bus fare. He could do that. But who would he call?
He shifted around in the bed, making its springs squeak. There was a fog in his head, an irritating fog. He could remember faces, he could remember first names, he could remember a few addresses. But nothing complete. Of the people he knew in New York, none of them would come in full and clear, with face and first name and last name and address. He could think of no telephone numbers at all.
They shouldn’t have turned me loose , he thought. They should have kept me at the hospital.
The window was open a little bit, and that stink of smoldering wet cardboard was in the room. It had been everywhere he’d gone on the street, and in the restaurant, and in the movie house. It distracted him sometimes, the way a persistent noise can distract.
The stink was interrupting his thoughts. He kept trying to remember, trying to put a name to this face, or that face, and it wasn’t working. His hands clenched and relaxed at his sides, and his mouth was twisted with strain, but it wouldn’t work. He couldn’t get them.
He kept trying, and kept trying, and under the covers he was perspiring, but it didn’t work at all. The fog was too persistent, it was more like syrup poured into his head, sticking to everything, obscuring all the outlines, like the paint muffling the lines of the moldings in the room, but more softly and more cloyingly.
And what made it worse was that it was ridiculous. It was like being on a crowded street, and your pants have fallen down around your ankles. You bend over and tug at them, but you can’t get them back up again because it turns out you’re standing on them. You stay in that position, too ashamed to straighten and show your face, and too off-balance to move your feet, and you tug uselessly at your trousers, and they just won’t come free. And it’s too absurd to be a tragedy. It’s even too absurd to be high comedy.
I can’t remember my friends.
He could imagine himself going up to a stranger, and asking for help, saying, “I can’t remember my friends. I have to get back to New York and see them again, so I can remember who they are.”
He tugged and tugged, but the names wouldn’t come free.
When he finally fell asleep, it was from exhaustion. He awoke again to a room full of thin sunshine, and the ever-present stink of wet cardboard. He wasn’t at all rested. His head ached, and he felt lumpy and awkward.
He washed himself and dressed, and then stood a moment looking at the door. He was all dressed up with no place to go. The door was old wood, aged and varnished a nut brown. It was decorated with knob and bolt and chain and framed house rules. It led generally to the whole world, but particularly to nowhere at all.
He sat down on the bed, and scraped his forehead with the palm of his hand, remembering last night’s struggle with names and faces. It was no good, and he knew it. The memory would get stronger again later on, the doctor had said so, but in the meantime what was he supposed to do?
There was only one immediate goal: to get back to New York. It called to him like the womb. There, in New York, home , he could crowd himself into a warm dark place and wait for his health to return. Here he was naked, unprotected, out alone on a hostile plain.
He remembered counting his money last night, but he couldn’t remember what the figure had been, so he took out the bills and coins, spread them on the bed, and counted them again, and discovered again that he had five dollars and seven cents.
Not enough. Not enough for anything. Enough to pay for this room one more night, and to eat sparingly today, and then tomorrow there would be nothing left of him at all.
When the idea came to him to get a job here in this town, he was at first surprised at it. A job—not a job touring, but a job —implied some sort of permanence, and his connection with this town couldn’t be more temporary. He wanted nothing more from it than its
Eleanor Coerr, Ronald Himler