Derek came home to his cheap studio to find the mail slot filled with bills. He shut the door with his foot and let the envelopes slip to the floor. He poured a can of soup into a pan and stirred it over a hotplate. He contemplated a small vial of amber fluid, one of Bettide’s ampules, on the counter in front of him.

Derek felt trapped. He had been accessing increasingly recent memories, more and more painful to face. He wasn’t sure he could go through the final two years’ worth of total recall.

He would be gambling the pain of recent memories against Dr. Bettide’s hypothetical “breakthrough”… when all the storage in his mind would supposedly be his again, reachable at will.

Reliving that episode with the kids at the improv—and then his first purchase of Time-Jizz from dealer Barney—had driven him away from the drug for a few days. He had walked around in a depressed haze, getting stoned on older, less terrifying highs.

He hung around a few theaters, milking a few tourists who recognized him. He ignored their whispers to each other after he finished signing autographs.

Finally, he found himself at the office of Frank Furtess, his old agent. Old Frankfurter had looked genuinely surprised to see him. Then Derek remembered. He had fired Furtess more than a year ago, using nearly every piece of invective in the book.

Derek realized that he had adopted a frame of reference twenty months old, and momentarily forgotten the incident! By then he had already shaken the agent’s hand; he had to play the scene to its end.

The meeting was chilly. Furtess promised to look into a few possibilities. Derek left his landlady’s phone number, but he figured the man would throw it away the moment he left.

Now, to come home and find all these bills, and royalties so scant these days…

It was late afternoon, and once again the ripped windowshade cast the legs of a runner on the wall. The jogger’s slow, mute progress was a tale of perseverance.