The fountain jetted its cold umbrella above the green-tinged copperdolphins. The sun ignited it whenever he moved his head. The wind rumpledit.

Clustered on the concrete, birds pecked at part of a candy bar stuck toa red wrapper.

Kites swayed on their tails, nosed downward, rose again, as youngsterstugged at invisible strings. Telephone lines were tangled with wooden framesand torn paper, like broken G clefs and smeared glissandos.

He hated the telephone lines, the kites, the children, the birds.

Most of all, though, he hated himself.

How does a man undo that which has been done? He doesn't. There is noway under the sun. He may suffer, remember, repeat, curse, or forget.Nothing else. The past, in this sense, is inevitable.

A woman walked past. He did not look up in time to see her face, butthe dusky blonde fall of her hair to her collar and the swell of her sure,sheer-netted legs below the black hem of her coat and above the matchingclick of her heels heigh-ho, stopped his breath behind his stomach andsnared his eyes in the wizard-weft of her walking and her posture and somemore, like a rhyme to the last of his thoughts.

He half-rose from the bench when the pink static struck his eyeballs,and the fountain became a volcano spouting rainbows.

The world was frozen and served up to him under a glass.

...The woman passed back before him and he looked down too soon to seeher face.

The hell was beginning once more, he realized, as the backward-flyingbirds passed before.

He gave himself up to it. Let it keep him until he broke, until he wasall used up and there was nothing left.

He waited, there on the bench, watching the slivey toves be brillig, asthe fountain sucked its waters back within itself, drawing them up in agreat arc above the unmoving dolphins, and the boats raced backward over thepond, and the fence divested itself of stray scraps of paper, as the birdsreplaced the candy bar within the red wrapper, bit by crunchy bit.

His thoughts only were inviolate, his body belonged to the retreatingtide.

Eventually, he rose and strolled backwards out of the park.

On the street a boy backed past him, unwhistling snatches of a popularsong.

He backed up the stairs to his apartment, his hangover growing worseagain, undrank his coffee, unshowered, unswallowed his aspirins, and gotinto bed, feeling awful.

Let this be it, he decided.

A faintly-remembered nightmare ran in reverse though his mind, givingit an undeserved happy ending.

It was dark when he awakened.

He was very drunk.

He backed over to the bar and began spitting out his drinks, one by oneinto the same glass he had used the night before, and pouring them from theglass back into the bottles again. Separating the gin and vermouth was notrick at all. The liquids leapt into the air as he held the uncorked bottlesabove the bar.

And he grew less and less drunk as this went on.

Then he stood before an early Martini and it was 10:07 in the P.M.There, within the hallucination, he wondered about another hallucination.Would time loop-the-loop, forward and then backward again, through hisprevious seizure?

No.

It was as though it had not happened, had never been.

He continued on back through the evening, undoing things.

He raised the telephone, said "good-bye", untold Murray that he wouldnot be coming to work again tomorrow, listened a moment, recradled the phoneand looked at it as it rang.

The sun came up in the west and people were backing their cars to work.

He read the weather report and the headlines, folded the evening paperand placed it out in the hall.

It was the longest seizure he had ever had, but he did not really care.He settled himself down within it and watched as the day unwound itself backto morning.

His hangover returned as the day grew smaller, and it was terrible whenhe got into bed again.

When he awakened the previous evening the drunkenness was high upon himagain. Two of the bottles he refilled, recorked, resealed. He knew he wouldtake them to the liquor store soon and get his money back.

As he sat there that day, his mouth uncursing and undrinking and hiseyes unreading, he knew that new cars were being shipped back to Detroit anddisassembled, that corpses were awakening into their death-throes, and thatpriests the world over were saying black mass, unknowing.

He wanted to chuckle, but he could not tell his mouth to do it.

He unsmoked two and a half packs of cigarettes.

Then came another hangover and he went to bed. Later, the sun set inthe east.

Time's winged chariot fled before him as he opened the door and said"good-bye" to his comforters and they came in and sat down and told him notto grieve overmuch.

And he wept without tears as he realized what was to come.

Despite his madness, he hurt.

...Hurt, as the days rolled backward.

...Backward, inexorably.

...Inexorably, until he knew the time was near at hand.

He gnashed the teeth of his mind.

Great was his grief and his hate and his love.

He was wearing his black suit and undrinking drink after drink, whilesomewhere the men were scraping the clay back onto the shovels which wouldbe used to undig the grave.

He backed his car to the funeral parlor, parked it, and climbed intothe limousine.

They backed all the way to the graveyard.

He stood among his friends and listened to the preacher.

".dust to dust; ashes to Ashes," the man said, which is pretty much thesame whichever way you say it.

The casket was taken back to the hearse and returned to the funeralparlor.

He sat through the service and went home and unshaved and unbrushed histeeth and went to bed.

He awakened and dressed again in black and returned to the parlor.

The flowers were all back in place.

Solemn-faced friends unsigned the Sympathy Book and unshook his hand.Then they went inside to sit awhile and stare at the closed casket. Thenthey left, until he was alone with the funeral director.

Then he was alone with himself.

The tears ran up his cheeks.

His shirt and suit were crisp and unwrinkled again.

He backed home, undressed, uncombed his hair. The day collapsed aroundhim into morning, and he returned to bed to unsleep another night.

The previous evening, when he awakened, he realized where he washeaded.

Twice, he exerted all of his will power in an attempt to interrupt thesequence of events. He failed.

He wanted to die. If he had killed himself that day, he would not beheaded back toward it now.

There were tears within his mind as he realized the past which lay lessthan twenty-four hours before him.

The past stalked him that day as he unnegotiated the purchase of thecasket, the vault, the accessories.

Then he headed home into the biggest hangover of all and slept until hewas awakened to undrink drink after drink and then return to the morgue andcome back in time to hang up the telephone on that call, that call which hadcome to break...

...The silence of his anger with its ringing.

She was dead.

She was lying somewhere in the fragments of her car on Interstate 90now.

As he paced, unsmoking, he knew she was lying there bleeding.

...Then dying, after that crash at 80 miles an hour.

...Then alive?

Then re-formed, along with the car, and alive again, arisen? Even nowbacking home at terrible speed, to re-slam the door on their final argument?To unscream at him and to be unscreamed at?

He cried out within his mind. He wrung the hands of his spirit.

It couldn't stop at this point. No. Not now.