I had sat in an armchair in that office, somewhat like the one I have in Limbo. I got up from the oak chair and seated myself in the armchair. I gripped its arms with my hands as I remembered doing. My body fell into that old tense position as though I were an actor who had played the scene a thousand times.

And there I was living it again in a small room with Currier and Ives prints on the wall and the interviewer, a florid man in a brown suit, smiling blandly at me. I knew instantly that it was all as it had been and that it would not end differently. Buttoning my fly in the classroom had changed nothing.

I remained through the inventing of the phone number and then I returned to Limbo. It was clear that I could only change things one at a time; I could not start new chains of circumstance.

Eventually I was to find out that my intuition was correct. I could change particular scenes in my life, erasing mistakes as it were and adding corrections, but I could not seriously change the substantive details. I was a high school teacher for my adult life and I could not change that. I was married twice and divorced twice; I could not alter that either, although I could edit my more unfortunate scenes with my wives. Honesty compels me to say there were many of these scenes. By judicious editing over a period of Limbo-years and hundreds of trips back I was able to improve my behavior in arguments, make myself kinder and more understanding, and the like. But I still divorced them and I could not change that. And truly I did not want to.

I could only make the transition to the past while sitting in the appropriate chair. I found that with some effort it was always possible to associate a chair with every part of my past I wished to explore and then, when needed, change. I have come to believe that the chairs were put here as vehicles for me to render my former life less painful to remember—less embarrassing and wrong. Perhaps other inhabitants of Limbo have more or fewer chairs. Perhaps not. I have never seen another inhabitant.

My first wife was Jane; I was married to her five years. It took me all of two years in Limbo to edit the relationship, yet with all the changes the divorce took place on the same date it had the first time around.

After three years of marriage to Jane I had lost interest in her and had stopped having sex with her. I had found—and I shudder to mention this—ways to blame her for my lack of interest. I told her that her clothes were all wrong—especially her underwear. I told her her education was lacking, that I felt she was afraid of sex. I had married her in the first place because she was a kind of boyish, no-nonsense woman, and now I blamed her for being that way, told her I wanted her to be more feminine. Yet the truth was that I mistrusted women who were very feminine. I told Jane in anger that I thought she was a repressed lesbian because of the way she wore blue jeans all the time. It was horrible of me to say such things. I had winced over them more than once, here in Limbo, before I discovered that I could change them. I am not a cruel person; I really wanted to erase those cruelties.