Rating: Still the same.

Disclaimer: Computer used in the story is owned by IBM.

God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion. --Pliny the Elder, 23-79

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now. --John Cameron III.

-

I wandered around the streets with a woolong in my pocket and thought about myself. Then i remembered that blind guy before the Sunderland and got idea. A young couple carried on a polite conversation, as their leashed wire-haired terriers developed a more intimate acquaintanceship, which the dogs' owners studiously ignored. I held out my hand and said.

"Please, if you could spare any change...?"

The person i asked for money hesitated for a moment and then gave me few coins, though they were probably wondering where i got my outfit.

A kid, about eight years old, going on fourteen, looked at me with a smirk and said.

"Hey, you need bread? Wanna earn easy money?"

"Sure." I answered his invitation.

He handed me a bottle of Widnex and rather greasy dishrag.

"You can earn plenty, washing windshields. Just do it when the turkeys stop for a light. But be careful, man. The cops will have you alone around the Maureen tunnel, but don't try it where the rich folks live."

"What about you?" I asked when i understood his gesture.

He left, doing a cartwheel.

"Me, I got me a new business now, I'm gonna be the break-dancing superstar of Tharis! See you on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous!"

"Smart kid."

I mumbled to myself. Never mind.
Meanwhile i got really tired and searched for somewhere to sleep, luckily just on the other side of the street was an abandoned tenement. I mount the steps and squeezed round door, what hanged, twisted from a single hinge. I found myself in a cramped vestibule. The building once held (by count of the gutted mailboxes) twelve apartments. The inner doorway of the vestibule stood wide open, allowing a very dim view of a narrow, shadowy hallway. I went through the open door and entered that hallway. There was a smell of must and wet ashes. My feeling that I've been here was now almost a certainty. I went to the foot of the staircase and found, that there was only a foot and a head. Where the main body of the stairs could be, was a gaping hole. From the floor above a pair of feral cats peered down at me with the complacence of secure ownership. They knew the upstairs was theirs. Then the white cat followed the tiger stripped somewhere.

I entered, something what must have been a railroad flat. The room was empty, expect for a ruined television set, its shattered screen spread across the warped linoleum floor like silvery autumn leaves. A pair of windows, what once looked out on the street, have been covered by sheet metal, but there were smaller windows looking onto an airshaft, and these admitted a murky fraction of the outside light. I could faintly see a doorway leading to the north, and the hall doorway to the east. I headed north, and came into something what must have been the bedroom of that apartment. I saw a rectangle of greyness on the floor. I tested it with the toe of my shoe. At least that was a room with a bed, or the remains of one.

I laid down on the charred and moldy mattress, closed my eyes and fell asleep almost instantly. In the last hour of the night i had a dream, and when i woke up, to the first gray monochromes of dawn, i tried to remember what I've dreamt, because i knew that the dream explained, why this building inspired such sense of deja-vu. All i could remember, however, was a woman's face. She smiled and spoke some words, was one of them "Cheese?", and just as i were about to kiss her i woke up. So beautiful. The curve of her lips, the arch of her brow, the radiance of her hair, that smile: Perfection. I hoped that the dream arose from some memory of the life I've lived, not from my imagination, for if there was such woman in the world, then my life had a long-term purpose: love.

The light of another day revealed the dismal reality of my waking life. I got up from the mattress feeling stiff, but reasonably rested.

As i left the tenement, i tried to think what now? I took the matchbook what was inside the bookbag and opened it. It was empty and i wondered why I've kept it. It was white with an orange coat of arms. Written below that: 'Princeton Club, 15 W. 43rd Street.'

On my way to Princeton, feeling of hunger attacked my stomach. I looked around. There was a Chock Full o' Nuts. The interior of the restaurant was decorated in stylish bright red formica. A counter with stools decorated with condiment containers, containing mustard and relish. Small square napkins stood erect in a spring-loaded dispenser. At the moment i was the only customer except for a man apparently conversing with a cup of coffee. I sat down at the counter and looked at the menu on the wall, which offered me a choice of: Frankfurter, Burger, Cheese sand, Donut, Coke, Coffee...

"What can I get for you, Charlie?" The counterman asked me.

"Donut." I chose the less expensive food from the list.

"One donut coming right up."

"Anything else to eat?" He asked me in sense of better trade.

"No."

The attendant totaled up my purchase on the register. I handed him the money. After paying him, i checked to see how much money i had left. Not much.
My order arrived. I quickly consumed it, then got up and left the restaurant.

As i slowly came into the street with the Princeton Club, a young man wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a clip-on bow tie, and a painfully sincere smile approached me.

"I have good news for you, friend. Luke can save your life! Go to Roadway and 108th Street. Believe it!" He turned and walked away quickly.

"Yeah, right... with that gun." I said and entered the Club.

I was in the lobby, fully convinced on the evidence of the empty matchbook, that i was an alumnus of the university and a member of the club. I took a quick scan of the interior and made a mental note to write to the Club's Board of Directors on the subject of the dangers of creeping seediness. Surely, such venerable institution, should not be allowed to sag into such a state of shabbiness. Perhaps contributions should be solicited for a Redecorating Fund. Just as I've began mentally to frame this appeal, the doorman asked me what my business was. I explained that i believed myself to be a member. He assured me, that he had an infallible memory for faces and that i weren't. I insisted on seeing a list of the membership. When that list proved that there was no John Cameron among the members of the Princeton Club, the doorman escorted me out to the street and waved me goodbye with a smile of withering condescension.
I felt as though I'd been expelled from the university on the first day of my freshman year: it was a very brief career.

"John Cameron!"

I looked around to see who called me in that deep, cracked voice. She called again and i spotted her, an immense woman wearing layer upon layer of dirty rags.
She sat on the sidewalk across the street from the Princeton Club, surrounded by shopping bags. I crossed the street and approached her.

"How do you know me?" I asked.

"We were lovers, honey," she confided with a sly smile. "And I didn't have an angry sheriff for a daddy like that girl you told me about in Texas. Don't you remember?"

"I'm afraid I don't remember anything. I have amnesia." I replied.

She confessed that she knew about my amnesia, for two weeks earlier, I had a long conversation with her about it, right there at her post of duty. At that time I gave her a letter, what she have to gave me if i ever turned up again, as i did, thanks to the matchbook from the Princeton Club. After some minutes of polite conversation about the perils and pleasures of being destitute in the Mars greatest city, i took my leave of the shopping bag lady and opened the letter I wrote to myself. It read.

Dear self,
In case you haven't been able to get into your strongbox at the hotel, the password comes from the first lines of the Gospel according to John. You will need what's in that box. So get it.

Fond regards from, Guess Who.

Congratulating myself on my foresight, I torn up the note and threw it away. Only I had the password.

I passed one street and saw a telephone booth. Somehow, number 555-6200 rang in my head. I entered the pay telephone at that corner, which looked as though it was vandalized. It required coins, luckily i begged before. I pressed the buttons and heard dialing sound.

"Hi, this is Tiny Tykes Talent Town, Tharis newest and most successful Children's Modeling Agency. We can't answer the phone right now, but please leave a message after the beep." I only waited after that, saying nothing.

"We're located at 25W. 19th and providing free-of-charge evaluations of your Tiny Tyke's modeling potential." Who the hell wants that?

I tried to head west, i bumped my nose against glass, i realized it would be prudent to leave the telephone enclosure. I left.

Again i appeared on 53rd Street, where the Sunderland Hotel stood. Across the street, a glass tower rose above the Museum of Modern Art, Tharis big Moma. I entered the Sunderland and stood once again in the lobby. Across from the elevators was the registration desk, then a door to the vault. I walked over to the registration desk, where the clerk was patiently going about his duties.

"Excuse me, I am Mr. Cameron, can i please see my vault box." I asked politely.

"Oh yes, your vault box. Follow me and I'll show it to you." The clerk replied.

"Mr. Cameron, I thought I should tell you that a woman came to the desk about an hour ago and was very insistent, that she be allowed to examine your safe deposit box. She said she was your wife, but she had no identification, and you weren't in your room, and at last she went away."

"I hope - if she was indeed your wife - that she was not too much inconvenienced. But we really can't allow anyone to have access to the safe deposit boxes expect those who've singed for them." Clerk continued.

"A woman?"

"I thought her a very attractive and quite smartly dressed. Of course, I did feel suspicious, having earlier spoken to the young lady, Miss Dudley, who had reserved the All-faith Chapel for your wedding and whom I understood to be your intended bride." I made an angry face after he said this.

"Of course none of that is my business." Clerk was lucky.

"Please follow me, and I will let you in to examine the contents of the box."

The desk clerk unlocked the metal door of a cubbyhole of a room and i followed him inside. Two of the walls were given over to steel strongboxes of various sizes. There was a small table with a wooden chair by it. On the table was a computer, keyboard and monitor, which connected by a black electric cord to a kind of dashboard projecting from the wall. He showed me where my strongbox was, number 334, switched on the computer, typed a few instructions on the keyboard, and left the room with that parting advice.

"The security system will allow as many as four errors - so do type carefully. Remember, the computer understand a blank space as another letter. If I can be of further assistance, I'll be at the desk outside."

He left me in the small strongbox vault, facing the alert-looking monitor, with its cursor blinking in front of the blank space, where i was supposed to type in the password. Gospel bible. I tried John 1. Password incorrect. Eight letters. Start... word. Word! I remembered John 1 and wrote - With God.
With a click of instant recognition the little metal door of strongbox 334, opened and a massage appeared on the monitor before me. 'Your vault box is now unlocked and may be opened for your examination.'

I lifted the gray metal lid of the box. The strongbox contained a single old Compact Disc in a plain paper sleeve. I felt equal pangs of curiosity and of disappointment. The disc could have the answer to my basic question of WHO AM I, but i felt like a kid who unwrapped a Christmas present and had to say thank you for new underwear. I examined the disc. Label read: User Friendly Computer Store, 56th St. and Nosidam.

My head and body told me, that i could use some rest. I headed back to the tenement, and entered the bedroom then a back room. A pair of windows facing north looked out at a back lot embellished with a decade's, perhaps a century's, accumulation of broken bottles, viewed through the lattice ironwork of a rickety fire escape. There was a cast iron bathtub in one corner of the room, a doorless icebox sprawled in its back to the floor, and a poster on the wall, what posed the question: 'What if they gave a war and nobody came?' By the looks of that place, the question was not posed soon enough. The shattered bottles outside the window triggered just the shadow of a memory - my hands deftly mixing the contents of an odd collection of bottles over a rickety oval table in a hot, dirty room. I held a flask up to the light and started to shout excitedly to the empty room. But before i could grasp at the heart of my exultation, it faded into the drab reality of the tenement walls, leaving me as confused and dejected as before. I returned into the bedroom.

I did not find it as easy to sleep there, as i did the first time. The smell of the mattress, the rustling of rats in the rubble, and sheer anxiety kept me awake. But at last I fell into a light doze, and again I dreamt of the woman, just as last night and again she smiled at me, and called me by name: "Spike! Spike, where are you?"
I woke up, aching with the need to tell her, I was there beside her and always would be. Then the feeling faded, and the mists of my amnesia erased her beauty.

I got up from the mattress feeling stiff just as yesterday.

I came at 56th St. and entered the User Friendly store.
It looked like it was either not yet opened for business or recently gone bankrupt. There were only few computers in sight, Elppa, a Erodommoc and a PC by new founded IBM. Various products lined the wall, including some games and new holographic software, as well as hardware. The other person in the store, a woman in what almost but not quite a man's suit, approached me. I decided to rent one hour on IBM. I paid the saleswoman for an hour on the computer, and she led me to a back room about the size of a large walk-in closet. When i was alone, i entered the disc and monitor displayed the introductory message.

-Highly Confidential-
Do not access material on this disk unless it is YOURS.
You will know if it is yours, only if you don't know who you are.

Directory of Cameron:
1. File1 5k TXT 4-Jul-2072
2. File2 6k TXT 3-Jul-2072
3. File3 8k TXT 2-Jul-2072
4. File4 7k TXT 1-Jul-2072
5. -File5- 14k Bad 30-Jun-2072

It was text based, so most of people couldn't get in by simple commands.
I typed in File5.

Access to Cameron:File5.txt has failed: File is not of type TXT.
Block read error.
Damn.

I tried the File4. By dates.
Access to Cameron:File4.txt is controlled by the correct answer to the following riddle:

Without and within
I am skin after skin,
Core I have none,
And I shall be undone
By the slice of your knife.
It's a hell of a life.
Who am I?

I wrote, Onion. - Access authorized.

The notebook in which I had been keeping a day-by-day journal of my amnesia, has disappeared. Stolen? Misplaced and-or forgotten? With it is gone the metal cash-box in which I'd kept it locked - and, at this point, virtually all first-hand memory of my past. I remember passages that I've read in the past few days in that notebook, but my concern in those pages seemed to be more with analyzing the process of my disease, a kind of progressive amnesia, that I developed in the course of research into a small-scale epidemic of the disease, in a town named fiction. Even the recent past I remember spottily. What I can recall of earlier years is quite fragmentary. My memory is like a box of family snapshots, unlabeled and all jumbled together - and the family is a stranger's. Miss Abrams, the young woman who has been helping me all through these difficulties in countless practical ways, tells me that it was my death, months ago, that precipitated the more severe memory losses of recent days. For instance, in the missing journal, I exhumed, in often tiresome detail, memories of my childhood and school years - the names of school fellows, the furnishings of the houses I'd lived in - my course of studies, all in an effort to kind a pattern in what kinds of memories are proof against the amnesia and what kind are likeliest to be erased. The pattern is clear enough in that regard. Skills, intellectual or manual, seem impervious. Miss Abrams says she rented this computer for me so I could gather my thoughts and try to recall my work, but the first discs I recorded in my journal have already vanished. I must somehow guard these physical manifestations of my memory. I remember the computer's operation, even programming, perfectly. But this memory that serves me so well at these impersonal tasks, is a sieve with regard to the details of my own life. Worse, the memories I do have are a palimpsest of contradictions. Even my own name seems uncertain, for one of my few distinct memories of my school years is sitting down to take an exam in mathematics and writing. On outside of the blue test booklet is the name 'Zane Bester'.

This was the end of File4. I exited it and tried File3.
Access to Cameron:File3.txt is controlled by the correct answer to the following riddle:

I am evolution's way
Of saying:
'You've had long enough to play.'
I'm the unveiling of the skull,
The barnacles sheered off the hull
To show the noble wreck beneath,
As all shall lear who feel my teeth...
Who am I?

I entered word Bald.
It opened and i read.

I am in the classic situation of a man who must find some way to remember to tie a string round his finger, so as not to forget to tie a string round his finger... and so on, in an endless vicious circle. Only by accident did I discover this disc with its incredible information, for since I made it my amnesia has been virtually total. I've no recollection of keeping the journal that earlier file speaks of, nor of reading that journal - and why couldn't I have, as I said I would, at least set down what I then remembered having read? Alice Dudley (who I presume is the same person referred to in that first file as 'Miss Abrams', though I did not describe her there) now tells me we are engaged! When I reacted to the news as though it were a sample of black humor, she became vindictive and threatening. She says she'll give me another week to marry her OR ELSE. Or else what? I wanted to know. Or else she'd let the police know my whereabouts. I tried to buy time, saying I'd consider the offer on its merits. Meanwhile I insisted that she fill me in on her past, if she refused to tell me about mine. She then spun out a preposterous fiction about discovering me, wandering on Earth, in a state of delirium, and how we'd fallen in love as she'd nursed me back to health. She intends for us to fly to Ganymede on false passports and take up fishing! If I weren't sure she was trying to con me, I'd have thought she was crazy. Both are probably the case. And me - I'm not crazy? Only after I had two hours to myself, in which time I was supposed to pack a suitcase full of clothes etc. to take the hotel we're moving to ('Why must we move?' I demanded; 'I can't explain, John. You must trust me!'), only then, rummaging through the things here in the apartment, did I discover the miniature time-capsule I'd made - this disc and an address book with assorted phone numbers tucked away inside an old copy of Scientific Am. She now calls herself Alice Dudley. But if the disc and the address book too well - and then forget having hidden them... would file 5 have the answers I need? I cannot seem to gain access to it (something wrong with the disc, it seems), so I may never find out.

I clicked on the file2

Access to Cameron:File2.txt is controlled by the correct answer to the following riddle:

With every question that I pose
The keener curiosity grows.
Who? I ask, and then a moment later,
And why? And how?
And where's our waiter?
What am I?

I typed a question mark. - Access authorized.

I have become a virtual prisoner of Room 1502 of the Sunderland Hotel - but you may have no idea who 'I' am, or no better idea than I do, or than you do, if you're me. I mean, I assume that you must be in the same fix I am, or even a worse fix. Facts, I better stick to facts. This afternoon my self-declared lover and fiance 'Alice Dudley', who may be someone else entirely, according to what 'I' have written on the files within this file - read on, and answer the next riddle, and read on some more - anyhow, Alice Whoever appeared outside the door of 1502 and got very impatient rattling the chain lock while I secreted this disk, which I had just entered in the computer. I discovered the disc in my gym bag I'd deposited in the gym of the hotel, having gone there thanks to a note I'd left in the Bible here in the room. If this seems confusing, excuse me, I fell confused. Anyhow, I let this Alice Dudley in the room. She came bearing a Chinese takeout dinner, which I refused to eat, from a paranoid suspicion that my dinner might be mind-alerting. And for absence of meat. Something has been alerting my mind, and that's a fact! So I ordered an alternate meal from room service and while I was waiting for it, Alice Whoever was eating moo goo pan, she explains that I'm engaged to her, and have amnesia (which I knew very well already, thank you!), as a result (she claims) of my pre-martial anxieties. 'Who am I?' I kept asking her, and her reply was always 'Don't ask.' because apparently whenever I'm told who I am I black out again and am back to square one... Impasse. Though I doubt most of what she tells me, I can't, on the basis of the lovemaking that followed the moo goo gai pan, doubt her essential good will toward me. Call it love even, at least on her side. But it isn't love I need now, it's information, and that was in short supply. I keep thinking, tomorrow is another day, and maybe I'll figure out who I am and what to do. Maybe I'll find a machine that will read the last riddle - I can't seem to get this thing to access it. And meanwhile, before I black out, which begins to feel like the next likely event, I'd better think of someone to tuck this disc away, and seal up what I've just written with another damned rhyming riddle. Is there a method to my madness? I don't know. I mean, if you were me, what would you do? And further paranoid suspicion: what if I didn't write the earlier files on the disc? Maybe an answer to that is in the riddles. They may not be that hard to answer, I can't say, but if I can invent another now, to seal this bit of text inside its rhymes, that seems a kind of guarantee that whoever sealed the earlier texts with such riddles must be me.

"Shit..."

I tried File1.

Access to Cameron:File1.txt is controlled by the correct answer to the following riddle:

Although I talk of no one and
Of nothing else but me and mine
I hope you will not understand
Just who I am until the line
Revealing all my tradiddle
As the substance of -------.

I entered riddle. - access authorized.

I am writing this message to myself on a rented computer in room 1502 of the Sunderland Hotel, but beyond that one certain fact anything else I might say about who I am or why I'm here is a matter of faith and-or inference. I'm registered at the desk downstairs as John Cameron III, and my bill is being paid for by a VISA card in that name (no idea where the card is though, dammit), but all my efforts to dig up solid info about this 'John Cameron' have met with no success. VISA insists my records are confidential and can't be divulged over the phone. The WHO'S WHO at the library shows no entry for John Cameron III. The name is probably an alias. This much is certain: Whoever I am, I'm suffering from a disease that causes a progressively worse amnesia. The nature and origin of that disease - and much else - are set out (presumably by myself, but that's where faith comes in, since I don't remember writing even yesterday's entry!) in files that are coded within this disc. Access to these files is controlled by series of riddles similar to, but harder than the riddle that opened this file. The need for 'burying' this information will become evident as you-I continue to access earlier files. As far the riddles themselves, it seems that ween in my amnesiac condition I have a knack for inventing doggerel riddles. God, I hope I don't end up discovering I'm a poet! I have, at this point, almost no memories of my adult life, though I do retain certain capabilities - such as flying some ships - and general knowledge. There is also a grab-bag of what I suppose are childhood memories - streets and rooms and cooking smells and a woman's voice softly urging me to go sleep. My mother's voice? I can remember watching Dumbo and wishing that I had his magic feather. I remember unwrapping a birthday present that had one box inside of another box inside of another box - but i can't remember what was in the last box. It's not safe for me to continue writing. You-I will find what you need to know on the earlier files. I have nothing substantive to add. I'll deposit this in the hotel's vault and use the password that's keyed to John I. None of the other riddles concern the Bible. I was able to guess the clues, so I guess you will, since I'm counting on you to be me. This is a weird situation.

I turned the computer off and left the store.

Who am i? I asked myself inside my brain. That number flashed again 555-6200.

Maybe it was some info about me, time for Tiny Tokes.

I took the subway.
After some time i stood there. I climbed the steps to the entrance portico. There was a doorbell on the wall with a plastic nameplate beside it. The nameplate read: Tiny Tykes Talent Town. I rang the doorbell, after a short wait the buzzer sounded. I entered and found myself at the foot of another flight of stairs. A voice called down, pipingly.

"Who's there?"

"John." I answered apathetically.

"Oh John, how nice. Mummy is in the bathtub, and I'm making imaginary cookies. I'll go tell her you're here."

I climbed the stairs to the second floor landing, where the door to apartment B was ajar. I entered a large loftlike space, in which the elements of a kitchen, a living room, and a toyshop were mingled in one bright-colored jumble. From another room, another voice called to me.

"I just got into the tub. Do be a dear, John, and read Cecily that nice book you got her. I won't be long." Something in my brain whispered, that I hate kids.

A moment later, from behind a room-dividing bookshelf, Cecily appeared with an aluminum cookie sheet full of imaginary cookies. She held out the cookie sheet and offered me a choice between an imaginary chocolate-chip cookie and an imaginary sprinkle cookie. I took the chocolate one.

"Thanks." I smiled.

Just then a woman's voice addressed me.

"John Cameron! This is a surprise." Who was this? Little book on table, the diary, answered that it was Ann.

I turned and saw a woman dressed in a blue bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her hair. She was beautiful with the beauty of the Ideal Housewife to be seen in ads for cooking oil and detergents. Ann began vigorously drying her hair with the bathtowel what was her turban. After it was all fluffed out into a great halo of damp blonde curls, she opened a cupboard compartment, and took out two brandy glasses and a bottle of brandy. The name somehow messed up now. The two of us drank a toast.

"Don't think, John Cameron, that what we started is still happening. You've had your chance. I'm after a long-term relationship. Not one where you pop up with a smile on your face, telling strange jokes about a hired doppleganger in a gilded cage, looking for a free dinner and a place to crash and then disappearing for a month. I'm not blaming you - you never pretended to be anything you're not." She continued.

"But you're a bum - a good-looking, personable sort of bum, but a bum for all that."

"Bum, huh? How sensible. Do you have anything to eat in here?"

"If you're hungry there's a big hunk of brie in the icebox. I carted it home from a party last night, so have all you want, it was free. Now excuse me a moment, I've got to put the little princess to bed. She's got a makeup call for a six a.m." She stopped and walked away with Cecily.

I went across the room to a corner that was predominantly kitcheny without quite becoming a kitchen, opened the icebox and encountered a truly mouth-watering wedge of brie gleaming in wrinkly plastic wrap. I took the brie and closed the door. The unwrapped brie, was too cold to release a really knockout aroma. I returned to the couch and consumed the entire piece of brie. Ann returned from putting Cecily to bed.

"John, you're a darling, and you know how fond I am of you, but you must accept the fact that as lovers we belong in the past tense. It's over, and I'm engaged to another man, as you very well know, and he is jealous of you, and I don't blame him, so you see, you must stop coming round here. In fact I'll have to ask you to leave now, since Jeff is coming over to watch an old Bergman movie on the Betamax." She said sadly.

"I'm sorry, I won't be bothering you ever again. I promise." I looked on her. Deja-vu.

"In one way I am glad you came, since it gives me an opportunity to give you this."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a note.

"Cecily found this under hall door this morning when she came back from her dance class. In the future, please have your mail left at another address. I'm not a forwarding service."

The note was in the form of a short hand-written letter.

Dear John,
I have no reason to suppose you'll ever remember your precious Ann when you've forgotten everything else in your past, but you always used to find your way back to her like some salmon returning to spawn, so I will go with my hunch and leave this note with her to pass on to you. Only to say this: I'm sorry I couldn't connect with you in some other fashion, but I was being watched every minute and it would not have been safe. That danger seems to be past now, and if you want to meet me again I will go each day around noon to the Tharis Historical Society at 77th Street and Park West and wait for you upstairs in the Neustadt Gallery. I'm sorry about what happened at the hotel, It was not my fault. I love you - and I apologize for doing so. I realize that for you my love only represents an inconvenience.
Alice.

Ann went to the door and held it open, inviting my departure with a bittersweet smile. I accepted her invitation, and left the apartment.
When the door closed i whispered to myself.

"Good-bye... Julia..."

Again with the help of subway i entered my home, the tenement and slept dreaming about the purple angel.

A/N: In the time the story takes place,are CDs more like floppy discs now in 2006, used for storing small files. Mini versions are most used. I think.