The postman now believes that it’s possible to choose whether you are happy or unhappy, just by changing your way of seeing things. He wakes up with Cabbage beside him and realizes that since cats have not disappeared, he is going to disappear instead. He’s come to terms with the inevitability of his death. Although it was possible for him to get rid of other things, he couldn’t bear to get rid of cats.

The previous night, to Aloha’s surprise and chagrin, the postman refused to make cats disappear. Aloha said that the postman’s refusal meant that Aloha had once more lost to God; the past week was like the biblical story of the Forbidden Fruit—a bet between God and the Devil. Aloha appeared as a doppelganger of the postman because the Devil has no set form. Instead, his appearance reflects the postman’s regrets—a version of the postman that could have been but never was. The postman then accepted that he would die with such regrets, and was now just happy to have lived at all. Aloha laughed: Only on the brink of death had the postman finally learned to value the important parts of life.