This is getting me nowhere, he realized. I should be out trying to locate someone holding. I’ve got to get my supply or pretty soon I’ll be freaking, and then I won’t be able to do anything. Even sit at the curb like I am. I not only won’t know who I am, I won’t even know where I am, or what’s happening.

What is happening? he asked himself. What day is this? If I knew what day I’d know everything else; it’d seep back bit by bit.

Wednesday, in downtown L.A., the Westwood section. Ahead, one of those giant shopping malls surrounded by a wall that you bounced off like a rubber ball—unless you had a credit card on you and passed in through the electronic hoop. Owning no credit card for any of the malls, he could depend only on verbal report as to what the shops were like inside. A whole bunch, evidently, selling good products to the straights, especially to the straight wives. He watched the uniformed armed guards at the mall gate checking out each person. Seeing that the man or woman matched his or her credit card and that it hadn’t been ripped off, sold, bought, used fraudulently. Lots of people moved on in through the gate, but he figured many were no doubt windowshopping. Not all that many people can have the bread or the urge to buy this time of day, he reflected. It’s early, just past two. At night; that was when. The shops all lit up. He could—all the brothers and sisters could—see the lights from without, like showers of sparks, like a fun park for grownup kids.

Stores this side of the mall, requiring no credit card, with no armed guards, didn’t amount to much.