The question, by now, had to be which of the two of us was crazier. Yes, he'd talk for a while and then sudenly stop, falling into a reverie while his eyes darted about, as if he were dreaming, before returning to consciousness and asking me to join him in his "trips through time". "We have to take precautions, my dear sir", he explained. "Those who are not ready to understand, won't, because they won't know how to follow. You never imagined that Metaphysics could,be so practical, did you?" Yes, he really said that, and yes, I sat there, listening to this, by choice. I could only be thankful that we didn't have an audience for this, aside from the characters inhabiting my ever louder auditory hallucinations. The fever must have taken hold. I needed to excuse myself, civilly, and leave, but he wouldn't stop talking.

He thanked me for stopping to tell him that I agreed with him, when what he really should have been thanking me for was my willingness to stop by to decipher this nonsense. My eyes had been tightly closed, remained tightly closed - because I was listening to him so closely, he seemed to believe? In truth, they remained so because only in darkness could I find relief from the headache that this conversation was giving me. Or was it the fever?

"Why, indeed, should I feel ashamed - or why should we feel ashamed"

How gracious of him to include me in his delusions.

"because I don't walk upright and ponderously, striking my walking stick on the pavement and brushing the clothes of the people who pass so loudly"

In other words, why should he be ashamed that he had remained inconspicuous? I wondered if he had spent much time in his own presence.

"Shouldn't I rather venture to complain with justified resentment at having to flit along the house walls like a shadow with hunched shoulders, many a time disappearing from sight in the plate glass of the shop windows.

Ie. shouldn't he be mad that he had to keep ducking into shops to avoid these mean, boisterous people who were after him on the streets? Would it have killed him to speak plainly for once? In the time he had been telling me this tale full of sound and fury, I could have been given the antibiotics that I must surely have needed by now and what I was hearing was surely signifying nothing. Still ... maybe in this, I was not being altogether fair. Idiot though he was, he was a gentle seeming idiot, and the streets were not gentle with gentle people, especially those who did not look like they'd be credible witnesses in court. People were loud around here, far more eager to shove than to step aside. This thing that had afflicted me, that made every drop of water out of the corroded pipe around the corner sound like it exploded as it touched the ground, and the footfalls of every mouse that scurried by echo like horse hooves against the pavement - how long had he suffered from it? Perhaps his life was like a hangover that never ended? To him, was the brushing of one coat against another enough to trigger pain, pain that would drive him to seek escape? What would it be like, to have to live like that, always? Would it not drive a man mad?

I looked at those angry welts crisscrossing his scalp, vanishing back into his hair, and thought back to my own foolish days, when I was even younger than the man before me. How rash I had been as a youngster, so quick to act, so hesitant to think! The fights I had gotten myself into! At times, with people who could have done me real damage, had they wished. How lucky I had been, that they never did. Lucky. Not wise or virtuous or even tough. Just lucky. No credit came to me from that. Had this young man been as fortunate?