adele was listening.  she was still in tunis.  the movie was the moon and sixpence, she said.

sandy nichols was eric blore.  he was in a movie with george sanders.  i don't know about the others.

no particular eight-ball.  nothing to distinguish it from others.

eight-ball

white whiskey label.  auld pure scotch whiskey, distilled and bottled by sandy gibbs distilling co.  glasgow, scotland.  there is a hand holding the bottle and it seems as if he has just written his name on the label.  there is a pencil in the upper right corner visible.  the name written on the label is sandy nichols.  

i remember that!  paul, i remember that.  the man was fritz schmidt, a german i knew.  he was a friend of mine for a time.  he was always taking pictures.  it was the 19th of november.  it was birthday bash for him.  the year?  i could never remember years.  everything is twenty or thirty years ago at my age.  i do remember that light.  it was six or seven in the morning and that was sunlight streaming through a crack in the curtains.  i don't know what he was looking at.  i do remember that at that point no one was feeling any pain.  show me a few more.  the ones with writing.

there is a man on the right with his head tilted up.  he is clearly looking at something or someone.  he may have a startled look.  he looks up to the left beyond the frame.  there is a calendar hanging on the wall on his right shoulder.  i can only make out the number 19 as the day.  it is dark.  a bright light shines on his throat.  do you remember that light?  

there are two halves.  the left half is the criminal division, main office entrance door.  room 220.  the right half is the wall next to the door.  there are three shadows on the wall, two with hats.  i assume that they are men.  the third shadow is smaller and overlaps the two in the foreground.  i can almost make out a face on the tallest shadow with the hat.  the shadow in the foreground is of uncertain gender.

a woman in front of ivy lane theater stage entrance.  mask painted on door.  cool weather.

delvaux broke the silence.  he said that he would describe what he sees in arthur's past.  arthur will see if they match the series of images that he sees in his past.  arthur said that he felt that it may be enlightening.    yes.  arthur said the word enlightening.  arthur has something left.  this does not surprise adele.  he has already gone against her wish to rid himself of delvaux.  arthur felt that he was only partially a failure in life.  he thought that while he was in the midst of these dilemmas in the past were the times when he felt the most comfortable in life.  arthur used to tell the story of how giaccometti and beckett took long, winding walks.  beckett was quiet.  when they did talk, they talked of how they were failures, and how they laughed and laughed and laughed.  arthur seemed to be comfortable with experimentation still.  adele had thought of him as an experienced man who was just a bit tired of it all.  but arthur was able to laugh about his failures and seek comfort, the kind of comfort which wasn't comfort at all.  he certainly didn't consciously think of himself as defeated.  adele said that arthur was an uneasy man.  he told her he had always been an uneasy man. adele said that he enjoys uneasy things.  arthur always wanted to the stranger in town.  now perhaps he could be a little more of a stranger to himself. 

 and then delvaux and arthur backed up a few steps, and looked at each other for a long time.

the neon sign says dreamland.  it is very dark.  but I can see a commotion out front.

tell me what you see!  describe them to me.

pictures with words you say?  i can see them too, said paul delvaux.

now all the things that i remember are pictures with words.  i do not know them.

being shocked out of his head.

and now even these memories were at first reduced... before

arthur was at that age when everything happened thirty years ago. 

the stan laurel in my dreams is the same stan laurel in my life.

adele never talks about her dreams.  it is all one thing,  she thinks.

adele put down the phone with arthur.  she would have a long, pleasant sleep.

he did some other things.  i know he has murdered at least one man.  i beg of you arthur, cast him off.  

later i learned that he went into cons.  now he's getting shock treatments.

delvaux did forgeries, petty stuff in the beginning.

paul delvaux was a friend of ferdinand waldo demara, the great impostor.

mr. delvaux is a con artist.  i ran into him years ago.  i told you to not get involved.

if i have no memory of these things, how would i know them to be even half truths?

arthur said that mr. delvaux could reveal memories that he never had before.

you said that you wanted to forget your past.

arthur, do not get involved with this man.

his name is paul delvaux.  he says that he can read my past.

arthur will tell me about him late friday night.

arthur met a man in the sanatorium.

but when we kissed from a thousand miles away, they were a thousand kisses deep.  (l.c.)

arthur was in herisau, switzerland.  but his mind was elsewhere.

i was in tunis.

adele kissed him from a thousand miles away.

now he couldn't remember himself as a boy.

arthur said that the shock treatments were meant to relieve his mania.

welcome to your life.  there's no turning back.  even while we speak.

adele said that he shouldn't be concerned.  it will show up someday.

in the back of his mind was this.  he could not place it in his history.

was it from the past or from the future?  arthur didn't seem to care.

he thinks there was a girl on the floor.  it might have been on a train.

the first clip arthur saw was of men's shoes tapping each other.  maybe a kind of introduction.

he said it sounded like a fog horn. he said that it felt like something was making an entrance.

they didn't use sine-waves.  some other waves were thrust into his head from both sides.

arthur felt less excitable.  he was happy with that.  but he felt dull.

she felt a frisson when arthur received his treatments.

and i want to take them all.  i want to take everything with me.

i want to see pictures of everything yesterday, today and tomorrow.