It must have been past two. I spent the hours just driving aimlessly, trying to think, to make sense out of what was happening to me. I kept coming back to the fact that the dog knew me, as if that meant something, as if that were the key, but it meant nothing and there was no key. And the dog had changed between one time and the next, which was completely impossible, of course, but no more impossible than the idea that some malign, cosmic equivalent of Nixon’s secretary Rosemary Woods had performed incredible contortions to erase part of my life, leaving these inexplicable eighteen-minute gaps. No, it wasn’t that.
I remember sitting at a stoplight on an empty, rain-slick street, gazing up at Billy Penn’s statue atop City Hall, wondering if it really was the same statue I’d always known, or one which was, somehow, different.
When I finally turned the bolt on the door and stood in my own living room, Martina called down from the top of the stairs. “Alan? Is that you?”
“I…think so.”
“Alan, are you all right? I got worried, so I called the Meeses, and Joe said you’d called once but never showed up. I didn’t know what to do next.”
“I don’t know what to do next either,” I said softly.
“What?”
I took off my raincoat and my regular coat, which was also wet, and looked around for a place to put them. There was none, so I hung them on the doorknob.
“Martina…Marty…please come down and talk to me. Just come down.” My voice broke. I was crying again.
She came down, in curlers and bathrobe and slippers, a concerned expression on her face. For an instant I felt the most hopeless, helpless terror I had ever known, as I was certain she didn’t recognize me and was about to run up the stairs and call the police. But she merely paused, two steps from the bottom, then continued cautiously, startled, bewildered, but not acting at all like a woman who confronts a total stranger in her house late at night.
“What’s wrong, Alan?”
“Something…very disturbing has happened. Just sit with me.”
We sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace, across from my so familiar armchair. The newspaper she’d brought me that evening was still there.
I told her what had happened that evening, all of it, as best I could.
“It’s like I’ve lost my grip,” I said, “like I’m drifting out of the lives of the people around me, just drifting away. I don’t know what I’ve done or what the reason is, but Joe and I, we were not in quite the same world anymore—”
I couldn’t say anything more. I sat still, interlocking my fingers, joining my hands together, then moving my hands until some of the fingers missed, and more did, until I was grasping my left thumb with my right pinkie. Then I spread my hands apart, palms up, and looked into Martina’s eyes.
“It’s all crazy,” I said. “It can’t happen, but it’s happening. I want you to tell me it’s not, but I know better. It would just be a lie.”
I embraced her then, my head upon her shoulder, and once more I wept like a child. She put her arms around me lightly.
“What I’m most afraid of is that somehow everything will change, and Gabby won’t know her father anymore …”
She sucked in breath suddenly, stiffened, and let go of me. I drew back, and as I looked into her face, I saw the change taking place, right there. The concern faded. The expression became totally different, a kind of shocked bewilderment, a sense of being imposed upon, something bordering on rage.
“How can you do this to me?” she said. “You promised me you would never mention that name again. Remember? Our daughter’s name is Julia. Gabrielle died when she was a baby. You know that.”
She rose from the sofa and turned her back on me, and I knew then, with the utmost certainty, that there was nothing more I could do. It had happened, completely and totally, whatever it was.
“Go to bed,” I said in desperation. “Go to sleep and in the morning everything will be fine. None of this will have happened.”
She backed away from me. I got up and shooed her up the stairs. “Go on,” I said. “I’ll be a little while yet.”
I waited until I heard her close our bedroom door behind her, and then I slowly made my way up the stairs.
I walked very quietly past our bedroom, down the hall to the end, and there, as carefully as I could, I opened another door and peered in.
Our daughter was asleep amid huge pillows, beneath an E. T. bedspread I could recognize even by the dim glare of her nightlight.
I slipped into the room, but I didn’t turn the overhead light on. I was afraid to, lest I see her too clearly, and she turn out to be too tall, or a blonde instead of a brunette, or merely a stranger to me. I groped around for one of her school copy books, tore out a page slowly, and crouched by the night light, writing a short note with a felt-tip pen:
DARLING, YOUR FATHER LOVES YOU VERY MUCH, BUT HE HAS TO GO AWAY. TRY TO REMEMBER HIM.
I picked up her alarm clock and placed the note under it. The clock said 2:45. It was no more than ten and a half hours since this had all begun, but the elevator cable had snapped now, and I had fallen very far, very fast. I was beyond trying to understand.
I stood for a few minutes, gazing at the sleeping girl, and then I left the room.
* * * *
I did not look in on Martina again. Instead, I went downstairs, got a dry coat out of the closet, and left the house. The rain had stopped by then, but the wind was bitterly cold.
I walked the streets for hours, taking note of all the familiar houses in the neighborhood until, after a while, they were no longer familiar. Once a police car cruised right by me, very slowly, but I stood motionless until it was gone. I had not been seen. How very appropriate, I thought to myself, that I was becoming invisible, too. It was, after all, the next logical step.
Dawn had just begun to break when I boarded a streetcar, and sat in a kind of stupor as it rushed into the tunnel at 40th Street. It was somehow comforting to be inside the tunnel, with the world shut out and concrete walls whizzing past, blurring into a featureless grey. I listened numbly as the stops were called out: 37th Street, Sansom, 35th, and Saint Mary’s Academy—it no longer mattered that there was no 35th Street stop on this line nor any place called Saint Mary’s Academy.
I got off at 30th Street, and walked slowly along the traffic island between the huge main post office and the equally monumental 30th Street train station. I thought of them as two vast tombs, containing the bones of all the kings of the Earth.
After a while, I stood on a bridge, staring down into the Schuylkill River, watching the colors and the waves, the light and shadow, and the occasional bits of debris. The pattern was always changing, never the same from one moment to the next, never, ever returning to what it once had been.
Another police car went by, ignoring me.
Some days passed. I had some money with me, so I ate in restaurants, among crowds of strangers, until my increasingly unkempt state made waiters shy away from me. I tried to keep clean, using the sinks in the men’s room at the train station. I lived in that station, like so many others, who were also lost, but for different reasons.
Once or twice I saw people I knew, co-workers from the office passing through on their daily commutes. The first time this happened, I hid myself. Afterwards, I always carried a newspaper to hide behind when the time came. I never dared to approach any of them, for fear of what they might say if I asked them if they had ever known someone named Alan Summers.
After a while I saw them no more, and all the people around me were strangers, the great masses of them flowing, changing, changing again, until I never saw the same face twice and all the faces blended into a sameness, like the blur of the rushing subway tunnel.
I