Out. The other didn’t even seem to have noticed that blank had been away on a trip, but just lay there making patterns with pine needles, and presently said, “How is your memory?”
Blank searched it to see if it had improved while he was away. There was less in it than before. The cupboard was bare. There was a lot of junk in the cellars and attics, old toys, nursery rhymes, myths, old wives’ tales, but no nourishment for adults, no least scrap of possession, not a crumb of success. He searched and searched like a starving methodical rat. At last he said uncertainly, “I do remember England.”
“Why surely. I expect you can even remember Omaha.”
“But I mean, I remember being in England.”
“Do you?” The other sat up, scattering pinestraw.
“You do remember being, then! What a pity England sank.”
They were silent again.
“I have lost everything.”
There was a darkness in the other’s eyes and on the eastern edge of the earth plunging down the steepening slopes of night.
“I’m nobody.”
“At least,” said the other, “you know you’re human.”
“Oh, what good’s that? with no name, no sex, no nothing? I might as well be a bristleworm or a tree-sloth!”
“You might as well,” the other agreed, “be Jean-Paul Sartre.”
“I?” said blank, offended. Driven to denial by so nauseous a notion, he stood up and said, “I certainly am not Jean-Paul Sartre. I am myself.” And so saying he found himself to be, in fact, himself; his name was Lewis D. Charles and he knew it as well as he knew his own name. There he was.
The forest was there, root and branch.
The other was, however, gone.
Lewis D. Charles looked in the red eye of the west and the dark eye of the east. He shouted aloud, “Come back! Please come back!”
He had gone at it all wrong, backwards- He had found the wrong name. He turned, and without the least impulse of self-preservation plunged into the pathless forest, casting himself away so that he might find what he had cast away.
Under the trees he forgot his name again at once. He also forgot what he was looking for. What was it he had lost? He went deeper and deeper into shadows, under leaves, eastward, in the forest where nameless tigers burned.