264.

He sat slumped at a cafe table making himself revisit a high school scene he had vaguely recalled only a week before.  All he could sense about it was a circle, but was it the wheel to a bicycle, the waterwheel to a windmill — or even the moon itself?  It quite suddenly felt to him to have been the knob to a console radio. And, that’s right, it was being turned — Off.  Whose hand? His father’s? A girlfriend’s?  Regardless, the radio was turned off, and, then, nothing.  He strained to recall what had then followed, and grew bone-weary from the effort when, suddenly, he bolted straight up:  The “click” of turning the radio off was the actual substance of his memory!  It had been a psychological device he had once often used.  He’d get himself to hear a loud Click! in his mind and would then immediately — as if helpless to it — put a needed change into practice.  It’s how he had stopped smoking.  Over time, that Click! did start to fail him, and, soon enough, even fell from memory — till, when at the cafe table, he heard it in him again and knew that he was not going to leave her or the city he had till then only been visiting.


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