Harold has already ascended through Florida and Georgia, and is now in Alabama—still running. Since leaving his prefab home in Miami and the tennis computer game, he has been running constantly, and has not been back. The only thing he has stopped for is to sleep; everything else he does as he runs. At each fork in the road, he turns at random, thus meandering in such a way that if his course were set down on a map it would resemble that of a woodworm proceeding up an America-shaped bed leg. [Someone has also recently pointed out the likeness with the gyri of the cerebral cortex.] Pair of pleated chinos, red polo shirt, bomber jacket, and the old Converses on his feet. No signs tell him to go on or to stop, and so he adopts the neutral solution of Newton’s law of inertia: an object continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by a net force. His mind has closed in the same way flesh closes after surgery. This was one of the secrets most interesting to him during his time as a doctor in Boston: Why does the body, though subjected to gory operations, always tend to close up, to heal, to re-create the darkness inside itself as though the light, which outside the body is the sign of life, if admitted would mean death? Now Harold is running, his body mass increasing, and so it becomes more and more difficult for the light to get inside, to access the center of the body, which, once maculated by light, can no longer be restored. Very far away, this light accumulates on a black-and-white screen, along with thousands of tennis matches won against itself with a spongy boing. A 3,057-kilometer run, and not a single memory.