He began walking.
The day was mild and clear, except for a haze that seemed to hang very high in the towers of the hotel buildings and apartment houses lining Fifth Avenue. He came out of the park and crossed immediately past the equestrian statue and to the fountain outside the Plaza. He looked around for a clock someplace, searching the tops of the buildings (Wasn’t there a goddamn thing that flashed the time and the temperature every three or four seconds? Where the hell had that disappeared to?) but he could not find a clock. He knew it was very early in the morning, sensed that he had awakened only moments after the sun had cleared the horizon. The usual carriages were not waiting across from the Plaza; it was too early for that. Nor was there even a doorman on duty as yet outside the hotel. He pushed his way through the revolving doors and was walking toward the Palm Court when he glanced to his right and saw a man walking parallel with him.
The man startled him.
When he turned, the man turned. He realized all at once that he was looking at the doors of the men’s room — he saw the sign GENTLEMEN — and that the twin doors were each broken into eight mirrored panels and that the man who was looking back at him was himself. The mirrored doors were divided by painted strips of wood, and he had to bend to see his own face because one of the horizontal strips crossed the mirror at just that point. His eyes met with the eyes of the crouching man in the mirror, and they both looked at each other unknowingly, two perfect strangers, neither knowing who the other was. He stepped closer to the mirror. The man was about thirty-five years old. His suit, though rumpled from a night’s sleep, was obviously expensively tailored and fit him impeccably. His tie was knotted with a Windsor knot. He was wearing a shirt with a tab collar. His hair was a brownish black.
He looked into the other man’s eyes, the eyes of the man who was himself, whom he did not know. The eyes were blue, flecked with white chips, the brows over the eyes somewhat bushy. The nose of the man, the stranger in the mirror, cleaved his face harshly, a little too large for the face really. The cheekbones were high; he had not been mistaken about that. The upper lip was not really as thin as he had imagined; he had a good mouth, this man in the mirror. He was, all in all, a good-looking man; he liked this man he saw in the mirror, but he did not have the faintest notion who he was.
Well, he thought, you’re not Cary Grant.
He was fascinated by the mirror image. At the back of his mind, the store of knowledge added another kernel, added an image that he knew was his, an image he could now carry as an external shell inside of which he could operate, an image he had not possessed before. He had been only a bodiless mind moving through boundless space before this, but now the space had closed in and taken shape, had created a shell for itself, and the shell was this image staring back at him from the mirrored wall of the Plaza, an image he instantly liked, an image that fascinated him. He raised one eyebrow, a trick he had learned when he was sixteen; another kernel of knowledge was added minutely to the growing mound at the back of his mind. He was delighted by this person he saw, this face with its blue eyes and its uncombed but well-groomed hair, this broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, obviously intelligent and good-looking gentleman who looked back at him from the mirror in appreciation of the stranger grinning at him with such undisguised joy. He backed away from the mirror, and realized all at once that he was hungry.
The hunger seemed to attack him with immediate violence, so that he knew it had probably been there from the moment he had awakened, but had been shunted aside in view of more pressing matters, like wondering exactly who the hell he was, for example. It was the hunger that lent sudden urgency to the telephone number — if it was a telephone number — he had found in the black book. He did not have any money, and in order to eat you had to have money. Perhaps the person at the other end of that number had some money to give him or lend him. Perhaps that person would know him and love him and feed him. He walked immediately to one of the house phones. He lifted it from the cradle and then opened the black book to the number again and waited until a hotel operator said, “Your call, please.”
“Operator, would you get me MO 6-2367, please?”
“Are you a guest of the hotel, sir?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“Your room number, please.”
“407,” he said.
“One moment, please.”
He waited, half suspecting the operator was going through an elaborate register listing all the guests in all the rooms, and discovering either that Room 407 was vacant at the moment, or occupied by a spinster in her eighties. Instead, and to his immense relief, he heard a clicking sound that told him she was dialing, and then he heard a phone humming somewhere in the city, insistently calling a person who, for him, had no face and no name.
The phone rang once, twice, three times.
He waited.
It rang again, and again, and he was ready to hang up when a woman’s voice miraculously said, “Hello?”
“Hello,” he said, surprised.
“What time is it?” the woman said. Her voice was breathless, edged with sleep.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Did I wake you?”
He heard a muffled sound, and then the woman, who had obviously just looked at the clock beside her bed, said, “For God’s sake, it’s six o’clock in the morning. Who is this?”
“Is this MO 6-2367?”
“Yes, this is Monument 6-2367. Who’s this?”
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“What is this, some kind of joke? Is that you, Sam?”
“Well, who’s this?” he said.
“This is Gloria. What do you mean, who’s this? Are you calling me, or am I calling you?”
“I’m calling you, Gloria,” he said. Gloria, he thought. G.V. “How are you?”
“How am I? I’m half asleep, that’s how I am. What is this? Is that you, Sam?”
Sam, he thought. “Yes,” he said, “this is me. Sam.”
“I thought so,” Gloria said. “What do you want?”
“I want to see you.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“I... have to talk to you.” He hesitated a moment, and then said, “I’m lost.”
“Where are... what do you mean, you’re lost? Lost, did you say?”
“Yes.”