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He was lost. And he was naked, wet and shivering. He was lost in a rain-drenched midnight Eden, and all the black trees around him were whispering like mad and laughing. Thunder blossomed in the distance.

And something else was very wrong. Then he remembered: he'd lost his memory.

Oh damn, he thought, and flung himself through the underbrush. After a time the forest surrendered to the road which glistened like a strip of licorice in the rain. He leaned against a tree and remembered that he had passed under an arch of blinding light, and been struck down by a hand of fire. Then, slowly, the smell of the earth, the awareness of his body, the certain knowledge that he had no idea who or where he was.

He blinked and headed for the road. The sleek metallic rain kept pouring down so his vision was blurred, but at one point he saw, or thought he saw, something which made his blood run cold. It was a huge neon sign shimmering in shades of blue and green. It hovered for a moment over the forest, then disappeared.

WELCOME, it read, TO THE LONELIEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.

I'll hitch a ride to somewhere, he thought. But how can I? I'm naked!

Since it was early Spring the forest was still quite bare, but scattered here and there were a few of last year's maple leaves. They lay on the ground in what had once been wanton splendour; originally they had been golden-red, but now they were dirty orange, shades of rust. He found that he could peel them from the ground like soggy pages of the earth's diary, layers of its skin. He chose one of the largest and held it over the nakedest part of his nakedness. Then he stepped to the edge of the road and held up his thumb. At least I remember how to thumb a ride; that means I'll remember lots of things later.

A small red car shot out of the night and came to a screeching stop beside him. The driver, a woman, leaned out of the window and stared at him in disbelief. She was very beautiful; he wanted to die. She thinks I'm some kind of pervert. But wait - would a pervert be clad in a maple leaf? I'm going to assume control of this situation.

'Excuse me, Miss, he said, 'I'm in need of help. I've lost three things: I've lost my way, I've lost my clothes, and I've lost my memory.'

'Your memory?' she asked. 'Oh come on!'

'It's true, I swear it.'

'Do you mean you have amnesia?'

'Yes, and I'm also catching a cold.'

She began to laugh. It was an unusual laugh; it was almost as though she were laughing in another language.

'Well, if you feel it's that funny, I'll take another car!' he said, offended. 'I have my pride,' he added, clutching the leaf to his groin. 'And I'm in no hurry.'

She opened the door for him. 'It's all right. Come in then, stranger.' She reached over into the back seat and produced an old brown blanket bordered by a geometric Indian pattern; gratefully, he draped it around himself as best he could in a style resembling a toga.

'You wouldn't have a pin or a clasp to hold this thing together?' he asked.

She pulled something from her hair which was made from a sweep of turquoise feathers and shell and bone. With some difficulty he manouevered it through the coarse material of the blanket so the toga was fastened at the shoulder. Then he saw that her black hair had fallen free, and it was straight and shiny, and although she wasn't laughing anymore there was a maddening little smile around the corners of her mouth.

'Now,' she said, when they had turned from the road in the forest onto the highway, 'tell me about yourself.'

'But I can't! There's nothing to tell; I don't know who I am!'

'Oh come on!'

'Why would I invent such a story? I don't know where my clothes are, I don't know where I was going, and I don't know what happened to my memory.'

'Cigarette?' she asked, pointing to a pack of Export on the dashboard.

'I don't smoke,' he said, then frowned. 'What am I saying? Of course I smoke.' And he helped himself to a cigarette.

'For the time being I'll go along with you,' she said, casting him a long sideways glance. 'I'll assume you're telling the absolute truth.'

'I swear it, I swear it.' He coughed loudly and put out the cigarette in the crowded ashtray. 'I don't smoke,' he added, and sank back into the brown depths of the toga.

'And you don't remember anything?'

'Nothing. Except things like night and day, heat and cold, how to speak.'

She was worried now, not smiling. 'There was a huge electric storm back there. Maybe you were struck by lightning.'

'I felt a hand of fire,' he said, 'here, just across my left shoulder. It sort of slapped me down. And my whole left arm is numb.'

There was a long silence as the miles whizzed by.

'Back there ...' he said finally, 'you say back there and I realize that I don't know what you mean. Back where? I mean - where are we?'

'Back there was a place called Kingsmere,' she informed him, 'the residence of a former Prime Minister of this country. We are not far from Ottawa, capital of this country.'

He liked the way she drove; she didn't clutch the wheel like he pictured other drivers doing, as though they expected it to assume a demonic will of its own and steer itself into oblivion; her right elbow on her lap, she guided the car with the merest touch of her fingertips on the bottom of the wheel. Almost no other cars were on the highway, and as they rolled on through the night with the broad thunder receding in the distance, they might have been anywhere in the world.

'I don't want to sound like a fool,' he said, drumming his fingers against the dashboard, 'but - may I take another cigarette? I think I do smoke - but, when you say this country I honestly don't know where you mean.'

'Oh come on!'

'I'm serious. I don't know where you mean.'

'This country,' she said slowly, 'is called Kanada.'

'Oh. Kanada.'

The second cigarette tasted better than the first. He finished it and fell asleep.

He awoke sighing and talking to himself the way sleepers do when they leave the private country of their sleep.

'Where are we going?' he murmured.

'Toronto. Unless you have some other place in mind.'

She told him that her name was Kali, and that she had an extra room in her little house in the east end of the city; he was welcome to stay there for a day or two until he recovered his memory.

You're not afraid of me? You don't even know my name. For that matter, neither do I.'

'Then for the moment,' she replied, 'I'll call you Noman.'

The next time he slept it was was in a voluptuous bed under a dark red cover that felt like heavy ancient velvet. He prayed to the Unknown God - the only god who came to mind, an ideal god for a man in his condition - to give him his memory back. But he woke up the following morning with the flu; the cold wet night in the forest had lowered his resistance to the world. He lay in bed with a high fever, and Kali made him lemon tea and Marmite sandwiches; now and again she tried to distract him with a page or two of escapist fiction or nature poetry, but he tossed and turned and refused to be entertained. Once in his despair he tried to eat the pillow, and when he saw the lost feathers floating in the air he declared that his mind was a cloud, a snowstorm; he talked of the wings of the angel of death, which were not black, but white.

The second night he woke up drenched in sweat; the bed was a lake of black water where he sank and drowned. He tried to crawl in between the folds of the magnificent suffocating cover and disappear among the layers of dreams that lay between this world and the other.

'Kali,' he said, his face a gruesome mushroom grey, 'I want to be sure that my precious parts go to Science. My brain to the General Hospital in - where was it? - Ottawa. My eyes to Mount Sinai, my heart -'

'There are far worse things than having the flu,' she said, and brought him the fiftieth pot of lemon tea.

'Like what?' He stared at the Japanese maidens on the teapot, walking back and forth over the same bridge, forever.

'You could be lame, paralyzed, blind. You could be a leper, or a mythopoeic poet.'

'I'll drink the tea.'

'Not to mention what fearful diseases of the spirit, or even of your immortal soul.'

'I'll drink the tea!' he cried, his arms outstretched in wild pursuit of the Japanese maidens.

That day the fever played itself out, and the next day as she was standing in front of the hall mirror she turned to see him framed in the doorway, about to go out, the outline of his body fuzzy and unreal in the early morning light. Behind him the blue-grey haze of the strange city rose from his shoulders like wings.

'Kali, who am I?' he whispered, and he was afraid. 'Who am I?'

He wanted to break every rule in the world, to commit unspeakable but perfectly reasonable acts in an effort to find himself; everything was within his reach, everything was impossible. Surely she knew how desperate he was? But she said nothing; she was absorbed in the complex ritual of braiding her hair and tying it into place. He resisted the urge to shake her so it all came apart again.

'Then who are you? You live alone here. Do you have a family? Do you have a man?'

'I did.'

'And where is he? What happened to him?'

'Oh,' she said, 'he died.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, and of course he wasn't.

'So am I.' We ploughed through each other's lives, she thought, leaving these furrows a mile wide, these great gashes in each other's souls.

'What was he like?' He wondered if he should be asking all these questions.

A kaleidoscope, a collage, a creature who occupied the spaces between moments, sliding in between the folds of reality, his life a room composed of sliding panels and doors.

'He was quite unusual,' she said.

He studied her. She was not, as he had first thought, beautiful; she was slim and angular. One of her ancestors was a Mohawk, she had told him. When she spoke, her voice took on a low conspiratorial tone as though she had just escaped from a situation that was fraught with danger, or was about to embark on a madly daring and clandestine escapade. Every word was charged with a dark, quiet excitement. In moments of ecstasy or distress, he was to learn later, she insisted on fleeing to India but never went. Although she had travelled in the past she now got no farther than packing her bags. She had told him that she often had trouble deciding which aspect of herself to present to the world - the North American Indian resplendent with beads and feathers, or that other Indian after whom she was named, the dusky and terrible consort of Siva, Kali.

'I'm going out,' he announced. 'But first tell me about that place where you found me. What is this Kingsmere?'

'Kingsmere was the residence of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Short, fat little man with a brown suit and a little dog. If you study a picture of him it's like studying a snowbank: opaque, inscrutable. He communicated telepathically with his dog, employed mediums to contact his dead mother, and made no important decisions unless the hands of a clock or watch formed a propitious angle. He needed spiritualists, he needed prostitutes. He had dreams and visions of Hitler and was impressed by the Fuehrer's "love of peace".'

'Baffling man,' said Noman.

'He imported pseudo Graeco-Roman columns and bits and pieces from historic buildings and used them to decorate the grounds at Kingsmere. Zap - instant history. But he was wrong; all he did was create a sort of grotesque stage set. But for what play? The place is surreal, with all those arches leading nowhere but to the forest. He tried to decorate the present with relics from the past, and ended up creating a time-warp. The ruins don't belong in that landscape, the landscape rejects them, they create a tension that's almost electrically charged.' She glanced at his arm, recovered now from the numbing effect of the lightning.

'Is there anything you can tell me about this country that I should know now, before I set out? It doesn't seem quite real to me.'

'Nor to anyone!' she laughed. 'Nor will it ever, until we look inside of what's real to discover what's real. The dark myths of the forest. And it won't settle into time, into history, until we know it well enough to make fiction of it, to play with it. Until we take it so seriously we can stop taking it seriously. There is another country, you know, and it's inside this one.' She tied something blue onto her braids.

'What was I doing at Kingsmere the night you found me?' he asked.

'You tell me. '

'I can't!'

She went into the kitchen and left him to rendezvous with himself in the mirror. If he had been born, so to speak, at Kingsmere - could he be a reincarnation of the madcap King? But he had no particular fondness for dogs, and politics distressed and bored him. He studied himself in the glass. He was probably in his mid forties, or so his general condition, including that of his teeth - two extractions, several fillings - indicated. He was fairly tall, with a lean and muscular build; it was the body (perhaps) of a dancer or a runner, of someone accustomed to long, lyrical exercise involving endurance and coordination. Dark auburn hair, eyes that changed colour, nationality uncertain. As for his naked self, which had surprised him that morning in the bath, there was an egg-shaped birthmark on his inner thigh and a small scar from some operation on his abdomen; his skin had a faintly olive cast. He had found that he couldn't wear a watch because his pulse interferred with it somehow and made it stop. Kali had given him one belonging to her late boyfriend (as did the clothes he now wore), and the thing gave up on him each time he put it on. Private time subverting world time, he mused.

Who was he? Useless scraps of information, names, places, random data, combined to form nothing he could call a memory. He had no family, he was sure; no one was related to him. Someone had stolen his passport to life, if indeed he ever had a passport. Or else he was merely something that someone had misplaced, someone who was now rummaging through papers in a desk in the Library of Lost Souls in search of him.

He couldn't be sure of anything; of that he was certain. There were no truths, no lies. Everything was very important.

'Well, I'm going out,' he called, and returned to the doorway.

'Do you want me to go with you?' She came out, holding two glasses of orange juice.

'No.'

'I've got to clean these windows,' she said, running a finger down the pane of glass in the door. Then she drew a lion through the film of dirt, and he drew a bird and a dolphin. 'Good luck out there,' she added.

'I don't want luck. I want a past, I want a second name, a social insurance number, a soul.'

'You already have a soul.'

'I've never been introduced to my soul. Souls are cheap. I want to smash this window, I want to fly, I want to write a sequel to the Odyssey, I want to die, I want to swim the lake, I want to break all the rules there are and then make new ones so I can break them too, I want to invent electricity; my needs are simple.'

The world beyond the window as it looked now through the transparent bodies of the animals was a fabulous and terrifying place.

'You can do anything you like, then,' she said as their glasses clicked and kissed. 'There is the city.'

He went to the police and asked them if he was a Missing Person; he went to the library and looked himself up in Who's Who in Kanada (he wasn't there); he gave two dollars to a girl with green hair in Yorkville who read his palm and told him that he was at a turning point in his life and things would either be good or bad; he almost wept for joy when a young man asked him 'Do you want to know who you really are?' and he cried 'Yes, yes!' only to discover that he had inadvertently consented to take a Scientology test; he went to a psychiatrist who asked him about his sex life, and he replied that he'd never had one, and anyway he was only six days old. By the end of the week he was exhausted and feeling a little reckless, which was why suddenly, at the corner of Yonge and Bloor, he grabbed the violin from the hands of a young street musician who played there every day, found the instrument familiar and satisfying, and immediately gave forth a brilliant rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's Hymn to the Sun. He felt better afterwards.

He kept dreaming he was swimming in a huge lake with the shoreline nowhere in sight, and it occurred to him that this probably meant that he wanted to swim, so he went to the nearest pool and realized immediately that he was indeed a superb swimmer. His body rejoiced in itself; he did fifteen lengths in an excellent crawl with scarcely any effort. Then he did fifteen more. Afterwards in the shower room he surprised his naked fellow swimmers by breaking out into boisterous lines of Homeric poetry, in the original Greek. Soon he found a job as a lifeguard in a high school pool which was creamy white like old porcelain or a dentist's bowl, streaked along the sides with slippery yellow. In the evening he taught a group of students called The Water Babies, and standing with them, waist deep in the blinking turquoise water, he told them that swimming was just like navigating in dreams. 'Open your eyes underwater!' he cried. 'What are you afraid to see down there - yourselves?' And when the lessons were over he'd circle the pool and peer into the depths for lost engagement rings, band-aids, jewels. He quit smoking and breathed.

He moved into a room on the third floor of a house close to the lake. It was an odd, circular room with windows looking out in three directions. He called it the tower room. It had silly orange curtains that whizzed across the windows on long metal runners. There was a magic tree outside - Ygdrasil. Marvellous children made hopscotch marks all over the sidewalk in purple and white chalk. Small kids didn't sit on the kerbs after sundown because then the black asphalt became a river, and something called Orca swam down it to bite off their feet. It was wonderful; there were no limits to the world.

Some buildings had signs on them saying JERUSALEM, CAIRO, ATHENS and so on. It was part of a festival called Caravan. You could start off the day with ordinary cornflakes, watch native dancers twirl and beat drums all morning, have a lunch of Lebanese falafel, buy Russian embroidery and Spanish dolls in the afternoon, have Italian pasta and Brio for dinner, take in Ukrainian dances in the evening and wind up with Chinese food at midnight, having seen only one or two token Anglo Saxons all day. You had no idea whose country you were in; it was perfectly Kanadian. It was wonderful. He had never been so lonely.

He began walking around everywhere, looking for his life. In Eatons, everything was inside out; indoors was made to look like outdoors with real trees and fake avenues. He got into a transparent elevator with women who wore black lipstick and musk perfume that turned men into animals. A memory seized him in a stranglehold around the throat; he was in the Eatons of the Forties in an elevator where a woman in a navy blue suit with white cuffs and immaculate white gloves was opening and closing the metal gates that moved like accordions and calling out the floors in a nasal monotone. When the memory released its grip he was left with the image of a white disembodied glove floating in the air, and the sound of sliding metal doors.

But whatever else it was, it was a charmed life. Often he'd find himself on some unknown street, staring in disbelief as suddenly everything before his eyes began to shimmer and glow with a frightening radiance. The hallucinatory presence of things. The trees, the grass, the sidewalk seemed on the brink of confessing to him and him alone their luminous secrets. Confronting the miraculous, he could only shake his head and whisper look at this, look at this, as a kind of delicious terror gripped him and he was consumed by something he called godfire. But he was also cursed with an awful inclusive vision, the painful ability to see everything at once. Thus the darkness alongside of the radiance, and the sight of his fellow human beings in their pathetic and hilarious attempts to be beautiful, to be important, to be immortal, drove him into a quietness which was at all times between laughter and tears.

And nobody knew him; the high-heeled woman who strode back and forth across the city in purple suede boots, taking up the whole sidewalk, her whole being in pursuit of some lavish dream, didn't know him; the Greeks carrying around the unbearable burden of their own existence didn't know him; the woman known as the Swedish Queen who wore pink harem pants and outrageous jewellery and a gold ribbon that said SOCIALISM across her chest didn't know him; the Chinese and Jamaicans and Hungarians and Philipinos didn't know him; the bag ladies didn't know him; the troubled young woman who cut up playing cards and left the pieces on the pavement in front of churches and police stations in some sort of private ritual didn't know him. (One morning he picked up a part of the Three of Diamonds and spent an hour looking for the rest because perhaps she was trying to communicate with him by means of a secret code.)

Kali, he thought (this in the darkest nights), I am so lonely.

He walked all over the city, talking to popcorn vendors from places like Lisbon and Gibraltar and Corinth, to newspaper boys and mailmen and street cleaners. He wore a light brown trenchcoat, and because he looked like such a gentleman and spoke so softly and politely when he asked people if they knew who he was, they often dismissed the idea that he might be mad and were almost sorry that, no, they didn't know him and never had. Finally it was clear to him that nobody knew him and why should they? The world was theirs - or was it? Were they also alone? Was this city somebody's rough diagram of reality, or was it pure mirage? He gazed at the Tower - tallest free-standing structure in the world - and it shimmered in the gray air, a monument to nothing, a spaceship that would never have lift-off, a rocket without a launching pad.

They didn't know who they were, so they came and built these big cities in the wilderness. They still found it empty, so they stuck up this tower in the emptiness. They were so lonely they didn't even know it, maybe even lonelier than me.

On one of his walks he learned that he possessed certain magical powers which, although feeble and uneven at first, held promise of greater things to come. The simplest of these powers and the one which was easiest to summon up was telekinesis, and he passed some pleasant moments moving small objects such as pebbles back and forth across the sidewalk. But he soon tired of this, impatient for more dramatic feats.

News made no sense to him because he had no backdrop against which the world's daily drama might be played. He swam and swam and watched the fishy bodies of the other swimmers thrashing around, their vision coloured by red and green goggles, or crawling back and forth doing lengths, doing lengths, covering the same ground over and over like his futile thoughts. Yet there was a seductive loneliness about swimming; the water was easy, opening for him and permitting him passage, offering no resistance. Too easy, he thought. What he needed were huge waves bashing his head, black angry ones whipped up by wind, brutal cold ones thick with froth and plankton from the mouths of seabeasts, waves so chill and merciless they would pour through the sluice gates of his memory. Not this tame pool he swam in daily, this tepid water. When he showered down after his swim, splashing off the layers of chlorine and blinking the turquoise film from his eyes, the porcelain tiles on the walls of the shower room were as white and vapid as his memory; they were like nascent photographs in a chemical solution waiting to develop. But no image ever appeared on them. At least I have an open mind, he told himself. In your condition, said a familiar and increasingly perverse voice in his head, what other kind could you have!

In the tower room he went to bed early and listened to the tic-toc of bedsprings coming from somewhere in the old house where lovers were creating their own love-clock, a challenge to ordinary time. (Everyone was perishing from loneliness except the lovers. Everyone was walking around with a list of loves and terrors in his head, hoping to meet somebody with an identical list. Looking for sibling images, flirting with mirrors.) But mostly he listened to the lake when it grew stormy and the crashing of lakewaves, south of his head, against the breakwater.

Kali was a costume designer for a small theatre company which was doing a new version of The Cyclops. At a theatre party he met a lot of people who all seemed to be talking about the Alexander Technique and their recent trips to Crete. 'I saw one guy from New York arguing with a cafe owner who'd said, quite nicely, how he liked to please the foreigners,' one man said, 'and the guy turned on him shouting I'm not foreign, I'm American! Now a Kanadian would never think of saying that, you know?' He also learned at the party that in Crete people still Tilled the Soil. And the editor of The Golden Yo-Yo: A Magazine of the Arts declared to anyone within range of his voice that regional theatre was dead. Noman listened, baffled.

The next week he went to see the play, and one of the actors delivered a line that made his blood run cold. Sweat broke out on his forehead; it seemed to him that everyone in the audience turned toward him. Jesus Christ, they're doing a play about me, he thought, and went to the nearest bar and drank himself into oblivion. He wrote NOMAN WAS HERE on the washroom wall, and considered it to be the most suggestive and obscene piece of graffiti ever composed. At two-thirty in the morning Kali got a call from a police station informing her that they were holding a drunk they'd picked up on Bay Street who claimed he knew her. He kept saying, 'Noman they call me, my father and mother and all my fellows.'

She picked him up from the station and drove him back to the tower room. 'All right, Kali, I give up,' he said, because it was clear to him now that of course she had always known him. He was the man who had died. 'Tell me everything. Am I supposed to be dead, is that it? And if so - why?'

'Some people think you're dead; it's easier for them to deal with you when you're dead,' she said. 'But I wouldn't dwell on it.'

'Why didn't you tell me before?'

'When I knew you before you also claimed you had amnesia. It's your old trick.'

'This time it's no trick, I swear it. Aren't you going to tell me anything about the past? '

'Even if it's no trick ... no. You had a thousand pasts. And anyway, if I wait long enough, you'll tell me. It'll come back to you in pieces.'

'Tell me something! Was I a murderer, or a poet? Was I rich, was I poor?'

'You weren't rich, you just lived like you were. I thought you were, until you sold everything in your apartment one day to pay off your debts. That was a while ago. You've been away rather a long time.'

'How long? Tell me something. What do I love?'

'Mathematics, music, Metaxa brandy, astronomy.'

'What do I fear?'

'The last hour of the night - the hour of the wolf - albinos for some strange reason, comets, quicksilver, fireworks, the last hour of the day.'

'And ?'

'No more. You were always inventing yourself; now you can do it again.'

The tower room loomed above him. He waited for a moment on the sidewalk and waved after her as she drove away. She watched him growing smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror, moving back through private time, retreating into microcosms where all manner of pasts were possible, and therefore all manner of futures. She wondered if he knew how lucky he was. Yes I know you, she thought, I know all about you - all the people you aren't, all the places you can't be found.

That night it rained and rained. In the last hour of the night he couldn't sleep. He opened the shameless orange curtains, rust-coloured now by moonlight, and looked down onto the street. Some people were walking home, and their multi-coloured umbrellas were codified dots in a computer's memory - the codes of yesterday, he thought, the codes of possible tomorrows - or bingo chips, or the dots of those crazy modern clocks which had no numbers or hands and lit up in key positions to tell the time. Beyond the street with its anonymous residents, down a steep hill and over an expressway, the lake heaved and sighed. The funny green dinosaurs and purple monsters in the children's playground on the lakeshore were getting drenched in the rain. He stared out, feeling suddenly very afraid. The rain slid down diagonal slots from the sky, the fat trees lurched like drunkards in the wind, the magic tree outside the window shone like a star. The street was a glistening strip of licorice; it became a road in the Gatineau hills. It was the first day of the world, and he was naked and alone.

But he started to fall asleep despite himself. The rain turned into an angel timidly knocking on the doors of his consciousness, then it was a horseman pounding on the door of an inn in Italy in the fifteenth century. Then as he sank into the dark waters of deeper sleep he thought he would die here in this loneliest of countries.

Whose country, what country? For that matter, what world? His mind was at an oblique angle, leaning into nowhere. The darkness drove a wedge into his reason. The wind confided in him all through the last hour of the night, telling him its obscure troubles. He knew that he couldn't face this loneliness much longer. He also knew that he would have to.

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