His throat continued to bother him. As he rifled through his pockets, he found a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a beautiful gold lighter. He extracted a cigarette and lit it. The boy with the monkey appeared at his side and bummed a smoke. Ad Magic lit it for him, and watched the boy pass the cigarette to the monkey, who held it in the fashion of an aristocratic S.S. officer in an old black-and-white Second World War movie. The monkey smoked as though he had a real yen for nicotine, and after this demonstration he presented his little bellman’s cap for another tip. Ad Magic gave him a five-dollar bill and then sat down on a small, rusting Ferris wheel, looking out at the horse again. He took a drag off his cigarette, and on his wrist he noticed a stainless-steel Med-Alert bracelet and a solid-gold Rolex. He examined them both with curiosity, as if he had never seen them before. The little bracelet was inscribed with the word “Epilepsy.”

Epilepsy. Ad Magic did not have epilepsy in the classic sense, with full-blown, convulsive seizures. He was a temporal-lobe epileptic. He remembered this now. He had suffered an epileptic fugue. He still wasn’t sure what his name was, where he lived, whether he was married, whether he had children, or much else, but he did know himself to be an advertising man. That, and an epileptic. He quite clearly remembered the voice of his doctor, the large, high-ceilinged consulting room trimmed in dark oak, a door with a frosted-glass window, and a hands-clasped-in-prayer statue on the doctor’s desk. Ad Magic remembered spending hours from early adolescence into maturity in that room. He remembered majestic oak trees, crisp autumn afternoons, the smell of burning leaves, and the palatial brownstone estates of a Midwestern city, but he could not identify the city, could not picture the doctor or remember his name. He did know the man had been more than a doctor to him—he had been a good friend as well, a man whom Ad Magic loved very much. He suspected that the doctor was now dead, but he distinctly remembered something the doctor had told him about his condition. “These spells you have, where you go gadding about the world—they could be a form of epileptic fugue, or you could be suffering from the classical form of global amnesia, which is so often depicted on television soap operas. They are very common in television melodrama but almost unheard of in real life. But so, too, are psychomotor fugues, which are a kind of status epilepticus of the left temporal lobe.”