He visited an art institute once but never returned because it made him
uneasy. The same was true of the museum of natural history, though it
was more to his liking than the artificial art.
On the same street was a museum of science which, because of a
strange arrangement of windows, portico, and row of columns, took on
a distorted picture of a grinning giant that threatened to swallow
whoever entered. Carroll, without knowing the subconscious connection,
feared and avoided it even though he had to cross the street to pass it.
They took him from a planetarium once--screaming in fear and crying
to be set free. Claustrophobia, one "expert" said, but he didn't know
that Carroll had been mentally sitting in deep space with no solidity
beneath him when he started to scream.
He--got along.
There was no apparent advance. His actions in life were normal to his
preamnesiac self on minor items. He preferred the better restaurants,
took an instinctive liking to the same good clothing that he had lived
with before. In all outward respects James Forrest Carroll was a
well-to-do man without the mental right to carry that position.
Occasionally it bothered him that something was wrong but he avoided
the reason for it.
_Why am I?_ he asked himself again and again. _What has happened?_ His
evenings were spent in roaming, just walking the quiet streets and
trying to think of why he was puzzled. On these walks he noticed little
of his fellow men and their actions. If they wanted to be as they were,
James Carroll was not to bother them.
He often pondered the question of how he would react if one of them
called upon him or spoke to him. Then, he thought, he would act. But
he was not to criticize nor object to the way in which his fellow man
conducted himself so long as it did not bother James Forrest Carroll.
This wonder of what he would do took ups and downs. There were times
when he wished someone would act toward him so that he could find out
about himself. At other times he did not care. At still other times he
knew that how he would act depended entirely upon the circumstances.
In the final analysis, however, Carroll's first act toward anyone came
from sheer instinct rather than from any plan.
A girl emerged from a building carrying a file-box of papers. It was
dusk and she was hurrying along the street before him by fifty feet. It
was obvious that her last job for the day was the delivery of this box
of papers to some other building and, once it was delivered, she was
finished. That Carroll understood.
She stopped for traffic at the end of the block and as she stood there,
a large car drove up to the curb and stopped beside her. Idly she
turned and walked to the car slowly, opened the door and started to
enter.
That struck a hidden chord in Carroll's mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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