And then one night I had supper at home, washed the dishes, and threw out everything in the refrigerator that wasn't canned or bottled. Then I sat down at a card table in my living room, and wrote a note or postcard to everyone I knew who might wonder about me.

The work wasn't going very well here in New York, I said in each of them; and this was January 4th, a new year, so I'd bought an old station wagon on impulse, packed, and was leaving in the morning before I could change my mind. I was just going to tour around, I didn't really know where — I might head for one of the Western states — drawing, sketching, and taking reference photographs as I went. I'd write when I could, I said, and would be in touch when I got back. I didn't like doing it this way but I knew I wasn't up to convincingly answering questions if I tried doing it in person or by phone.

I mailed my cards and notes on Lexington Avenue, a block from my apartment. I dropped them into the box, then stood looking around for a moment at New York in the second half of the twentieth century. But there wasn't much to see besides the walls of the buildings around me, a long stretch of asphalt on which only a single cab was moving and a fragment of gray-black sky directly overhead too hazed for any stars to be visible. The day's car-exhaust seemed to have settled down here and was making my eyes smart; it had turned cold; and half a block down the cross street, on the corner of which I was standing, a group of young Negroes was walking toward Lex, so I didn't hang around to encounter them and explain how fond I'd always been of Martin Luther King. I walked on, up Lexington and then across town toward the warehouse; I felt tired, a little sleepy, yet so excited I was conscious of the beat of my heart.

At ten minutes after one in the morning, an hour and a half later, we left the warehouse; Rube had his car, a squat little red MG sedan, parked in the street at the side door. He drove, Doc Rossoff sat on the outside, and I was more or less hidden between them wearing Doc's raincoat over the costume I'd put on at the warehouse, though I tried not to think of it as a costume. No need to hide my long hair and beard, of course.

I like New York late at night, most places closed and dark, the streets as nearly empty of movement and as quiet as they ever get. We could hear the sound of our own tires on the asphalt, and at Amsterdam Avenue, waiting for a light, I heard someone cough half a block or more away. We didn't talk to amount to anything; we crossed Broadway, stopped for another light at Columbus, and Rube said, "Funny-looking dog," nodding toward a woman walking a clipped poodle in a jeweled dog-coat. A block or so further on Oscar Rossoff pointed at a darkened restaurant and said, "Good seafood there." I don't recall saying anything, but I yawned a lot from nervousness. Rossoff understood the reason, glancing at me occasionally to smile.

Rube parked a dozen yards from the Dakota's main entrance; he held out his hand to me, and I took it. All he said was "Good luck, Si; I wish it were me." Rossoff had his door open, and he stepped out, and I slid across the seat to follow him.

The uniformed doorman was expecting us; he simply nodded and we walked on past him, under the great main arch, then on across the courtyard; the two huge green-bronze fountains were empty. We climbed the wide old staircase in the northeast corner of the Dakota, meeting no one, stepping out onto the seventh floor; my apartment was a few doors off, and I brought out my key. "My coat, Si," Oscar said, and I took off the raincoat and handed it to him. "Want to come in?" I said, but he shook his head; he was staring at my clothes, then he lifted his eyes to stare at my hair and mustache as though he'd never seen them; he seemed suddenly awed. "No," he said, "I don't think anything of the present belongs in there now, Si." He held out his hand. "Good luck. You know what to do when you're ready."

We shook hands, then I walked to my door, slid my key into the lock, and turned the big ornamented brass knob; the door swung soundlessly back on its hinges as though it were weightless, but I could sense its solidity. I turned to say a final goodbye, but Doc Rossoff was down the hall, just turning onto the stairway again; he turned to glance back at me, then he was gone.

I walked in, closing the door behind me, my eyes widening, accustoming themselves to the faint light from the tall rectangles of the windows. I knew the layout and appearance of the apartment; I'd been here with Dr. Danziger and Rube the day it was completed. Now I walked over to one of the windows, stopped, and stood looking down onto the pale curves and jumbled shadows that were the paths and greenery of Central Park under the moon. Directly below my window if I'd cared to lean forward and look straight down, I knew I could have seen the street, Central Park West, and its traffic lights and occasional cars. Far across the park, if I'd lifted my eyes to look, I could have seen a few still-lighted windows in the block-after-block row of great apartment houses bordering Central Park's eastern side. By turning my head to the right, I could have seen the rooftop neon of the hotels at the southern end of the park, and the lights of the great midtown office buildings beyond.

But I looked at none of these. Instead I stared down into the shadows of Central Park, and almost directly ahead the moon shone on the surface of the lake just as it must have, I thought, on another such night when the building I stood in was new. On the curved roads of the park widely spaced streetlamps burned, each with a nimbus of late-at-night mist, and it seemed to me that from here they couldn't look very different, if at all, from the way they had looked long ago.

There was a heavy green window shade, I knew, and in the darkness I pulled it down, then drew the velvet drapes. I did this with each of the other windows, then brought a matchbox from my pocket. I struck a match on the sole of my boot, it spluttered, then caught and burned steadily, the wax running thinly down its stem. Cupping the flame with my other hand, I lifted it to an L-shaped ornamented brass tube projecting from the wall. Fastened to the short arm of the tube was a bracket on which a flowered glass shade was fitted; a key-shaped brass handle projected from the underside of the tube. I turned it, heard the soft hiss of gas, then touched my lighted match to the open end of the tube. A wedge of blue-edged flame popped into existence under the glass shade, and a wavering circle of flowered gray carpet appeared at my feet, then steadied.

I looked at the room and its furnishings for only a moment or so. It was approaching two in the morning, two o'clock in the morning of January 5, 1882, I said to myself, suddenly realizing that the experiment had actually begun. But I was tired, empty of all energy now, and my hand still on the fixture, I turned the light out, then walked down the hall to my bedroom.