Outside, Fischbinder slipped me a twenty-dollar bill. “Cabs cost more than they used to,” he said. “But then so does everything else. If you have any medical problems, call me. For other problems, I can recommend someone for you to talk to.”

“Other problems?”

“It’s quite an emotional adjustment you’ve got to make. Some therapy might not be a bad idea. But the first thing you will want to do is eat a meal and get a good night’s sleep. But you don’t, do you?”

“Don’t?”

“Don’t sleep, according to what I read in your file. You get government disability for it, if I remember correctly.”

“A hundred and twelve dollars a month.”

“That won’t go too far these days, I’m afraid.”

“It never did,” I said. “I wonder. Do you suppose I’ll be able to sleep as a result of all this?”

“Of being frozen, you mean? I can’t think why. No proof that freezing restores the sleep center, not that I’m aware of. Still, there’s an irony there, wouldn’t you say?”

“Irony?”

“For years you couldn’t sleep at all,” he said. “And then for all those years that’s all you did. Ironic.”

The cab cost more than it would have in 1972, but I still had change from Fischbinder’s twenty dollars, even after a good tip for the driver. He was from East Pakistan, which now seemed to be called Bangladesh, and he was evidently not the only one of his countrymen to have reached New York. There were plenty of Indo-Pak restaurants on the way home, and the streets were full of Asian and Latin American faces as they had never been before.

And that was the least of it.

The city was changed utterly. Whole blocks of buildings I’d been seeing my whole life, and which had still been there a few days ago in my personal time scheme, had been replaced by other buildings out of a science-fiction movie. And some places looked somehow the same while managing to be entirely different. Times Square, for instance. All the old wonderful signs were gone, but they’d been replaced by other more wonderful signs, and the result was still unmistakably Times Square.