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Sometimes he couldn't even remember how long he'd had the amnesia. But one of the nice things about not remembering anything was that the world was almost unbearably beautiful; everything was fresh and new. The city was full of surprises. Right now the wind was flinging itself at him with shameless abandon as he made his way down the tunnel of Bay Street in the direction of City Hall. He headed across the square to where Henry Moore's Archer was slowly acquiring its splendid patina, turning green with age and doing so with great dignity.

Here there occurred one of the unpleasant things about having amnesia - one of the hot waves of recognition or nearrecognition of something which was sometimes accompanied by a slight sensation of nausea.

'I have the most extraordinary feeling that I know this thing,' he thought, and then realized that he had spoken aloud, as a bum who was sitting on a nearby bench got up and joined him in scrutinizing the sculpture.

'You like this thing?' he asked. 'I don't like this thing. Nobody likes this thing, they just get used to it, that's all. Piece of crap if you ask me.'

'I mean I feel like I know it, it's almost as though I've been inside it, you know? I'm the only man in this city who's seen it from the inside. God, I probably know this piece better than any man alive. Except the artist.'

'I've heard a lot of comments about this thing,' said the bum, 'but this is ridiculous.'

'Sorry,' he said. 'That's what I get for talking out loud.'

The wind went right through a stop light, turned a corner and proceeded along Queen Street. The Archerturned an imperceptively darker shade of green.

He had despaired of fortune-tellers, having gone twice to tea rooms in the east end of town to consult professional readers of cards and palms. They were justifiably upset when he informed them that he wasn't even slightly interested in the future, that it was the past which he wished to have revealed to him. The past was something they were wary of, crammed as it was with its dark mysteries, but they bristled with news of the future. He couldn't understand why they couldn't turn their talents with equal success to either end of the spectrum of time; surely, in fact, the past presented less difficulties than the future since it was accomplished, over and done with. (This he argued despite the fact that he knew time to be nonlinear.) But none of them saw things his way. One of them wasted half an hour telling him about her psychic war with Jean Dixon; another offered him a cup of weak tea in which the saddest tea leaves he had ever seen arranged themselves in disinterested patterns of random destiny.

But one day a little yellow-haired girl at the corner of Bloor and Dufferin handed him a leaflet which read:

Two images flanked the message - one of Christ holding a cross and a bouquet of flowers, and one of Christ with arms raised, palms outward to reveal the stigmata. Zodiac signs decorated the borders of the leaflet. He turned it over and read:

There were translations of the message in Portuguese and Greek and a few more flowers and Zodiac signs.

It was Sunday when he went to see Miss Lisa.

All the church bells were ringing, and little ladies with beige and white handbags and lace gloves and blue and pink flowered hats were going arm in arm to church to hear sermons such as: Jesus: The First Hippie! or Christ the Woman! or even: Christ the Dow Jones Average. Sunlight was everywhere, except in the dark green lane which led to the side entrance of 93 Bell Avenue.

Miss Lisa was very tall; she wore dark blue nail polish on nails that seemed to have grown out of control, like those of ancient mandarin lords, and many large rings with semiprecious stones. She had plucked out her eyebrows over dark green eyes. She motioned for him to sit at a naked kitchen table overseen by two enormous spider plants. The room was full of flies, all telling him their secrets. He was very nervous.

She sat down opposite him and put an old brown teapot and two frail cups and saucers on the table, then opened the pot to stir the tea - a colourless tea upon which floated an ancient teabag in its second or third incarnation.

'I don't read tea-leaves,' she said. 'They're old fashioned and silly.'

She stared at him and he murmured something as she poured the awful brew. Then out of the middle of nowhere she said, 'No man is an island, you know.'

This gave him such a start that he almost dropped the cup. 'How did you know?' he cried. 'That's my name - Noman. At least that's what I'm calling myself until I find out who I am. How could you possibly know?'

Miss Lisa, who knew that everyone believed what they wanted to believe, said, 'I know what I know,' and dropped her eyelids mysteriously. Then she looked up at him again and added, 'My fee is five dollars for a half-hour consultation.'

'Let's get on with it them,' he urged her.

'You men,' she chided, 'rush rush rush. You must learn to take your time, to savour the time like nectar. I have always known this; in one of my incarnations I was a Greek heteira.'

'What have you been doing since then?' he asked as she laid her Tarot cards and crystal ball on a piece of black velvet on the table.

'I was Xenobia. I was Joan of Arc. I was Hitler's mistress. I've been busy.'

He wondered why, whenever people spoke of their previous lives, it always turned out that they occupied some very high position; most often they were royalty. Why did nobody ever reveal that in the past they were peasants, dock-workers, slaves? He didn't have long to dwell on this, for now the cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck were spread out before him. His eyes fell immediately upon La Lune, Le Pendu and Le Monde - the Moon, the Hanged Man and The World. Her eyes followed his eyes, 'Remember which card you are most drawn to,' she said. 'That card will represent yourself as you appear to yourself, as you are in your own eyes.'

'I want you to know something,' he told her. 'I have amnesia, that's why I'm here. I'm only interested in the past. Don't waste your time on the future.'

'The past,' she said.

'The past.'

She raised a non-existent eyebrow. 'You're crazy,' she said. 'For five dollars you can have the future too.'

'I don't want the future. Can't you just concentrate twice as much on the past so I'll be getting my money's worth anyway?'

She peered at him under the ridge where her eyebrows had been. Then she shrugged. 'Keep in mind the cards which you were first drawn to,' she told him, as she gathered up the Major Arcana and handed them to him in a small pile. 'Now shuffle and cut these three times and spread them out face down before you. Then you will choose a card blindly, and that will be your card; that will be you. Every Tarot reader has a somewhat different approach. This is mine.'

Her rings flashed - green, amber, red. He took the potent cards and began to shuffle them.

'Are you religious?' he asked. 'You have those pictures of Christ on your leaflets.'

'I won't get any of the Greek or Portuguese business unless I indicate that my work is authorized by God,' she said. 'The women who come to me want to be sure that what I do is clean and acceptable. Of course you and I know that there is no magic without the devil, but they want it both ways.'

'Are all your customers women?' he asked, beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable. He spread out the cards, face down.

'You're the first man who's come here in two months,' she replied. 'Now, choose a card.'

His fingers were drawn like magnets to the card at the extreme left of the fan-shaped pattern on the table. He handed it to Miss Lisa and she turned it over and gazed at it in ecstacy, her nostrils slightly dilated, her cheeks flushed.

'I knew it,' she breathed. 'Le Monde. On the upper left corner the winged man, on the upper right the eagle, on the lower right the lion, and the lower left the ox. The vision of Ezekiel.'

'What does it mean? Does it say anything about my past?' he demanded.

'The eagle is air, intelligence and action,' she said. 'The lion is fire, strength and movement. The ox is earth, labour, forbearance and sacrifice. The winged man symbolizes the intuitive knowledge of truth.'

'And what does all that mean? '

'It is the twenty-first enigma of the Tarot pack,' she went on. 'In the center of a garland symbolizing the cosmic process a girl runs, carrying two sticks; this is the creative activity, the rotational motion of all things created by polarity.'

'I really don't understand any of that,' he protested, although he did.

'Does it really matter?' she asked. She looked as though she were falling into a trance.

'Can we do the fortune now, can we look into the past? Don't you have to spread the cards out in some kind of pattern or something?'

'The past, the past, who cares about the past?' she breathed. 'Ours is the perfect Present, the marvellous and holy Now. You have chosen the card which speaks of the perfection of Man! When a man chooses this card it signifies the quest for perfection through thought. When a woman chooses it, it is the same quest, but through feelings. I am a woman.'

'But what does all this mean?'

'Who cares, who cares? Even now the Present slips through our fingers!' she cried, leaning over the table and clutching his wrists.

It was a fragile table, and her sudden movement sent the crystal ball off the edge and onto the floor where it shattered internally, making a noise like a smashed egg. Then it rolled away to the corner of the room.

'And so much for the future,' she added. 'The future with its broken dreams.'

'What about the past with its broken dreams?' he said, gently freeing his wrist form her taloned grip. 'I don't know anything about it; that's why I'm here.'

'Very well,' she sighed, and shuffled the deck. 'I'll see what I can do.'

She laid the cards out in a pattern with a cross in the centre, pondered them a while and frowned. 'There's a lot of turmoil in the past,' she informed him, 'and a lot of restriction. I see you confined in a very small space. And I see you in some foreign country - somewhere in Europe, I think. You're in a very small space, fighting to get out. Perhaps you were imprisoned in a European country? Perhaps you were a political prisoner, or something of that nature? Here's the Ace of Clubs. Perhaps someone was pounding or beating you - am I right? No? I tend to take some of the cards quite literally. Does any of this bring anything back?'

'I don't think so,' he said. 'I think I'd like to go now.' He felt in his pocket for the five dollars to pay her. His hands were sweating and he felt slightly ill.

'So soon? I haven't finished. You fool, you don't know what you're missing. God, you're so attractive. You must know how attractive you are, don't you?'

'It's eleven-thirty in the morning,' he said. 'I don't know anything, it's too early. Besides, it's Sunday. Besides, I want to go home.'

He put the crisp five dollar bill on the black velvet; she covered it with her resplendent hand.

'I suppose I'm not a very physical person,' he said, not wanting to hurt her.

'You're like me, you're spiritual,' she sighed, and for the first time he noticed what a beautiful voice she had. 'And the spirit,' she went on, 'is the sexiest thing of all.'

Slowly gathering up the tired, powerful cards she added, 'I could look into your previous incarnations for a few dollars more. But you're leaving.'

'Did you really see those things in the cards?' he asked.

'Of course I did. Do you think I'm a fake?' she exclaimed, turning her rings around one by one. 'Nothing is fake, nothing in the world, not even these rings. Everything is real, darling, remember that. Real and literal. Everything.'

'I thought you people thrived on enigma and mystery,' he teased.

'We do,' she smiled.

'Goodbye,' he said. 'Thank you.' And he made for the door.

'No man is an island, you know,' she whispered, wrapping the cards up in the black velvet.

'Yes,' he said, pausing for a moment.

'You mean no,' she corrected him. 'I said no man is an island.'

'I am,' he said softly, shutting the door behind him. 'I am an island. I am Noman.'

The same bum was sitting on the same bench when he went back to City Hall square a day later.

'I remember you,' he said. 'You're the guy who thinks you were inside the sculpture or something.'

'It might interest you to know,' said Noman, 'that I was inside of it once.'

'Oh come on!'

'I kid you not, my dear man. You see, yesterday I remembered something. It's not much, but it's a start. See down at the bottom where it says H. NOACK - BERLIN? Well that's the name of the foundry in Germany where they cast Moore's stuff - and I was there. Yes, I was there sometime in the Sixties, I remember it now. I visited the foundry, and since I knew something about welding, one of the workers let me crawl in through the square hole in the piece and weld a couple of seams inside.'

'You mean it's hollow?' asked the bum.

'Of course it's hollow. Then the guy outside would talk to me inside with a kind of walkie-talkie, and together we'd smooth out any little bumps or marks on the surface. The guy outside would tell me to move my hammer a little left or right or up or down so he could hammer from the outside without making a dent. God, I remember it like it was yesterday.'

'You mean you were literally inside it? Like in real life?'

'I was. And I remember workers left things like cigarette butts and coffee cups inside. I left a ball point pen in there; it fell from my shirt. I can't prove it to you, but if they ever opened this thing up they'd find the pen in there. A red pen. A Parker.'

'Oh man,' groaned the bum. 'This is too much. Just when I was starting to think you were some kind of real mystery guy. But nothing's mysterious anymore, is it? Everything's a pile of crap, like this piece. Nothing's for real.'

'Oh no - everything's real. Real and literal. Everything.' Noman said. 'Inside is the mystery.'

The powerful wind that had blown a few days ago beat a shameful retreat down Bay Street. He ran his hand over the perfect contours of The Archer.

'You know,' he thought aloud, 'she really was something.'

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