into his arms as he is still smelling of garbage that he realizes that he’s in love.

She takes him back to her place to clean him up and have a touching love scene. He tells her that he wants to donate his money to a fund for children needing transplants. She says she’ll throw in the money that is left from her husband if he finds it. This tacit permission figures in in the last chapter. He tells her that he has to get back to Seattle. He knows now who the “other woman” was and needs to track her down.

This scene, of course, will end with him jumping or being thrown out a window which leaves him hanging from a sixth floor ledge over the Seattle waterfront with one foot on a telephone wire. We’ve caught up with the beginning of the story and are ready for the final action. End Section 5.