Just before the corner of Fifth was a wastebasket with a bum poking around in it. Harold had seen this bum before, had given him a quarter once. Fellow alcoholic. There but for the grace of God, et cetera. He fished a quarter from his pocket and gave it to the bum without solicitation. “Say,” Harold said, on a wild impulse, “have you noticed something funny? People in brown sweaters and jeans?” He felt foolish, asking. The bum was fragrant in the afternoon sun.

“Hell, yes, buddy,” the bum said. “Kind of light brown hair? And tennis shoes? Hell yes, they’re all over the place.” He shook his head dazedly. “Can’t get no money out of ’em. Tried ’em six, eight times. You got another one of those quarters?”

Harold gave him a dollar. “Get yourself a drink,” he said.

The bum widened his eyes and took the money silently. He turned to go.

“Hey!” Harold said, calling him back. “Have a drink for me, will you? I don’t drink, myself.” He held out another dollar.

“That’s the ticket,” the bum said, carefully, as if addressing a madman. He took the bill quickly, then turned toward Fifth Avenue. “Hey!” he said. “There’s one of ’em,” and pointed. The man in the brown sleeveless sweater went by, jogging slowly on his Adidas. The bum jammed his two dollars into a pocket and moved on.

Well, the bum had been right. Don’t let them interfere with business. But it wasn’t hallucination—not unless he had hallucinated the bum and the conversation with the bum. He checked his billfold and found the two dollars were indeed gone. Where would they have gone if he had made up the bum in his unconscious? He hadn’t eaten them. If he had, the whole game was over anyway and he was really in a straitjacket somewhere, being fed intravenously, while somebody took notes. Well.

He turned at Fifth Avenue, toward the spire of the Empire State Building, and stopped cold. Most of the foot traffic on the avenue was moving uptown toward him, and every third or fourth one of them was the person in the brown sweater and the blue short-sleeved shirt. It was like an invasion from Mars. And he saw that some of the normal people—the people like himself—were staring at them from time to time. The brown-sweatered person was always calm, whistling softly sometimes, cool. The others looked flustered. Harold jammed his hands into his pockets. He felt suddenly cold.

He began walking down Fifth Avenue. He kept going for several blocks, then on an impulse ran across the street to the Central Park side and climbed up on a park bench that faced the avenue and then from the bench onto the stone railing near the Sixtieth Street subway station. He looked downtown, up high now so that he could see. And the farther downtown he looked, the more he saw of an array of brown sweaters, light brown in the afternoon sunlight, with pale, sandy-haired heads above them. On a crazy impulse, he looked down at his own clothes and was relieved to see that he was not himself wearing a brown sleeveless sweater and that his jeans were not the pale and faded kind that the person—that the multitude—was wearing.