London is both a real destination and Arthur’s imagined refuge: the city where he can move among people who speak as he does and feel, for a short time, that he has come home. Its significance turns on the abrupt change of perspective when Allen wakes in Arthur’s hotel room. What Arthur experiences as escape and belonging, Allen experiences as another bewildering loss of control.

The route to London

Arthur decides to leave Ohio when Marlene’s growing presence at the apartment makes it harder to keep the inner group’s secret. Lost time deepens his uncertainty about what is happening in his absence: he has found a bail receipt, learned that one of them was arrested for filling illegal drug prescriptions, and suspects that someone is having sex with Marlene. Against this unsettled domestic background, the passport becomes a means of departure. Arthur uses one that Ragen had arranged through an underworld connection, alongside a second passport in the name of Ragen Vadascovinich. Both were either stolen and altered or exceptionally convincing forgeries, and Arthur believes they would withstand close scrutiny.

He books a one-way ticket to London with Pan American Airlines, gathers whatever money he can find in closets, drawers, and books, and packs his bags. His departure is presented as purposeful: he calls London home before he has reached it. The flight to Kennedy and across the Atlantic is uneventful, and at Heathrow the customs official waves him through. That unremarkable passage matters. The elaborate plan carries Arthur across the ocean without confrontation, leaving the conflict to emerge not at a border but within the shared body and the hotel room where he settles.

Arthur’s London

Arthur checks into a small hotel above a pub in Hopewell Place. He notices the name and entertains the possibility that it might prove prophetic. After lunch alone at a small, select restaurant, he takes a taxi to Buckingham Palace, arriving too late to see the changing of the guard but intending to return another day. Rather than treat the missed ceremony as a failure, he folds it into a future plan: London is a place he expects to inhabit long enough to explore.

The city’s appeal is made concrete through habits and landmarks. Arthur wanders its streets, greets passers-by in the manner he associates with local speech, and plans to buy a bowler hat and umbrella. The traffic moves on the side he considers correct, while the bobbies make him feel secure. For the first time in his memory, he is surrounded by people who speak as he does. The sense of recognition is not abstract patriotism so much as a fit between his manner, his surroundings, and the ordinary cues of public life.

He visits the Tower of London and the British Museum, eats fish and chips, and drinks warm English beer. Back in his hotel room, memories of his favorite Sherlock Holmes movies prompt a plan to visit 221b Baker Street and check that the address is being maintained as a suitable memorial to the detective. These details give his stay the shape of a life already beginning to take root: a room, meals, walks, sightseeing, and a list of tomorrow’s intentions. Arthur’s conviction that he has come home rests on this accumulation of small acts of recognition.

The same room through Allen’s eyes

The next morning, Allen wakes to the loud ticking of the wall clock. The hotel’s iron bedstead, patterned wallpaper, and threadbare rug make the room’s difference from a Holiday Inn immediately apparent; there is no bathroom. He cannot identify where he is. On the stairs, a man carrying a tray addresses him in a Cockney manner, and Allen rushes outside, where the black taxis, pub sign, and traffic on the opposite side of the road confirm that he is in London.

The city Arthur had read as familiarity becomes, for Allen, proof that something has gone badly wrong. He runs up and down the street, shouting in terror and anger, and beats his fists against the curb with tears running down his face. His distress is focused not simply on being abroad but on repeatedly waking in places he cannot explain and being unable to control what happens to him. He wants to die. The contrast between the two experiences gives London its sharpest narrative function: one location holds Arthur’s carefully imagined homecoming and Allen’s acute alienation at the same time.

Fear of being taken to a mental institution if a policeman finds him shouting sends Allen back to the room. In his suitcase he discovers the passport bearing the name Arthur Smith and the receipt for the one-way ticket to London. These objects expose the immediate cause of his presence there without giving him control over the journey. Allen finds seventy-five dollars in his pockets and realizes that a return ticket may cost three or four hundred. London has not become a shared destination chosen by both men; it is an itinerary Arthur arranged, and Allen inherits its costs and confusion.

Return and aftermath

Allen’s efforts to get home eventually succeed when those dealing with him put him on a 747 back to the United States. He stays awake throughout the flight, reading every magazine because he does not trust himself to sleep. On reaching Columbus, a security official drives him to Lancaster. There, Allen retrieves money from paintings he had sold, hidden behind a loose board in the broom closet, and pays for the return ticket. The journey back depends on resources and arrangements rooted in Ohio, in pointed contrast to Arthur’s departure with money gathered from around the apartment.

Once alone in the apartment, Allen becomes deeply depressed and tries to communicate with Arthur. It takes a long time before Arthur comes out. When he sees that he is no longer in London, he refuses to have anything to do with anyone. The return therefore does not simply close the journey: it reveals how completely Arthur’s hoped-for homecoming depended on remaining in control of the body and its movements. London briefly offered him a life made legible by familiar speech, streets, and rituals; Allen’s return removes that possibility, leaving Arthur confronted with the place he had tried to escape.