It was a good exit line, so he went out.
II
He got his hat and coat and went outside, out of the air-conditioning and into the hot sunlight. Out of the quiet madhouse of a newspaper office after deadline, into the quieter madhouse of the streets on a sultry July afternoon.
He tilted his panama back on his head and ran his handkerchief across his forehead. Where was he going? Not to the library to bone up on paranoia; that had been a gag to get off for the rest of the afternoon. He’d read everything the library had on paranoia—and on allied subjects—over two years ago. He was an expert on it. He could fool any psychiatrist in the country into thinking that he was sane—or that he wasn’t.
He walked north to the park and sat down on one of the benches in the shade. He put his hat on the bench beside him and mopped his forehead again.
He stared out at the grass, bright green in the sunlight, at the pigeons with their silly-head-bobbing method of walking, at a red squirrel that came down one side of a tree, looked about him and scurried up the other side of the same tree.
And he thought back to the wall of amnesia of three years ago.
The wall that hadn’t been a wall at all. The phrase intrigued him: a wall at all. Pigeons on the grass, alas. A wall at all.
It wasn’t a wall at all; it was a shift, an abrupt change. A line had been drawn between two lives. Twenty-seven years of a life before the accident. Three years of a life since the accident.
They were not the same life.