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dying.
    Was there a pattern for all that?
    He felt dizzy, trying to discover it. As he had always grown dizzy when he sought a meaning to everything, a template that fitted over all the parts.
    And, in the dizziness, the edges of the room clouded again and he blinked his eyes.
    “
Is
there?” he asked
    But the walls were silent. And he tried to sit up so he could wash his face. But he couldn’t move. Only his right hand twitched a little.
    I can’t move
.
    That was the crux of it. That he had soaked himself like an impotent child or that there was money on the floor or that the rose was dying—all that was unimportant.
    He couldn’t move. That was the only thing.
    The rest was emptiness. The rest might as well not exist for all its importance.
    If there were no coat on the floor and no hat tilted against the chair back and no scraps of financial paper on the rug and no peanut butter assailing the air with its putty flavor and no shriveling rose—what difference would it make to him?
    Those things revolved about him. And he couldn’t move. Therefore they were worthless. The coat was worthless because it was of value only to wear and keep him warm. He couldn’t get up to put it on so it was of no value. The money was worthless because he didn’t have the means to get up and spend it.
    That was why he had wondered if the trains really went on running after a person died.
    It could have been that the entire universe was just a ruse to fool him and that everyone had their own universe of the mind. And it could also be that he was the only one and that it was all—the people and the cars and the trees and the skies and stars and all—put there to dupe him. And when he died there would no longer be any need for it to go on. So that the trains might disappear and the world and the universe go—
pop!—
just like that, the very instant breath ceased in his lungs.
    He didn’t care. He stopped thinking about it and listened because the church bells were ringing.
    He listened carefully, not because he wanted to hear everything, not because he felt any longer that he must catch every single element of his surroundings so that he could be that much more alive and present in them.
    Simply because he wanted to know the time.
    He cursed the traffic for its noisiness and its lack of consideration. He gave half a thought to dying for an instant until the traffic had disappeared and then becoming alive again so he could hear the bells ringing.
    Ding-dong-ding-dong. That was fifteen minutes before the hour. What hour? He’d have to wait.
    He thought again. He wondered if
that
mattered either.
    Because what was time of intrinsic worth to him? Without his movements to be guided by its instructions, time was nothing but a worthless set of partial measurements. So they followed the revolving about the sun and the spinning about the axis. So who in hell ever told the Earth to spin around in something like 24 hours?
    Did
he
?
    All these things, tangible and otherwise were not worth a penny to him. Because they were apart from him.
    Odd, he thought. Being here in this room. So ugly. How was it to end? Would the police come and find him? Would the landlord? No, the rent wasn’t due for two weeks yet.
    Would Leonora come? No, she hated him and the room too. This is the ugliest, dirtiest room I ever saw in my life, haven’t you got any self respect at all? She was in her tan jacket when she said that. And he had said, no one asked you to come. And said something else which made her suddenly breathless with a vicious anger and she couldn’t find the right words to yell at him and finally she stamped out and flung the door open because she knew he was right.
    But she was right too.
    He looked at the room through hot, dry eyes.
    It
was
. Ugly. Absolutely. You go on and on and time passes and you accept anything. He simply didn’t notice it anymore. She had mentioned it and it had come as a sort of mild surprise. Because he had grown