“I will, if the delusion or the dream returns. Or if I do not feel well.”
After this Charles Vincent began to forget about the incident. He only recalled it with humor sometimes when again he was behind in his work.
“Well, if it gets bad enough I may do another sleepwalking act and catch up. But if there is another aspect of time and I could enter it at will, it might often be handy.”
Charles Vincent never saw his face at all. It is very dark in some of those clubs and the Coq Bleu is like the inside of a tomb. He went to the clubs only about once a month, sometimes after a show when he did not want to go home to bed, sometimes when he was just plain restless.
Citizens of the more fortunate states may not know of the mysteries of the clubs. In Vincent’s the only bars are beer bars, and only in the clubs can a person get a drink, and only members are admitted. It is true that even such a small club as the Coq Bleu had thirty thousand members, and at a dollar a year that is a nice sideline. The little numbered membership cards cost a penny each for the printing, and the member wrote in his own name. But he had to have a card—or a dollar for a card—to gain admittance.
But there could be no entertainments in the clubs. There was nothing there but the little bar room in the near darkness.
The man was there, and then he was not, and then he was there again. And always where he sat it was too dark to see his face.
“I wonder,” he said to Vincent (or to the bar at large, though there were no other customers and the bartender was asleep), “I wonder if you have ever read Zurbarin on the Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius?”
“I have never heard of the work nor of the man,” said Vincent. “I doubt if either exists.”
“I am Zurbarin,” said the man.