I made my way down the carpeted stairs to the street, trying to think. Instead, I felt only despair. I had thought I was Fred Martin. Through the ears of Dave Thordsen I had listened to Fred Martin, and as I listened I had realized I couldn't be. Some of his memories were my memories, but what I possessed was nothing more than fragments. Spotty fragments.
It was the same with his other identity, Orville Snyder. Spotty fragments that I clutched and possessed, while all else was strange to me—even such a thing as the name of his wife, a recognition of her features.
It was the same now, with Dave Thordsen. His face was my face when I looked at it in the mirror—just as Fred's face had been mine when I looked at it with his eyes in the mirror.
A new realization materialized within me as I stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide which way to go to find a bus line. I had no single memory of my own. Not one.
Every memory I possessed belonged to Dave or Orville, or his other identity, Fred Martin. And those memories were fragments. Three incomplete jigsaw puzzles mixed together in a box, and now put together sufficiently to see that they were incomplete. Sufficiently complete to see they were not one puzzle.
Yet, in a way, they were. I possessed a continuity of thought beginning when I was standing in the living room with Orville's wife talking to me, and continuing right up to now. Except for two large gaps. The first gap in memory was from the time Orville left his house until he stood in the lab. The second gap was from the time he tried to read the paper—or I tried to read the paper, until I woke up three or four hours later as Dave.
That, then, was my own memory, my remembrance of this continuity of existence starting the day before. Twenty-four hours. If I defined memory as existence, then I was twenty-four hours old. But that was utterly absurd. I could think. I could think for myself. I was reasoning right now, trying to solve the riddle of my existence, and I was doing so without Dave Thordsen being aware of it.
That was obvious, once I thought of it. Dave would have recognized his own wife. So would Orville. If they looked at their wives and couldn't recall ever seeing them before, they wouldn't have the same reaction I had had.
I studied that angle. Right now, as I walked slowly along the sidewalk toward the street where I had seen a bus cross, I was not all of Dave Thordsen. I was seeing through his eyes, hearing what he was hearing. But he was also seeing through his eyes and hearing with his ears, and he was completely unaware of me. More, he was unreachable. What was he thinking of Fred Martin? I didn't know.
My contact was not with Dave Thordsen, but with his sensory and his motor centers. It had been the same with Fred Martin, with a filtering through of some of his memories—probably because of his emotional disturbances. And in both cases the contact was so smooth and intimate that instead of feeling separate, I had possessed that contact as my own.