I stayed where I was. For a while I watched the movie, and it was utterly unfamiliar to me, as if I had not already seen it from start to finish once that day. Neither the visual images nor the dialogue seemed even remotely familiar. How curious the mind is.

No one knows very much about blackouts, the how and why of them, all of that. Some heavy drinkers never have them. Some heavy drinkers always have them. And the great run of drinkers have tiny stretches of blankness; they lose the last half hour or so before bedtime, or have little hazy spots for the periods of intense drunkenness.

Often you can recapture bits of the memory that has been lost. You rarely get the whole thing, but you can dredge up bits and pieces, scraps and shreds. One memory is a clue, a handle to another chunk of memory, and while the jigsaw puzzle is never quite complete, a man can often put together enough of the pieces to get a good idea of the over-all design.

It was thus with Evangeline Grant. I remembered picking her up. I did not remember taking her to the hotel-one rather like the Maxfield, and no more than three blocks away. I remembered entering the room with her. I remembered her body moving under mine, and I remember to this day, and without any particular sense of lust, all the details of her body. I remember the feel of her flesh in a way that transcends normal memory, and I have wondered whether it is not false memory indeed, for it strikes me as incredible that I can remember this once-possessed whore’s flesh, taken in deep drunkenness, a flash of memory in a sea of black, that I can remember this flesh in a far more vivid fashion than I can recall, for example, the oft-possessed body of my own wife.

That I remember. I don’t remember the murder, a knife slash across the jugular, blood spurting, everything. I remember none of it.