possessions. Eye to the viewer, I read briefly at random, something
about the management of compound fracture, then realized I had
understood exactly three words in a paragraph. I put my fist against my
forehead and heard the words echoing there emptily; "laceration ...
primary efflusion ... serum and lymph ... granulation tissue...." I
presumed that the words meant something and that I once had known what.
But if I had a medical education, I didn't recall a syllable of it. I
didn't know a fracture from a fraction.

In a sudden frenzy of impatience I stripped off the white coat and put
on the first shirt I came to, a crimson thing that hung in the line of
white coats like an exotic bird in snow country. I went back to
rummaging the drawers and bureaus. Carelessly shoved in a pigeonhole I
found another microcard that looked familiar; and when I slipped it
mechanically into the viewer it turned out to be a book on
mountaineering which, oddly enough, I remembered buying as a youngster.
It dispelled my last, lingering doubts. Evidently I had bought it before
the personalities had forked so sharply apart and separated, Jason from
Jay. I was beginning to believe. Not to accept. Just to believe it had
happened. The book looked well-thumbed, and had been handled so much I
had to baby it into the slot of the viewer.

Under a folded pile of clean underwear I found a flat half-empty bottle
of whiskey. I remembered Forth's words that he'd never seen Jay Allison
drink, and suddenly I thought, "The fool!" I fixed myself a drink and
sat down, idly scanning over the mountaineering book.

* * * * *

Not till I'd entered medical school, I suspected, did the two halves of
me fork so strongly apart ... so strongly that there had been days and
weeks and, I suspected, years where Jay Allison had kept me prisoner. I
tried to juggle dates in my mind, looked at a calendar, and got such a
mental jolt that I put it face-down to think about when I was a little
drunker.

I wondered if my detailed memories of my teens and early twenties were
the same memories Jay Allison looked back on. I didn't think so. People
forget and remember selectively. Week by week, then, and year by year,
the dominant personality of Jay had crowded me out; so that the young
rowdy, more than half Darkovan, loving the mountains, half-homesick for
a non-human world, had been drowned in the chilly, austere young medical
student who lost him