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Third
It seems late. Perhaps because the street is empty. Memory other than my own places me in the late 1940s. So do my clothes, especially this heavy wool topcoat. My thick-soled leather shoes feel oddly comfortable as I approach a dark doorway. Barely visible just inches away from me, the knife-like brim of a wide felt hat stands out against the gloom, so I stop. The hat doesn't move. A cat steps into the doorway. A drunk I hadn't noticed starts yelling something toward the doorway, maybe at the cat, maybe at nothing. I don't know. A light comes on from above. Then, very abruptly, as a car passes toward me, a large man in a large hat bolts from the doorway and runs toward the half-lit intersection a few feet away, turning to his right, with the drunk in pursuit of what is now massive desperate shadow dwindling into distant light.
The drunk looks for all the world like the film actor Joseph Cotton. But he looks truly drunk, so I don't speak as we pass each other. He is headed back from wherever it was he came. The big man's shadow is long gone to wherever it is going, and I have nowhere to go except around the block again.
A short while later on my second tour everything is changed. What appears to be a crew of technical people are here in the street, hauling lighting equipment and a large camera onto a truck. They are festive, yelling, talking, slapping one another on the back. A large black car pulls up and the big man, now minus the hat, gets in and is soon gone. The Joseph Cotton fellow is there, too, but no longer seems drunk. In fact, his mood is jovial. He jokes with everyone around him as people offer him cigarettes and brief applause. "You will be remembered forever for this scene!" someone shouts, just as I turn the corner, thinking about taking one more pass along this interesting street before returning to whoever I was before the coat and shoes and what have you.
Now the street is utterly dark. The movie people, gone, the big guy, long gone. There is not so much as a cat. When I reach the doorway where the large man stood, I step in, all the way into the shadow he briefly overfilled. I don't know why I'm doing this. I seem to have been here now for a very long time. Not so much as a single thought has passed through my head, though I feel something eternal animating the darkness around me. But suddenly, I want to run.
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