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In that year, Charles Journal, if that was his name, and he wasn't sure, had taken to going to a park, not the same one every time, and willing himself out of himself, and a long way off. It was surprisingly easy to do, and better, as an oblivion-producer, than alcohol or pot, except that it was harder to come back than to go. He knew why. He had walked a couple of sleeping-pill cases in his time. They fought coming back, they hated it. Oblivion is heaven, after all, it is the only heaven, and the loss of it is surely hell. So, certain of the root of the matter, he worked on it. He liked to think that if he could really learn to go and come back, in and out, he could teach the technique. He would be a benefactor to humanity, and he would be remembered, an immortal, unlike the nameless heroes who first drank spoiled grape juice and put fire to hemp. But, in the main, he thought of himself.

It was easy to get off, it wasn't a great deal more difficult than ordinary autohypnosis, and he would quickly, or so it seemed, find himself happily disoriented, wholly out of himself, out of touch with reality, quite unaware of where he was, so that he would be looking, say, at the leaves scattering over the level lawn of the park in autumn, finding rare beauty in them, wondering from what high-reaching trees, in what strange land, they had been blown. And nearly always, because he was still learning, and out of fright at the chance of not being able to get back, he would begin almost at once to try. He would stare at the leaves, for instance, telling himself that they should offer some kind of clue. Still, they did not. Fallen leaves look much the same the world around. It did occur to him that these ran to yellows and browns, lacking the reds and oranges of leaves thrown by maple trees. There must be something in that. The little park, or garden, or whatever, in which he sat bore some resemblance in shape, in air, to one in Worcester, Massachusetts, near a museum, on a hill. On the other hand, there was one much like this near Breese Terrace, in Madison, in Wisconsin. There were red leaves there, though. Washington? Were there maples in Washington? Certainly, there were the famous Japanese maples along the Potomac, and every year thousands came to see the cherry blossoms on them. The Nymphenburg in Munich? A fountain, and hidden in the woods a little house made all of shells, and red leaves, yes, some red, some brown. He decided he wouldn't worry about it for a while, he would put his mind somewhere else, he would amuse himself, and he gave himself a new name, and made a rhyme about it:

They found that Adam Ashley Burton Jones

Was made of skin, and also bones

And blood, and guts, and all of that

And brains enough to fill his hat.

Whimsical, he thought. He stuffed it away in his head and did another one:

The policeman came with measured tread

His flat hat blue upon his head

Wryly smiling as he said,

"You poor dear man, your ear is dead."

Why "flat blue hat"? There must be something in that. Where do the police wear anything that could be called flat blue hats? France? He looked around the park again. It was more like Gramercy Park than a corner of the Champ de Mars. On the other hand, it was more like the Champ de Mars than Gramercy Park.

He recalled the first verse again. He liked it, but the last line needed fixing. He had meant it as an upsidedown hat, full of brains to the brim, like Irish stew, but you could read it as meaning brains enough to fill his skull and his skull big enough for his hat...a string of sentences, in red type, (continued on page 202)untitled(continued from page 109) began to pop up out of his own brain, in a pink corner labeled, he noticed, Hats, and the first one was, "He couldn't generate enough brain power to warm a hatband." Who wrote that? Alan Hynd. He was going to remember the title of the article, the date of the magazine, and the picture on the cover, but he shut off the whole process, and just in time, too. Once started, he'd go through everything in Hats and it could take a long time. That was the center hell around which he spun, all his days, a memory, no, he couldn't call it that, a good word for a bad thing; he thought of his memory as, say, a monster computer, a really big one, a roomful, a gimmick with about 20,000,000 miles of wire in it, and a trainload of transistors, a big chromium box the size of a house, covered with gray-brown mouse hair, scraggly individual pelts, small, like the steel plates with which the Indians used to armor their war elephants. He had not asked for that kind of memory, or worked to get it, or anything of the sort. He could remember all kinds of useful facts: January 20, 1954 was the coldest day recorded in Montana, 70 degrees below zero F., and Henry I died in 1135, and a blimp is a blimp because it used to be a B-type Limp Aircraft, and before S O S radio operators used to send C O D, and on and on and on, he could give you stuff like that hour after hour, and once in a while he could amuse himself, or someone else, but unhappily it was a package deal, and he could remember just as well the amber scent of a girl named Margaret Biere, the one and true love of his life when he was 13, and every five years or so he would pick it up on someone, maybe on the street, and it would turn his heart over and slam him against a lamppost. He could remember every word of a conversation of an hour and a half in which he had, helplessly, and watching himself do it, destroyed and blown up and ground to dirt his friendship with his father, a nice enough man who happened to be worth something over $2,000,000 when he died, and who made, as a result, a capricious distribution of it among strangers, oafs, charlatans, and lickspittles. He knew the exact taste of an omelette aux champignons he'd had in the Hotel de Marcier in Nemours on the 17th of May, 1949, although ever since he had been careful not to eat mushrooms in any form, in the fear that the taste of that omelet, and the taste of the girl who sat up in bed with him and ate half of it, would volatilize and disappear. He knew it would never happen.

A fat Dalmatian dog loped across the green, running crookedly and sidewise, as if his hindquarters were getting orders from somewhere else. Tall in orange, a black leash dragging from her wrist, through the bushes and under the arching trees, a girl, about a foot high at that distance, and he thought, if I could stop her just there I would take her home and put her under a bell jar. The thing would have a rosewood base, with a round groove where the glass fitted, and green felt on the bottom, I'd have the dog, too, he'd be lean, though, and standing straight. He tried to stop her, so that he would work out the picture fully, but it was no good, she kept coming, a tall, leggy one, a stupid face with a nose like a bent shovel, but pretty; she came straight, that being the way the path lay, and growing as she came until she was, just before he shut his eyes, 92 feet tall or something near it; he was staring at her shins just above the ankle, he could see the mesh of her stockings, about an inch square between threads, and the silver-yellow short hairs on her legs, as big around as, say, clothesline, and when he knew she was going to step on him, the round wet file in his head flicked over and he read that the ordinary spike heel, slammed down by a woman weighing 105, delivers a pressure of just over 2500 pounds per square inch, or more weight than a tractor puts on the ground. He waited for the crunch that didn't come and opened his eyes to watch her pass; she had a really lovely ass and as she passed she diminished, according to the true laws of perspective, down to two and a half times the size of the dog, galloping gimpily ahead of her, a stick in his mouth so long that one end dragged foolishly on the ground, an idiot dog, lost in a world with no more carriages for him to run under. He watched the girl out of sight around the turning in the path. Her buttocks, winking like a heliograph across 50 miles of desert, went last.

A thin girl came, and as she passed

One noted that she was golden-assed;

How odd a whim of mighty God's

To case gluteals in gilded pods.

He stuffed it into a crack under A for ass, reading it once as it went. Water fell on him. Sit in the rain, or go? He retched lightly under the idea that there would be a place to go, if he knew where it was. I had better get back, he thought, and he tried, he tried hard, but the gears spun soundlessly without meshing. He was very frightened. He walked to the fence and took a big piece of it in each hand and stared into the street, running now with rain. It told him nothing. He heard the girl coming back, her feet scuffing lightly on the gravel. He turned. I'll have another look at that as it goes by, he thought, and then I'll sit down and I'll work, and I'll get back. She stopped beside him. Her dog stopped, too, looking up over his stick. The dog was cross-eyed.

"Well, love." she said, "you got my little message, I hear."

"Message?"

"Read it again when you go home," she said. "Read it again. You ought to read it fifteen times, you bastard!" She snapped the leash on the dog, jerked the stick through his teeth and tossed it over the fence. She went toward the gate, fast.

"Hang on," he said. "I'm coming with you."

"You are not," she said. She was outside now, she stuffed the dog into a blue car, dropped herself in after him and had it moving five seconds later. He couldn't even see which way she turned at the corner, there were bushes in the way.

He stood looking into the street, plucking absently at his shirt, half wet through. Tremors ran up and down his arms, and not from cold. He lifted the top of his head a crack and saw a moist pink chaos. He looked at the shoes he wore, the slacks, which were none of his that he knew. He felt in the pockets. It was a thin inventory: a handkerchief, a box of Swedish matches, a pewter cigarette case, empty. There was a square of typing pasted to the inner lid of the case, a name and an address, Dr. John Oliver. Well. All right. He would go around and see Dr. Oliver, whoever he was, and after a while he'd say, "You know, doctor, a funny thing happened to me on the way to your office; I forgot who I was, or who I am, if I am."

He went through the gate and stopped a man.

"Pardonnez-moi, m'sieu'," he said. "Pouvez-vous m'indiquer le chemin pour cette adresse?"

The man looked at it. Pleasant-looking old man, carrying a cane, white hair.

"I don't speak French, I'm sorry," he said. "Do you speak any English at all?"

"Yes. Yes, of course."

"Well, now," the old man said. "Dr. Oliver. Is that 129 East 87th Street?"

"Right. I just don't know which way to go from here, you see."

"But, my dear man, surely that's a New York address, 129 East 87th Street? And surely we're in Dublin?"

He let the old boy go and went back into the park and sat down in the rain. After all, she just might come back.