Saturday.
He knew it was Saturday.
He sat quite still on the bench, looking off into the distance that was Fifth Avenue, lulled by the knowledge he knew he possessed, a knowledge of place and now of time; this was Saturday. He could not have told himself how he knew it was Saturday, but he knew it for certain, and then he wondered why on earth he felt there was someplace he was supposed to be on this Saturday morning. But the panic was gone completely now. He simply sat calmly and stared into space. The search that had started with the ring on his finger and then led to his trouser pockets, looking for his wallet, inevitably led to a curious probing of the pockets of his jacket. He was wearing a dark blue suit, he noticed, and blue socks and black shoes. His shirt was white, and a pair of gold cuff links showed where his jacket ended. He was wearing a gray tie with a tiny gold tie tack. He was hatless — that did not surprise him; he knew he never wore a hat. He found a package of L&M cigarettes in the breast pocket of his jacket, and he lighted one now — he was carrying matches, no lighter — and then he replaced the cigarettes in his pocket and continued searching through the other pockets. He found a slim gold pen and pencil set in his inside jacket pocket, and a small black address book behind them, and behind that a timetable for the Harlem Division of the New York Central. He glanced only briefly at the train schedule — it meant nothing to him — and then he opened the small black book, expecting it to be crammed with names and addresses, disappointed when he learned it was not. The pages were blank except for the first page, and written onto that page in a hand he did not recognize was: MO 6-2367. On impulse, he took the pen from his pocket, turned the barrel to bring the point into writing position, and directly beneath the MO 6-2367, wrote the identical legend, which he supposed was a telephone number, MO 6-2367. The hand he had not recognized was his own; the script was identical. He replaced the book, the train schedule, and the pen in his right inside pocket, and then searched the left inside pocket and found nothing. The left waist pocket of the jacket was empty as well. In the right waist pocket, he found two torn movie stubs. He had no idea whether they were old stubs or whether he had been to a movie last night, but a cold cunning recorded the fact that there were two of them. Whenever he had been to the movie, he had not gone alone. He stuck two fingers into the watch pocket of his trousers, expecting to find nothing, and was surprised to find two small gelatin capsules with white powder in them. He did not know what the capsules contained, or why he was carrying them. He put them back in the watch pocket.
He sat quietly for several moments more, thinking very calmly, and reasoning that the first thing he should do was call the number in the black book, if it was a number. What else could it be but a telephone number? He reasoned that the book was obviously new, and that the number must be an important one if he had jotted it down as the first and only item in the book. He knew it was not his own phone number because no one ever jotted down his own phone number. Unless he had recently moved, and had a new phone, and wasn’t familiar with the number as yet, in which case he might possibly have written it down as a reminder. The possibility seemed extremely remote to him, but he nonetheless did not discard it. He moved it to a place at the back of his mind somewhere, a place where he was beginning to store a bank of knowledge about this person who was himself and whom he did not know. The knowledge was scanty at best, but at least he knew he was wearing a gold ring on his right hand and none on his left, which seemed to indicate he was not married. He also knew that G.V. had given him the ring, and he further knew that he was wearing gold cuff links and a gold tie tack and a fairly decent-looking suit. He opened the jacket now and looked at the label sewn into it. De Pinna’s. An expensive suit. Whatever he was, he was not a pauper. The knowledge that he could afford gold cuff links and a gold tie tack and a suit from De Pinna’s was reassuring, unless all these, like the gold ring, were gifts from G.V., whoever he or she was, in which case
He closed his mind against a dizzy spiraling that seemed endless and dangerous. The first thing he should do was call that number. He reached into his pocket for the black book again, and turned to the first page where the two numbers were written one under the other, the first already there when he had initially opened the book, the other that he had written to check the handwriting. MO 6-2367. Well, the first thing he would do was call the number, and yet something told him that there was no urgency about calling it, that once he called it, he would know nothing more about himself than he now knew.
Besides, he had no money.
He also had no watch, a fact that combined with the loss of his wallet and the absence of even any small change to lead him to believe he had been a robbery victim. And yet, his cuff links and tie tack had not been stolen. Would a thief have taken his wallet, his watch, and all his small change, without bothering to take his jewelry? Or had there been a thief and a robbery at all? Was it not equally possible that he had walked out of someplace, an apartment, a hotel room, someplace, anyplace, and simply left his wallet, and his watch, and his money behind? Perhaps he had never owned a watch to begin with. No, he hardly knew anyone in the world who did not own a wristwatch. Again, he was amused. Because not only did he hardly know anyone in the world who did not own a watch, he also hardly knew anyone in the world, period. Or, to be more exact, he absolutely did not know anyone in the world, never mind the hardly. He did not know a single living soul, unless perhaps he knew President Johnson and all the others whose names had flashed through his mind. Why not? Perhaps he called the President every night and said, “L.B., would you like to go bowling?” Perhaps he was a delegate to the United Nations. Perhaps, for Christ’s sake, perhaps he was Adlai Stevenson himself. Why couldn’t he be? He hadn’t even seen his own face yet.
He suddenly touched the top of his head because the idea that he was Adlai Stevenson, that he was really Adlai Stevenson who had somehow through some curious quirk wandered into Central Park and been mugged and left on a bench, seemed very real and quite possible to him, and he knew that Adlai Stevenson was bald, so he touched the top of his head to see whether he was bald and really Adlai Stevenson.
He felt hair.
It was cut rather close to his head, not a crew cut, but close nonetheless. Well, he was not Adlai Stevenson, which he supposed was something of a relief. This did not exclude the possibility that he was someone who knew Stevenson, and who knew Johnson, in fact someone very important who wandered in very high political circles — why couldn’t he be? His suit had come from De Pinna’s, and he was wearing gold cuff links and a gold tie tack, and he had obviously wandered out of the Sherry-Netherland where an important Democratic political function had been taking place, accidentally leaving his watch and wallet behind in the men’s washroom where he had been standing side by side with Dean Rusk.
He rose from the bench.
The first thing he had to do, he now realized, was not what he originally surmised. The telephone number in the black book, if indeed it was a telephone number, still did not seem particularly urgent, nor did it now seem even terribly important. The most important thing he had to do was find a mirror someplace and take a good hard look at himself. He might surprise himself and discover he was Cary Grant. If there were some people around (where the hell had everybody in the city vanished to?) he would know right away if he was Cary Grant, because someone would most certainly stop him for an autograph, or perhaps someone would swoon — but unfortunately, there were no people around. Anyway, a dead swoon would not necessarily indicate that he was Cary Grant. It might only indicate that he was Burt Lancaster, or Frank Sinatra, or, as some swooning circles went, perhaps even Van Cliburn. He looked at his fingers. They were long and thin. Perhaps he was a piano player, or maybe a bongo drummer; the possibilities were limitless and, to tell the truth, a little frightening. Suppose, for example, suppose he found a mirror someplace, and he faced that mirror, and suppose he really was Cary Grant, but suppose he failed to recognize Cary Grant when he looked at him, then what? Suppose he simply saw some guy looking back at him, and he hadn’t the faintest notion who the hell that guy was, Tony Curtis, or Dr. Schweitzer — please God, don’t let me be Dr. Schweitzer.