Even in full stride his feet seemed to stray slowly and lightly and at deliberate random across an earth without solidity, until he fell.
Nothing tripped him.
He just fell full length, believing for a while that he was still on his feet and still running.
But he was down, lying on his face in a shallow ditch at the edge of a plowed field.
Then he said suddenly,
“I reckon I better get up.”
When he sat up he found that the sun, halfway up the sky, now shone upon him from the opposite direction.
At first he believed that he was merely turned around.
Then he realised that it was now evening.
That it was morning when he fell running and that, though it seemed to him that he had sat up at once, it was now evening.
‘I have been asleep,’ he thought. ‘I have slept more than six hours.
I must have gone to sleep running without knowing it.
That is what I did.’
He felt no surprise.
Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness.
It would be either one now, seemingly at an instant, between two movements of the eyelids, without warning. He could never know when he would pass from one to the other, when he would find that he had been asleep without remembering having lain down, or find himself walking without remembering having waked.
Sometimes it would seem to him that a night of sleep, in hay, in a ditch, beneath an abandoned roof, would be followed immediately by another night without interval of day, without light between to see to flee by; that a day would be followed by another day filled with fleeing and urgency, without any night between or any interval for rest, as if the sun had not set but instead had turned in the sky before reaching the horizon and retraced its way.
When he went to sleep walking or even kneeling in the act of drinking from a spring, he could never know if his eyes would open next upon sunlight or upon stars.
For a while he had been hungry all the time.
He gathered and ate rotting and wormriddled fruit; now and then he crept into fields and dragged down and gnawed ripened ears of corn as hard as potato graters.
He thought of eating all the time, imagining dishes, food.
He would think of that meal set for him on the kitchen table three years ago and he would live again through the steady and deliberate backswinging of his arm as he hurled the dishes into the wall, with a kind of writhing and excruciating agony of regret and remorse and rage.
Then one day he was no longer hungry. It came sudden and peaceful.
He felt cool, quiet.
Yet he knew that he had to eat.
He would make himself eat the rotten fruit, the hard corn, chewing it slowly, tasting nothing.
He would eat enormous quantities of it, with resultant crises of bleeding flux.
Yet immediately afterward he would be obsessed anew with the need and the urge to eat. It was not with food that he was obsessed now, but with the necessity to eat.
He would try to remember when he had eaten last of cooked, of decent food.
He could feel, remember, somewhere a house, a cabin.
House or cabin, white or black: he could not remember which.
Then, as he sat quite still, with on his gaunt, sick, stubbled an expression of rapt bemusement, he smelled negro.
Motionless (he was sitting against a tree beside a spring, is head back, his hands upon his lap, his face worn and peaceful) he smelled and saw negro dishes, negro food.
“It was in a room.
He did not remember how he got there.
But the room was filled with flight and abrupt consternation, as though people had fled it recently and suddenly and in fear.
He was sitting at a table, waiting, thinking of nothing in an emptiness, a silence filled with flight.
Then there was food before him, appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands fleeing too in the act of setting down the dishes.
It seemed to him that he could hear without hearing them wails of terror and distress quieter than sighs all about him, with the sound of the chewing and the swallowing.
‘It was a cabin that time,’ he thought. ‘And they were afraid.
Of their brother afraid.’
That night a strange thing came into his mind.
He lay ready for sleep, without sleeping, without seeming to need the sleep, as he would place his stomach acquiescent for food which it did not seem to desire or need.
It was strange in the sense that he could discover neither derivation nor motivation nor explanation for it. He found that he was trying to calculate the day of the week. It was as though now and at last he had an actual and urgent need to strike off the accomplished days toward some purpose, some definite day or act, without either falling short or overshooting.
He entered the coma state which sleeping had now become with the need in his mind.
When he waked in the dewgray of dawn, it was so crystallised that the need did not seem strange anymore.
It is just dawn, daylight.
He rises and descends to the spring and takes from his pocket the razor, the brush, the soap.
But it is still too dim to see his face clearly in the water, so he sits beside the spring and waits until he can see better.
Then he lathers his face with the hard, cold water, patiently.