She continued up the street, parked, bought herself breakfast at a fast-food restaurant. A sign on the wall announced a thirty-minute limit, but Susan found the table attendant, a Jamaican woman, and said she had an appointment at eleven-thirty—was it okay if she sat here out of the rain? The woman smiled and said, “We don’t get a big rush till noon. Make yourself comfortable, dear.”

She finished the Travis McGee while nursing a cup of coffee. A steady rain washed over the tinted atrium-style windows. The air was steamy and warm.

At ten she ran across the street for a copy of Time magazine, came back for a second coffee and left the lid on.

At eleven-thirty she left the restaurant and walked a block and a half to the building where Benjamin worked.

She stationed herself in the lobby as the lunch crowd began to flow past. No sign of Benjamin. She wondered if there was a second exit. But she hadn’t seen one.

At twelve-ten she asked the guard by the elevator whether there was a cafeteria in the building.

“Third floor,” he said.

“Do I need a badge?”

He smiled. “No, ma’am. I don’t believe it’s considered a privilege to eat there.”

She took a deep breath and punched the Up button.

“You’re not yourself today, Benjamin,” the secretary at Unemployment Insurance said; but Benjamin sailed on past, deaf to the obvious, pushing his mail cart. It was true, he was not himself; he was full of disquieting thoughts, thoughts he could barely contain.

He had missed a lot of work recently—more evidence that things were not as they should be. Today he had noticed his supervisor Mr. Gill eyeing him from the office behind the mail desk … maybe wondering whether to launch a complaint or to say something to Benjamin first; in the Provincial Government, with its labyrinths of employee protection, the process of firing someone could be tortuous. The absences were unusual, though, because Benjamin genuinely liked his job. He liked sorting the mail and pushing the cart twice a day; when the work ended he liked coming home to Amelie, at least when she had the evening off. He had fallen into the routines of his life like a sleepwalker caught up in an especially happy, luminous dream, and he would have been content to dream on forever. But something had begun to interfere with the dream—a waking-up; or perhaps a deeper, dreamless sleep.

Trouble, Benjamin thought. Trouble all around him, trouble inside him. He felt its pulse beat at his temples with every step. Trouble trouble trouble.

All the office clocks were creeping toward noon. He had nearly finished his run, half of the building on Bay Street, room to room and up the elevators, dropping off mail with the pretty, brightly dressed secretaries who smiled and thanked him from behind their reception desks, their barricades of computer terminals and hanging plants—their perfume mingling with the smell of broadloom and Xerography to create what Benjamin thought of as the Government Office Smell. Shouldering past the men in suits who nodded or ignored him, he was rendered invisible by his open collar: the Invisible Man. He wheeled down the corridor from Unemployment Insurance to Social Welfare with the unanswered statement now echoing in his head (I’m not myself—I’m not—I’m not myself) in time with the squeak of the left rear wheel of the cart (must oil that). It was not the sort of idea he was accustomed to having. It was troubling and strange, and he knew (but did not want to acknowledge) its obvious source.

John.

The name arose unbidden, a sort of greyness. The name John Shaw was associated in Benjamin’s mind with things hard, drab, and unyielding. Asphalt, concrete, slate. John was a dim memory, a ghost impulse, as ephemeral as the sense of deja vu. But he was also a real presence, suddenly more real than he had been for years, a demanding presence … dangerous. Not just because I might lose my job, Benjamin thought, but because I might lose, might lose … no, but oh well, admit it, might lose Amelie.

Might lose that touch, voice, smile, night presence, that (yes, say it) love, which had entered into his life so suddenly … those eyes, which regarded him and in some sense created him: confirmed his suspicion that he existed. If Amelie can love Benjamin then Benjamin is real. He understood this about himself. He possessed only a few scraps of a past, some of them illusory. But the present was real. This moment, this now. And especially his moments with Amelie. What he felt for her was uncreated, was whole, was beyond suspicion.

He didn’t want to lose her.

He would not allow her to be taken away…

But how to stop it?

Things were happening. Things beyond his control.

Trouble, he thought, as he parked the mail cart behind the sorting desk in the basement. He rode the elevator up to the employee cafeteria, bought himself a ham-on-a-kaiser and a carton of milk; then stood petrified with the tray in his hand, staring at the woman across the room, familiar but unfamiliar, who was staring at him—and the only thought in his head was trouble trouble trouble.

Trembling, he carried his tray to her table. She gestured for him to sit down.

They regarded each other for a long moment, Benjamin arriving at the understanding that she was frightened, too; though he couldn’t guess why. She was a small, nervous woman with short dark hair and brittle eyeglasses and a can of Diet Pepsi in front of her. “I’m Susan,” she said.

“Do I know you?”

“I’m a friend of John’s.”

Benjamin doubted it. Sometimes, scraps of memory would cross the barrier between Benjamin and John—more often now than ever before. That was how he had recognized the woman in the first place. But the recognition did not signal “friend”; instead it evoked a more complex reaction, fear and hunger and hope and an old, vast disappointment almost too big to contain.

“I only have an hour for lunch,” he said.

She sipped her Pepsi. “You work here?”

“In the mail room. I sort and deliver.”

“Interesting work?”

“I like it.” He unwrapped his sandwich but left it alone. He wasn’t hungry anymore. “This is about John,” he said. “Something’s happening to John.”

John my real father, he thought, John who invented me, John who created me. No, not quite that; but there was no obvious word for what John had done or Benjamin had become; no word that Benjamin knew.

He knew about John. It was a shadow knowledge, ghostly, and for a long time Benjamin had tried to ignore it. But the knowledge wouldn’t go away. Useless to pretend, for instance, that he had had a childhood. For a long time he had remembered growing up with the Woodwards, but most of that was false memory, no more substantial than the picture on a TV screen. His “real” childhood was John’s childhood, a confusion of threatening images (a woman named Marga, a man named Kyriakides); in fact his childhood was no childhood at all, because “Benjamin” had never been a child. Benjamin was born a teenager and only gradually acquired a substantial existence, imitation deepening into reflex—the mask growing roots into the skull, he thought, startled: because it was a John thought more than a Benjamin thought. Maybe John was coming back again.

So soon. Too soon.

“I was sent here by Dr. Kyriakides,” Susan said, and the name sent a shockwave up his spine. “Dr. Kyriakides thinks John might be sick. Might be dying.”