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The fountain jetted its cold umbrella above the green-tinged copper dolphins. The sun ignited it whenever he moved his head. The wind rumpled it.
Clustered on the concrete, birds pecked at part of a candy bar stuck to a red wrapper.
Kites swayed on their tails, nosed downward, rose again, as youngsters tugged at invisible strings. Telephone lines were tangled with wooden frames and torn paper, like broken G clefs and smeared glissandos.
He hated the telephone lines, the kites, the children, the birds.
Most of all, though, he hated himself.
How does a man undo that which has been done? He doesn't. There is no way under the sun. He may suffer, remember, repeat, curse, or forget. Nothing else. The past, in this sense, is inevitable.
A woman walked past. He did not look up in time to see her face, but the dusky blonde fall of her hair to her collar and the swell of her sure, sheer-netted legs below the black hem of her coat and above the matching click of her heels heigh-ho, stopped his breath behind his stomach and snared his eyes in the wizard-weft of her walking and her posture and some more, like a rhyme to the last of his thoughts.
He half-rose from the bench when the pink static struck his eyeballs, and the fountain became a volcano spouting rainbows.
The world was frozen and served up to him under a glass.
...The woman passed back before him and he looked down too soon to see her face.
The hell was begi
He gave himself up to it. Let it keep him until he broke, until he was all used up and there was nothing left.
He waited, there on the bench, watching the slivey toves be brillig, as the fountain sucked its waters back within itself, drawing them up in a great arc above the unmoving dolphins, and the boats raced backward over the pond, and the fence divested itself of stray scraps of paper, as the birds replaced the candy bar within the red wrapper, bit by crunchy bit.
His thoughts only were inviolate, his body belonged to the retreating tide.
Eventually, he rose and strolled backwards out of the park.
On the street a boy backed past him, unwhistling snatches of a popular song.
He backed up the stairs to his apartment, his hangover growing worse again, undrank his coffee, unshowered, unswallowed his aspirins, and got into bed, feeling awful.
Let this be it, he decided.
A faintly-remembered nightmare ran in reverse though his mind, giving it an undeserved happy ending.
It was dark when he awakened.
He was very drunk.
He backed over to the bar and began spitting out his drinks, one by one into the same glass he had used the night before, and pouring them from the glass back into the bottles again. Separating the gin and vermouth was no trick at all. The liquids leapt into the air as he held the uncorked bottles above the bar.
And he grew less and less drunk as this went on.
Then he stood before an early Martini and it was 10:07 in the P.M. There, within the hallucination, he wondered about another hallucination. Would time loop-the-loop, forward and then backward again, through his previous seizure?
No.
It was as though it had not happened, had never been.
He continued on back through the evening, undoing things.
He raised the telephone, said "good-bye", untold Murray that he would not be coming to work again tomorrow, listened a moment, recradled the phone and looked at it as it rang.
The sun came up in the west and people were backing their cars to work.
He read the weather report and the headlines, folded the evening paper and placed it out in the hall.
It was the longest seizure he had ever had, but he did not really care. He settled himself down within it and watched as the day unwound itself back to morning.
His hangover returned as the day grew smaller, and it was terrible when he got into bed again.
When he awakened the previous evening the drunke
As he sat there that day, his mouth uncursing and undrinking and his eyes unreading, he knew that new cars were being shipped back to Detroit and disassembled, that corpses were awakening into their death-throes, and that priests the world over were saying black mass, unknowing.
He wanted to chuckle, but he could not tell his mouth to do it.
He unsmoked two and a half packs of cigarettes.
Then came another hangover and he went to bed. Later, the sun set in the east.
Time's winged chariot fled before him as he opened the door and said "good-bye" to his comforters and they came in and sat down and told him not to grieve overmuch.
And he wept without tears as he realized what was to come.
Despite his madness, he hurt.
...Hurt, as the days rolled backward.
...Backward, inexorably.
...Inexorably, until he knew the time was near at hand.
He gnashed the teeth of his mind.
Great was his grief and his hate and his love.
He was wearing his black suit and undrinking drink after drink, while somewhere the men were scraping the clay back onto the shovels which would be used to undig the grave.
He backed his car to the funeral parlor, parked it, and climbed into the limousine.
They backed all the way to the graveyard.
He stood among his friends and listened to the preacher.
".dust to dust; ashes to Ashes," the man said, which is pretty much the same whichever way you say it.
The casket was taken back to the hearse and returned to the funeral parlor.
He sat through the service and went home and unshaved and unbrushed his teeth and went to bed.
He awakened and dressed again in black and returned to the parlor.
The flowers were all back in place.
Solemn-faced friends unsigned the Sympathy Book and unshook his hand. Then they went inside to sit awhile and stare at the closed casket. Then they left, until he was alone with the funeral director.
Then he was alone with himself.
The tears ran up his cheeks.
His shirt and suit were crisp and unwrinkled again.
He backed home, undressed, uncombed his hair. The day collapsed around him into morning, and he returned to bed to unsleep another night.
The previous evening, when he awakened, he realized where he was headed.
Twice, he exerted all of his will power in an attempt to interrupt the sequence of events. He failed.
He wanted to die. If he had killed himself that day, he would not be headed back toward it now.
There were tears within his mind as he realized the past which lay less than twenty-four hours before him.
The past stalked him that day as he u
Then he headed home into the biggest hangover of all and slept until he was awakened to undrink drink after drink and then return to the morgue and come back in time to hang up the telephone on that call, that call which had come to break...
...The silence of his anger with its ringing.
She was dead.
She was lying somewhere in the fragments of her car on Interstate 90 now.
As he paced, unsmoking, he knew she was lying there bleeding.
...Then dying, after that crash at 80 miles an hour.
...Then alive?
Then re-formed, along with the car, and alive again, arisen? Even now backing home at terrible speed, to re-slam the door on their final argument? To unscream at him and to be unscreamed at?
He cried out within his mind. He wrung the hands of his spirit.
It couldn't stop at this point. No. Not now.