Free Black Curtain by Cornell Woolrich

uncomprehending shake of the head. But somebody had done it, somebody must have! It had been a good, solid impact. He was about ready to fly with crazed helplessness, when suddenly the fourth man he tackled answered with somewhat sheepish reluctance: "'Scuse me, I mistook you for somebody else. You fooled me from the back for a minute." He pried his sleeve away from Townsend's convulsive grip and went on.
     
    Townsend stopped dead for a minute while the sluggish tide of humanity flowed on around both sides of him; the sudden letdown was so cruelly deflating.
     
    It had been on a Monday, a Monday-morning daybreak, that he had first reached Tillary Street. Tuesday passed and Wednesday; Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Those first few he was sure of. After that they began to telescope themselves a little, lose their sharpness of identity. It was harder to keep track of the days down here. Having no job might have had something to do with it, or the blurring monotony of the routine he had set for himself. There came the day when his landlord accosted him at the foot of the stairs on his way out, and he knew he had been there a full week and it was Monday again.
     
    He had been eating very sparingly and irregularly, but he discovered when he tried to pay for the coming week that he had only two-odd dollars left.
     
    He handed over two, said, "I'll have the other fifty for you by tonight or tomorrow," wondering to himself at the same time how he'd manage to.
     
    But he did have it by that very night, when he returned toward midnight; handed it over with finger tips puckery and red from long immersion, after an agonizing afternoon- and evening-long session washing the dishes in that place he'd eaten in the day of his first arrival. They had had a temporary need for someone, luckily. There was enough left to tide him over the next day or two, but he knew that, however else he managed, he'd never wash a dish again as long as he lived. He could still feel the greasy scum of reeking water, lapping up his arms to the elbows, for days afterwards.
     
    He'd already finished his casing of the shops several days before this. And although he'd left a bad impression as a time waster, maybe even as a potential shoplifter, on many of the proprietors, and got dirty looks from then on whenever he strolled past their premises, he had nowhere gained the impression that any of them had seen him before.
     
    His clocklike pacing of the street, day after day, up one side, down the other; then down the one, up the other, was undoubtedly making him familiar by sight to dozens of the denizens of Tillary Street, but it was all current familiarity, none from before, and to keep from getting tangled up and mistaking the one for the other, he held himself strictly aloof from overtures of new vintage, rebuffed them where they seemed about to be tentatively put forth for the first time.
     
    Eventually, of course, a law of diminishing returns was going to set in against him. If he stayed on around here long enough for new familiarity to become seasoned, a time would come when he would no longer be able to differentiate recognition having its inception in the immediate past from that of the more distant past that he was trying to re-enter. But that point hadn't been quite reached yet.
     
    He was haunted now at times, alone in his barren room at nights, with the ghost window square cast by the street lights wavering on the wall before his eyes, by a looming sense of failure, of the futility of the whole thing he was attempting.
     
    Perhaps it was based on a faulty premise in the first place. He might have just been traversing Tillary Street at random, that day that the curtain had suddenly been drawn upon the past; might have happened upon it in the course of a hap. hazard, meaningless digression. He might be mistaking an erratic diversion for his regular orbit. How was he ever to find out, in that case, where he had been going or where he had come from? He