I struck up a new cigarette.
The thing I must remember, I told myself, was that my recollections were false and unreliable. It would do me no good to keep following these false memories in a closed curve.
I touched my navel area and flinched. The beating, I was confident, had been real. But it had been a nightmare. Those cops couldn't have been true. They were a small boy's bad dream about symbolized authority. They were keeping me from re-entering the past where I belonged, punishing me to make me stay in my trap of the present.
Oh, God.
I rolled over on my face and pushed it into the upholstery.
That was the worst part of it. False memories, feelings of persecution, that was one thing. Believing that you are actively caught up in a mixture of the past with the present, a Daliesque viscosity of reality, was something else.
I needed help.
Or if there was no help for me, it was my duty to have myself placed where I couldn't harm other consumers.
If there was one thing that working for an advertising agency had taught me, it was social responsibility.
I took up the phone book and located several psychiatrists. I selected one at random, for no particular reason.