Let the Great World Spin

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN

THOSE WHO SAW HIM HUSHED. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke — stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the man-shape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.

It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn’t want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.

Around the watchers, the city still made its everyday noises. Car horns. Garbage trucks. Ferry whistles. The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pothole. A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.

But the watchers could have taken all the sounds and smashed them down into a single noise and still they wouldn’t have heard much at all: even when they cursed, it was done quietly, reverently.

They found themselves in small groups together beside the traffic lights on the corner of Church and Dey; gathered under the awning of Sam’s barbershop; in the doorway of Charlie’s Audio; a tight little theater of men and women against the railings of St. Paul’s Chapel; elbowing for space at the windows of the Woolworth Building. Lawyers. Elevator operators. Doctors. Cleaners. Prep chefs. Diamond merchants. Fish sellers. Sad-jeaned whores. All of them reassured by the presence of one another. Stenographers. Traders. Deliveryboys. Sandwichboard men. Cardsharks. Con Ed. Ma Bell. Wall Street. A locksmith in his van on the corner of Dey and Broadway. A bike messenger lounging against a lamppost on West. A red-faced rummy out looking for an early-morning pour.

From the Staten Island Ferry they glimpsed him. From the meatpacking warehouses on the West Side. From the new high-rises in Battery Park. From the breakfast carts down on Broadway. From the plaza below. From the towers themselves.

Sure, there were some who ignored the fuss, who didn’t want to be bothered. It was seven forty-seven in the morning and they were too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen, a telephone. Up they came from the subway stations, from limousines, off city buses, crossing the street at a clip, refusing the prospect of a gawk. Another day, another dolor. But as they passed the little clumps of commotion they began to slow down. Some stopped altogether, shrugged, turned nonchalantly, walked to the corner, bumped up against the watchers, went to the tips of their toes, gazed over the crowd, and then introduced themselves with a Wow or a Gee-whiz or a Jesus H. Christ.

The man above remained rigid, and yet his mystery was mobile. He stood beyond the railing of the observation deck of the south tower — at any moment he might just take off.

Below him, a single pigeon swooped down from the top floor of the Federal Office Building, as if anticipating the fall. The movement caught the eyes of some watchers and they followed the gray flap against the small of the standing man. The bird shot from one eave to another, and it was then the watchers noticed that they had been joined by others at the windows of offices, where blinds were being lifted and a few glass panes labored upward. All that could be seen was a pair of elbows or the end of a shirtsleeve, or an arm garter, but then it was joined by a head, or an odd-looking pair of hands above it, lifting the frame even higher. In the windows of nearby skyscrapers, figures came to look out — men in shirtsleeves and women in bright blouses, wavering in the glass like fun-house apparitions.

Higher still, a weather helicopter executed a dipping turn over the Hudson — a curtsy to the fact that the summer day was going to be cloudy and cool anyway — and the rotors beat a rhythm over the warehouses of the West Side. At first the helicopter looked lopsided in its advance, and a small side window was slid open as if the machine were looking for air. A lens appeared in the open window. It caught a brief flash of light. After a moment the helicopter corrected beautifully and spun across the expanse.

Some cops on the West Side Highway switched on their misery lights, swerved fast off the exit ramps, making the morning all the more magnetic.

A charge entered the air all around the watchers and — now that the day had been made official by sirens — there was a chatter among them, their balance set on edge, their calm fading, and they turned to one another and began to speculate, would he jump, would he fall, would he tiptoe along the ledge, did he work there, was he solitary, was he a decoy, was he wearing a uniform, did anyone have binoculars? Perfect strangers touched one another on the elbows. Swearwords went between them, and whispers that there’d been a botched robbery, that he was some sort of cat burglar, that he’d taken hostages, he was an Arab, a Jew, a Cypriot, an IRA man, that he was really just a publicity stunt, a corporate scam, Drink more Coca-Cola, Eat more Fritos, Smoke more Parliaments, Spray more Lysol, Love more Jesus. Or that he was a protester and he was going to hang a slogan, he would slide it from the towerledge, leave it there to flutter in the breeze, like some giant piece of sky laundry — NIXON OUT NOW! REMEMBER ’NAM, SAM! INDEPENDENCE FOR INDOCHINA! and then some-one said that maybe he was a hang glider or a parachutist, and all the others laughed, but they were perplexed by the cable at his feet, and the rumors began again, a collision of curse and whisper, augmented by an increase in sirens, which got their hearts pumping even more, and the helicopter found a purchase near the west side of the towers, while down in the foyer of the World Trade Center the cops were sprinting across the marble floor, and the undercovers were whipping out badges from beneath their shirts, and the fire trucks were pulling into the plaza, and the redblue dazzled the glass, and a flatbed truck arrived with a cherry picker, its fat wheels bouncing over the curb, and someone laughed as the picker kiltered sideways, the driver looking up, as if the basket might reach all that sad huge way, and the security guards were shouting into their walkie-talkies, and the whole August morning was blown wide open, and the watchers stood rooted, there was no going anywhere for a while, the voices rose to a crescendo, all sorts of accents, a babel, until a small redheaded man in the Home Title Guarantee Company on Church Street lifted the sash of his office window, placed his elbows on the sill, took a deep breath, leaned out, and roared into the distance: Do it, asshole!

There was a dip before the laughter, a second before it sank in among the watchers, a reverence for the man’s irreverence, because secretly that’s what so many of them felt — Do it, for chrissake! Do it! — and then a torrent of chatter was released, a call-and-response, and it seemed to ripple all the way from the windowsill down to the sidewalk and along the cracked pavement to the corner of Fulton, down the block along Broadway, where it zigzagged down John, hooked around to Nassau, and went on, a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, flail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage, while the others — those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther — felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky.

They were jazzed now.

Pumped.

The lines were drawn.

Do it, asshole!

Don’t do it!

Way above there was a movement. In the dark clothing his every twitch counted. He folded over, a half-thing, bent, as if examining his shoes, like a pencil mark, most of which had been erased. The posture of a diver. And then they saw it. The watchers stood, silent. Even those who had wanted the man to jump felt the air knocked out. They drew back and moaned.

A body was sailing out into the middle of the air.

He was gone. He’d done it. Some blessed themselves. Closed their eyes. Waited for the thump. The body twirled and caught and flipped, thrown around by the wind.

Then a shout sounded across the watchers, a woman’s voice: God, oh God, it’s a shirt, it’s just a shirt.

It was falling, falling, falling, yes, a sweatshirt, fluttering, and then their eyes left the clothing in midair, because high above the man had unfolded upward from his crouch, and a new hush settled over the cops above and the watchers below, a rush of emotion rippling among them, because the man had arisen from the bend holding a long thin bar in his hands, jiggling it, testing its weight, bobbing it up and down in the air, a long black bar, so pliable that the ends swayed, and his gaze was fixed on the far tower, still wrapped in scaffolding, like a wounded thing waiting to be reached, and now the cable at his feet made sense to everyone, and whatever else it was there would be no chance they could pull away now, no morning coffee, no conference room cigarette, no nonchalant carpet shuffle; the waiting had been made magical, and they watched as he lifted one dark-slippered foot, like a man about to enter warm gray water.

The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.

Out he went.

ALL RESPECTS TO HEAVEN, I LIKE IT HERE

ONE OF THE MANY THINGS my brother, Corrigan, and I loved about our mother was that she was a fine musician. She kept a small radio on top of the Steinway in the living room of our house in Dublin and on Sunday afternoons, after scanning whatever stations we could find, Radio Éireann or BBC, she raised the lacquered wing of the piano, spread her dress out at the wooden stool, and tried to copy the piece through from memory: jazz riffs and Irish ballads and, if we found the right station, old Hoagy Carmichael tunes. Our mother played with a natural touch, even though she suffered from a hand which she had broken many times. We never knew the origin of the break: it was something left in silence. When she finished playing she would lightly rub the back of her wrist. I used to think of the notes still trilling through the bones, as if they could skip from one to the other, over the breakage. I can still after all these years sit in the museum of those afternoons and recall the light spilling across the carpet. At times our mother put her arms around us both, and then guided our hands so we could clang down hard on the keys.

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one’s mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime. One looks for the chink in the armor, the leg of the piano stool shorter than the other, the sadness that would detach us from her, but the truth is we enjoyed each other, all three of us, and never so evidently as those Sundays when the rain fell gray over Dublin Bay and the squalls blew fresh against the windowpane.

Our house in Sandymount looked out to the bay. We had a short driveway full of weeds, a square of lawn, a black ironwork fence. If we crossed the road we could stand on the curved seawall and look a good distance across the bay. A bunch of palm trees grew at the end of the road. They stood, smaller and more stunted than palms elsewhere, but exotic nonetheless, as if invited to come watch the Dublin rain. Corrigan sat on the wall, banging his heels and looking over the flat strand to the water. I should have known even then that the sea was written in him, that there would be some sort of leaving. The tide crept in and the water swelled at his feet. In the evenings he walked up the road past the Martello Tower to the abandoned public baths, where he balanced on top of the seawall, arms held wide.

On weekend mornings we strolled with our mother, ankle-deep in the low tide, and looked back to see the row of houses, the tower, and the little scarves of smoke coming up from the chimneys. Two enormous red and white power station chimneys broke the horizon to the east, but the rest was a gentle curve, with gulls on the air, the mail boats out of Dun Laoghaire, the scud of clouds on the horizon. When the tide was out, the stretch of sand was corrugated and sometimes it was possible to walk a quarter-mile among isolated waterpools and bits of old refuse, long shaver shells, bedstead pipes.

Dublin Bay was a slow heaving thing, like the city it horseshoed, but it could turn without warning. Every now and then the water smashed up against the wall in a storm. The sea, having arrived, stayed. Salt crusted the windows of our house. The knocker on the door was rusted red.

When the weather blew foul, we sat on the stairs, Corrigan and I. Our father, a physicist, had left us years before. A check, postmarked in London, arrived through the letter box once a week. Never a note, just a check, drawn on a bank in Oxford. It spun in the air as it fell. We ran to bring it to our mother. She slipped the envelope under a flowerpot on the kitchen windowsill and the next day it was gone. Nothing more was ever said.

The only other sign of our father was a wardrobe full of his old suits and trousers in our mother’s bedroom. Corrigan drew the door open. In the darkness we sat with our backs against the rough wooden panels and slipped our feet in our father’s shoes, let his sleeves touch our ears, felt the cold of his cuff buttons. Our mother found us one afternoon, dressed in his gray suits, the sleeves rolled up and the trousers held in place with elastic bands. We were marching around in his oversize brogues when she came and froze in the doorway, the room so quiet we could hear the radiator tick.

“Well,” she said, as she knelt to the ground in front of us. Her face spread out in a grin that seemed to pain her. “Come here.” She kissed us both on the cheek, tapped our bottoms. “Now run along.” We slipped out of our father’s old clothes, left them puddled on the floor.

Later that night we heard the clang of the coat hangers as she hung and rehung the suits.

Over the years there were the usual tantrums and bloody noses and broken rocking-horse heads, and our mother had to deal with the whispers of the neighbors, sometimes even the attentions of local widowers, but for the most part things stretched comfortably in front of us: calm, open, a sweep of sandy gray.

Corrigan and I shared a bedroom that looked out to the water. Quietly it happened, I still don’t recall how: he, the younger one by two years, took control of the top bunk. He slept on his stomach with a view out the window to the dark, reciting his prayers — he called them his slumber verses — in quick, sharp rhythms. They were his own incantations, mostly indecipherable to me, with odd little cackles of laughter and long sighs. The closer he got to sleep the more rhythmic the prayers got, a sort of jazz, though sometimes in the middle of it all I could hear him curse, and they’d be lifted away from the sacred. I knew the Catholic hit parade — the Our Father, the Hail Mary — but that was all. I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me. I kicked the bottom of Corrigan’s bed and he fell silent awhile, but then started up again. Sometimes I woke in the morning and he was alongside me, arm draped over my shoulder, his chest rising and falling as he whispered his prayers.

I’d turn to him. “Ah, Jesus, Corr, shut up.”

My brother was light-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed. He was the type of child everyone smiled at. He could look at you and draw you out.

People fell for him. On the street, women ruffled his hair. Workingmen punched him gently on the shoulder. He had no idea that his presence sustained people, made them happy, drew out their improbable yearnings — he just plowed along, oblivious.

I woke one night, when I was eleven, to a cold blast of air moving over me. I stumbled to the window but it was closed. I reached for the light and the room burned quickly yellow. A shape was bent over in the middle of the room.

“Corr?”

The weather still rolled off his body. His cheeks were red. A little damp mist lay on his hair. He smelled of cigarettes. He put a finger to his lips for hush and climbed back up the wooden ladder.

“Go to sleep,” he whispered from above. The smell of tobacco still lingered in the air.

In the morning he jumped down from the bed, wearing his heavy anorak over his pajamas. Shivering, he opened the window and tapped the sand from his shoes off the sill, into the garden below.

“Where’d you go?”

“Just along by the water,” he said.

“Were you smoking?”

He looked away, rubbed his arms warm. “No.”

“You’re not supposed to smoke, y’know.”

“I didn’t smoke,” he said.

Later that morning our mother walked us to school, our leather satchels slung over our shoulders. An icy breeze cut along the streets. Down by the school gates she went to one knee, put her arms around us, adjusted our scarves, and kissed us, one after the other. When she stood to leave, her gaze was caught by something on the other side of the road, by the railings of the church: a dark form wrapped in a large red blanket. The man raised a hand in salute. Corrigan waved back.

There were plenty of old drunks around Ringsend, but my mother seemed taken by the sight, and for a moment it struck me that there might be some secret there.

“Who’s that, Mum?” I asked.

“Run along,” she said. “We’ll sort it out after school.”

My brother walked beside me, silent.

“Who is it, Corrie?” I thumped him. “Who is it?”

He disappeared towards his classroom.

All day I sat at my wooden desk, gnawing my pencil, wondering — visions of a forgotten uncle, or our father somehow returned, broken. Nothing, in those days, was beyond the realm of the possible. The clock was at the rear of the room but there was an old freckled mirror over the classroom sink and, at the right angle, I could watch the hands go backwards. When the bell struck I was out the gate, but Corrigan took the long road back, short, mincing steps through the housing estates, past the palm trees, along the seawall.

There was a soft brown paper package waiting for Corrigan on the top bunk. I shoved it at him. He shrugged and ran his finger along the twine, pulled it tentatively. Inside was another blanket, a soft blue Foxford. He unfolded it, let it fall lengthwise, looked up at our mother, and nodded.

She touched his face with the back of her fingers and said: “Never again, understand?”

Nothing else was mentioned, until two years later he gave that blanket away too, to another homeless drunk, on another freezing night, up by the canal on one of his late-night walks, when he tiptoed down the stairs and went out into the dark. It was a simple equation to him — others needed the blankets more than he, and he was prepared to take the punishment if it came his way. It was my earliest suggestion of what my brother would become, and what I’d later see among the cast-offs of New York — the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless — all of those who were hanging on to him like he was some bright hallelujah in the shitbox of what the world really was.

CORRIGAN STARTED GETTING drunk young — twelve or thirteen years old — once a week, on Friday afternoons after school. He’d run from the gates in Blackrock towards the bus stop, his school tie off, his blazer bundled, while I stayed behind in the school fields, playing rugby. I could see him hop on the 45 or the 7A, his silhouette moving towards the backseat of the bus as it pulled away.

Corrigan liked those places where light was drained. The docklands. The flophouses. The corners where the cobbles were broken. He often sat with the drunks in Frenchman’s Lane and Spencer Row. He brought a bottle with him, handed it around. If it came back to him he drank with a flourish, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth as if he were a practiced drunk. Anyone could tell he wasn’t a real drinker — he didn’t search it out, and drank from the bottle only when it came his way. I suppose he thought he was fitting in. He got laughed at by the more vicious drunks but he didn’t care. They were using him, of course. He was just another snotnose trying on the poorman shoes, but he had a few pennies in his pockets and was always prepared to give them up — they sent him to the off-license for bottles, or to the corner shop for loose cigarettes.

Some days he came home not wearing any socks. Other times he was shirtless and ran up the stairs before our mother caught him. He brushed his teeth and washed his face and came down, fully dressed, a little starry-eyed, not quite drunk enough to get caught.

“Where were you?”

“God’s work.”

“And is God’s work not looking after your mother?” She adjusted his shirt collar as he sat down to dinner.

After a while with the down-and-outs he began to fit in, slipped into the background, melted in among them. He walked with them to the flophouse on Rutland Street and sat slumped up against the wall. Corrigan listened to their stories: long, rambling tales that seemed rooted in a different Ireland altogether. It was an apprenticeship for him: he crept in on their poverty as if he wanted to own it. He drank. He smoked. He never mentioned our father, not to me or anyone else. But he was there, our gone father, I could tell. Corrigan would either drown him in sherry or spit him away like a fleck of tobacco from his tongue.

The week he turned fourteen my mother sent me to pick him up: he’d been gone all day and she’d baked a cake for him. An evening drizzle fell over Dublin. A horsecart went past, the light from its dynamo shining. I watched it clop away down the street, the pinpoint of light spreading. I hated the city at times like that — it had no desire to get out from under its grayness. I walked on past the bed-and-breakfast houses, the antique shops, the candle makers, the suppliers of liturgical medals. The flophouse was marked by a black gate, ironwork sharpened to points. I went to the back, where the bins were kept. Rain dripped from a broken pipe. I stepped over a pile of crates and cardboard boxes, shouting his name. When I found him, he was so drunk that he couldn’t stand. I grabbed his arm. “Hi,” he said, smiling. He fell against the wall and cut his hand. He stood staring at his palm. The blood ran down his wrist. One of the younger drunks — a teddy boy in a red T-shirt — spat at him. It was the only time I ever saw Corrigan throw a punch. It missed completely but blood from his hand flew, and I knew — even while I watched it — that it was a moment I would never forget, Corrigan swinging in midair, droplets of his blood spraying the wall.

“I’m a pacifist,” he said, slurring his words.

I walked him all the way along the Liffey, past the coal ships and into Ringsend, where I washed him with water from the old hand pump on Irishtown Road. He took my face in his hands. “Thank you, thank you.” He began to cry as we got to Beach Road, which led towards our house. A deep dark had fallen over the sea. Rain dripped from the roadside palms. I hauled him back from the sand. “I’m soft,” he said. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes, lit a cigarette, coughed until he threw up.

At the gate of the house, he looked up to the light in our mother’s bedroom. “Is she awake?”

He minced his steps up the driveway but once inside he charged up the stairs, ran into her arms. She smelled the drink and tobacco off him, of course, but didn’t say anything. She ran a bath for him, sat outside the door. Silent at first, she let her feet stretch across the landing, then laid her head against the doorjamb and sighed: it was as if she too were in a bath, stretching out towards days yet to be remembered.

He put on his clothes, stepped out into the landing, and she toweled his hair dry.

“You won’t drink again, will you, love?”

He shook his head no.

“A curfew on Fridays. Home by five. You hear me?”

“Fair enough.”

“Promise me now.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

His eyes were bloodshot.

She kissed his hair and held him close. “There’s a cake downstairs for you, love.”

Corrigan took two weeks off from his Friday jaunts, but soon began to meet the drunks again. It was a ritual he couldn’t give up. The down-and-outs needed him, or at least wanted him — he was, to them, a mad, impossible angel. He still drank with them, but only on special days. Mostly he was sober. He had this idea that the men were really looking for some type of Eden and that when they drank they returned to it, but, on getting there, they weren’t able to stay. He didn’t try to convince them to stop. That wasn’t his way.

It might’ve been easy for me not to like Corrigan, my younger brother who sparked people alive, but there was something about him that made dislike difficult. His theme was happiness — what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.

I was nineteen, and Corrigan was seventeen, when our mother died. A short, quick struggle with kidney cancer. The last thing she told us was to take care to close the curtains so the light didn’t fade the living room carpet.

She was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital on the first day of summer. The ambulance left wet tracks along the sea road. Corrigan cycled furiously after it. She was put in a long ward full of sick patients. We got her a private room and filled it with flowers. We took turns sitting at her bedside, combing her hair, long and brittle to the touch. Clumps of it came out in the comb. For the first time ever she had a jilted air about her: her body was betraying her. The bedside ashtray filled with hair. I clung to the idea that if we kept her long gray strands we could get back to the way we once were. It was all I could manage. She lasted three months, then passed on a September day when everything seemed split open with sunlight.

We sat in the room waiting for the nurses to appear and take her body away. Corrigan was in the middle of a long prayer when a shadow appeared in the hospital doorway.

“Hello, boys.”

Our father had an English accent on his grief. I hadn’t seen him since I was three years old. A stringpiece of light fell on him. He was pale and hunched. There was a smattering of hair across his scalp, but his eyes were a pellucid blue. He took off his hat and put it to his chest. “Sorry, lads.”

I went across to shake his hand. It startled me that I was taller than him. He gripped my shoulder and squeezed.

Corrigan remained silent, in the corner.

“Shake my hand, son,” our father said.

“How did you know she was sick?”

“Go on, now, shake my hand like a man.”

“Tell me how you knew.”

“Are you going to shake my hand or not?”

“Who told you?”

He rocked back and forth on his heels. “Is that any way to treat your father?”

Corrigan turned his back and laid a kiss on our mother’s cold brow, left without saying a word. The door closed with a snap. A cage of shadow crossed the bed. I went to the window and saw him yank his bicycle away from a pipe. He rode through the flowerbeds and his shirt flapped as he merged into the traffic on Merrion Road.

My father pulled up a chair and sat beside her, touched her forearm through the sheets.

“When she didn’t cash the checks,” he said to me.

“Pardon me?”

“That’s when I knew she was sick,” he said. “When she didn’t cash the checks.”

A sliver of cold moved down my chest.

“I’m only telling you the truth,” he said. “If you can’t stand the truth, don’t ask for it.”

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. “Where d’you think you’re going?” Our father gripped the banister. His hands were liver-spotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. “That’s not your room,” said Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. “Don’t,” said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confident. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.

“My own sons,” he said.

We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof: he went walking in the direction of the city center, and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside.

The morning of the funeral, I heard our father shouting Corrigan’s first name. “John, John Andrew.” A door slammed. Another. And then a long silence. I lay back against the pillow, allowed the quiet to surround me. Footsteps on the stairs. The creak at the top step. The noises were full of mystery. Corrigan rumbled through the downstairs cupboards and slammed the front door.

When I went to the window I saw a line of well-dressed men on the strand, right outside our house. They were wearing our father’s old suits and hats and scarves. One had tucked a red handkerchief in the breast pocket of the black suit. Another carried a pair of polished shoes in his hand. Corrigan went among them, a little lopsided, his hand jammed down into his trouser pocket, where he was holding a bottle. He was shirtless and wild-looking. A head of uncombed hair. His arms and neck were brown, but the rest of his body was pale. He grinned and waved at my father standing now at the front door, barefoot, stunned, watching a dozen copies of himself out walking the tidal sands.

A couple of women I recognized from the charity lines at the flophouses were sauntering along the mucky sand in my mother’s old summer dresses, celebrating their new clothes.

CORRIGAN TOLD ME once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth — the filth, the war, the poverty — was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.

“Someday the meek might actually want it,” he said.

After our mother died, we sold the house. Our father took half the money. Corrigan gave his portion away. He lived off the charity of others and began studying the work of Francis of Assisi. For hours on end he would walk the city, reading. He made himself sandals out of some scrap leather and wore wild-colored socks underneath. He became a staple on the streets of Dublin in the mid-sixties, with stringy hair and carpenter pants, books tucked under his arm. He had a long, shambling stride. He went around penniless, coatless, shirtless. Every August, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, he locked himself to the gates of the Parliament on Kildare Street, a quiet vigil for one night, no photos, no journalists, just him and his cardboard box spread out on the ground.

When he was nineteen he began studying with the Jesuits at Emo College. Mass in the early dawn. Hours of theological study. Afternoon walks through the fields. Night walks along the Barrow River, beseeching his God out under the stars. The morning prayers, the noontime prayers, the evening prayers, the complines. The glorias, the psalms, the gospel readings. They gave a rigor to his faith, it staked him to a purpose. Still, the hills of Laois couldn’t hold him. He couldn’t be an ordinary priest — it wasn’t the life for him; he was ill defined for it, he needed more space for his doubt. He left the novitiate and went to Brussels, where he joined a group of young monks who took their vows of chastity, poverty, obedience. He lived in a small flat in the center of the city. Grew his hair out. Kept his head in books: Augustine, Eckhart, Massignon, Charles de Foucauld. It was a life of ordinary labor, friendship, solidarity. He drove a fruit truck for a local cooperative and organized a labor union for a small group of workers. In his work he wore no religious garments, or collars, carried no Bible, and preferred to stay quiet, even around the brothers of his own Order.

Few of the people who came across him ever knew of his religious ties and, even in those places where he spent the longest, he was seldom known for his beliefs — instead, people looked at him with a fondness for another era, when time seemed slower, less complicated. Even the worst of what men did to one another didn’t dampen Corrigan’s beliefs. He might have been naïve, but he didn’t care; he said he’d rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.

The only furniture he owned was his oak-wood prayer kneeler and his bookshelves. The shelves were lined with a number of religious poets, radicals mostly, and some liberation theologians. He had long angled for a posting somewhere in the Third World but couldn’t get one. Brussels was too ordinary for him. He wanted somewhere with a rougher plot. He spent a while in the slums of Naples, working with the poor in the Spanish Quarter, but then was shipped off to New York in the early seventies. He disliked the idea, bucked against it, thought New York too mannered, too antiseptic, but had no sway with those higher up in his Order — he had to go where he was sent.

He boarded a plane with a suitcase full of books, his kneeler, and a Bible.

I HAD DROPPED OUT of university and spent the best part of my late twenties in a basement flat on Raglan Road, catching the tail end of the hippie years. Like most things Irish, I was a couple of years too late. I drifted into my thirties, found a desk job, but still wanted the old reckless life.

I had never really followed what happened up north. Sometimes it seemed like an entirely foreign land, but in the spring of ′74 the violence came south.

I went to the Dandelion Market one Friday evening to buy some marijuana, an occasional habit. It was one of the few places where Dublin hummed: African beads, lava lamps, incense. I bought half an ounce of Moroccan hash at a stall for secondhand records. I was walking along South Leinster Street into Kildare Street when the air shook. Everything went yellow for an instant, a perfect flash, then white. I was knocked through the air, against a fence. I woke, panic all around. Shards of glass. An exhaust pipe. A steering wheel rolling in the street. The wheel flopped, exhausted, and all was strangely still until the sirens rang out, as if already mourning. A woman went by with her dress torn neck to hem, as if designed to show off her chest wound. A man stooped to help me up. We ran together a few yards, then parted. I was stumbling around the corner towards Molesworth Street when a Garda stopped me and pointed to a few spots of blood on my shirt. I fainted. When I woke in hospital they told me I’d lost a little flesh at the lobe of my right ear when I’d been slammed back against the spear of a railing. A fleur-de-lis. Such fine irony. The tip of my ear left behind on the street. The rest of me was intact, even my hearing.

At the hospital the police went through my pockets to look for identification. I was arrested for possession and brought to the courthouse, where the judge took pity and said it was a wrongful search, gave me a lecture, and sent me on my way. I went straight to a travel agency on Dawson Street, bought my ticket out.

I came through John F. Kennedy Airport in a long necklace and an Afghan coat, carrying a torn copy of Howl. The customs men sniggered. The cloth latch on my rucksack snapped when I tried to put it together again.

I stood looking around for Corrigan — he had promised, in a postcard, that he’d meet me. It was eighty-seven degrees in the shade. The heat hit me with the force of an ax. The waiting area pulsed. Families roamed about, pushing past one another to get at flight information. Taxi drivers had a shiny menace to them. No sign of my brother anywhere. I sat on my rucksack for an hour until a policeman with a billy club prodded me and knocked the book out of my hands.

I boarded a bus amid the swelter and noise. Later on the subway I loitered beneath the whirling fan. A black woman stood beside me, fanning herself with a magazine. Ovals of sweat at her underarms. I had never seen a black woman so close before, her skin so dark it was almost blue. I wanted to touch it, just press her forearm with my finger. She caught my eye and pulled her blouse tight: “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

“Ireland,” I blurted. “I’m Irish.”

A moment later she glanced at me again. “No kiddin’,” she said. She got off at 125th Street, where the train screeched to a halt.

It was nightfall by the time I reached the Bronx. I stepped out of the station to the late heat. Gray brick and billboards. A rhythmic sound came from a radio player. A kid in a sleeveless shirt spun on a piece of cardboard, his shoulder somehow a fulcrum for his whole body. A loosening of contour. No limits. Hands to the ground, his feet whipped out a long extended circle. He went low and suddenly spun on his head, then arced backwards, unsprung, and hopped into the air, pureness moving.

Some gypsy cabs idled on the Concourse. Old white men in wide hats. I flung my rucksack into the boot of a giant black car.

“Ants in their pants, man,” said the driver as he leaned over the seat. “You think that kid’s gonna go anywhere? After spinning on his goddamn head?”

I gave him Corrigan’s address on a slip of paper. He grunted something about power steering, said they never had it in ’Nam.

After half an hour we pulled sharply into the curve. We had been driving in elaborate circles. “Twelve bucks, bud.” No point in arguing. I threw the money over the seat, got out, grabbed my rucksack. The driver of the cab pulled off before I got a chance to close the boot. I clutched my copy of Howl to my chest. I saw the best minds of my generation. The lid of the taxi bounced and slammed shut when the driver turned sharply by the traffic lights and away.

On one side was a row of high-rise tenements behind a chain-link fence. Parts of the fence were topped with razor wire. On the other, the expressway: the light-streak of cars zipping above. Below, by the underpass, a long line of women. Cars and trucks were pulling into the shadows. The women struck poses. They wore hotpants and bikini tops and swimsuits, a bizarre city beach. An angled arm, in the shadowlight, reached the top of the expressway. A stiletto climbed to the top of a barbed-wire fence. A leg stretched half the length of a city block.

Nightbirds flew out from under the highway girders, momentarily intent on the sky, but then swooped back into hiding.

A woman emerged from under the girdings. She wore a fur coat open at the shoulders and spread her knee-high boots wide. A car went by and she threw open the coat. Underneath she wore nothing at all. The car beeped and sped off. She screamed after it, started walking my way, carrying what looked like a parasol.

I scanned the balconies of the high-rises for any sign of Corrigan. The street lights flickered. A plastic bag tumbled. Some shoes were strung on the high telegraph wire.

“Hey, honey.”

“I’m broke,” I said without turning around. The hooker spat thickly at my feet and raised the pink parasol over her head.

“Asshole,” she said as she walked past.

She stood on the lit side of the street and waited underneath the parasol. Every time a car went past she lowered and raised it, making herself into a little planet of light and dark.

I carried my rucksack towards the projects with as much nonchalance as I could. Heroin needles lay along the inside of the fence, among the weeds. Someone had spray-painted the sign near the entrance to the flats. A few old men sat outside the lobby, fanning themselves in the heat. They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who’d soon turn into empty chairs. One of them reached for the slip of paper with my brother’s address written on it, shook his head, sagged back.

A kid ran past, a metallic sound coming from him, a tinny bounce. He disappeared into the darkness of a stairwell. The smell of fresh paint drifted from him.

I turned the corner to another corner: it was all corners.

Corrigan’s place was in a gray block of flats. The fifth floor of twenty. A little sticker by the doorbell: PEACE AND JUSTICE in a crown of thorns. Five locks on the doorframe. None of them worked. I pushed the door open. It swung and banged. A little bit of white plaster fell from the wall. I called his name. The place was bare but for a torn sofa, a low table, a simple wooden crucifix over the single wooden bed. His prayer kneeler faced against the wall. Books lay on the floor, open, as if speaking to one another: Thomas Merton, Rubem Alves, Dorothy Day.

I stepped over to the sofa, exhausted.

I woke later to the parasol hooker slamming through the doorway. She stood mopping her brow, then threw her handbag on the sofa beside me. “Oops, sorry, honey,” she said. I turned my face so she wouldn’t recognize me. She walked across the room, hitching off her fur coat as she went, naked but for her boots. She stopped a moment, looked in a long slice of broken mirror propped against the wall. Her calf muscles were smooth and curved. She hitched the flesh of her bottom, sighed, then stretched and rubbed her nipples full. “Goddamn,” she said. The sound of running water came from the bathroom.

The hooker emerged with her lipstick bright and a new clack in her step. The sharp smell of perfume filled the air. She blew me a kiss, waved the parasol, left.

It happened five or six times in a row. The turn of the door handle. The ping of stilettos on the bare floorboards. A different hooker each time. One even leaned down and let her long thin breasts hang in my face. “College boy,” she said like an offer. I shook my head and she said curtly: “I thought so.” She turned at the door and smiled. “There’ll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin’ so good again.”

She went down the corridor, laughing.

In the bathroom was a small metal rubbish can. Tampons and sad polyps of used condoms wrapped in tissue.

Corrigan woke me later that night. I had no idea what time it was. He wore the same type of thin shirt he had for years: black, collarless, long-sleeved, with wooden buttons. He was thin, as if the sheer volume of the poor had worn him wayward to his old self. His hair was shoulder length and he had grown out his sideburns, a little punch of gray already at his temples. His face was cut slightly, and his right eye bruised. He looked older than thirty-one.

“Beautiful world you’re living in, Corrigan.”

“Did you bring tea?”

“What happened you? Your cheek? It’s cut.”

“Tell me you at least brought a few tea bags, brother?”

I opened the rucksack. Five boxes of his favorite. He kissed my forehead. His lips were dry. His stubble stung.

“Who beat you up, Corr?”

“Don’t worry about me — let me see you.”

He reached up and touched my right ear, where the tip of the lobe was gone.

“You all right?”

“It’s a memento, I suppose. You still a pacifist?”

“Still,” he said with a grin.

“You’ve got nice friends.”

“They just need to use the bathroom. They’re not allowed turn tricks. They weren’t turning tricks in here, were they?”

“They were naked, Corrigan.”

“No they weren’t.”

“I’m telling you, man, they were naked.”

“They don’t like cumbersome clothes,” he said with a little laugh. He palmed my shoulder, pushed me back on the couch. “Anyway, they must’ve been wearing shoes. It’s New York. You have to have good stilettos.”

He put the kettle on, lined up the cups.

“My very serious brother,” he said, but his chuckle died away as he turned the flame on the stove high. “Look, man, they’re desperate. I just want to give them a little spot that they can call their own. Get out of the heat. Splash some water on their faces.” His back was turned. I was reminded of how, years before, he had drifted away from one of our afternoon strolls and got surrounded by the tide — Corrigan, isolated on a sandbar, tangled in light, voices from the shore drifting over him, calling his name. The kettle whistled, louder now and shrill. Even from the back he looked like he’d been knocked around. I said his name, once, twice. On the third time he snapped to, turned, smiled. It was almost the same as when he’d been a child — he looked up, waved, and returned waist-high through the water.

“On your own here, Corr?”

“Just for a while.”

“No Brothers? No others with you?”

“Oh, I’m getting to know the immemorial feelings,” he said. “The hunger, the thirst, being tired at the end of the day. I’ve started wondering if God’s around when I wake up in the middle of the night.”

He seemed to be talking to a point over my shoulder. His eyes were deep and pouchy. “That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.”

“You all right, Corr?”

“Never better.”

“So who beat you up?”

He looked away. “I had a run-in with one of the pimps.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why, man?”

“Because he claimed I was taking up their time. Guy calls himself Birdhouse. Only got one good eye. Go figure. In he came, knocked on the door, said hello, called me brother this, brother that, real nice and polite, even hung his hat on the doorknob. Sat down on the sofa and looked up at the crucifix. Said he had a real appreciation for the holy life. Then produced a length of lead pipe that he’d ripped from the toilet. Imagine that. He’d been sitting there all that time, just letting my bathroom flood.”

He shrugged.

“But they still come around,” he said. “The girls. I don’t encourage it, really. I mean, what are they going to do? Pee on the street? It’s not much. Just a little gesture. A place they can use. A tinkling shop.”

He arranged the tea and a plate of biscuits, went to his prayer kneeler — a simple piece of wood that he tucked behind him to support his body as he knelt — and gave his thanks to God for the biscuits, the tea, the appearance of his brother.

He was still praying when the door swung hard and in marched three hookers. “Ooh, snowing in here,” cooed the parasol hooker as she stood under the fan. “Hi, I’m Tillie.” The heat oozed from her: little droplets of sweat on her forehead. She dropped her parasol on the table, looked at me with a half-grin. She was made up to be seen from a distance: she wore huge sunglasses with rose-colored rims and sparkly eye makeup. Another girl kissed Corrigan on the cheek, then started primping in the broken slice of mirror. The tallest, in a white tissue minidress, sat down beside me. She looked half Mexican, half black. She was taut and lithe: she could have been walking down a runway. “Hi,” she said, grinning. “I’m Jazzlyn. You can call me Jazz.”

She was very young — seventeen or eighteen — with one green eye, one brown. Her cheekbones were pulled even higher by a line of makeup. She reached across, lifted Corrigan’s teacup, blew it cool, left a smudge of lipstick on the rim.

“I don’t know why you don’t put ice in this shit, Corrie,” she said.

“Don’t like it,” said Corrigan.

“If you wanna be American you gotta put ice in it.”

The parasol hooker giggled then as if Jazzlyn had just said something fabulously rude. It was like they had a code going between them. I edged away, but Jazzlyn leaned across and picked a piece of lint off my shoulder. Her breath was sweet. I turned again to Corrigan.

“Did you get him arrested?”

My brother looked confused: “Who?” he said.

“The bloke who beat you up?”

“Arrested for what?”

“Are you serious?”

“Why would I get him arrested?”

“Did someone beat you up again, honey?” said the parasol hooker. She was staring at her fingers. She bit a long edge of fingernail from her thumb, examined the little slice. She scraped the fingernail paint off with her teeth, and flicked the slice of nail towards me from off her extended finger. I stared at her. She flashed a white grin. “I can’t stand it when I get beaten up,” she said.

“Jesus,” I muttered to the window.

“Enough,” said Corrigan.

“They always leave marks, don’t they?” said Jazzlyn.

“Okay, Jazz, enough, okay?”

“Once, this guy, this asshole, this quadruple motherfucker, he used a telephone book on me. You want to know something about the telephone book? Lots of names and not one of them leaves a mark.”

Jazzlyn stood up and removed her loose blouse. She wore a neon-yellow bikini underneath. “He hit me here and here and here.”

“Okay, Jazz, time to go.”

“I bet you could find your own name here.”

“Jazzlyn!”

She stood and sighed. “Your brother’s cute,” she said to me. She buttoned her blouse. “We love him like chocolate. We love him like nicotine. Isn’t that right, Corrie? We love you like nicotine. Tillie’s got a crush on him. Ain’t you, Tillie? Tillie, you listening?”

The parasol hooker stepped away from the mirror. She touched the edge of her mouth where the lipstick smeared. “Too old to be an acrobat, too young to die,” she said.

Jazzlyn was fumbling under the table with a small glassine package. Corrigan leaned across and touched her hand. “Not here, you know you can’t do that in here.” She rolled her eyes, sighed, and dropped a needle in her handbag.

The door bounced on its hinges. All of them blew kisses, even Jazzlyn, with her back turned. She looked like some failed sunflower, her arm curving backwards as she went.

“Poor Jazz.”

“What a mess.”

“Well, at least she’s trying.”

“Trying? She’s a mess. They all are.”

“Ah, no, they’re good people,” Corrigan said. “They just don’t know what it is they’re doing. Or what’s being done to them. It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are.”

He drank the tea without cleaning the lipstick off the rim.

“Bits of it floating in the air,” he said. “It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down, covering everything. You’re breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in it. It’s everywhere.

What I mean is, we’re afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we stopped to take account of it, we’d just fall into despair. But we can’t stop. We’ve got to keep going.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know — that’s my problem.”

“What are you into here, Corr?”

“I suppose I have to put flesh on my words, y’know. But sometimes that’s my dilemma too, man. I’m supposed to be a man of God but I hardly ever mention Him to anyone. Not to the girls, even. I keep these thoughts to myself. For my own peace of mind. The ease of my conscience. If I started thinking them out loud all the time I think I’d go mad. But God listens back. Most of the time. He does.”

He drained the teacup and cleaned the rim with the flap of his shirt.

“But these girls, man. Sometimes I think they’re better believers than me. At least they’re open to the faith of a rolled-down window.”

Corrigan turned the teacup upside down onto his palm, balanced it there.

“You missed the funeral,” I said.

A little dribble of tea sat in his palm. He brought his hand to his mouth and tongued it.

Our father had died a few months before. In the middle of his university classroom, a lecture about quarks. Elementary particles. He had insisted on finishing his class while a pain shot down his left arm. Three quarks for Muster Mark. Thank you, class. Safe home. Good night. Bye-bye. I was hardly devastated, but I had left Corrigan dozens of messages, and even got through to the Bronx police, but they said there was nothing they could do.

In the graveyard I had kept turning, hoping to see him coming up the narrow laneway, maybe even in one of our father’s old suits, but he never appeared.

“Not too many people there,” I said. “Small English churchyard. A man cutting the grass. Didn’t turn the engine off for the service.”

He kept tilting the teacup on his hand, as if trying to get the last drops out.

“What scriptures did they use?” he said finally.

“I can’t remember. Sorry. Why?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What would you have used, Corr?”

“Oh, I don’t know, really. Something Old Testament, maybe. Something primal.”

“Like what, Corr?”

“Not sure exactly.”

“Go on, tell me.”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t fucking know!”

The curse stunned me. The shame flushed him red. He lowered his gaze, scrubbed the cup with the flap of his shirt. The sound of it made a high, unusual squeak and I knew then that there’d be no more talk about our father. He had closed that path down, quick and hard, made a border; do not cross here. It pleased me a little to think that he had a flaw and that it went so deep that he couldn’t deal with it. Corrigan wanted other people’s pain. He didn’t want to deal with his own. I felt a pulse of shame too, for thinking that way.

The silence of brothers.

He tucked the prayer kneeler at the back of his knees, like a wooden cushion, and he began mumbling.

When he stood he said: “Sorry for cursing.”

“Yeah, me too.”

At the window, he absently pulled the cord of the blinds open and shut. Down below, a woman by the underpass screamed. He parted the window blind again, with two fingers.

“Sounds like Jazz,” he said.

The orange streetlight from the window latticed him as he crossed the floor at a clip.

HOURS AND HOURS of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain-link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn’t catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then they would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away.

I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d some poems in me while I was in Dublin. It was like hanging old clothes out to dry. Everyone in Dublin was a poet, maybe even the bombers who’d treated us to their afternoon of delight.

I’d been in the South Bronx a week. It was so humid, some nights, we had to shoulder the door closed. Kids on the tenth floor aimed television sets at the housing cops who patrolled below. Air mail. The police came in, clubbing. Shots rang out from the rooftop. On the radio there was a song about the revolution being ghettoized. Arson on the streets. It was a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes. I had to get out. The plan was to look for a job, get my own little place, maybe work on a play, or get a job on a paper somewhere. There were ads in the circulars for bartenders and waiters, but I didn’t want to go that way, all flat hats and micks in shirtsleeves. I found a gig as a telemarketer but I needed a dedicated phone line in Corrigan’s apartment, and it was impossible to get a technician to visit the housing complex: this was not the America I had expected.

Corrigan wrote out a list of things for me to see, Chumley’s bar in the Village, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park by day. But I had little money to speak of. I went to the window and watched the plot of the days unfold. The rubbish accused me. Already the smell rose up to the fifth-floor windows.

Corrigan worked as part of his Order’s ethic, made a few bob by driving a van for some old folk in the local nursing home. The bumper was tied with rusted wire. The windows were plastered with his peace stickers. The front headlights hung loose in the grille. He was gone most of the day, in charge of the ones that were infirm. What was ordeal for others was grace for him. He picked them up in the late morning in the nursing home on Cypress Avenue — mostly Irish, Italian, one old Jewish man, nicknamed Albee, in a gray suit and skullcap. “Short for Albert,” he said, “but if you call me Albert I’ll kick your ass.” I sat in with them a few afternoons, men and women — most of them white — who could have been folded up just like their wheelchairs. Corrigan drove at a snail’s pace so as not to bounce them around. “You drive like a pussy,” said Albee from the backseat. Corrigan laid his head against the steering wheel and laughed, but kept his foot on the brake.

Cars behind us beeped. A hellish ruckus of horns. The air was stifled with ruin. “Move it, man, move it!” Albee shouted. “Move the goddamn van!”

Corrigan took his foot off the brake and slowly guided the van around to the playground at St. Mary’s, where he wheeled the old folk out into whatever bits of shade he could find. “Fresh air,” he said. The men sat rooted like Larkin poems. The old women looked shaken, heads nodding in the breeze, watching the playground. It was mostly black or Hispanic kids, zooming down the slides or swinging on the monkey bars.

Albee managed to wheel himself into the corner, where he took out sheets of paper. He bent over them and said not another word, scratching on the paper with a pencil. I hunkered down beside him.

“What you doing there, friend?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

“Chess, is it?”

“You play?”

“Right on.”

“You rated?”

“Rated?”

“Oh, get the fuck outta here — you’re a pussy too.”

Corrigan winked at me from the edge of the playground. This was his world and he plainly loved it.

Lunch had been made for them in the old folks’ home, but Corrigan went across the road to the local bodega to buy them extra potato crisps, cigarettes, a cold beer for Albee. A yellow awning. A bubblegum machine sat triple-chained to the shutters. A dustbin was overturned at the corner. There had been a garbage strike earlier that spring and still it wasn’t all cleaned up. Rats ran along the street gutters. Young men in sleeveless tops stood malevolently in the doorways. They knew Corrigan, it seemed, and as he disappeared inside he gave them a series of elaborate handshakes. He spent a long time inside and came out clutching large brown paper bags. One of the hoodlums back-slapped him, grabbed his hand, drew him close.

“How d’you do that?” I asked. “How d’you get them to talk to you?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“It just seems, I don’t know, they’re tough, y’know”

“Far as they’re concerned, I’m just a square.”

“You’re not worried? You know, a gun, or something, a switchblade?”

“Why would I be?”

Together we loaded the old folk up in the van. He revved the engine and drove to the church. There had been a vote among the old folk, the church as opposed to the synagogue. It was daubed in graffiti — whites, yellows, reds, silvers. TAGS 173. GRACO 76. The stained-glass windows had been broken with small stones. Even the cross on top was tagged. “The living temple,” said Corrigan. The elderly Jewish man refused to get out. He sat, head down, saying nothing, skipping through the notes in his book. Corrigan opened the back of the van and slipped him an extra beer over the seat.

“He’s all right, our Albee,” said Corrigan as he strolled away from the back of the van. “All he does is work on those chess problems all day long. Used to be a grandmaster or something. Came from Hungary, found himself in the Bronx. He sends his games off in the post somewhere. Does about twenty games all at once. He can play blindfolded. It’s the only thing that keeps him going.”

He helped the others out of the van and we wheeled them one by one towards the entrance. “Let’s walk the plank.” There were a series of broken steps at the front but Corrigan had stashed two long pieces of wood around the side, near the sacristy. He laid the planks parallel to each other and guided the chairs up. The wood lifted in the air with the weight of the wheelchairs, and for a moment they looked like they were bound for the sky. Corrigan pushed them forward and the planks slapped back down. He had the look of a man at ease. A shine in the corners of his eyes. You could see the gone boy in him, the nine-year-old back in Sandy-mount.

He left the old folk waiting by the holy-water font, until they were all lined up, ready to go.

“My favorite moment of the day, this,” he said. He crossed over into the cool dark of the church, rolled them to whatever spot they wanted, some in the rear pews, some to the sides.

An old Irish woman was brought up to the very front, where she wrapped and rewrapped her rosary beads. She had a mane of white hair, blood in the corner of her eyes, an otherworldly stare. “Meet Sheila,” said Corrigan. She could hardly speak anymore, barely able to make a sound. A cabaret singer, she had lost most of her voice to throat cancer. She had been born in Galway but emigrated just after the First World War. She was Corrigan’s favorite and he stayed near her, said the formal prayers alongside her: a decade of the Rosary. She had no idea, I’m sure, about his religious ties, but there was an energy about her in that church she didn’t have elsewhere. She and Corrigan, it was like they were praying together for a good rain.

When we got out into the street again, Albee was dozing in the van, a bit of spittle on his chin. “Goddamn it,” he muttered when the engine rumbled into life. “Pair of pussies, the two of ya.”

Corrigan pulled into the nursing home in the late afternoon, then dropped me off in front of the housing project. He had another job to do, he said; there was someone he had to see.

“It’s a little project I’m working on,” he said, over his shoulder. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll see you later.”

He climbed in and touched something in the glove box of his van before he took off. “Don’t wait up for me,” he called. I watched him go, hand out the window, waving. He was holding something back, I knew.

It was pitch black when I saw him finally arriving back down among the whores alongside the Major Deegan. He gave out iced coffee from a giant silver canister that he kept in the back of the van. The girls gathered around him as he spooned ice into their cups. Jazzlyn wore a one-piece neon swimsuit. She tugged the back, snapped the elastic, edged close to him, gave the hint of a belly dance against his hip. She was tall, exotic, so very young she seemed to flutter. Playfully, she pushed him backwards. Corrigan ran a circle around her, high-stepping. A scream of laughter. She ran off when she heard a car horn blow. Around Corrigan’s feet lay a row of empty paper coffee cups.

Later he came back upstairs, thin, dark-eyed, exhausted.

“How was your meeting?”

“Oh, grand, yeah,” he said. “No problem.”

“Out tripping the light fantastic?”

“Ah, yeah, the Copacabana, you know me.”

He collapsed on the bed but was up early in the morning to a quick mug of tea. No food in the house. Just tea and sugar and milk. He said his prayers, and then touched the crucifix as he went towards the door once more.

“Down to the girls again?”

He looked at his feet. “I suppose so.”

“You think they really need you, Corr?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.”

The door swung on its hinges.

I’ve never been interested in calling out the moral brigade. Not my place. Not my job. Each to his own. You get what you create. Corrigan had his reasons. But these women disturbed me. They were light-years removed from anything I’d ever known. The high of their eyes. Their heroin sway. Their swimsuits. Some of them had needle marks at the back of their knees. They were more than foreign to me.

Down in the courtyard, I walked the long way around the projects, following the broken lines in the concrete, just to avoid them.

A few days later a gentle knock sounded on the door. An older man with a single suitcase. Another monk from the Order. Corrigan rushed to embrace him. “Brother Norbert.” He had come from Switzerland. Norbert’s sad brown eyes gladdened me. He looked around the apartment, swallowed deeply, said something about the Lord Jesus and a place of deep shelter. On his second day Norbert was robbed in the lift at gunpoint. He said he had gladly given them everything, even his passport. There was a shine like pride in his eyes. The Swiss man sat in serious prayer for two solid days, not leaving the apartment. Corrigan stayed down on the streets most of the time. Norbert was too formal and correct for him. “It’s like he’s got a toothache and he wants God to cure it,” said Corrigan.

Norbert refused the couch, lay on the floor. He balked each time the door opened and the hookers came in. Jazzlyn sat in his lap, ran her fingers on the rim of his ear, messed with his orthopedic shoes, hid them behind the couch. She told him that she could be his princess. He blushed until he almost wept. Later, when she was gone, his prayers became high-pitched and frantic. “The Beloved Life was spared, but not the pain, the Beloved Life was spared but not the pain.” He broke down in tears. Corrigan was able to get Norbert’s passport back and he drove him out to the airport in the brown van to get a flight to Geneva. Together they prayed and then Corrigan dispatched him. He looked at me as if he expected me to be leaving also.

“I don’t know who these people are,” he said. “They’re my brothers, but I don’t really know who they are. I’ve failed them.”

“You should leave this hole, Corr.”

“Why would I leave? My life’s here.”

“Find somewhere with a bit of sunshine. You and me together. I’ve been thinking about California or somewhere like that.”

“I’m called here.”

“You could be called anywhere.”

“This is where I am.”

“How did you get his passport back?”

“Oh, I just asked around.”

“He was robbed at gunpoint, Corr.”

“I know.”

“You’re going to get hurt.”

“Oh, give me a break.”

I went to the chair by the window and watched the large tractor-trailers pulling up under the highway. The girls jostled to get at them. A single neon sign blinked in the distance: an advertisement for oatmeal.

“The edge of the world here,” said Corrigan.

“You could do something back home. In Ireland. Up north. Belfast. Something for us. Your own people.”

“I could, yeah.”

“Or shake up some campesinos in Brazil or something.”

“Yeah.”

“So why stay here?”

He smiled. Something had gone wild in his eyes. I couldn’t tell what it was. He put his hands up close to the ceiling fan, as if he were about to thrust them in there, right up into the whirling blades, leave his hands there, watch them get mangled.

IN THE RAW OF mornings the girls stretched in a line along the block, though daylight thinned them out. After his morning matins, Corrigan went down to the corner deli to buy The Catholic Worker. Through the underpass, across the road, under the awning. Old men in their undershirts sat at the door, pigeons working bread crumbs at their feet. Corrigan came out carrying the paper tucked under his arm. I could see him as he crossed back, framed through the concrete eye of the underpass. Out of the shadows, he passed the hookers and they called to him in their singsong. It hit the scale on about three different notes. Corr — i-gan. Cor — rig-gan. Caw-rig-gun.

He passed through the gauntlet. Jazzlyn stood chatting with him, her thumb hooked under the strap of her swimsuit. She looked like an old-time cop in the wrong body, snapping the thin, lime-colored straps against her breasts. She leaned close to him again, her bare skin almost touching his lapel. He did not recoil. She was getting a charge from it all, I could tell. The lean of her young body. The hard snap of the strap. Her nipple against the fabric. Her head tilting closer and closer to him.

As cars passed, she turned to watch them, and her morning shadow lengthened. It was like she wanted to be everywhere, all at once. She leaned closer still and whispered in my brother’s ear. He nodded, turned, and went back towards the deli, came out carrying a can of Coke. Jazzlyn clapped her hands in delight, took it from him, pulled the ring off, sauntered away. A row of eighteen-wheelers was parked along the expressway. She propped her leg on the silver grille and sipped from the can, then suddenly threw the drink on the ground and climbed up into the truck.

Halfway in the door, she was already removing her swimsuit. Corrigan turned away. The cola lay in a black puddle in the gutter beneath her.

It happened times in a row, Jazzlyn asking him for a can of Coke, then throwing it to the ground when she found a mark.

I thought I should go down to her, negotiate a price, and treat myself to whatever trick it was she was able for, grab the back of her hair, bring her face close to mine, that sweet breath, curse her, spit on her, for wringing out my brother’s charity.

“Hey, leave the door open for them, will ya?” he said to me after he came home. I had taken to closing the locks in the afternoon, even though they pounded on the door.

“Why don’t they piss in their own houses, Corrigan?”

“Because they don’t have houses. They have apartments.”

“Why don’t they piss in their own apartments then?”

“Because they’ve got families. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sons and daughters. They don’t want their families to see them dressed like that.”

“They’ve got kids?”

“Sure.”

“Jazz, she got kids?”

“Two,” he said.

“Oh, man.”

“Tillie’s her mother.”

I turned on him. I knew how it sounded. Step into that river, you don’t step out — no return. It came out in a torrent, how disgusting they were, sucking on his blood, all of them, leaving him thin, dry, helpless, taking the life out of him, leeches, worse than leeches, bedbugs that crawled from the wallpaper; he was a fool — all his religiosity, all his pious horse-shit, it came down to nothing, the world is vicious and that’s what it amounts to, and hope is nothing more or less than what you can see with your own bare eyes.

He pulled at a small thread on the sleeve of his shirt, but I caught his elbow.

“Don’t give me your shit about the Lord upholding all that fall and raising up all that be bowed down. The Lord’s too big to fit in their miniskirts. Guess what, brother? Look at them. Look out the window. No amount of sympathy is ever going to change it. Why don’t you cop on? You’re just placating your conscience, that’s all. God comes along and sanctifies your guilt.”

His lips broke open a little. I waited but still he did not speak. We were so close together I could see his tongue move behind his teeth, flicking up and down like something nervous. His eyes were fixed and intent.

“Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They’re not Magdalenes. You’re just a bum among them. You’re looking for the poor man within? Why don’t you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?”

I could see the small, oblong reflection of the white door in his pupils, and I kept thinking that one of his hookers, one of his holy failures, was going to walk in and I’d see her reflection in the flicker.

“Why don’t you embarrass the rich with some of your charity? Go sit on a rich woman’s step and bring her to God? Tell me this — if the poor really are the living image of Jesus, why are they so fucking miserable? Tell me that, Corrigan. Why are they standing out there, displaying their misery to the rest of the world? I want to know. It’s just vanity, isn’t it? Love thy neighbor as thyself. It’s rubbish. You listening? Why don’t you take all those hookers of yours and have them go sing in the choir? The Church of the High Vision. Why don’t you have them sit in the front pews? I mean, there you go on your knees to all the tramps and the lepers and the cripples and dopeheads. Why don’t they do something? Because they want nothing but to suck you dry, that’s why.”

Exhausted, I laid my head against the windowsill.

I kept waiting for him to give me some sort of bitter benediction — something about being weak towards the strengthless, strong against the powerful, there is no peace save in Jesus, freedom is given, not received, some catch-all to soothe me, but instead he let it all wash over him. His face did not betray a thing. He scratched the inside of his arm and nodded.

“Just leave the door open,” he said.

He went down the stairwell, footsteps echoing, around the edge of the courtyard, disappeared into the grayness.

I ran down the slick steps of the apartment building. Huge swirls of fat graffiti on the walls. The drift of hash smoke. Broken glass on the bottom steps. Smells of piss and puke. Through the courtyard. A man held a pit bull on a training rope. He was teaching it to bite. The dog snapped at his arm: there were huge metal bracelets strapped across the man’s wrists. The snarls rolled across the yard. Corrigan was backing up his brown van, which he’d parked on the side of the road. I slapped the windows. He didn’t turn. I suppose I thought I might knock some sense into him, but after a moment the van was out of sight.

Over my shoulder the dog was snapping again at the man’s arm, but the man was staring at me, like I was the one trying to rip his wrists. A half-smile crawled over his face, malevolent and pure. I thought: Nigger. I couldn’t help it, but that’s what I thought: Nigger.

This place would ruin me: how did Corrigan stand it?

I wandered the neighborhood, hands down deep in my pockets, not on the pavement, but at the edge of parked cars, an altered perspective. Taxis brushed by, close to my hip. The wind blew the smell of the subways up through the traffic. A hard, musty waft.

I went to the church on St. Ann’s. Up the broken steps, into the vestibule, past the holy-water font, into the dark. I was half expecting to see him there, head bowed, praying, but no.

Small red electric candles could be lit at the back of the church. I dropped a quarter inside and heard the deep rattle against the emptiness. My father’s ancient voice in my ear: If you don’t want the truth, don’t ask for it.

Corrigan came home to the apartment late that night. I left the door unlocked but he came in with a screwdriver anyway, began to take all the screws from the chains and locks. “Job to do.” He was lethargic and his eyes were rolling around in his head and I should have known then, but I didn’t recognize it. He knelt on the floor, eye-level with the doorknob. The underside of his sandals were worn down. The sole had faded away, a little bubble of flat rubber. His carpenter pants were tied around his waist with a length of cord. They wouldn’t have stayed up on his hips otherwise. The long-sleeved shirt he wore was tight to his body and the bones of his ribcage were like some odd musical instrument.

He worked intently but he was using a flathead screwdriver for a Phillips head bolt and he had to prop the screwdriver sideways and angle it into the grooves.

I had already packed my bag and was ready to go, find a room, get a bartending job, anything, just get out of there. I pulled the couch into the center of the room under the ceiling fan, folded my arms, waited. The blades couldn’t cut through the heat. For the first time ever I noticed that Corrigan had a bald spot beginning in the back of his hair. I wanted to make some crack about it being a monkish thing but there was nothing between us anymore, no words or glances. He toiled away at the locks. A couple of screws fell on the floor. I watched the beads of sweat come down the back of his neck.

He rolled up his sleeve absentmindedly, and then I knew.

IF YOU THINK YOU know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures. I suppose it wasn’t too much of a surprise to me that Corrigan was scoring heroin: he had always done what the least of them had done. It was the perverse mantra of what he believed. He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground. There was no getting away from it. It was what he had done in Dublin too, though a different quarry of recklessness. He was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he wasn’t getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain. If he couldn’t cure it, he took it on. He was shooting smack because he couldn’t stand the thought of others being left alone with the same terror.

He left his sleeve rolled up for an hour or so while he dealt with the locks. The bruises inside his arm were a deep blue. When he was finished, the door didn’t even click closed, just swung on the hinges.

“There,” he said.

He went into the bathroom, where I was sure I could hear him strapping an elastic band around his arm. He came out, long-sleeved again.

“Now leave the friggin’ door alone,” he said.

He fell soundlessly into bed. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep, but I woke to the usual thrum of the Deegan. The outside world was dependable. Engine noise and tire song. Huge metal sheets had been laid over some potholes. They boomed deeply when a truck ran over them.

It was an easy enough choice to stay: it wasn’t as if Corrigan was ever going to ask me to leave. I was up and shaved early in the morning to accompany him on his rounds. I stirred him from the blankets. He had a faint nosebleed and the blood was dark against his stubble. He turned away. “Put on the tea, will you?” When he stretched, he touched the wooden crucifix on the wall. It swung back and forth on its nail. There was a light patch where the paint was not discolored. The faint imprint of the cross. He reached up to steady it, muttered something about God being ready to move sideways.

“Leaving today?” he asked.

The rucksack was packed on the floor.

“I was thinking I’d stay a couple more days.”

“No problem, brother.”

He combed his hair in the fragment of broken mirror, sprayed on some deodorant. At least he was keeping up pretenses. We took the lift instead of the stairs.

“A miracle,” said Corrigan as the door sighed open, and the little moons of light shone on the inside panel. “It’s working.”

Outside, we crossed the small patch of grass in front of the projects, among the broken bottles. All of a sudden, being around him felt right for the first time in years. That old dream of purpose. I knew what I had to do — bring him on the long walk back towards a sensible life.

Among the early-morning hookers I felt strangely charmed. Corr-gan. Corr-i-gun. Corry — gan. It was, after all, my last name too. It was a strange taking of ease. Their bodies did not embarrass me as much as when I’d watched them from afar. Coyly, they covered their breasts with their arms. One had dyed her hair a bright red. Another wore sparkling silver eyeliner. Jazzlyn, in her neon swimsuit, positioned the strap over her nipples. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in expert streams from nose and mouth. Her skin shone. In another life she could have been aristocratic. Her eyes went to the ground as if she was looking to find something she had dropped. I felt a softening for her, a desire.

They kept up a wavery pitch of banter. My brother gazed across at me and grinned. It was like Corrigan whispering in my ear to give his approval to all I couldn’t understand.

A few cars cruised past. “Get outta here,” said Tillie. “We got business to accomplish.” She said it like it was a stock exchange transaction. She nodded to Jazzlyn. Corrigan pulled me into the shadows.

“They all use smack?” I said.

“Some of them, yeah.”

“Nasty stuff.”

“The world tries them, then shows them a little joy.”

“Who gets it for them? The smack?”

“No idea,” he said as he took a small silver pocket watch out from his carpenter pants. “Why?”

“Just wondering.”

The cars rumbled above us. He slapped my shoulder. We drove to the nursing home. A young nurse was waiting on the steps. She stood up and waved brightly as the van pulled in. She looked South American— small and beautiful with a clout of black hair and dark eyes. Something fierce shot in the air between them. He loosened around her, his body more pliable. He put his hand on the small of her back, and they both disappeared inside the electronic door.

In the glove box of the van I looked for evidence: needles, packets, drug paraphernalia, anything. It was empty except for a well-worn Bible. In the inside flap Corrigan had written scattered notes to himself: The wish to make desire null. To be idle in the face of nature. Pursue them and beg for forgiveness. Resistance is at the heart of peace. When he was a boy he had seldom even folded down the pages of his Bible — he had always kept it pristine. Now the days were stacked up against him. The writing was spidery and he had underlined passages in deep-black ink. I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.

I watched as the short nurse negotiated the ramp with the wheelchairs. She had a tattoo at the base of her ankle. It crossed my mind that she might be the one supplying him heroin, but she looked so cheerful in the hot slanting sun.

“Adelita,” she said, extending her hand out to me through the van window. “Corrigan’s told me all about you.”

“Hey, get your carcass out here and help us,” my brother said from the side of the van.

He was straining to get the old Galway woman through the door. The veins in his neck pulsed. Sheila was just a rag doll of a thing. I had a sudden recollection of our mother at the piano. Corrigan breathed heavily as he heaved her inside, arranged a series of straps around the woman’s body.

“We have to talk,” I said to him.

“Yeah, whatever, let’s just get these people in the van.”

He and the nurse glanced at each other across the rim of the seats. She had a little bead of sweat around the top of her lip and she wiped it away with the short sleeve of her uniform. As we drove off, she leaned against the ramp and lit a cigarette.

“The lovely Adelita,” he said as he turned the corner.

“That’s not what I want to talk about.”

“Well, it’s all I want to talk about,” he said. He flicked a look in the rearview mirror and said: “Right, Sheila?” He did a fake drum roll on the steering wheel.

He was back to his old singsong self. I wondered if perhaps he had shot up while inside the nursing home: from what little I knew of addiction, anything at all could happen. But he was bright and cheery and didn’t have many of the hallmarks of heroin, or at least the ones I imagined. He drove with one arm out the window, the breeze blowing back his hair.

“You’re a mystery, you are.”

“Nothing mysterious at all, brother.”

Albee piped up from the backseat: “Pussy.”

“Shaddup,” said Corrigan with a grin, his accent tinged a little by the Bronx. All he cared about was the moment he was in, the absolute now. When we had fought as children, he used to stand and take the blows — our fights had lasted as long as I punched him. It would be easy to thump him now, fling him back against the van door, rifle his pockets, take out the packets of poison that were ruining him.

“We should make a visit back, Corr.”

“Yeah,” he said absently.

“I mean to Sandymount. Just for a week or two.”

“Isn’t the house sold?”

“Yeah, but we could find somewhere to stay.”

“The palm trees,” he said, half smiling. “Strangest sight in Dublin. I try to tell people about them, but they just don’t believe me.”

“Would you go back?”

“Sometime, maybe. I might bring some people with me,” he said.

“Sure.”

He flicked a look in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t imagine that he wanted to bring the old woman back to Ireland, but I was ready to let Corrigan have whatever space he needed.

At the park he wheeled them into the shadows by the wall. It was a bright day, sunny and close. Albee took out his sheaf of papers, muttering the moves to himself as he worked on his chess problems. Every time he made a good move he let the brake go on his wheelchair and rocked himself back and forth in joy. Sheila wore a wide-brimmed straw hat over her long white hair. Corrigan dabbed his handkerchief on her brow. She scratched out some sounds from her throat. She had that emigrant’s sadness — she would never go back to her old country — it was gone in more senses than one — but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.

Some kids nearby had turned on a fire hydrant and were dancing in the spray. One of them had taken a kitchen tray and was using it as a surfboard. The water skimmed him along by the monkey bars, where he fell headlong, laughing, into the fence. Others clamored to use the tray. Corrigan moved over to the fence and pressed his hands against the wire diamonds. Beyond him, farther, some basketball players, sweat-soaked, driving towards the netless basket.

It seemed for a moment that Corrigan was right, that there was something here, something to be recognized and rescued, some joy. I wanted to tell him that I was beginning to understand it, or at least get an inkling, but he called out to me and said he was running across to the bodega.

“Watch Sheila for a while, will you?” he said. “Her hat’s tilted. Don’t let her get sunburned.”

A gang of youths in bandannas and tight jeans hung out in front of the bodega. They lit one another’s cigarettes importantly. They gave Corrigan the usual handslaps, then disappeared inside with him. I knew it. I could feel it welling up in me. I jogged across, my heart thumping in my cheap linen shirt. I stepped past the litter piled up outside the shop, liquor bottles, torn wrappers. A row of goldfish bowls sat in the window, the thin orange bodies spinning in aimless circles. A bell sounded. Inside, Motown came over the stereo. A couple of kids, dripping wet from the fire hydrant, stood by the ice cream vault. The older ones, in their red bandannas, were down by the beer fridges. Corrigan was at the counter, a pint of milk in his hand. He looked up, not the least bit disturbed. “I thought you were watching Sheila.”

“Is that what you thought?”

I expected some shove, a packet of heroin into his pocket, some clandestine transaction across the counter, another handslap with the gang, but there was nothing. “Just put it on my tab,” said Corrigan to the shopowner, and he tapped one of the fishbowls on the way out.

The shop doorbell rang.

“They sell smack there too?” I asked as we crossed through the traffic to the park.

“You and your smack,” he said.

“Are you sure, Corr?”

“Am I sure of what?”

“You tell me, brother. You’re looking rough. One look in the mirror.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” He reared back and laughed. “Me?” he said. “Shooting smack?”

We reached the fence.

“I wouldn’t touch that stuff with a barge pole,” he said. His hands tightened around the wire, the tip of his knuckles white. “With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”

He turned to look at the short row of wheelchairs set out along the fence. Something remained fresh about him, young, even. When he was sixteen Corrigan had written, in the inside of a cigarette packet, that all the proper gospel of the world could be written in the inside of a cigarette packet — it was that simple, you could do unto others what you’d have them do unto you, but at that time he hadn’t figured on other complications.

“You ever have the feeling there’s a stray something or other inside you?” he said. “You don’t know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it’s inside you. It’s not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there’s no way to get at it?” He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. “Well, here it is. Right here.”

We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

“You’re having me on, right?”

“Wish I was,” he said.

“Come on now …”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Jazzlyn?” I asked, floored. “You haven’t fallen for that hooker, have you?”

He laughed heartily but it was a laugh that ran away. His eyes shot across the playground, and he ran his fingers along the fence. “No,” he said, “no, not Jazzlyn, no.”

CORRIGAN DROVE ME through the South Bronx under the flamed-up sky. The sunset was the color of muscle, pink and striated gray. Arson. The owners of the buildings, he said, were running insurance scams. Whole streets of tenements and warehouses abandoned to smolder.

Gangs of kids hung out on the street corners. Traffic lights were stuck on permanent red. At fire hydrants there were huge puddles of stagnant water. A building on Willis had half collapsed into the street. A couple of wild dogs picked their way through the ruin. A burned neon sign stood upright. Fire trucks went by, and a couple of cop cars trailed each other for comfort. Every now and then a figure emerged from the shadows, homeless men pushing shopping trolleys piled high with copper wire. They looked like men on a westward-ho, shoving their wagons across the nightlands of America.

“Who are they?”

“They ransack the building, pull the guts of the walls out, and then they sell the copper wire,” he said. “They get a dime a pound or something.”

Corrigan pulled the van up outside a series of tenements that were abandoned but untouched by fire, yanked the gearshift on the steering column down into park.

A haze hung over the street. You could hardly see the top of the street lamps. Warning tape had been fixed over the doorways but the doors behind them had been kicked in. He drew his feet up onto the seat, so that his sandals were nestled close to his crotch. He lit a cigarette and brought it right down to the dregs, threw the butt out the window.

“Thing is, I have a mild case of a thing called TTP or something,” he said finally. “I started getting these bruises all over. Here and here. It’s worst on my legs. They’re splotchy. About a year or so ago. At first I didn’t really think anything of it, honest. I had a bit of a fever. A few dizzy spells.

“And then I was in the nursing home in February. Helping them move some furniture from the first floor to the third. Stuff too big to fit in the elevator. And it was hot as hell in there. They keep the heat turned up for all the old ones. You can’t imagine how hot, especially in the stairwell there, where the pipes were. Like Dante had furnished the place. Rough work. So I took off my shirt. Down to my string vest. You know how many years it’s been since I’ve been down to a string vest? And I was halfway up the stairs with a few lads, when one of them points to me, my arms and shoulders, and says that I must have been in some sort of fight. Truth is, I had been in a fight. The pimps were giving me a hard time for letting the girls use the bathroom. I’d been knocked around a little. Had some stitches over my eye. One of them wore cowboy boots and roughed me up good. But I didn’t give it a second thought until we got the furniture up on the third floor and Adelita was there, directing the traffic. ‘Put this here. Put that there.’ We heaved this big desk into a corner. And the lads were still giving me a hard time about being the only white bloke who still gets in fights in the neighborhood. Like I’m some throwback. Like I’m some Big Jack Doyle, you know. They’re all joking: ‘Come on Corrigan, let’s dance, man, let’s rumble!’ They say they ought to bring me to Zaire, I’m such a fighter. They don’t know I’m in the Order. Nobody knows. Not then anyway, they didn’t. And Adelita came over and just pushed her finger down hard on one of the bruises and she said something like, ‘You’ve got TTP.’ And I made some crack about DDT and she said, ‘No, I think it could be TTP.’ It turns out she’s studying at night. She wants to do medicine. She was a nurse in Guatemala in a couple of fancy hospitals. Always wanted to be a doctor, even went to university and all, but the war kicked in, and she got all caught up in it. Lost her husband. So she nurses here. They won’t take her credentials. She’s got two kids. They’ve got American accents now. Anyway she says something about low platelet counts and bleeding into the tissues and that I’ve got to get it seen to. She surprised me, brother.”

Corrigan rolled down the window of the van and sprinkled some tobacco on a thin piece of paper, lit up.

“So, fair enough, I get it seen to. And she’s bang on. I have this thing they don’t know much about. It’s idiopathic, you know, they don’t know what causes it. But they say it’s serious enough, you can get real sick from it. I mean, you gotta eventually get the treatment or you can die. And so I go home at night and I call on God in the dark, and I say, ‘Thanks, God, another thing to worry about.’ But the thing is, God’s there this time, brother. He’s there. In plain sight. It would be easier if He wasn’t there. I could pretend I was searching for Him. But no, He’s there, the son of a gun. He’s telling me all the logical things about being sick and getting over it and dealing with it and looking at the world in a new way, the way He does, the way He should talk to you, the Body, the Soul, the sacrament of being alone, being furious with an aim, using it for the greater good. Opening yourself to the promise. But, see, this logical God, I don’t like him all that much. Even His voice, He’s got this voice that I just can’t, I don’t know, I can’t like. I can understand it, but I don’t necessarily like it. He’s out of my range. But that’s no problem. Plenty of times I haven’t liked Him. It’s good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse.

“I figure being sick is old news anyway and dying’s even older than that. What’s fatal is the big hollow echo every time I tried Him out. See, I just felt hollow every time I tried talking with Him. I gave it everything, brother. My proper confession, you know, about maintaining faith and all. I talked with Father Marek there in St. Ann’s. A good priest. We struggled together, him and I. Hours on end. And with Him too, with God, at all hours of the day. Used to be, though, that the arguments with Him stirred the depths of my heart. I wept in His presence. But He kept coming back at me with all His pure logic. Still, I knew it would pass. I knew I’d get over it. I wasn’t even thinking about Adelita then. She wasn’t even on my mind. It was losing God. The prospect of losing that. The rational part of me knew it was me — I mean, I was just talking to myself. I was obstructing Him. But being rational about it didn’t cure it. You meet a rational God and you say, Well, okay, that’s not my cup of tea right now, Heavenly Father, I’ll come back at a better time.

“You know, when you’re young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can’t hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again. That’s what I’m looking for. But I wasn’t getting up. I wasn’t able.

“So, anyway, I’m in the nursing home one Friday afternoon and Adelita was sitting in the stock room, going through the bottles of cough mixture. And I just sat down on the low ladder and was chatting away with her. She was asking me if I was getting treatment in the hospital and I find myself lying, flat-out lying, saying, Yes, of course, everything’s fine, not a bother on me. ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘because you really need to be looking after yourself.’ Then she stepped over beside me, pulled up a chair, and started rubbing the inside of my arm. She said that I had to keep the blood flowing. She pushed her fingers into my arm here. And it was like she put her hands down deep in the earth. That’s how it felt. I got goosebumps, my blood moving under her fingers. My other hand gripped the side of the ladder. And there was a voice inside me saying, ‘Strengthen yourself against this, this is a test, be ready, be ready.’ But it’s the same voice I don’t like. I’m looking behind the veil of it and all I see is this woman, it’s a catastrophe, I’m descending, sinking like a hopeless swimmer. And I’m saying, God don’t allow this to happen. Don’t let it. She was tapping the inside of my arm with her fingernail, just flicking it. I closed my eyes. Please don’t allow this. Please. But it was so pleasant. So so very pleasant. I wanted to keep my eyes closed and pry them open at the same time. No words for it, brother. I couldn’t stand it. I got up and stormed out of the place. Stumbled out into the van.

“I think I drove all night. I just kept going. Following the white lines. I got snared up on bridges. Had no idea where I was going. Soon enough the lights of the city were fading. I figured I was out somewhere way upstate, but it was the island, man, Long Island. I thought I was going west, across some great open land, where I’d work everything out, but I wasn’t, I was actually heading east along this big highway. And I just kept going. Driving and driving. Cars zipping by me. I had to keep muttering to myself and lighting matches, smelling the sulfur, to keep awake. Trying to pray. To make two plus two equal five. And then the highway ended, middle of nowhere, it seemed like, and I just followed a smaller road. Out through farmland and past these isolated houses, little pinpoints of light. Montauk. I’d never been there before. The dark got thicker, no lights at all. And it turned into this little one-laner. That’s what takes you to the end of this country, man, a tiny little potholed road that ends up at a lighthouse. And I thought: ‘This is right, this is where I’ll find Him.’

“I got out and stepped in among the dunes, along the beach. I walked about and screamed at Him, under the clouds. Not a star shining anywhere. No response. You’d expect a bit of moon at least. Something. Anything. Not even a boat. It was like everything had deserted me. And I could still feel her touch there, on the inside of my arm. Like it was deep and there was something growing there. And I’m out in the middle of an endless beach with a lighthouse twirling behind me. Thinking stupid things. The way you do. I’ll move away. I’ll give it all up. I’ll leave the Order, I’ll go back to Ireland, find a different poverty. But nothing made sense. The end of the country, man, but there was no revelation.

“After a while I gathered myself into that silence and finally I sat down in the sand and said to myself, ‘Well, maybe it will only make me better for Him in the long run, I have to fight this, battle it, use it for my own advantage, it’s a sign.’ I resigned myself to it. That which doesn’t break you, blah blah blah. I was running a fever but I left the beach, got back in the van and calmed myself down, and said good-bye to the lighthouse, the water, the east, and said it will be fine, nothing holy is free, and I drove all the way back to the flat, parked the van, fell into the lift, and closed the door. I actually fell asleep in the lift. Only woke up when it started moving. Found myself staring at the face of some frightened black woman. I scared her. I locked myself in for two days. Waiting for the bandages to blacken, y’know, that sort of thing. Waiting for it to blow over. And I bolted the chain. Can you believe that? I bolted the door shut. So much for the crap I gave you, brother, about the locks.”

He chuckled a little and a spray of headlight went across his face from the far side of the boulevard.

“The girls thought I was dead. They were banging on the door, wanting to use the facilities. And I didn’t reply. I just lay there, trying to pray for some sign of gentle mercy. But I kept seeing Adelita in my mind. Eyes closed, eyes open, it didn’t matter. Things I shouldn’t have been thinking of. Her neck. The back of her neck. Her clavicle. The side of her face in a slice of light. There she was, taking me in. And I wanted to scream at her, No, no, no, you’re just pure lust, and I’ve made a pact with God to fight lust, please just let me be, please just go. But she’s still standing there, smiling, understanding. And I’d whisper to her again: Please go. But I knew it wasn’t lust, it was so much more than lust. I was looking for a simple answer, the sort we give to children, you know. And I kept thinking that we were all children once, maybe I could return. That’s what echoed in my head. Go back to being a child. Sprint along the strand there. Up past the tower. Run along the wall. I wanted that sort of joy. Make it simple again. I was trying, really trying, to pray, get rid of my lust, return to the good, rediscover that innocence. Circles of circles. And when you go around in circles, brother, the world is very big, but if you plow straight ahead it’s small enough. I wanted to fall along the spokes to the center of the circle, where there was no movement. I can’t explain it, man. It was like I was staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sky. All this banging was still going on outside the door. Then hours of silence.

“At one time I heard Jazzlyn, you know, that voice of hers, like she just swallowed the Bronx, man, leaning in against the keyhole and screaming: ‘Okay! To hell with you, you dumbass cracker!’ It’s the only time I laughed. If only she knew. To hell with you, you dumbass cracker, I’ll piss somewheres else!’

“Then they actually got the Guards in to bash down the door. And they come rushing in, flashing badges, guns drawn. They stop and stare. Looking at me, lying on the couch, the Bible over my face. And one cop is saying, ‘What’s going on here, man? What the hell is this? He’s not dead. He smells bad, but he’s not dead.’ I’m just lying there and I swipe the Book off my face and cover my eyes with my forearm. And Jazz comes charging in behind them, saying, ‘I gotta go, I gotta go.’ Then comes Tillie with her pink parasol. Then both of them came out and started shouting. ‘How come you keep the door locked, Corrie? Asshole! That’s mean and unusual punishment. That’s the honkypox, man!’ The Guards were standing there, open-mouthed. They couldn’t believe what was going on. One of them was wrapping a piece of gum tight around his finger. He kept winding it, like he wanted to strangle me. I’m sure they were thinking that they’d done this for nothing, for a bunch of working girls who just wanted to pee. They were not happy at all. Not at all. They wanted to give me a citation for wasting their time, but they couldn’t dream up anything. I said maybe they should give me one for losing my faith and then they thought I was really off my rocker. One of them said to me, ‘Look at this shithole — get a life, man!’ And it was just so simple, the way he said it, the young Guard, right in my face: ‘Get a life, man!’ He kicked over the flowerpot as he went out the door.

“Tillie and Angie and Jazzlyn and the girls threw a ‘not-dead’ party for me. They even bought me a cake. One candle. I had to blow it out. I was going to take it as a sign. But there were no signs. I went back down the nursing home and that night I asked Adelita if she’d mind just moving the blood around a little — that’s the way I said it, ’Move the blood around a little, would you?’ She gave me that big cheerful smile and said that she was busy on her rounds, maybe she’d get to it later. I sat there, trembling with God, all my sorrows, bound up inside. And sure enough she came back a short while later. It was all very simple. I just stared at the dark of her hair. Couldn’t look in her eyes. She was rubbing my shoulder and the small of my back and even my calf muscles. I kept hoping maybe somebody would come in the door and find us, make a big stink, but nobody did. And I kissed her. And she kissed me back. I mean, how many men can say they’d rather be nowhere else in the world? That’s how I felt. That moment. That I wanted nothing but the here and now, and nowhere else. On earth as it is in heaven. That one moment. And then after a few days I started going to her house.”

“She’s got three kids, you said.”

“Two. And a husband who got killed down in Guatemala. Fighting. For, I don’t know, Carlos Arana Osorio or someone. A fascist of some sort. She hated him, the husband — she got caught up in this marriage young — and still she’s got his picture on the bookcase. For the kids to know that he exists, existed, that they had a father. We just sit there and he’s looking out at us. She doesn’t talk about him. He’s got this hard stare. I sit in her kitchen and she cooks a little and I move the food around on the plate and we chat and then she rubs my shoulders while her kids are in the other room, watching cartoons. She knows I’m in the Order, knows the celibacy rules, everything. I told her. She says that if it doesn’t matter to me then it doesn’t matter to her. She’s the loveliest person I’ve ever known. I can’t stand it. I can’t deal with it. I sit there and it’s like these blades turning in my stomach. The voice I go home to is not the voice I ever heard before. I can’t lay a hand on the old one. He’s gone. I find myself stretching out at night, trying to grab a hold of it but He’s not there. All I get is sleeplessness and disgust. Call it what you like. Call it joy, even. How can I pray with this inside me? How can I do what I’m supposed to do? I don’t even judge myself by my actions. I judge myself by what’s in my heart. And it’s rotten because it wants to own things, but it’s not rotten because it’s the most content I’ve ever been, and it’s the most content she’s ever been too, sitting there, together. We’re happy. And I keep wondering if we’re supposed to be happy. I haven’t slept with her, brother. At least not… We’ve thought about it, yes, but, I mean …”

He faded off.

“You know my vows. You know what they mean. I used to think there was no other man in me, no other person, just me, the devoted one. That I was alone and strong, that my vows were everything, and I wasn’t tempted. And I’ve turned it over and over in my mind. What happens if this? What happens if that? And maybe it’s not even a matter of losing faith. I stand in the mess of myself. It’s against everything I’ve ever been, and suddenly just watching it all disappear, and then also lying to her, even about my treatment.”

“What’s this sickness mean? This TTP stuff?”

“It means I’ve just got to get better.”

“How?”

“I have to get treatment. Plasma replacement and that sort of thing. I will.”

“Painful?”

“Pain’s nothing. Pain’s what you give, not what you get.”

He took out the slim pack of rolling papers and sprinkled the tobacco along the curved edge of a paper.

“And her? Adelita? What’re you going to do?”

He worked the grains over, looked out the window.

“Her kids are out of school for the summer. They’re running around. Lots of time on their hands. Used to be that I went over with the excuse that I was helping them with their homework. But it’s summer, so there’s no more homework. Guess what. I’m still going over. And no real excuse except the truth — I want to see her. And we just sit there, Adelita and me. I have to come up with other excuses for myself. Oh, they need someone to help clean up the rubbish in front of the apartment. She really needs to get that toaster fixed. She needs time to study her medical books. Anything. Except I can’t pretend that I can give them a catechism lesson because they’re Lutheran, man, Lutherans! From Guatemala. Just my luck, man! I find the only non-Catholic woman in Central America. Brilliant. She’s a believer, though. She’s got a heart, huge and kind. She really does. She tells me these stories about where she grew up. I go to her house every chance I get. I want to. I need to. That’s where I’ve been disappearing all these afternoons. I guess I wanted to keep it hidden from everyone.

“And all the time I’m sitting there, in her house, thinking that this is the one place I shouldn’t be. And I wonder what’s going to be left over when I extricate myself from the mess. Then her kids come in from outside and jump on the sofa and watch TV and spill yogurt all over the cushions. Her youngest, Eliana, she’s five, she drifts in trailing a blanket along the floor and grabs my hand and brings me into the living room. I’m bouncing her up and down on my knee, and they’re beautiful kids, both of them. Jacobo’s just turned seven. I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life. At the end of Tom and Jerry, or I Love Lucy, or The Brady Bunch, whatever dose of irony you want, I say to myself, That’s okay — this is real, this is something I can handle, I’m just sitting here, I’m not doing anything bad. And then I leave because I can’t accept the brokenness.”

“So, leave the Order.”

He knitted his hands together.

“Or leave her.”

The whites of his knuckles.

“I can’t do either,” he said. “And I can’t do both.”

He studied the lit end of his cigarette.

“You know what’s funny?” he said. “On Sundays I still feel the old urges, the residual feelings. That’s when the guilt hits most. I walk along, the Our Father in my mind. Over and over again. To cut the edge off the guilt. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

A car pulled up slowly behind us and a sharp light shone through the back window. The red and blue lights flicked on, but no siren. We waited in silence for the cops to get out of the car, but they hit the megaphone: “Move on, faggots, move it!”

Corrigan gave a pinch of a smile as he pulled the gearshift down into drive.

“You know, I have a dream every night that I’m running my lips down along her spine, like a skiff down a river.”

He eased the van out into the street and said nothing more until he pulled in near the projects, where his hookers were. Instead of walking in among them, he waved them off and brought me across the street to where a yellow light pulsed on the corner. “What I need to do is get drunk.” He pushed open the door of a little bar, arm around my shoulder.

“Straight as a good fence the last ten years, now look at me.”

He sat at the counter, raised two fingers, ordered a couple of beers.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water — it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.

“You ask me if I’m using heroin, man?” He was laughing, but looking out the bar window at the rafters of the highway. “It’s worse than that, brother, much worse.”

IT WAS LIKE ALL the clocks agreed and the fridge was humming and the sirens outside sounded out like flutes. He had talked her free. Just mentioning her was enough for him: he became new.

For the next couple of days they saw each other as much as they could — in the nursing home mainly, where she changed her shift just to be with him. But Adelita also came to the apartment, knocked on the door, uncorked a bottle of wine, and sat across the table. She wore a ring on her right hand, twirling it absently. There was a grace and a toughness about her, entwined. They needed me there. I was hardly allowed to stand up from the table. “Sit down, sit down.” I was still the safe border between them. They weren’t ready to fully let go. Some propriety held them back, but they looked as if they wanted to leave some of their good sense behind, at least for a while.

She was the sort of woman who became more beautiful the more you watched her: the dark hair, almost blue in the light, the curve of her neck, a mole by her left eye, a perfect blemish.

I suppose, as the nights wore on, my presence made them feel that they had to entertain someone, that they were in it together, that they were more properly alone by being together.

She spoke softly to Corrigan, as if to get him to lean closer. He would look at her as if it were quite possible he wasn’t ever going to see her again. Sometimes she just sat there with her head upon his shoulder. She gazed past me. Outside, the fires of the Bronx. To them it could have been sunlight through the girders. I dragged my chair across the floor.

“Sit down, sit down.”

Adelita had a wild side that Corrigan liked but couldn’t bring himself to grin about. One night she wore a wide white off-the-shoulder blouse and orange hot pants. The blouse was modest, but the pants were tight to her thighs. We drank a little cheap wine, and Adelita was whooped up a little. She gathered her shirt and knotted it at the front, showing the brown of her stomach, stretched slightly from children. The small dip of her belly button. Corrigan was embarrassed by the cling of the pants. “Look at you, Adie,” he said, his cheeks flushing. But instead of asking her to unknot the blouse and cover herself up, he made a theater of giving her one of his own shirts to wear over her outfit. As if it were the tender thing to do. He draped it around her shoulders, kissed her cheek. It was one of his old black collarless shirts, past her thighs, almost down to her knees. He hitched it on her shoulders, half afraid that he was being a prude, the other half rocked by the sheer immensity of what was happening to him.

Adelita paraded around the apartment, doing a slight hula-hoop movement.

“I’m ready now for heaven,” she said, tugging the shirt lower still.

“Take her, Lord,” said Corrigan.

They laughed, but there was something in that, like Corrigan wanted his life to make sense again, that he had fallen from grace, all he had now was his old recklessness and temptation, and he wasn’t sure he could handle it. He looked up as if the answer might be written on the ceiling. What might happen if she tumbled short of his dreams? How much might he hate his God if he left her behind? How might he detest himself if he stuck to his Lord?

He walked her home, holding hands in the dark. When he returned to the apartment, many hours later, he hung the shirt on the edge of the mirror. “Orange hot pants,” he said. “Can you believe it?”

We sat, hunched over the bottle.

“You know what you should do?” said Corrigan. “Come work at the nursing home.”

“Need a bodyguard, is that it?”

He smiled, but I knew what he was saying. Come help me, I’m still that hopeless swimmer. He wanted someone from the past around in order to make sure that it wasn’t all just a colossal illusion. He couldn’t just be an observer: he had to get some message through. It had to make sense, if even just for me. But I got a job in Queens instead, in one of the shamrock bars I dreaded. A low ceiling. Eight stools along the formica counter. Sawdust on the floor. Pouring pale draft beer and putting my own dimes in the jukebox so I wouldn’t have to hear the same old tunes over and over. Instead of Tommy Makem, the Clancy Brothers, and Donovan, I tried some Tom Waits instead. The single-minded drinkers groaned.

I figured I might write a play set in a bar, as if it had never been done before, as if it were some sort of revolutionary act, so I listened to my countrymen and wrote notes. Theirs was a loneliness pasted upon loneliness. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left. My accent deepened. I took on different rhythms. I pretended I was from Carlow Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick. One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy-haired man. He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks. They clinked glasses with him and called him a “motherfucking ambulance chaser” when he went to the bathroom. It was not a series of words they would have used at home — motherfucking ambulance chasers weren’t big in the old country — but they said it as often as they could. With great hilarity they injected it into songs when the lawyer left. One of the songs had an ambulance chaser going over the Cork and Kerry mountains. Another had an ambulance chaser in the green fields of France.

The place grew busier as the night went on. I poured the drinks and emptied the tip jar.

I was still staying with Corrigan. He spent a few evenings at Adelita’s place, but he never told me a word about them. I wanted to know if he’d finally been with a woman but he simply shook his head, wouldn’t say, couldn’t say. He was still in the Order after all. His vows still shackled him.

There was a night in early August when I dragged myself back on the subway, but couldn’t find a cab on the Concourse. I didn’t like the idea of walking back to Corrigan’s place at that hour. There had been beatings and random murders in the Bronx. Being held up was close to ritual. And being white was a bad idea. It was time to get a room of my own somewhere else, maybe the Village or the East Side of Manhattan. I stuck my hands in my jeans, felt the rolled-up wad of money from the bar. I had just begun walking when a whistle sounded from the other side of the Concourse. Tillie was pulling up the strap on her swimsuit. She had been kicked out of a car and her knees were scraped raw.

“Sugarplum,” she shouted as she stumbled towards me with her handbag waving above her head. She had lost her parasol. She put her arm in the crook of mine. “Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.”

It was, I knew, a line from Rumi. I stood, stunned. “What’s the big deal?” she shrugged. She dragged me on. Her husband, she said, had studied Persian poetry.

“Husband?”

I stopped on the street and gaped at her. Once, as a teenager, I had examined a piece of my skin on a glass slide, staring at it through a microscope: an amplitude of ridged canals striving beneath my eye, all pure surprise.

My intense disgust — so remarkable on other days — in that single moment turned into an awe for the fact that Tillie didn’t care at all. She jiggled her breasts and told me to get a grip. It was her ex-husband anyway. Yes, he had studied Persian poetry. Big fucking deal. He used to get a suite at the Sherry-Netherlands, she said. I assumed she was high. The world seemed to grow smaller around her, shrunken to the size of her eyes, painted purple and dark with eye shadow. I suddenly wanted to kiss her. My own wild, yea-saying overburst of American joy. I leaned towards her and she laughed, pushed me away.

A long pimped-up Ford Falcon pulled up at the curb and, without turning, Tillie said: “He already paid, man.”

We continued up the street, arm in arm. Under the Deegan she nestled her head against my chest. “Didn’t you, honey?” she said. “You already paid for the goodies?” She was rubbing her hand against me and it felt good. There’s no other way to say it. That’s how it felt. Good.

“Call me SweetCakes,” she said in an accent that loitered around her.

“You’re related to Jazzlyn, aren’t you?”

“What about it?”

“You’re her mother, right?”

“Shut up and pay me,” she said, touching the side of my face. Moments later there was the surprising condolence of her warm breath against my neck.

THE RAID BEGAN in the early morning, a Tuesday in August. Still dark. The cops lined up the paddy wagons in the streetlight shadows near the overpass. The girls didn’t seem to care half as much as Corrigan did. One or two dropped their handbags and ran towards the intersections, arms flailing, but there were more paddy wagons waiting there, doors open. The police tightened the handcuffs and herded the girls into the well of the dark vehicles. Only then could we hear any shouting — they leaned out, looking for their lipstick or their sunglasses or their stilettos. “Hey, I dropped my keyring!” said Jazzlyn. She was being helped into the wagon by her mother. Tillie was calm, as if it happened all the time, just another rising sun. She caught my eye, gave half a wink.

On the street, the cops sipped their coffees, smoked their cigarettes, shrugged. They called the girls by their names and nicknames. Foxy. Angie. Daisy. Raf. SweetCakes. Sugarpie. They knew the girls well and the crackdown was as lethargic as the day. The girls must have heard the rumor of it beforehand, and they had gotten rid of their needles and any other drug paraphernalia, dropped them down into the gutter. There’d been raids before, but never so complete a sweep.

“I want to know what’s happening to them,” said Corrigan, going cop to cop. “Where are they going?” He spun on his heels. “What are you arresting them for?”

“Stargazing,” said a cop, bashing into Corrigan’s shoulder.

I watched a long pink boa scarf get caught up in the wheels of a patrol car. It wrapped the wheelbase as if in affection, and bits of tufted pink spun in the air.

Corrigan took down a series of badge numbers. A tall female cop plucked the notebook out of his hand and shredded it slowly in front of him. “Look, you dumb Mick, they’ll be back soon, okay?”

“Where’re you taking them?”

“What’s it to you, buddy?”

“Where are you bringing them? Which station house?”

“Step back. Over there. Now.”

“Under what statute?” said Corrigan.

“Under the statute that I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.”

“All I want is an answer.”

“The answer’s seven,” the female cop said, staring Corrigan down. “The answer’s always seven. Get it?”

“No I don’t.”

“What are you, man, some sort of fruit or something?”

One of the sergeants swaggered up and shouted: “Somebody take care of Mr. Lovey-Dovey here.” Corrigan was pushed to the side of the road and told to stand on the curb. “We’ll lock you up if you say another word.”

I guided him aside. His face was red and his fists tightened. Veins thrummed at his temple. A new splotch had appeared on his neck. “Take it easy, okay, Corr? We’ll sort it out later. They’ll be better off in a station anyway. It’s not as if you actually like them being here.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Oh, Jesus, come on,” I said. “Just trust me. We’ll get to them later.”

The paddy wagons bounced down off the curbs and all but one of the squad cars followed behind. A few onlookers gathered in clumps. Some kids rode their bicycles in circles around the empty space as if they’d found themselves a brand-new playground. Corrigan went to pick up a keyring from the gutter. It was a cheap little glass thing with a picture of a child in the center. Flipped over, there was a picture of another child.

“That’s the reason,” said Corrigan, thrusting the keyring towards me. “They’re Jazz’s kids.”

Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home. Tillie had charged me fifteen dollars for our little tryst, patted me on the back, then said I represented the Irish quite well, a grand dollop of irony in her voice. Call me SweetCakes. She flicked the ten-dollar bill and said she knew some Khalil Gibran too — she would quote a bit or two if I wanted. “Next time,” I said. She’d riffled through her handbag. “Are you interested in a little horse?” she asked as she buttoned me up. She said she could get some from Angie. “Not my style,” I said. She giggled and leaned closer to me. “Your style?” she said. She put her hand on my hip, laughed again. “Your style!” There was a sickening moment when I thought she had pickpocketed all my tips, but she hadn’t; she just tightened my belt and slapped me on the arse.

I was glad that I hadn’t gone with her daughter. I felt almost virtuous, as if I hadn’t been tempted at all. Tillie’s smell had lingered with me for a couple of days and it returned again now that she had been taken off and arrested.

“She’s a grandmother?”

“I told you that,” said Corrigan. He stormed towards the last remaining cop car, brandishing Jazz’s key chain. “What’re you going to do about this?” he shouted. “You going to get someone to look after her kids? Is that what you’re going to do? Who’s going to look after her kids? Are you going to leave them there on the street? You’re arresting her mother and her!”

“Mister,” the cop said, “one more word from you—”

I pulled Corrigan’s elbow hard and dragged him back through the projects. For a moment the buildings seemed more sinister without the hookers outside: the territory was transformed, none of the old totems anymore.

The lift was broken again. Corrigan wheezed up the stairs. Inside, he began dialing all the community groups he knew, looking for a lawyer, and a babysitter for Jazzlyn’s kids. “I don’t even know where they’ve gone,” he screamed into the phone. “They wouldn’t tell me. Last time, the lockups were full and they got sent down to Manhattan.”

Another phone call. He turned away from me, cupped his hand around the receiver.

“Adelita?” he said.

His grip deepened around the phone as he whispered. He had spent the previous few afternoons with her, at her house, and each time he came home he was the same: roaming the room, pulling at the buttons on his shirt, muttering to himself, trying to read his Bible, looking for something that might justify himself, or maybe looking for a word to leave him even further tortured, a pain that would leave him again on edge. That, and a happiness too, an energy. I wasn’t sure what to tell him anymore. Give in to the despondency. Find a new posting. Forget her. Move on. At least with the hookers he didn’t have time to juggle notions of love and loss — down on the street it was pure take and take. But with Adelita it was different — she wasn’t pushing any greed or climax. This is my body, it has been given up for you.

Later, around noon, I found Corrigan in the bathroom, shaving in front of the mirror. He had been down to the Bronx county courthouse, where most of the hookers had already been released on time served. But there were outstanding warrants in Manhattan for Tillie and Jazzlyn. They had pulled some robbery together, turned on a trick. The case was old. Still, they were both going to be transported downtown. He pulled on a crisp black shirt and dark trousers, went to the mirror again, pasted his long hair back with water. “Well, well,” he said. He took a small scissors to his hair and lopped off about four inches. His fringe went in three smooth snips.

“I’m going to go down to help them,” he said.

“Where?”

“The parthenon of justice.”

He looked older, more worn. With his haircut, the bald spot was more pronounced.

“They call it the Tombs. They’ll be arraigned in Centre Street. Listen, I need you to take my shift in the nursing home. I talked with Adelita. She already knows.”

“Me? What am I going to do with them?”

“I don’t know. Take them to the beach or something.”

“I have a job in Queens.”

“Do it for me, brother, will you, please? I’ll give you a shout later on.” He turned at the door. “And look after Adelita for me too, will you?”

“Sure.”

“Promise me.”

“Yeah, I will — now, go.”

Outside I could hear the sounds of the children following Corrigan down the stairs, laughing. It was only when the apartment had fallen into full silence did I remember that he had taken the brown van with him.

At a rental joint down in Hunts Point, I used the very last of my tips to make a deposit on a van. “Air-conditioning,” said the clerk with an idiotic grin. It was like he was explaining science. He had his badge name pasted over his heart. “Don’t run it too hard, it’s brand new.”

It was one of those days when the summer seemed to have fallen into place, not too warm, cloudy, a tranquilized sun high in the sky. On the radio a DJ played Marvin Gaye. I maneuvered around a low-slung Cadillac and onto the highway.

Adelita was waiting by the ramp of the home. She had brought her children to work — two dark beauties. The younger one tugged at her uniform and Adelita went down to eye level with her, kissed the child’s eyelids. Adelita’s hair was tied back with a long colorful scarf and her face shone.

I understood perfectly, then, what Corrigan knew: she had an interior order, and for all her toughness there was a beauty that rose easily to the surface.

She smiled at the idea that we should try the beach. She said it was ambitious but impossible — no insurance, and it was against the rules. Her kids screamed beside her, tugged on her uniform, grabbed her wrist. “No, m’ijo,” she said sharply to her son, and we went through the routine of loading all the wheelchairs and jamming the kids between the seats. Litter was pinned against the railings of the park. We pulled the van in under the shade of a building. “Oh, what the hell,” said Adelita. She slid across into the driver’s seat. I rounded the back of the van. Albee was looking out at me, and he mouthed a word with a grin. No need to ask. Adelita beeped the horn and pulled the van out into a light summer traffic. The children cheered as we merged onto the highway. In the distance, Manhattan was like something made out of play boxes.

We found ourselves snared in the Long Island traffic. Songs came from the back, the old folk teaching the kids bits and pieces of songs they couldn’t really conjure. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” “When the Saints Go Marching In.” “You Should Never Shove Your Granny off the Bus.”

At the beach, Adelita’s kids tore down to the waterfront while we lined the wheelchairs up in the shade of the van. The van shadow grew smaller as the sun arced. Albee dropped the suspenders from his shirt and opened up his shirt buttons. His arms and neck were extraordinarily tanned but beneath the shirt his skin was translucent white. It was like watching a sculpture of two different colors, as if he were designing his body for a game of chess. “Your brother likes those hookers, huh?” he said. “You ask me, they’re a bunch of rip-off artists.” He said nothing more, just stared out at the sea.

Sheila sat with her eyes closed, smiling, her straw hat tilted down over her eyes. An old Italian whose name I didn’t know — a dapper man in perfectly pressed trousers — dented and redented his hat upon his knee and sighed. Shoes were taken off. Ankles exposed. The waves crashed along the shore and the day slipped from us, sand between our fingers.

Radios, beach umbrellas, the burn of salt air.

Adelita walked down to the waterfront, where her children were kicking happily in the low surf. She drew attention like a draft of wind. Men watched her wherever she went, the slender curve of her body against the white uniform. She sat on the sand beside me with her knees pressed against her breasts. She shifted and her skirt rose slightly: a red welt on the ankle near where her tattoo was.

“Thanks for renting the van.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“You didn’t have to do it.”

“No big deal.”

“It runs in the family?”

“Corrigan’s going to pay me back,” I said.

A bridge lay between us, composed almost entirely of my brother. She shaded her dark eyes and looked down towards the water, as if Corrigan might have been in the surf alongside her children, not in some dark courthouse arguing a series of hopeless causes.

“He will be down there for days, trying to get them out,” she said. “It’s happened before. Sometimes I think they would be better off if they learned their lesson. People get locked up for less.”

I was warming up to her, but wanted to push her, to see how far she’d go for him.

“Then he’d have nowhere to go, would he?” I asked. “At night. Nowhere to work.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“He’d have to go to you, then, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, maybe,” she said, and a little shadow of anger went across her face. “Why you ask me this?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said.

“Just don’t string him along.”

“I’m not stringing him along,” she said. “Why would I want to, as you say, string him along? ¿Por qué? Me dice que eso.”

Her accent had sharpened: the Spanish had an edge to it. She let the sand drift between her fingers and looked at me like it was the first time she’d seen me, but the silence calmed her and finally she said: “I don’t really know what to do. God is cruel, no?”

“Corrigan’s one is, that’s for sure. I don’t know about yours.”

“Mine is right beside his.”

The kids were throwing a frisbee at each other in the surf. They leaped at the flying disc and landed in the water and splashed.

“I’m terrified, you know,” she said. “I like him so much. Too much. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do, you understand? And I don’t want to stand in his way.”

“I know what I’d do. If I were him.”

“But you’re not, are you?” she said.

She turned away and whistled at the children and they came trudging up the sand. Their bodies were brown and supple. Adelita pulled Eliana close and softly blew sand off her ear. Somehow, for whatever reason, I could see Corrigan in both of them. It was like he had already entered them by osmosis. Jacobo climbed in her lap too. Adelita nipped his ear with her teeth and he squealed in delight.

She had safely surrounded herself with the children and I wondered if it was the same thing she did with Corrigan, reeling him in close enough and then shielding herself, gathering the many and making it too much. For a moment I hated her and the complications that she had brought to my brother’s life, and I felt a strange fondness for the hookers who had taken him away, to some police station, down to the very dregs, some terrible cell with iron bars and stale bread and filthy toilets. Maybe he was even in the cells alongside them. Maybe he got himself arrested just so he could be near them. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

He was at the origin of things and I now had a meaning for my brother — he was a crack of light under the door, and yet the door was shut to him. Only bits and pieces of him would leak out and he would end up barricaded behind that which he had penetrated. Maybe it was entirely his own fault. Maybe he welcomed the complications: he had created them purely because he needed them to survive.

I knew then that it would only end badly, her and Corrigan, these children. Someone or other was going to get torn asunder. And yet why shouldn’t they fall in love, if even just for a short while? Why shouldn’t Corrigan live his life in the body that was hurting him, giving up in places? Why shouldn’t he have a moment of release from this God of his? It was a torture shop for him, worrying about the world, having to deal with intricacies when what he really wanted was to be ordinary and do the simple thing.

Yet nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. Poverty, chastity, obedience — he had spent his life in fealty to them, but was unarmed when they turned against him.

I watched Adelita as she loosened an elastic band from her daughter’s hair. She tapped her on the bottom and sent her along the beach. The waves broke far out.

“What did your husband do?” I asked.

“He was in the army.”

“Do you miss him?”

She stared at me.

“Time doesn’t cure everything,” she said, looking away along the strand, “but it cures a lot. I live here now. This is my place. I won’t go back. If that’s what you’re asking me, I won’t go back.”

It was a look that suggested she was part of a mystery she wouldn’t let go of. He was hers now. She had made her declaration. There could indeed be no going back. I recalled Corrigan when he was a boy, when everything was pure and definite, when he walked along the strand in Dublin, marveling at the roughness of a shell, or the noise of a low-flying plane, or the eave of a church, the bits and pieces of what he thought was assured around him, written in the inside of that cigarette box.

OUR MOTHER USED to like to use a gambit in the telling of her stories: “Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn’t have been there, and if I had been there, I could not be here, but I am here, and I wasn’t there, but I’ll tell you anyway: Once upon a time and long ago …” whereupon she would launch into a story of her own creation, fables that sent my brother and me to different places, and we would wake in the morning wondering if we had dreamed different parts of the same dream, or if we had duplicated each other, or if in some strange world our dreams had overlapped and switched places with each other, something I would have done easily after I heard about Corrigan’s smash into the guardrail: Teach me, brother, how to live.

We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don’t attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it’s chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

Yet the plain fact of the matter is that it happened and there was nothing we could do to stop it — Corrigan at the wheel of the van, having spent all day down in the Tombs and the courtrooms of lower Manhattan, driving north up along the FDR, with Jazzlyn beside him in the passenger seat, her yellow high heels and her neon swimsuit, her choker tight around her neck, and Tillie had been locked away on a robbery charge, she had taken the rap, and my brother was giving Jazzlyn a lift back to her kids, who were more than keyrings, more than a flip in the air, and they were going fast along the East River, hemmed in by the buildings and the shadows, when Corrigan went to change lanes, maybe he hit the indicator, maybe he didn’t, maybe he was dizzy or tired or out of sorts, maybe he’d gotten some medicine that slowed him or fogged his vision, maybe he tapped the brake, maybe he cut it too hard, maybe he was gently humming a bit of a tune, who knows, but it was said that he was clipped in the rear by a fancy car, some old antique, nobody saw the driver, a gold vehicle going about its everyday applause of itself, it caught the back end of his van, nudged it slightly, but it sent Corrigan into a spin across all three lanes, like some big brown dancing thing, elegant for a split second, and I think now of Corrigan gripping the steering wheel, frightened, his eyes large and tender, while Jazzlyn beside him screamed, and her body tightened, her neck tensed, it all flashing in front of her — her short vicious life — and the van skidded on the dry roadway, hit a car, hit a newspaper truck, and then smashed headlong into the guardrail at the edge of the highway, and Jazzlyn went head-first through the windshield, no safety belt, a body already on the way to heaven, and Corrigan was smashed back by the steering wheel, which caught his chest and shattered his breastbone, his head rebounding off the spidery glass, bloody, and then he was whipped back into the seat with such force that the metal frame of the seat shattered, a thousand pounds of moving steel, the van still spinning from one side of the road to the other, and Jazzlyn’s body, only barely dressed, made a flying arc through the air, fifty or sixty miles per hour, and she smashed in a crumpled heap by the guardrail, one foot bent in the air as if stepping upwards, or wanting to step upwards, and the only thing of hers they found later in the van was a yellow stiletto, with a Bible sitting canted right beside it, having fallen out of the glove compartment, one on top of the other and both of them littered with glass, and Corrigan, still breathing, was bounced around and smashed sideways so that he finished up with his body twisted down in the dark well by the accelerator and the brake, and the engine whirled as if it still wanted to go fast and be stopped at the same time, all of Corrigan’s weight on both of the pedals.

They were sure he was dead at first, and he was loaded in a meat wagon with Jazzlyn. A cough of blood alerted a paramedic. He was taken to a hospital on the East Side.

Who knows where we were, driving back, in another part of the city, on a ramp, in a traffic jam, at a toll booth — does it matter? There was a little bubble of blood at my brother’s mouth. We drove on, singing quietly, while the kids in the back seats dozed. Albee had solved a problem for himself. He called it a mutual checkmate. My brother was scooped into an ambulance. There was nothing we could have done to save him. No words that would have brought him back. It had been a summer of sirens. His was another. The lights spun. They took him to Metropolitan Hospital, the emergency room. Sprinted him down through the pale-green corridors. Blood on the floor behind them. Two thin tracks from the back trolley wheels. Mayhem all around. I dropped Adelita and her children outside the tiny clapboard house where they lived. She turned and looked over her shoulder at me, waved. She smiled. She was his. She would suit him. She was all right. He would find his God with her. My brother was wheeled into the triage room. Shouts and whispers. An oxygen mask over his face. Chest ripped open. A collapsed lung. One-inch tubes inserted to keep him breathing. A nurse with a manual blood-pressure cuff. I sat at the wheel of the van and watched as the lights went on in Adelita’s house. I saw her shape against the light curtains until heavier ones were drawn across. I started the engine. They held him in traction with counterweights above the bed. A single breathing machine by his bed. The floor so skiddy with blood that the interns had to wipe their feet.

I drove on, oblivious. The Bronx streets were potholed. The orange and gray of arson. Some kids were dancing on the corners. Their bodies in flux. Like they had discovered something entirely new about themselves, shaking it through like a sort of faith. They cleared the room while they took X-rays. I pulled in under the bridge where I had spent most of my summer. A few girls were scattered around that night — the ones who had missed the raid. Some swallows scissored out from underneath the rafters. Seeding the sky. They didn’t call out to me. My brother, in Metropolitan Hospital, still breathing. I was supposed to work in Queens, but I crossed the road instead. I had no idea what was happening. The blood swelling in his lungs. Towards the tiny bar. The jukebox blared. The Four Tops. Intravenous lines. Martha and the Vandellas. Oxygen masks. Jimi Hendrix. The doctors did not wear gloves. They stabilized him. Gave him a shot of morphine. Shot it right into his muscle. Wondered about the bruises on the inside of his arm. Took him for a junkie at first. The word was he’d come in with a dead hooker. They found a religious medal in the pocket of his pants. I left the bar and crossed the late-night boulevard, half drunk.

A woman called out to me. It wasn’t Tillie. I didn’t turn. Darkness. In the courtyard some kids were high and playing basketball without a ball. Everyone working towards repair. The single lights of the heart machine beeping. A nurse leaned into him. He was whispering something. What last words? Make this world dark. Release me. Give me love, Lord, but not just yet. They lifted his mask. I got to the fifth floor of the projects. The stairs exhausted me. Corrigan lay in the hospital room, in the cramped space of his own prayer. I leaned against the apartment door. Someone had tried to pry open the gold lock on the telephone. Some books lay scattered on the floor. There was nothing to take. Perhaps he drifted in and out, in and out, in and out. Tests going to see how much blood he had lost. In and out. In and out. The knock came on the door at two in the morning. Not many knocked. I shouted for them to come in. She pushed the door slowly. My brother’s heart machine at a slow canter. In and out. She held a tube of lipstick. That I recall. Not a girl I knew. Jazzlyn has been in a crash, she said. Maybe her friend. Not a hooker. Almost casually. With half a shrug. The lipstick going across her mouth. A vivid red slash. My brother’s heart machine blipping. The line like water. Not returning to any original place. I burst out through the door. Through the graffiti. The city wore it now, the swirls, the whorls. Fumes of the fresh.

I stopped at Adelita’s house. Oh, Jesus, she said. The shock in her eyes. She pulled a jacket over her nightgown. I’m bringing my kids, she said. She bundled them into my arms. The taxi sped, flashing its lights. At the hospital, her children sat in the waiting room. Drawing with crayons. On newspaper. We ran to find Corrigan. Oh, she said. Oh. Oh, God. Doors swinging open everywhere. Closing again. The lights fluorescent above us. Corrigan lay in a small monkish cell. A doctor closed the door on us. I’m a nurse, said Adelita. Please, please, let me see him, I have to see him. The doctor turned with a shrug. Oh, God. Oh. We pulled two very simple wooden chairs up by his bed. Teach me who I might be. Teach me what I can become. Teach me.

The doctor came in, clipboard to his chest. He spoke, quietly, of internal injuries. A whole new language of trauma. The electrocardiogram beeped. Adelita leaned down to him. He was saying something in his morphine haze. He had seen something beautiful, he whispered. She kissed his brow. Her hand on his wrist. Heart monitor flickering. What’s he saying? I asked her. Outside, the clack of wheels down the corridor. The screams. The sobs. The odd laughter of interns. Corrigan whispered something to her again, the blood bubbling at his mouth. I touched her forearm. What’s he saying? Nonsense, she said, he’s talking nonsense. He’s hallucinating. Her ear to his mouth now. Does he want a priest? Is that what he wants? She turned to me. He says he saw something beautiful. Does he want a priest? I shouted. Corrigan was lifting his head slightly again. Adelita leaned down to him. Her reigning calmness. She was softly crying. Oh, she said, his forehead’s cold. His forehead’s very cold.

MIRÓ, MIRÓ, ON THE WALL

FROM OUTSIDE, THE SOUNDS OF PARK AVENUE. Quiet. Ordered. Controlled. Still, the nerves jangle in her. Soon she will receive the women. The prospect ties a small knot at the base of her spine. She brings her hands to her elbows, hugs her forearms. The wind ruffles the light curtains at the window. Alençon lace. Handmade, tatted, with silk trimmings. Never much for French lace. She would have preferred an ordinary fabric, a light voile. The lace was Solomon’s idea, long ago. The stuff of marriage. The good glue. He brought her breakfast this morning, on the three-handled tray. Croissant, lightly glazed. Chamomile tea. A little slice of lemon on the side. He even lay down on the bed in his suit and touched her hair. Kissed her before he left. Solomon, wise Solomon, briefcase in hand, off downtown. The slight waddle in his step. The clack of his polished shoes on the marble floor. His low-growled good-bye. Not mean, just throaty. Sometimes it strikes her — there is my husband. There he goes. Same way he’s been going for thirty-one years. And then a sort of silence interrupted. The drifting sounds, the snap of the lock, the dim bell, the elevator boy—G’morning Mr. Soderberg! — the whine of the door, the clank of machinery, the soft murmur of descent, the clanging stop at the lobby below, the roundelay of the cables rising.

She pulls the curtains back and peeps out the window once more, catches sight of the flap end of Solomon’s gray suit as he disappears into a taxi. The little bald head dips. The slam of yellow. Into the traffic and away.

He does not even know about the visitors — she will tell him sometime, but not yet, no harm. Perhaps this evening. At dinner. Candle and wine. Guess what, Sol. As he settles in the chair, fork poised. Guess what. A slight sigh from him. Just tell me, Claire, honey — I’ve had a long day.

Nimble out of her nightdress. Her body in the full-length mirror. A little pale and puckered, but she can still stretch out of it. She yawns, hands high in the air. Tall, still thin, jet-black hair, a single streak of badger gray from the temple. Fifty-two years old. She passes a damp cloth over her hair and brushes it with a wooden comb. Turns her head sideways and presses the hair lengthwise against her palm. Tangled at the split ends. Time for a trim. She cleans out the comb and dumps the strands in the foot-flip garbage can. They say the hair of the dead still grows. Takes on a life of its own. Down there with all the other detritus, tissues, tubes of lipstick, toothpaste tops, allergy pills, eyeliner, heart medicine, youth, nail clippings, dental floss, aspirin, grief.

But how is it that the gray hairs are never the ones to come out? In her twenties she had hated the badger streak when it appeared overnight, dyed it, hid it, chopped it. Now it defines her, the elegant swift ray of gray, sideways from the temple.

A road in my hair. Do not overtake.

Things to do. Hurryhurry. Toilet. Toothbrush rub. A light swish of makeup. Some blush. A little eyeliner and a lipstick dab. Never one to fuss with makeup. At the dresser she pauses. Bra and panties in simple beige. Her favorite dress. Aqua and green silkscreen, with a shellfish motif. A-line. Sleeveless. Just above the knee. Bows on the slits. Zip behind. Fashionable and feminist at the same time. Not too fancy or showoffy, but contemporary, modest, good.

She hitches the hem a little higher. Extends her foot. Legs that glisten, said Solomon years ago. She told him once he made love like a hanged man, erect but dead. A joke she had heard at a Richard Pryor concert. She had sneaked in alone, using a friend’s press pass. A one-off. Found the concert neither too risqué nor boring. But Solomon pouted for a week — three days at the joke, four days because she went to the concert at all. Women’s lib, he said. Burn your bra, lose your marbles. Small, sweet man.

Devoted to good wine and martinis. The last little peninsula of hair on his head. Needs sunscreen in summertime. Freckles on his dome. Boyhood summers still around his eyes. When they met at Yale he had an overhang of hair, fair and thick over his eye. In Hartford as junior counsel he would walk along the narrow paths with Wallace Stevens, of all people, both men in sleeveless shirts. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. Home to her, they would make love on the four-poster bed. They lay on the sheets and he would try to recite poems in her ear. He could seldom recall the lines. Still, it was a sensual wonder, his lips against the tip of her ear, the side of her neck, down to her clavicle, the glow of enthusiasm about him. The bed broke one night from their hijinks. Nowadays it is not often, but often enough, and she still reaches up to hold the back of his hair. Not so woody anymore. The end of the stem where the fruit once was. The thugs in court are quiet until they’re sentenced, then the anvil comes down and they scream and shout and thrash, call him filthy names. She no longer goes downtown with him to the dark wood-paneled room to observe — why endure the abuse? Hey, Kojak! Who loves ya, baby? In chambers there is a photograph of her, beachside, with Joshua, just a boy, both leaning together, mother and son, heads touching, the dunes behind them endless and grassy.

She feels a little murmur at her ribcage, a swell of air. Joshua. Not a name for a boy in uniform.

The necklace with a phantom hand. Sometimes it happens. She gets a little rush of blood to the throat. A clawing at her windpipe. As if someone is squeezing her, a momentary restriction. She turns to the mirror, sideways, then front, sideways again. The amethyst? The bangles? The small leather necklace Joshua gave her when he was nine? He had drawn a red ribbon on the brown wrapping. In crayon. Here, Mommy, he said, then ran away and hid. She wore it for years, around the house mostly. Had to sew it back together twice. But not now, not today, no. She tucks it back in the drawer. Too much. A necklace is too dressy anyway. She dithers at her reflection. Oil crisis, hostage crisis, necklace crisis. I’d rather be deep-solving algorithms. That was her specialty. College days. One of only three women in the math department. She got mistaken for the secretary as she walked the corridors. Had to go along with eyes downcast. A woman of two shoes. Knew the floor very well. The intricacies of tile. Where the baseboards broke.

We find, as in old jewelry, the gone days of our lives.

Earrings, then? Earrings. A pair of tiny seashells bought in Mystic two summers ago. She slides the small silver bar into the piercing. Turns to the mirror. Odd to see the strain of her neck. Not mine. Not that neck. Fifty-two years in that same skin. She extends her chin and her skin tightens. Vain, but better. The earrings against her dress. Seashell with seashell. She sells. By the shore. She drops them in the jewelry box and scatter-searches through. Casts a look at the dresser clock.

Quick quick.

Almost time.

She has been to four houses over the past eight months. All of them simple, clean, ordinary, lovely. Staten Island, the Bronx, two on the Lower East Side. Never any fuss. Just a gathering of mothers. That’s all. But they were drop-jawed at her address when she finally told them. She had managed to avoid it for a while, but then they went to Gloria’s apartment in the Bronx. A row of projects. She had never seen anything like it before. Scorch marks on the doorways. The smell of boric acid in the hall. Needles in the elevator. She was terrified. She went up to the eleventh floor. A metal door with five locks. When she rapped, the door vibrated on its hinges. But inside the apartment sparkled. Two huge chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, cheap but charming. The light chased the place free of shadows. The other women were already there — they smiled at her from the deep, pouchy sofa. They air-kissed, all of them, and the morning drifted smoothly. They even forgot where they were. Gloria bustled around, changing coasters, swapping napkins, cracking the windows for smokers, then showed them her sons’ room. She had lost three boys, imagine — three! — poor Gloria. The photo albums were thick with memory: hairstyles, running meets, graduations. The baseball trophies were passed around the room. It was a lovely morning, all in all, and it drifted, drifted, drifted. And then the clock on top of the radiator clicked to noon and the talk came around to the next time. Well, Claire, you’re up next. She felt like her mouth was made of chalk. Almost swallowed it as she spoke. Like an apology. Looking at Gloria all the time. Well, I’m on Park at Seventy-sixth. Silence, then. You get the six. She had rehearsed that. And then she said: Train. And then: The subway. And then: Top floor. None of it came out right, how she said it, like the words didn’t quite fit on her tongue. You live on Park? said Jacqueline. Another silence. That’s nice, said Gloria, a dab of light on her lips where she licked them, as if there were something to be removed there. And Marcia, the designer from Staten Island, clapped her hands together. Tea with the Queen! she said, joking, no harm meant, really, but still it pulsed, a brief wound.

Claire had told them, at the first meeting, that she lived on the East Side, that was all, but they must have known, even though she wore long pants and sneakers, no jewelry at all, must have intuited anyway, that it was the Upper East Side, and then Janet, the blonde, leaned forward and piped up: Oh, we didn’t know you lived up there.

Up there. As if it were somewhere to climb. As if they would have to ascend to it. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

She had actually felt faint. Like there was air in the back of her legs. Like she might be trying to show off. Rubbing their noses in it. Her whole body swayed. She stammered. I grew up in Florida. It’s very small, really. The plumbing is shocking. The roof’s a mess. She was about to say that she didn’t have help — not servants, she would never have said servants—when Gloria, dearest Gloria, said: Hell’s bells, Park Avenue, I’ve only ever been there for Monopoly! And they had all laughed. Reared back and just flat-out laughed. It gave her a chance to sip water. Squeeze out a smile. Take a breath. They couldn’t wait. Park Avenue! Jeepers creepers, isn’t that the purple one? Well, it wasn’t the purple one. The purple one was Park Place, but Claire didn’t say a word, why show off? They left together, all except Gloria, of course. Gloria waved from the eleventh-floor window, her patterned dress against the window bars across her chest. She looked so lost and lovely up there. It was the time of the garbage strike. Rats out by the trash. Streetwalkers by the underpass. In hot pants and halters, even in the snow flurries. Sheltering from the cold. Running out to the trucks when they passed. Clouds of white breath coming from them. Terrible cartoon bubbles. Claire wanted to dash back upstairs and bring Gloria with her, take her away from the horrific mess. But there was no going back to the eleventh floor. What could she say? Come, Gloria, pass go, collect two hundred, get out of jail free.

They had walked to the subway in a close group, four white women, their handbags held just a little too tightly. Might have been mistaken for social workers. All of them neatly dressed, but not overdone. They waited for the train in a smiling silence. Janet nervously tapped her shoe. Marcia fixed her mascara in a small mirror. Jacqueline swept back her long red hair. The train came, a wash of color, big curvy whirls, and in they got. It was one of those carriages covered head to toe in graffiti. Even the windows were blotted out. Hardly a moving Picasso. They were the only white women in the car. Not that she minded getting the subway. She just wouldn’t tell them that it was only her second time. But nobody looked sideways at them, or said a rotten word. She got out at Sixty-eighth just so she could walk, get some air, be alone. She strolled up the avenue, wondering why she had ever gotten together with them in the first place. They were all so different, so little in common. But, still, she liked them all, she really did. Gloria especially. She had nothing against anyone — why would she? She hated that manner of talk. In Florida, her father had once said at dinner: I like Negroes, yessir, I think everyone should own one. She had stormed from the table and stayed in her room for two days. Her dinner was slid in under the door. Well, not slid under. Handed around the doorknob. Seventeen and about to go off to college. Tell Daddy I’m not coming out until he apologizes. And he did. Clomped up the curving staircase. Held her in his big round southern arms and called her modern.

Modern. Like a fixture. A painting. A Miró.

But it’s only an apartment anyway. An apartment. Nothing more. Silverware and china and windows and trim and kitchenware. Only that. Nothing else. Homespun. Ordinary enough. What more could it be? Nothing. Let me tell you, Gloria, the walls between us are quite thin. One cry and they all come tumbling down. Empty mail slots. Nobody writes to me. The co-op board is a nightmare. Pet hair in the laundry machines. Doorman downstairs in his white gloves and creased trousers and epaulets, but just a little secret between you and me: he doesn’t use deodorant.

A quick shiver splits through her: the doorman.

Wonder, will he question them too much? Who is it today? Melvyn, is it? The new one? Wednesday. Melvyn, yes. If he mistakes them for the help? If he shows them to the service elevator? Must call down and tell him. Earrings! Yes. Earrings. Quick now. In the bottom of the box, an old pair, simple silver studs, seldom worn. The bar a little rusty, but no matter. She wets each stem in her mouth. Catches sight of herself in the mirror again. The shell-patterned dress, the shoulder-length hair, the badger streak. She was mistaken once for the mother of a young intellectual seen on television, talking of photography, the moment of capture, the defiant art. She too had a badger streak. Photographs keep the dead alive, the girl had said. Not true. So much more than photographs. So much more.

Eyes a little glassy already. Not good. Buck up, Claire. She reaches for the tissues beyond the glass figurines on the dresser, dries her eyes. Runs to the inner hallway, picks up the ancient handset.

— Melvyn?

She buzzes again. Maybe outside smoking.

— Melvyn?!

— Yes, Mrs. Soderberg?

His voice calm, even. Welsh or Scottish — she’s never asked.

— I have some friends dining with me this morning.

— Yes, ma’am.

— I mean, they’re coming for breakfast.

— Yes, Mrs. Soderberg.

She runs her fingers along the dark wainscoting of the corridor. Dining? Did I really say dining? How could I say dining?

— You’ll make sure they’re welcome?

— Of course, ma’am.

— Four of them.

— Yes, Mrs. Soderberg.

Breathing into the handset. That fuzz of red mustache above his lip. Should have asked where he was from when he first started working. Rude not to.

— Anything else, ma’am?

Ruder to ask now.

— Melvyn? The correct elevator.

— Of course, ma’am.

— Thank you.

She leans her head against the cool of the wall. She shouldn’t have said anything at all about a correct or incorrect elevator. A bushe, Solomon would have said. Melvyn’ll be down there, paralyzed, and then he’ll put them in the wrong one. The elevator there to your right, ladies. In you go. She feels a flush of shame to her cheeks. But she used the word dining, didn’t she? He’ll hardly mistake that. Dining for breakfast. Oh, my.

The overexamined life, Claire, it’s not worth living.

She allows herself a smile and goes back along the corridor to the living room. Flowers in place. Sun bouncing off the white furniture. The Miró print above the couch. The ashtrays placed at strategic points. Hope they won’t smoke inside. Solomon hates smoking. But they all smoke, even her. It’s the smell that gets to him. The afterburn. Ah, well. Maybe she’ll join them anyway, puff away, that little chimney, that small holocaust. Terrible word. Never heard it as a child. She was raised Presbyterian. A small scandal when she married. Her father’s booming voice. He’s a what? A yoohoo? From New England? And poor Solomon, hands clasped behind his back, staring out the window, adjusting his tie, staying quiet, enduring the abuse. But they still took Joshua to Florida, to the shores of Lochloosa Lake, every summer. Walking through the mango groves, all three holding hands, Joshua in the middle, one two three weeeeee.

It was there in the mansion that Joshua learned to play the piano. Five years old. He sat on the wooden stool, slid his fingers up and down the keys. When they got back to the city they arranged lessons in the basement of the Whitney. Recitals in a bow tie. His little blue blazer with gold buttons. Hair parted to the left. He used to love to press the gold pedal with his foot. Said he wanted to drive the piano all the way home. Vroom vroom. They bought him a Steinway for his birthday and at the age of eight he was playing Chopin before dinnertime. Cocktails in hand, they settled on the couch and listened.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

She grabs her hidden cigarettes from under the lid of the piano chair and walks to the rear of the apartment, swings open the heavy back door. Used to be the maid’s entrance. Long ago, when there was such a thing: maids and entrances. Up the rear stairs. She is the only one in the building who ever uses the roof. Shoves open the fire door. No alarm. The blast of heat from the dark rooftop. The co-op board has been trying for years to put a deck up on the roof but Solomon complained. Doesn’t want footsteps above him. Nor smokers. A stickler for that. Hates the smell. Solomon. Good, sweet man. Even in his straitjacket.

She stands in the doorway and drags deep, tosses a little cloud of smoke to the sky. The benefit of a top-floor. She refuses to call it a penthouse. Something leering about that. Something glossy and magazine-y She has arranged a little row of flowerpots on the black tarmac of the roof, in the shade of the wall. More trouble than they’re worth sometimes, but she likes to greet them in the mornings. Floribundas and a couple of straggly hybrid teas.

She bends down to the row of pots. A little yellow spot on the leaves. Struggling through the summer. She taps the ash at her feet. A pleasant breeze from the east. The whiff of the river. The television suggested yesterday a slight chance of rain. No sign. A few clouds, that’s all. How is it they fill, the clouds? Such a small miracle, rain. It rains on the living and the dead, Mama, only the dead have better umbrellas. Perhaps we will drag our chairs up here, all four of us, no, five, and raise our faces to the sun. In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There’s the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

She pulls again on the cigarette and looks over the wall. A momentary vertigo. The creek of yellow taxis along the street, the crawl of green in the median of the avenue, the saplings just planted.

Nothing much happening on Park. Everyone gone to their summer homes. Solomon, dead against. City boy. Likes his late hours. Even in summertime. His kiss this morning made me feel good. And his cologne smell. Same as Joshua’s. Oh, the day Joshua first shaved! Oh, the day! Covered himself in foam. So very careful with the razor. Made an avenue through the cheek, but nicked himself on the neck. Tore off a tiny piece of his Daddy’s Wall Street Journal. Licked it and pasted it to the wound. The business page clotting his blood. Walked around with the paper on his neck for an hour. He had to wet it to get it off. She had stood at the bathroom door, smiling. My big tall boy, shaving. Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

No newspapers big enough to paste him back together in Saigon.

She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs — she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soliders. Lucky Strikes.

She spies a black woman on the corner, turning away. Tall and bosom-burdened. Wearing a flowery dress. Perhaps Gloria. But all alone. A housekeeper, probably. You never know. She would love to run downstairs and go to the corner and scoop her up, Gloria, her favorite of them all, gather her in her arms, bring her back, sit her down, make her coffee, talk and laugh and whisper and belong with her, just belong. That’s all she wants. Our little club. Our little interruption. Dearest Gloria. Up there in her high-rise every night and day. How in the world did she live in such a place? The chainlink fences. The whirling litter. The terrible stench. All those young girls outside selling their bodies. Looking like they would fall on their backs and use their spines as mattresses. And the fires in the sky — they should call it Dresden and be finished with it.

Perhaps she could hire Gloria. Bring her in. Odd jobs around the house. The bits and pieces. They could sit at the kitchen table together and while away the days, make a secret gin and tonic or two, and let the hours just drift, her and Gloria, at ease, at joy, yes, Gloria, in excelsis deo.

Down on the street, the woman turns the corner and away.

Claire stamps out the cigarette and totters back toward the roof door. A little dizzy. The world shifted sideways for an instant. Down the stairs, head spinning. Joshua never smoked. Maybe on his way to heaven he asked for one. Here’s my thumb and here’s my leg and here’s my throat and here’s my heart and here’s one lung and, hey, let’s bring them all together for a final Lucky Strike.

Back inside, through the maid’s entrance, she hears the clock in the living room striking time.

To the kitchen.

Woozy, now. Take a breath.

Who needs a master’s degree to boil water?

She steps unsurely along the corridor and back to the kitchen. Marble countertop, gold-handled cabinets, lots of white machinery. The others had made a rule early on in their coffee mornings: the visitors are the ones to bring the bagels, muffins, cheese Danish, fruit, cookies, crullers. The host makes the tea and coffee. A nice balance that way. She had thought about ordering a whole tray of goodies from William Green-berg’s up on Madison, rainbow cookies and pecan rings and challahs and croissants, but that would be oneupmanship, womanship, whatever.

She turns the flame under the water high. A little universe of bubble and burn. Good French roast. Instant satisfaction. Tell that to the Viet Cong.

A row of tea bags on the counter. Five saucers. Five cups. Five spoons.

Perhaps the cow-shaped creamer for a touch of humor. No, too much. Too whimsical. But can I not laugh in front of them? Didn’t Dr. Tonnemann tell me to laugh?

Go ahead, please, laugh.

Laugh, Claire. Let it out.

A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it’s a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option. I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing.

Yes, move wild laughter in the throat of death. A good doctor, yes. Could even quote Shakespeare. Move wild laughter indeed.

Joshua had written her a letter once about water buffalo. He was amazed by them. Their beauty. He saw a squadron once tossing grenades by a river. All merrily laughing. Throat of death indeed. When the water buffalo were finished, he said, the soldiers shot the brightly colored birds out of the trees. Imagine if they had to count that too. You can count the dead, but you can’t count the cost. We’ve got no math for heaven, Mama. Everything else can be measured. She had turned that letter over and over in her mind. A logic in every living thing. The patterns you get in flowers. In people. In water buffalo. In the air. He hated the war but got asked to go while out in California at PARC. Got asked politely, of all things. The president wanted to know how many dead there were. Lyndon B. couldn’t figure it out. Every day the advisers came to him with their facts and figures and laid them down on his desk. Army dead. Navy dead. Marine dead. Civilian dead. Diplomatic dead. MASH dead. Delta dead. Seabee dead. National Guard dead. But the numbers didn’t compute. Someone was messing up somewhere. All the reporters and TV channels were breathing down LBJ’s neck and he needed the proper information. He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn’t count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn’t figure out how many crosses to go into the ground. A crack computer unit. The Geek Squad. Quick initiation. Serve your nation. Get your hair cut. My country, ’tis of thee, we’ve got technology. Only the best and brighest came. From Stanford. MIT. University of Utah. U.C. Davis. His friends from PARC. The ones who were developing the dream of the ARPANET. Kitted up and sent off. White men, all. There were other systems also — how much sugar was used, how much oil, how many bullets, how many cigarettes, how many cans of corned beef, but Joshua’s beat was the dead.

Serve your country, Josh. If you can write a program that plays chess you surely can tell us how many are falling to the gooks. Give me all your ones and zeros, heroes. Show us how to count the fragged.

They could hardly find uniforms small enough at the shoulders or long enough at the legs for him. He stepped onto the plane, trouser legs at half-mast. I should have known then. Should have just called him back. But on he went. The plane took off and went small against the sky. A barracks was already built out in Tan Son Nhut. At the air force base. A small brass band was there to meet them, he said. Cinder block and desks of pressure-treated wood. A room full of PDP-10’s and Honeywells. They walked inside and the place hummed for them. A candy store, he said.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

But he stood, buzz-haired and red-cheeked, in front of her, and she said nothing.

Say something to him. That shine to his cheeks. Say something. Tell him. Tell him. But she just smiled. Solomon pressed a Star of David into his hands and turned away and said: Be brave. She kissed his forehead good-bye. She noticed the way the back of his uniform creased and un-creased in perfect symmetry, and she knew, she just knew, the moment she saw him go, that she was seeing him go forever. Hello, Central, give me heaven, I think my Joshua is there.

Can’t indulge this heartsickness. No. Spoon the coffee out and line the tea bags up. Imagine endurance. There’s a logic to that. Imagine and hang on.

How is it being dead, son, and would I like it?

Oh. The buzzer. Oh. Oh. Spoon clang to the floor. Oh. Stepping quickly along the corridor. Return and pick up the spoon. Everything neat now, neat, yes. Give me back his living body, Mr. Nixon, and we will not quarrel. Take this corpse, all fifty-two years of it, swap it; I won’t regret it, I won’t complain. Just give him back to us all sewn up and handsome.

Control yourself, Claire.

I shall not fall apart.

No.

Quick now. Doorwise. At the buzzer. Her mind, she knows, needs a quick dip in water. A momentary cold swell, like those little buckets outside a Catholic church. Dip in and be healed.

— Yes?

— Your visitors, Mrs. Soderberg.

— Oh. Yes. Send them up.

Too harsh? Too quick? Should have said, Wonderful. Great. With a big swell to my voice. Instead of Send them up. Not even please. Like hired hands. Plumbers, decorators, soldiers. She engages the button to listen in. Curious thing, the old intercoms. Faint static and buzz and some laughter and door close.

— The elevator’s straight ahead, ladies.

Well, at least there’s that. At least he didn’t show them to the service elevator. At least they’re in the warm mahogany box. No, not that. The elevator.

The faint mumble of voices. All of them together. They must have met up beforehand. Prearranged. Hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t let it cross my mind. Wish they hadn’t.

Talked about me, maybe. Needs a doctor. Awful gray streak in her hair. Husband’s a judge. Wears implausible sneakers. Struggles to smile. Lives in a penthouse but calls it upstairs. Is terribly nervous. Thinks she’s one of the gals, but she’s really a snob. Is likely to break down.

How to greet? Handshake? Air kiss? Smile? The first time around they had hugged good-bye, all of them, in Staten Island, at the doorstep, with the taxi beeping, her eyes streaked with tears, arms around one another, all of us happy, at Marcia’s house, when Janet pointed to a yellow balloon caught in the treetops: Oh, let’s meet again soon! And Gloria had squeezed her arm. They had touched cheeks. Our boys, you think they knew each other, Claire? You think they were friends?

War. The disgusting proximity of it. Its body odor. Its breath on her neck all this time, two years now since pullout, three, two a half, five million, does it matter? Nothing’s over. The cream becomes the milk. The first star at morning is the last one at night. Did she think they were friends? Well, they could have been, Gloria, they certainly could have been.

Vietnam was as good a place to start as any. Yes indeed. Dr. King had a dream and it would not be gassed on the shores of Saigon. When the good doctor was shot, she sent a thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills to his church in Atlanta. Her father raved and roared. Called it guilt money. She didn’t care. There was plenty to be guilty for. She was modern, yes. She should have sent her whole inheritance. I like fathers; I just think everyone should disown one. Like it or not, Daddy, it goes to Dr. King, and what do you think of your niggers and kikes now?

Oh. The mezuzah on the door. Oh. Forgot about that. She touches it, stands in front of it. Just tall enough to obscure it. The top of her head. The clang of the elevator. Why the shame? But it’s not shame, not really, is it? What is there possibly to be ashamed of? Solomon insisted on it years ago. That’s all. For his own mother. To make her comfortable when she visited. To make her happy. And what’s wrong with that? It did make her happy. Isn’t that enough? I have nothing to apologize for. I have scuttled around all morning with my lips puckered, afraid to breathe. Swallowed a bag of air. I should have been a pair of ragged claws. What is it the young ones say? Get a grip. Hang on. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

What was it I never said to Josh?

She can see the numbers as they rise. A bustle from the elevator shaft and a loud chatter. They are comfortable already. Wish I had met them earlier, in some coffee shop. But here they are, here they come.

What was it?

— Hello, she says, hello hello hello, Marcia! Jacqueline! Look at you! Come in, oh, I love your shoes, Janet, this way, this way. Gloria! Oh, hi, oh, look, please, come in, it’s lovely to see you.

The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.

IT WAS AS IF SHE could travel through the electricity to see him. She could look at any electronic thing — television, radio, Solomon’s shaver — and could find herself there, journeying along the raw voltage. Most of all it was the fridge. She would wake in the middle of the night and wander through the apartment into the kitchen and lean against the freezer. She would open the door then and blast herself with cool. What she liked about it was that the light wouldn’t come on. She could go from warm to cold in an instant and she could remain in the darkness and not wake Solomon. No sound, just a soft plop of the rubber-edged opening, and then a rush of cold over her body, and she could gaze past the wires, the cathodes, the transistors, the hand-set switches, through the ether, and she could see him, all of a sudden she was in the very same room, right beside him, she could reach out and lay her hand on his forearm, console him, where he sat under the fluorescents, amid the long rows of desks and mattresses, working.

She had inklings, intuitions about how it all worked. She was no slouch. She had her degree. But how was it, she wondered, that machines could count the dead better than humans? How was it that the punch cards knew? How did a series of tubes and wires know the difference between the living and the dead?

He sent her letters. He called himself a hacker. It felt like a word to chop down trees. But all it meant was that he programmed the machines. He created the language that tripped the switches. A thousand microscopic gates fell in an instant. She thought of it as opening up a field. One gate led to another, and another, over the hill, and soon he was on a river and away, rafting down the wires. He said that just being at a computer made him so giddy that he felt he was sliding down the banisters, and she wondered what banisters he meant, because there had been no banisters in his childhood, but she accepted it, and she saw him there, in the hills around Saigon, sliding down the banisters toward a concrete basement in a cinder-block building, stepping to his desk, punching the buttons alive. The crisp cursor flicking in front of his eyes. The furrow of his brow. His fierce scan through the printouts. His laughter at a joke as it rippled along the row of desks. The breakthroughs. The breakdowns. The plates of food on the floor. The Rolaids strewn on the desks. The web of wires. The whirl of switches. The purr of fans. It got so hot in the room, he said, that they would have to step out every half an hour. Outside, they kept a water hose to cool down. Back at their consoles they would be dry within seconds. They called each other Mac. Mac this, Mac that. Their favorite word. Machine-aided cognition. Men against computers. Multi-access cognition. Maniacs and clowns. Must ask coyly. Might add colostomy bag.

Everything they did centered around their machines, he said. They divided, linked, nested, chained, deleted. Rerouted switches. Cracked passwords. Changed memory boards. It was a sort of black magic. They knew the inner mysteries of each and every computer. They stayed inside all day. Working with hunches, failures, intangibles. If they needed sleep they just slid in under the desk, too tired to dream.

The Death Hack was his core project. He had to go through the files, key all the names in, add the men up as numbers. Group them, stamp them, file them, code them, write them. The problem was not even so much the dying as the overlap in the deaths. The ones who had the same names — the Smiths and the Rodriguezes and the Sullivans and the Johnsons. Fathers with the same names as their sons. The dead uncles with the exact initials as the dead nephews. The ones who went AWOL. The split missions. The misreported. The mistakes. The secret squadrons, the flotillas, the task forces, the reconnaissance crews. The ones who got married in little rural villages. The ones who stayed deep in the jungle. Who could account for them? But he fit them into his program as best he could. Created a space for them so that they became a sort of alive. He put his head down, worked it, asked no questions. It was, he said, the patriotic thing to do. What he liked most was the moment of creation, when he solved what nobody else could solve, when the solution was clean and elegant.

It was easy enough to write a program that would collate the dead, he said, but what he really wanted was to write a program that could make sense of the dying. That was the deep future. One day the computers would bring all the great minds together. Thirty, forty, a hundred years from now. If we don’t blow one another asunder first.

We’re at the cusp of human knowledge here, Mama, he said. He wrote about the dream of widely separated facilities sharing special resources. Of messages that were able to go back and forth. Of remote systems that could be manipulated through the telephone lines. Of computers that were capable of repairing their own malfunctions. Of protocols and bulk erasers and teletype printouts and memory and RAM and maxing out the Honeywell and fooling around on the prototype Alto that had been sent across. He described circuit boards like some people described icicles. He said that the Eskimos had sixty-four words for snow but that didn’t surprise him; he thought they should have more — why not? It was about the deepest sort of beauty, the product of the human mind being stamped onto a piece of silicon that you might one day cart around in your briefcase. A poem in a rock. A theorem in a slice of stone.

The programmers were the artisans of the future. Human knowledge is power, Mama. The only limits are in our minds. He said there was nothing that a computer couldn’t do, even the most complicated problems, find the value of pi, the root of all language, the most distant star. It was crazy how small the world truly was. It was a matter of opening up to it. What you want is your machine to speak back to you, Mama. It almost has to be human. You have to think of it that way. It’s like a Walt Whitman poem: you can put in it everything you want.

She sat by the fridge and read his letters and smoothed his hair and told him it was time to go to sleep, that he should eat something, he should change his clothes, that he really needed to look after himself. She wanted to make sure he wasn’t fading away. Once, during a blackout, she sat against the kitchen cabinets and wept: she couldn’t get through to him. She stuck a lead pencil into the wall socket and waited. When the electricity came on the pencil jumped in her fingers. She was aware of how it might look — a woman at a fridge, opening and closing the door — but it was a solace, and not something Solomon would suspect. She could pretend that she was cooking, or getting a glass of milk, or waiting for meat to thaw.

Solomon didn’t talk about the war. Silence was his way out. He chatted instead about his court cases, the insane litany of the city, the murders, the rapes, the cons, the hustles, the stabbings, the robberies. But not the war. Only the protesters came in his range — he thought them weak, guileless, cowardly. Gave them the stiffest sentences he could. Six months for pouring blood on the draft board files. Eight months for smashing the windows of the Times Square recruiting office. She wanted to march and protest, to meet all the hippies and yippies and skippies in Union Square, Tompkins Square Park, to carry a banner for the Catonsville Nine. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. We must support our boy, said Solomon. Our sweet little tow-headed one. Who slept between us not so many years ago, curled against us. Who played train sets on the Oriental rug. Who outgrew his blue blazer. Who knew fish fork, salad fork, dinner fork, the broad tines of life.

And then, from nowhere, blackout, all blackout, ever blackout.

Johsua became code.

Written into his own numbers.

She lay two months in bed. Hardly moving. Solomon wanted to hire a nurse, but she refused. She said she would snap out of it. But the word was not snap, more like slide. A word Joshua had liked. I will slide out. She began to walk around the house, through the dining room, around the living room, past the breakfast nook, toward the fridge again. She put Joshua’s photo front and center. She leaned against it and talked to him. And the fridge collected things that he might have liked. Simple things. She cut them out and pasted them on. Computer articles. Photos of circuit boards. A picture of a new building at PARC. A newspaper article about a graphics hack. The menu from Ray’s Famous. An ad from The Village Voice.

It struck her that her fridge was beginning to look hairy. The phrase almost made her smile. My hairy fridge.

And then one evening, the little clips fluttered to the floor and she leaned down and read it again. LOOKING FOR MOTHERS TO TALK TO. NAM VETS. P.O. BOX 667. She had never really thought of him as a veteran, or having been in Vietnam — he was a computer operator, had gone to Asia. But the ad made her fingers tingle. She brought it to the kitchen counter, sat down, quickly wrote a reply in pencil, then went over it with ink, stole quietly out the door, slunk into the elevator. She could have mailed it right downstairs in the lobby, but she didn’t want to; she ran outside to Park Avenue, middle of the night, in a snowstorm, the doorman stunned to see her going out the door in her nightdress, slippers on: Mrs. Soderberg, are you okay?

Can’t stop now. Letter in hand. Mother seeks bones of son. Found in blown-up café in foreign land.

She ran down to Lexington to the mailbox on Seventy-fourth. The white breath leaving her for the air. Toes wet with snow. She knew that if she didn’t send it right then, she never would. The doorman nodded shyly when she came back in, cast a quick flick of his eyes to her breasts. ’Night, Mrs. Soderberg, he said. Oh, she wanted to kiss him right then and there. On the forehead. A thanks for peeping. It made her feel good. Thrilled her, to be honest. The cloth stretched tight across her chest, the outline of everything showing, the benefit of cold, a single snowflake melting down along the very front of her throat. Any other time she would have thought it crass. But there, in her nightdress, in the warmth of the elevator, she was thankful. There was a lightness about her that night. She cleaned the front of the fridge of everything but his photograph. Made it simple again. Gave it a haircut of sorts. Thought of her letter winding its way through the postal system, eventually to find another like her. Who would it be, and what would they look like, and would they be tender, and would they be kind? That’s all she wanted: for them to be kind.

That night she climbed in and snuggled against the soft warmth of Solomon. Touched him on the low of the back. Sol. Solly. Solhoney. Wake up. He turned to say that her feet were cold. Warm me up then, Solly. He propped himself on his elbow and leaned across.

And afterward she went to sleep. For the first time in ages. She had almost forgotten what it meant to wake. She opened her eyes beside him in the morning and nudged him again, ran her fingers on the curve of his shoulder. Geez, he said with a grin, what is it, honey, my birthday?

IN THEY COME. Cautiously dressed, all except Jacqueline, who has a deep plunge to her Laura Ashley print. Marcia just behind her, all flushed and feathery. Like she’s just flown through a window and needs to bash at the walls. Not even a glance at the mezuzah on the door. Thank heavens for that. No explanations. Janet, with her head down. A touch from Gloria on the wrist and a deep wide smile. They rush along the corridor with Marcia at the front now, a bakery box in her hand. Past Joshua’s door. Past her own bedroom. Past the painting of Solomon on the wall, eighteen years younger and a good deal more hair. Into the living room. Straight to the couch.

Marcia places the box on the coffee table, sits back against the deep white cushions and fans herself. Maybe it’s just hot flashes, or perhaps she got caught up in the subway. But, no, she’s all aflutter, and the others know something is up.

At least, she thinks, they didn’t meet beforehand. Didn’t come up with a Park Avenue strategy. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred. She pulls up the ottoman and circles the chairs, guides Gloria onto the sofa by the arm. Gloria, with flowers in her hand, still clutching them. It would be rude to take them, but they’ll need some water soon.

— Oh, God, says Marcia.

— Are you all right?

— What is it?

Gathered around her as if at a campfire, all of them, leaning in, eager for outrage.

— You won’t believe it.

Marcia’s face is flushed red, with little beads of sweat at her brow. She breathes as if all the oxygen is gone, as if they are at some great height. Ropes and helmets and carabiners indeed.

— What? says Janet.

— Did someone hurt you?

Marcia’s chest yammering up and down, a gold-plated bear falling against her chestbone.

— Man in the air!

— What?

— A man in the air, walking.

— Mercy, says Gloria.

Claire considers a moment the notion that Marcia might be a tad drunk, or even high — who knows these days; she might have munched on some mushrooms for breakfast, or downed a little vodka — but she looks perfectly sober, if a little flushed, no redness to the eyes, no slurring.

— Downtown.

Drunk or not, she is thankful for Marcia and this little blip of hysteria. It has guided them all so quickly into the apartment. A minimum of fuss. No need for all those niceties, the oohs and the ahhs, the embarrassments, what fabulous curtains, and isn’t that a nice fireplace, and yes, I’ll have two sugars with mine, and oh, it’s very cozy, really, Claire, very cozy, what a lovely vase, and, Lord above, is that your husband on the wall? All the planning in the world could not have ushered them in so smoothly, without a single hiccup.

She should do something, she knows, to let them know they’re welcome. Hand Marcia a handkerchief. Get her a tall, cool glass of water. Take the flowers from Gloria’s hands. Open up the bakery boxes and spread them out. Compliment the bagels. Something, anything. But they are stuck on the swell of Marcia now, watching the rise and fall of her chest.

— Glass of water, Marcia?

— Yes, please. Oh, yes.

— A man where?

The voices fading. Silly of me. Into the kitchen, quickquick. She doesn’t want to miss a word. The soft murmur of conversation from the living room. To the freezer. The ice tray. Should have put in fresh trays this morning. Never thought of it. She bangs them on the marble counter. Three, four cubes. A few shards spread out across the counter. Old ice. Hazy at the center. One cube slips across the counter as if to release itself, falls on the floor. Should I? She glances toward the living room and picks the cube off the floor. In one smooth motion she’s across to the sink. Allows the tap to run a second, washes the cube, fills the glass. She should slice some lemon and would in normal circumstances, but instead she’s out of the kitchen and into the living room and across the carpet, with the water.

— Here you go.

— Oh, lovely. Thanks.

And a smile from Janet, of all people.

— But the ferry boat was full, you see, says Marcia.

She’s a little hurt that Marcia didn’t wait for her to begin, but no matter. The ferry from Staten Island, no doubt.

— And I was standing right at the very front.

Claire dries her hand on the hip of her dress and wonders now where it is she should sit. Should she go right to the heart of the matter, onto the sofa? But that might be a bit much, a bit forward, right beside Marcia, who has all the eye-gaze. And yet to stand on the outside might be noticed too, as if she’s not part of them, trying to be separate. Then again, she needs to be mobile, not hem herself in with the coffee table, she has to be able to get up and make refreshments, spread the breakfast out, take orders, make everyone feel at home. Instant or ground? Sugar or not?

She smiles at Gloria and edges across toward her, lifts the belted ashtray off the arm of the chair, places it on the table with a soft rattle, and sits down, feels the thick of Gloria’s hand on her back, a reassurance.

— Go on, please, go on. Sorry.

— And I was a little too late to watch the sunrise, but I thought I’d stand up there anyway. It’s pretty. The city. At that hour. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it but it’s pretty. And I was just daydreaming, really, when I looked up and I saw a helicopter in the air and, well, you all know me and helicopters.

They know indeed, and it makes the air somber a moment but Marcia doesn’t seem to notice, and she coughs for a pause, a fraction of silence, respect, really.

— So I’m watching this helicopter and it’s hanging in the air, almost like it’s doing a double take. Up there, but not very well. Suspended, like. But rocking back and forth.

— Landsakes.

— And I’m thinking about how Mike Junior would hang a much better turn than that, how he’d handle the craft so much better, I mean he was the Evel Knievel of helicopters, his sergeant said so. And I thought maybe there’s something wrong with it, you know? I had that dread. You know, hanging there.

— Oh, no, says Jacqueline.

— I couldn’t hear the engine so I didn’t really know. And then, suddenly, behind the helicopter, I saw this little flyspeck. No bigger than an insect, I swear to you. But it’s a man.

— A man?

— Like an angel? says Gloria.

— A flyman?

— What sort of man?

— Flying?

— Where?

— I just got the heebie-jeebies.

— It’s a guy, says Marcia, on a tightrope. I mean, I didn’t know it right away, I didn’t figure it out just like that, but what it is, there’s a guy on a tightrope.

— Where?

— Shh, shh, says Janet.

— Up there. Between the towers. A million miles up. We could just about see him.

— What’s he doing?

— Tightroping!

— A funambulist.

— What?

— Oh, my God.

— Does he fall?

— Shh.

— Oh, don’t tell me he falls.

— Shh!

— Please don’t tell me he falls.

— Shh already, says Janet to Jacqueline.

— So I tapped the shoulder of this young guy beside me. One of those ponytailed ones. And he’s like, What, lady? Like he’s real annoyed that I disturbed his little standing sleep or dream or whatever it is he’s doing at the front of the boat. And I said, Look. And he said, What?

— Mercy.

— And I pointed it out, the little flyman, and then he said a bad word, you’ll excuse me, Claire, in your house, I’m sorry, but he said, Fuck.

And Claire wants to say: Well, I’d say fuck too, if I were me. I’d say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all once, twice, three times. But all she does is smile at Marcia and give her what she hopes is a nod that understands that it’s absolutely no problem to say fuck, on Park Avenue, on a Wednesday, at a coffee morning, in fact it’s probably the best thing to say, given the circumstances, maybe they should all say it in unison, make a singsong out of it.

— And then, says Marcia, everyone around us started looking up and before I knew it even the captain of the ferry was out and he had binoculars with him and he said, That guy’s on a tightrope.

— For real?

— Now you can only imagine. The whole deck, full of people. Their early commute. Shoulder to shoulder. And someone’s walking a tightrope. Between those new buildings, the World Towery thingymajigs.

— Trade.

— Center.

— Oh, those?

— Listen to me.

— Those monstrosities, says Claire.

— And then this young guy, with the ponytail…

— The fuck guy? says Janet with a half-giggle.

— Yes. Well, he starts saying that he’s sure, stocksure, five hundred and fifty percent, that it’s a projection, that someone is projecting it up on the sky, and maybe it’s a giant white sheet, and the image is coming from the helicopter, it’s being beamed across from some sort of camera or other, he had all the technical terms.

— A projection?

— Like a TV thing? says Jacqueline.

— Circus, maybe.

— And I tell him that they can’t do that from a helicopter. And he looks at me, like, Yeah, lady. And I say it to him again: They can’t do that. And he says, And what do you know about helicopters, lady?

— Never!

— And I tell him I know a hell of a lot about ’copters, actually.

And she does. Marcia knows a hell of a hell of a hell of a lot about her helicopters, her hell of helicopters.

She has told them, in her own house, on Staten Island, that Mike Junior had been on his third tour of duty, routine fly mission over the coast at Qui Nhon, bringing cigars to some general or other in a Huey with the 57th Medical Detachment — cigars, can you imagine? and why the hell were the medevacs flying cigars? — and it was a good helicopter, top speed of ninety knots, she said. The figures had trilled off her tongue. It had something wrong with the steering column, she had said, and had gone into detail about the engine and the gearing ratio and the length of the two-bladed metal tail rotor, when what really mattered, all that truly mattered, was that Mike Junior had clipped the top of a goalpost, of all things, a soccer goalpost, only six feet off the ground — and who in the world plays soccer in Vietnam? — which sent the whirligig spinning and he landed awkwardly, sideways, and he smashed his head awkwardly, broke his neck, no flames, even, just a freak fall, the helicopter still intact; she had played it over in her mind a million times, and that was it, and Marcia woke at night dreaming of an army general opening and reopening the cigar boxes, finding bits and pieces of her son inside.

She knows her helicopters, yes she does, and more’s the pity.

— So, anyway, I told him he should mind his own damn business.

— Indeed, says Gloria.

— And sure enough the captain of the ferry, looking through his binoculars, he says to everyone, That’s no projection.

— That’s right.

— And all I could think of, was, Maybe that’s my boy and he’s come to say hello.

— Oh, no.

— Oh.

— Lord.

A deep swell in her heart for Marcia.

— Man in the air.

— Imagine.

— Very brave.

— Exactly. That’s why I thought of Mike Junior.

— Of course.

— And did he fall? says Jacqueline.

— Shh, shh, says Janet. Let her speak.

— I’m just asking.

— So the captain swings the ferry out so we can get a better look and then brings the boat into dock. You know, it bumped against the river wall. I couldn’t see anything from there. The wrong angle. Our view was blocked. The north tower, south tower, I don’t know which, but we couldn’t see what was happening. And I didn’t even say another word to the guy with the ponytail. I just turned on my heels. I was the very first person off. I wanted to run and see my boy.

— Of course, says Janet. There, there.

— Shh, says Jacqueline.

The room tight now. One turn of the screw and the whole thing could explode. Janet stares across at Jacqueline, who flicks her long red hair, as if tossing off a fly, even a flyman, and Claire looks back and forth between them, anticipating an overturned table, a broken vase. And she thinks, I should do something, say something, hit the release valve, the escape button, and she reaches across to Gloria to take the flowers from her, petunias, lovely petunias, gorgeous green stalks, neatly clipped at the bottom.

— I should put these in water.

— Yes, yes, says Marcia, relieved.

— Back in a jiffy.

— Hurry, Claire.

— Be right back.

The correct thing to do. Absolutely, positively. She tiptoes to the kitchen and stops at the louvered door. Too much farther in and she won’t be able to hear. How silly to say I’d put them in water. Should have delayed somehow, bought more time. She leans against the door slats, straining to hear.

— … so I’m running in those old mazy side streets. Past the auction houses and cheap electronic joints and fabric stores and tenements. You’d think you’d be able to see the big buildings from there. I mean, they’re huge.

— One hundred stories.

— A hundred ten.

— Shh.

— But they’re not in view. I get glimpses of them but they’re not the right angle. I was trying to take the most direct route. I should have just gone along the water. But I’m running, running. That’s my boy up there and he’s come to say hello.

Everyone silent, even Janet.

— I kept darting around corners, thinking I’d get a better view. Ducking this way and that. Looking up all the time. But I can’t see them, the helicopter or the walker. I haven’t run so fast since junior high. I mean, my boobs were bouncing.

— Marcia!

— Most days I forget I have them anymore.

— Ain’t my dilemma, says Gloria, hitching her chest.

There is a swell of laughter around the room and, at the moment of levity, Claire moves back across the carpet, still holding Gloria’s flowers, but nobody notices. The laughter ripples around, a reconciliation song, circling them all, making a little victory lap, and settles right back down at Marcia’s feet.

— And then I stopped running, says Marcia.

Claire settles on the arm of the sofa again. No matter that she didn’t take care of the flowers. No matter that there’s no water reboiling. No matter that there’s no vase in her hands. She leans forward with the rest of them.

Marcia has a tiny quiver in her lip now, a little tremble of portent.

— I just stopped cold, says Marcia. Dead smack in the middle of the street. I almost got run over by a garbage truck. And I just stood there, hands on my knees, eyes on the ground, breathing heavy. And you know why? I’ll tell you why.

Pausing again.

All of them leaning forward.

— Because I didn’t want to know if the poor boy fell.

— Ah-huh, says Gloria.

— I just didn’t want to hear him dead.

— I hear you, ah-huh.

Gloria’s voice, as if she’s at a church service. The rest of them nodding slowly while the clock on the mantelpiece ticks.

— I couldn’t stand the mere thought of it.

— No, ma’am.

— And if he didn’t fall…

— If he didn’t, no …?

— I didn’t want to know.

— Ah-huhn, you got it.

—’Cause somehow, if he stayed up there, or if he came down safe, it didn’t matter. So I stopped and turned around and got on the subway and came up here without even so much as a second glance.

— Say gospel.

— Because if he was alive it couldn’t possibly be Mike Junior.

All of it like a slam in the chest. So immediate. At all of their coffee mornings, it had always been distant, belonging to another day, the talk, the memory, the recall, the stories, a distant land, but this was now and real, and the worst thing was that they didn’t know the walker’s fate, didn’t know if he had jumped or had fallen or had got down safely, or if he was still up there on his little stroll, or if he was there at all, if it was just a story, or a projection, indeed, or if she had made it all up for effect — they had no idea — maybe the man wanted to kill himself, or maybe the helicopter had a hook around him to catch him if he fell, or maybe there was a clip around the wire to catch him, or maybe maybe maybe there was another maybe, maybe.

Claire stands, a little shaky at the knees. Disoriented. The voices around her a blur now. She is aware of her feet on the deep carpet. The clock moving but not sounding anymore.

— I think I’ll put these in water now, she says.

HE WOULD WRITE letters to her about the wheel wars late at night. Four in the morning at his terminal under the white fluorescents, cutting code, when sometimes a message flashed up. Most of the intrusions were from members of his own squad, linked in a couple of desks away, working on other programs, the tallies of war, and it was just a thing to pass the time, to hack another man’s code, to test his strength, find his vulnerability. Harmless, really, Joshua said.

Charlie and the Viet Cong didn’t have any computers. They weren’t going to sneak in past the cathode tubes and transistors. But the phone lines were linked up back to PARC and Washington, D.C., and some universities, so it was possible, every now and then, for a single slider — he called them sliders, she had no idea why — to come in from somewhere else and cause havoc, and once or twice they blindsided him. Maybe he was working on an overlap line, he said, or a code for the disappeared. And he would be in the zone. He would feel, yes, like he was sliding down the banisters. It was about speed and raw power. The world was at ease and full of simplicity. He was a test pilot of a new frontier. Anything was possible. It could even have been jazz, one chord to the next. All fingertips. He could stretch his fingers and a new chord was suddenly there. And then without warning it would begin disappearing in front of his eyes. I want a cookie! Or: Repeat after me, Bye-Bye Blackbird. Or: Watch me smile. He said it was like being Beethoven after scribbling the Ninth. He’d be out on a nice stroll in the countryside and suddenly all the sheet music was blowing away in the wind. He sat rooted to the chair and stared at his machine. The small blipping cursor ate away what he’d been doing. His code got munched. No way to stop it. All that dread rose in his throat. He watched it as it climbed over the hills and disappeared into the sunset. Come back, come back, come back, I haven’t heard you yet.

How strange to think that there was someone else at the other end of the wires. It was like a burglar breaking into his house and trying on his slippers. Worse than that. Someone getting into my skin, Mama, taking over my memory. Crawling right inside him, up his spinal cord, inside his head, deep into the cranium, walking over his synapses, into his brain cells. She could imagine him leaning forward, his mouth almost to the screen, static on his lips. Who are you? He could feel the intruders beneath his fingertips. Thumbs drumming on his spine. Forefingers at his neck. He knew they were American, the intruders, but he saw them as Vietnamese — he had to — gave them a brown slant to their eyes. It was him and his machine against the other machine. Right, okay, now, well done, you got me, but now I’m going to crush you. And then he would step right into the fray.

And she would go to the fridge and read his letters and sometimes she would open the freezer section and allow it all to cool him down. It’s all right, honey, you’ll get it back.

And he did. Joshua always got it back. He would phone her at odd hours, when he was elated, when he had won one of the wheel wars. Long, looping calls that had an echo to them. Didn’t cost him a cent, he said. The squad had a switchboard with multiline capability. He said he had tapped into the lines, routed them down through the army recuiting number just for fun. It was just a system, he said, and it was there to be exploited. I’m okay, Mama, it’s not so bad, they treat us fine, tell Dad they even have kosher here. She listened intently to the voice. When the elation wore off, he sounded tired, distant even, a new language creeping in. Look, I’m cool, Mama, don’t freak out. Since when did he say freak? He had always been careful with language. Wrapped it up in a tight Park Avenue crispness. Nothing loose or nasal about it at all. But now the language was coarser and his accent had stretched. I’m gonna go with the flow but it seems I’m driving another man’s hearse, Mama.

Was he taking care of himself? Did he have enough food? Did he keep his clothes clean? Was he losing weight? Everything reminded her. She even once put an extra plate out on the dinner table just for Joshua. Solomon said nothing about it. That and her fridge, her little idiosyncrasies.

She tried not to fret when his letters started to slacken. He wouldn’t call for a day or two. Or three in a row. She would sit staring at the phone, willing it to ring. When she stood, the floorboards gave out a little groan. He was busy, he said. There had been a new development in electronic postings. There were more nodes on the electronic net. He said it was like a magic blackboard. The world was bigger and smaller both. Someone had hacked in to chew away parts of their program. It was a dogfight, a boxing match, a medieval joust. I’m in the front line, Mama, I’m in the trenches. Someday, he said, the machines would revolutionize the world. He was helping other programmers. They logged on at the consoles and stayed on. There was a battle going on with the peace protesters, who were trying to break into their machines. But it was not machines that were evil, he said, but the minds of the top brass behind them. A machine could be no more evil than a violin, or a camera, or a pencil. What the intruders didn’t understand is that they were coming in at the wrong place. It was not the technology that they needed to attack, but the human mind, the way it failed, how it fell short.

She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple — hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat. There were over forty thousand to account for now in his Death Hack, and the numbers kept growing. Sometimes he would print the names out. He could unfurl them up and down the stairs. He sometimes wished that someone would hack his program from outside, chew it up, spit it all back out, give life again to all those boys, the Smiths and the Sullivans and the Rodriguez brothers, these fathers and cousins and nephews, and then he’d have to do a program for Charlie, a whole new alphabet of dying, Ngo, Ho, Phan, Nguyen — wouldn’t that be a chore?

— You okay, Claire?

A touch on her elbow. Gloria.

— Help?

— Excuse me?

— You want help with those?

— Oh, no. I mean, yes. Thanks.

Gloria. Gloria. Such a sweet round face. Dark eyes, moist, almost. A lived-in face. A generosity to it. But a little perturbed. Looking at me. Looking at her. Caught in the act. Daydreaming. Help? She almost thought for a second that Gloria wanted to be the help. Presumptuous. Two seventy-five an hour, Gloria. Clean the dishes. Mop the floor. Weep for our boys. A chore indeed.

She reaches high into the top cupboard and pulls out the Waterford glass. Intricate cut. Distant men do that. There are some that aren’t savages. Yes, that’ll do nicely. She hands it to Gloria, who smiles, fills it.

— You know what you should do, Claire?

— What?

— Put sugar in the bottom. It keeps the flowers longer.

She has never heard that before. But it makes sense. Sugar. To keep them alive. Fill up our boys with sugar. Charlie and His Chocolate Factory. And who was it called the Vietnamese Charlie anyway? Where did it come from? Some radiospeak, probably. Charlie Delta Epsilon. Incoming, incoming, incoming.

— Even better if you clip the bottom of them first, says Gloria.

Gloria takes the flowers out and spreads them on the dish rack, takes a small knife from the kitchen counter and lops off a tiny segment of each, sweeps the stems into the palm of her hand, twelve little green things.

— Amazing, really, isn’t it?

— What’s that?

— The man in the air.

Claire leans against the counter. Takes a deep breath. Her mind whirling. She is not sure, not sure at all. A nagging discontent about him too. Something about his appearance sitting heavy, bewildering.

— Amazing, she says. Yes. Amazing.

But what is it about the notion that she doesn’t like? Amazing, indeed, yes. And an attempt at beauty. The intersection of a man with the city, the abruptly reformed, the newly appropriated public space, the city as art. Walk up there and make it new. Making it a different space. But something else in it still rankles. She wishes not to feel this way, but she can’t shake it, the thought of the man perched there, angel or devil. But what’s wrong with believing in an angel, or a devil, why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to feel that way, why wouldn’t every man in the air appear to be her son? Why shouldn’t Mike Junior appear on the wire? What is wrong with that? Why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to freeze it there, her boy returned?

Yet still a sourness.

— Anything else, Claire?

— No, no, we’re perfect.

— Right-y-o, then. All set.

Gloria smiles and hoists the vase, goes to the louvered door, pushes it open with her generous bulk.

— I’ll be right out, says Claire.

The door swings back shut.

She arranges the last of the cups, saucers, spoons. Stacks them neatly. What is it? The walking man? Something vulgar about the whole thing. Or maybe not vulgar. Something cheap. Or maybe not quite cheap. She doesn’t quite know what it is. To think this way, how petty. Downright selfish. She knows full well that she has the whole morning to do what they have done on other mornings — bring out the photos, show them the piano Joshua used to play, open the scrapbooks, take them all down to his room, show them his shelf of books, pick him out from the yearbook. That’s what they have always done, in Gloria’s, Marcia’s, Jacqueline’s, even Janet’s, especially Janet’s, where they were shown a slide show and later they all cried over a broken-spined copy of Casey at the Bat.

Her hands wide on the kitchen counter. Fingers splayed. Pressing down.

Joshua. Is that what rankles her? That they haven’t yet said his name? That he hasn’t yet figured into the morning’s chatter? That they’ve ignored him so far, but no, it’s not that, but what is it?

Enough. Enough. Lift the tray. Don’t blow it now. So nice. That smile from Gloria. The beautiful flowers.

Out.

Now.

Go.

She steps into the living room and stops, frozen. They are gone, all of them, gone. She almost drops the tray. The rattle of the spoons as they slide against the edge. Not a single one there, not even Gloria. How can it be? How did they disappear so suddenly? Like a bad childhood joke, as if they might spring out of the closets any moment, or pop up from behind the sofa, a row of carnival faces to throw water balloons at.

It is, for an instant, as if she has dreamed them into being. That they have come to her, unasked, and then they have stolen away.

She lays the tray down on the table. The teapot slides and a little bubble of tea spurts out. The handbags are there and a single cigarette still burns in the ashtray.

It is then that she hears the voices, and she chides herself. Of course. How silly of me. The bang of the back door and then the upper roof door in the wind. She must have left it open, they must have felt the breeze.

Down along the corridor. The shapes beyond the upper doorway. She climbs the final few steps, joins them on the roof, all of them leaning out over the wall, looking south. Nothing to see, of course, just a haze and the cupola at the top of the New York General Building.

— No sign of him?

She knows of course that there could not be, even on the clearest of days, but it is nice to have the women turn to her in unison and shake their heads, no.

— We can try the radio, she says, sliding in behind them. It might be on a news report.

— Good idea, says Jacqueline.

— Oh, no, says Janet. I’d rather not.

— Me neither, says Marcia.

— Probably won’t be on the news.

— Not yet, anyway.

— I don’t think so.

They remain a moment, looking south, as if they might still be able to conjure him up.

— Coffee, ladies? A little tea?

— Lord, says Gloria with a wink, I thought you’d never ask.

— A nibble of something, yes.

— Calm our nerves?

— Yes, yes.

— Okay, Marcia?

— Downstairs?

— Mercy, yes. It’s hotter than a July bride up here.

The women guide Marcia back down the inside stairs, through the maid’s door, into the living room once more, with Janet on one arm, Jacqueline on the other, Gloria behind.

In the armchair ashtray, the cigarette has burned down to the quick, like a man about to break and fall. Claire puts it out. She watches as the women scrunch up tight on the sofa, arms around one another. Enough chairs? How could she have made such a mistake? Should she bring out the beanbag chair from Joshua’s room? Put it on the floor so that her body can spread itself out in his old impression?

This walking man, she can’t shake him. The bubble of discontent in her mind. She is being ungenerous, she knows, but she just can’t get rid of it. What if he hits somebody down below? She has heard that at night there are whole colonies of birds that fly into the World Trade Center buildings, their glass reflection. The bash and fall. Will the walker thump with them?

Snap to. Enough.

Pull your mind together. Pick up all the feathers. Guide them gently back into the air.

— The bagels are in the bag there, Claire. And there’s doughnuts too.

— Lovely. Thanks.

The small niceties.

— Dearest Lord, look at those!

— Oh, my word.

— I’m fat enough.

— Oh, stop. I only wish I had your figure.

— Take it and run, says Gloria. Bet it spills over!

— No, no, you have a lovely figure. Fabulous.

— Come on!

— I must say, truly.

And a hush around the room for the little white lie. A pullback from the food. They glance at one another. An unfolding of seconds. A siren outside the window. The static broken and thoughts taking shape in their minds, like water in a pitcher.

— So, says Janet, reaching for a bagel. Not to be morbid or anything …

— Janet!

— … I don’t want to be morbid … — Janet McIniff…!

— … but you think he fell?

— Ohmigod! Who gave you the sledgehammer?

— Sledgehammer? I just heard the siren and I—

— It’s okay, says Marcia. I’m okay. Really. Don’t worry about me.

— My God! says Jacqueline.

— I’m just asking.

— Really, no, says Marcia. I’m kinda wondering the same myself.

— Oh my God, says Jacqueline, the words stretched out now as if on elastic. I can’t believe you just said that.

Claire wishes now to be removed and off somewhere distant, some beach, some riverbank, some deep swell of happiness, some Joshua place, some little hidden moment, a touch of Solomon’s hand.

Sitting here, absent from them. Letting them close the circle.

Maybe, yes, it’s just pure selfishness. They did not notice the mezuzah on the door, the painting of Solomon, didn’t mention a single thing about the apartment, just launched right in and began. They even walked up to the rooftop without asking. Maybe that’s just the way they do it, or maybe they’re blinded by the paintings, the silverware, the carpets. Surely there were other well-heeled boys packed off to war. Not all of them had flat feet. Maybe she should meet other women, more of her own. But more of her own what? Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world’s oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons. She feels a pang, a return. Dear Mother, this is just to say that I have arrived safely, the first began. And then at the end he was writing, Mama, this place is a nothing place, take all the places and give me nothing instead. Oh. Oh. Read all the letters of the world, love letters or hate letters or joy letters, and stack them up against the single one hundred and thirty-seven that my son wrote to me, place them end to end, Whitman and Wilde and Wittgenstein and whoever else, it doesn’t matter — there’s no comparison. All the things he used to say! All the things he could remember! All that he put his finger upon!

That’s what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

But no, not past, not him, not ever.

Forget the letters. Let our machines fight. You hear me? Let them go at it. Let them stare each other down the wires.

Leave the boys at home.

Leave my boy at home. Gloria’s too. And Marcia’s. Let him walk a tightrope if he wants. Let him become an angel. And Jacqueline’s. And Wilma’s. Not Wilma, no. There was never a Wilma. Janet. Probably a Wilma too. Maybe a thousand Wilmas all over the country.

Just give my boy back to me. That’s all I want. Give him back. Hand him over. Right now. Let him open the door and run past the mezuzah and let him clang down here at the piano. Repair all the pretty faces of the young. No cries, no shrieks, no bleats. Bring them back here now. Why shouldn’t all our sons be in the room all at once? Collapse all the boundaries. Why shouldn’t they sit together? Berets on their knees. Their slight embarrassment. Their creased uniforms. You fought for our country, why not celebrate on Park Avenue? Coffee or tea, boys? A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

All this talk of freedom. Nonsense, really. Freedom can’t be given, it must be received.

I will not take this jar of ashes.

Do you hear me?

This jar of ashes is not what my son is.

— What’s that now, Claire?

And it’s as if she is rising again from a daydream. She has been watching them, their moving mouths, their mobile faces, but not hearing anything they’ve been saying, some sort of argument about the walking man, about whether the tightrope was attached or not, and she had drifted from it. Attached to what? His shoe? The helicopter? The sky? She folds and refolds her fingers into one another, hears the crack of them as they pull apart.

You need more calcium in your bones, the good doctor Tonnemann said. Calcium indeed. Drink more milk, your children won’t go missing.

— Are you okay, dear? says Gloria.

— Oh, I’m fine, she says, just a little daydreamy

— I know the feeling.

— I get that way too sometimes, says Jacqueline.

— Me too, says Janet.

— First thing every morning, says Gloria, I start to dream. Can’t do it at night. I used to dream all the time. Now I can only dream in daytime.

— You should take something for it, says Janet.

Claire cannot recall what she has said — has she embarrassed them, said something silly, out of order? That comment from Janet, as if she should be on meds. Or was that aimed at Gloria? Here, take a hundred pills, it will cure your grief. No. She has never wanted that. She wants to break it like a fever. But what is it that she said? Something about the tightrope man? Did she say it aloud? That he was vulgar somehow? Something about ashes? Or fashion? Or wires?

— What is it, Claire?

— I’m just thinking about that poor man, she says.

She wants to kick herself for saying it, for bringing him up again. Just when she felt that they could be getting away, that the morning could get back on track again, that she could tell them about Joshua and how he used to come home from school and eat tomato sandwiches, his favorite, or how he never squeezed the toothpaste properly, or how he always put two socks into one shoe, or a playground story, or a piano riff, anything, just to give the morning its balance, but, no, she has shunted it sideways again and brought it back around.

— What man? says Gloria.

— Oh, the man who came here, she says suddenly.

— Who’s that?

She picks a bagel from the sunflower bowl. Looks up at the women. She pauses a moment, slices through the thick bread, pulls the rest of the bagel apart with her fingers.

— You mean the tightrope man was here?

— No, no.

— What man, Claire?

She reaches across and pours tea. The steam rises. She forgot to put out the slices of lemon. Another failure.

— The man who told me.

— What man?

— The man who told you what, Claire?

— You know. That man.

And then a sort of deep understanding. She sees it in their faces. Quieter than rain. Quieter than leaves.

— Uh huhn, says Gloria.

And then a loosening over the faces of the others.

— Mine was Thursday.

— Mike Junior’s was Monday.

— My Clarence was Monday as well. Jason was Saturday. And Brandon was a Tuesday.

— I got a lousy telegram. Thirteen minutes past six. July twelfth. For Pete.

For Pete. For Pete’s sake.

They all fall in line and it feels right, it’s what she wants to say; she holds the bagel at her mouth but she will not eat; she has brought them back on track, they are returning to old mornings, together, they will not move from this, this is what she wants, and yes, they are comfortable, and even Gloria reaches out now for one of the doughtnuts, glazed and white, and takes a small, polite nibble and nods at Claire, as if to say: Go ahead, tell us.

— We got the call from downstairs. Solomon and I. We were sitting having dinner. All the lights were off. He’s Jewish, you see …

Glad to get that one out of the way.

— … and he had candles everywhere. He’s not strict, but sometimes he likes little rituals. He calls me his little honeybee sometimes. It started from an argument when he called me a WASP. Can you believe that?

All of it coming out from her, like grateful air from her lungs. Smiles all around, befuddled, yet silence all the same.

— And I opened the door. It was a sergeant. He was very deferent. I mean, nice to me. I knew right away, just from the look on his face. Like one of those novelty masks. One of those cheap plastic ones. His face frozen inside it. Hard brown eyes and a broad mustache. I said, Come in. And he took off his hat. One of those hairstyles, short, parted down the middle. A little shock of white along his scalp. He sat right there.

She nods over at Gloria and wishes she hadn’t said that, but there’s no taking it back.

Gloria wipes at the seat as if trying to get the stain of the man off. A little sliver of doughnut icing remains.

— Everything was so pure I thought I was standing in a painting.

— Yes, yes.

— He kept playing with his hat on his knee.

— Mine did too.

— Shh.

— And then he just said, Your son is passed, ma’am. And I was thinking, Passed? Passed where? What do you mean, Sergeant, he’s passed? He didn’t tell me of any exam.

— Mercy.

— I was smiling at him. I couldn’t make my face do anything else.

— Well, I just flat-out wept, says Janet.

— Shh, says Jacqueline.

— I felt like there was rushing steam going up inside me, right up my spine. I could feel it hissing in my brain.

— Exactly.

— And then I just said, Yes. That’s all I said. Smiling still. The steam hissing and burning. I said, Yes, Sergeant. And thank you.

— Mercy.

— He finished his tea.

All of them looking at their cups.

— And I brought him to the door. And that was it.

— Yes.

— And Solomon took him down in the elevator. And I’ve never told anyone that story. Afterward my face hurt, I smiled so much. Isn’t that terrible?

— No, no.

— Of course not.

— It feels like I’ve waited my whole life to tell that story.

— Oh, Claire.

— I just can’t believe that I smiled.

She knows that she has not told certain things about it, that the intercom had buzzed, that the doorman had stuttered, that the wait was a stunned one, that the sound of his knocking was like that against a coffin lid, that he took off his hat and said ma’am and then sir, and that they had said, Come in, come in, that the sergeant had never seen the like of the apartment before — it was obvious just from the way he looked at the furniture that he was nervous but thrilled too.

In another time he might have found it all glamorous, Park Avenue, fancy art, candles, rituals. She had watched him as he caught a mirror glance of himself, but he turned away from his own reflection and she might have even liked him then, the way he coughed into the hollow of his rounded hand, the gentleness of it. He held his hand at his mouth and he was like a magician about to pull out a sad scarf. He looked around, as if about to leave, as if there might be all sorts of exits, but she sat him down again. She went to the kitchen and brought a slice of fruitcake for him to eat. To ease the tension. He ate it with a little flick of guilt in his eyes. The little crumbs on the floor. She could hardly bring herself to vacuum them up afterward.

Solomon wanted to know what had happened. The sergeant said that he wasn’t at liberty, but Solomon pressed and said, None of us are at liberty, are we, really? I mean, when you think about it, Sergeant, none of us are free. And the hat went bouncing on the military knee again. Tell me, said Solomon, and there was a tremble in his voice then. Tell me or get out of my home.

The sergeant coughed into a closed fist. A liar’s gesture. They were still collecting the details, the sergeant said, but Joshua had been at a café. Sitting inside. They had been warned, all the personnel, about the cafés. He was with a group of officers. They had been to a club the night before. Must have been just blowing off steam. She couldn’t imagine that, but she didn’t say anything — her Joshua at a club? It was impossible, but she let it slide, yes, that was the word, slide. It was early morning, the sergeant said, Saigon time. Bright blue skies. Four grenades rolled in at their feet. He died a hero, the sergeant said. Solomon was the one who coughed at that. You don’t die a fucking hero, man. She had never heard Solomon curse like that before, not to a stranger. The sergeant arranged his hat on his knee. Like his leg might be the thing now that needed to tell the story. Glancing up at the prints above the couch. Miró, Miró, on the wall, who’s the deadest of them all?

He pulled his breath in. His throat looked corrugated. I’m very sorry for your loss, he said again.

When he had gone, when the night was silent, they had stood there in the room, Solomon and Claire, looking at each other, and he had said they would not crack, which they hadn’t, which she wouldn’t, no, they wouldn’t blame each other, they wouldn’t grow bitter, they’d get through it, survive, they would not allow it to become a rift between them.

— And all the time I was just smiling, see.

— You poor thing.

— That’s awful.

— But it’s understandable, Claire, it really is.

— Do you think so?

— It’s okay. Really.

— I just smiled so much, she says.

— I smiled too, Claire.

— You did?

— That’s what you do, you keep back the tears, gospel.

And then she knows now what it is about the walking man. It strikes her deep and hard and shivery. It has nothing to do with angels or devils. Nothing to do with art, or the reformed, or the intersection of a man with a vector, man beyond nature. None of that.

He was up there out of a sort of loneliness. What his mind was, what his body was: a sort of loneliness. With no thought at all for death.

Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cue, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate, death by machete, death by motorbike, death by firing squad, death by gangrene, death by footsore, death by palsy, death by memory loss, death by claymore, death by scorpion, death by crack-up, death by Agent Orange, death by rent boy, death by harpoon, death by nightstick, death by immolation, death by crocodile, death by electrocution, death by mercury, death by strangulation, death by bowie knife, death by mescaline, death by mushroom, death by lysergic acid, death by jeep smash, death by grenade trap, death by boredom, death by heartache, death by sniper, death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game, death by numbers, death by bureaucracy, death by carelessness, death by delay, death by avoidance, death by appeasement, death by mathematics, death by carbon copy, death by eraser, death by filing error, death by penstroke, death by suppression, death by authority, death by isolation, death by incarceration, death by fratricide, death by suicide, death by genocide, death by Kennedy, death by LBJ, death by Nixon, death by Kissinger, death by Uncle Sam, death by Charlie, death by signature, death by silence, death by natural causes.

A stupid, endless menu of death.

But death by tightrope?

Death by performance?

That’s what it amounted to. So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all. His little Charlie Chaplin walk, coming in like a hack on her morning. How dare he do that with his own body? Throwing his life in everyone’s face? Making her own son’s so cheap? Yes, he has intruded on her coffee morning like a hack on her code. With his hijinks above the city. Coffee and cookies and a man out there walking in the sky, munching away what should have been.

— You know what? she says, leaning into the circle of ladies.

— What?

She pauses a moment, wondering what she should say. A tremble running deep through her body.

— I like you all so much.

She is looking at Gloria when she says it, but she means it to them all, she genuinely means it. A little catch in her throat. She scans the row of faces. Gentleness and courtesy. All of them smiling at her. Come, ladies. Come. Let us while away our morning now. Let it slide. Let us forget walking men. Let us leave them high in the air. Let us sip our coffee and be thankful. Simple as that. Let’s pull back the curtains and allow light through. Let this be the first of many more. No one else will intrude. We have our boys. They are brought together. Even here. On Park Avenue. We hurt, and have one another for the healing.

She reaches for the teapot, her hands trembling. The odd sounds in the room, the lack of quiet, the rustle of bagel bags, and the peeling back of muffin wrappers.

She takes her cup and drains it. Dabs her knuckle at the side of her mouth.

Gloria’s flowers on the table, already opening. Janet picking a crumb off her plate. Jacqueline with her knee going up and down, in rhythm. Marcia looking off into space. That’s my boy up there and he’s come to say hello.

Claire stands, not shaky at all, not one bit, not now.

— Come, she says, come. Let’s go see Joshua’s room.

A FEAR OF LOVE

BEING INSIDE THE CAR, when it clipped the back of the van, was like being in a body we didn’t know. The picture we refuse to see of ourselves. That is not me, that must be somebody else.

In any other circumstance we might have ended up at the side of the road, swapping license numbers, maybe haggling over a few dollars, even going immediately to a body shop to get the damage repaired, but it didn’t turn out that way. It was the gentlest tap. A small screech of the tires. We figured afterward that the driver must have had his foot on the brake, or his rear lights weren’t working, or maybe he had been riding the brake all along — in the sunlight we didn’t see the shine. The van was big and lazy. The rear fender was tied with wire and string. I recall seeing it like one of those old horses from my youth, a lumbering, impatient animal grown stubborn to being slapped on the rump. It was the back wheels that went first. The driver tried to correct. His elbow pulled in from the window. The van went sideways right, which is when he tried to correct again, but he pulled too hard and we felt the second jolt, like bumper cars at a fair, except we weren’t in a spin — our car was steady and straight.

Blaine had just lit a joint. It smoldered on the rim of an empty Coke can that sat between us. He had barely smoked any, one or two drags, when the van spun out, brown and horsey: the peace decals on the rear glass, the dented side panels, the windows left slightly ajar. On and on and on it spun.

There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it’s the last we’ll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.

The driver had a handsome face and his hair was peppered toward gray. There were deep, dark bags under his eyes. He was unshaven and he wore a shirt ambitiously undone at the neck, the sort of man who might have been calm at most times, but the wheel was sliding through his hands now and his mouth open wide. He looked down at us from the height of the van as if he might be freezing our faces in memory too. His mouth stretched into a further O and his eyes widened. I wonder now how he saw me, my fringed dress, my curved beads, my hair cut flapper-style, my eyeliner royal blue, my eyes bleary with lack of sleep.

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max’s Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn’t get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another.

If only we had been so careful with ourselves.

Blaine was thirty-two. I was twenty-eight. We were two years married. Our car, an antique 1927 Pontiac Landau, gold with silver paneling, was almost older than both of us put together. We had installed an eight-track that was hidden under the dashboard. We played twenties jazz. The music filtered out over the East River. There was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise.

The van spun farther. It was almost front-on. On the passenger side, all I could see was a pair of bare feet propped up on the dashboard. Untangling in slow motion. The bottoms of her feet were so white at the edges and so dark in their hollows that they could only have belonged to a black woman. She untucked at the ankles. The spin was slow enough. I could just see the top of her frame. She was calm. As if ready to accept. Her hair was pulled back tight off her face and bright baubles of jewelry bounced at her neck. If I hadn’t seen her again, moments later, after she was thrown through the windshield, I might have thought she was naked, given the angle I was looking from. Younger than me, a beauty. Her eyes traveled across mine as if asking, What are you doing, you tan blond bitch in your billowy blouse and your fancy Cotton Club car?

She was gone just as quickly. The van went into a wider spin and our car kept on going straight. We passed them. The road opened like a split peach. I recall hearing the first crunch behind us, another car hitting the van, then the clatter of a grille that fell to the ground, and later on, when we went back over it all in our minds, Blaine and I, we reheard the impact of the newspaper truck as it sent them into the guardrail, a big boxy truck with the driver’s door open and the radio blaring. It hit with brute force. There never would have been a way out for them.

Blaine looked over his shoulder and then floored it for an instant until I shouted at him to stop, please stop, please. Nothing more uncluttered than these moments. Our lives in perfect clarity. You must get out. Take responsibility. Walk back to the crash. Give the girl mouth-to-mouth. Hold her bleeding head. Whisper in her ear. Warm the whites of her feet. Run to a phone. Save the crushed man.

Blaine pulled over to the side of the FDR and we stepped out. The caw of gulls from the river, breasting the wind. The dapple of light on the water. The surging currents, their spinning motions. Blaine shaded his eyes in the sunlight. He looked like an ancient explorer. A few cars had stopped in the middle of the road and the newspaper truck had come to a sideways halt, but it wasn’t one of those enormous wrecks that you sometimes hear about in rock songs, all blood and fracture and American highway; rather, it was calm with only small sprinklings of jeweled glass across the lanes, a few bundles of newspapers in a havoc on the ground, distant from the body of the young girl, who was expressing herself in a patch of blooming blood. The engine roared and steam poured out of the van. The driver’s foot must still have been on the pedal. It whined incessantly, at its highest pitch. Some doors were opening in the stalled cars behind and already some other drivers were leaning on their horns, the chorus of New York, impatient to get going again, the fuck-you shrill. We were alone, two hundred yards ahead of the clamor. The road was perfectly dry but with patches of puddled heat. Sunlight through the girdings. Gulls out over the water.

I looked across at Blaine. He wore his worsted jacket and his bow tie. He looked ridiculous and sad, his hair flopping down over his eyes, all of him frozen to the past.

— Tell me that didn’t happen, he said.

The moment he turned to check the front of the car I recall thinking that we’d never survive it, not so much the crash, or even the death of the young girl — she was so obviously dead, in a bloodied heap on the road — or the man who was slapped against the steering wheel, almost certainly ruined, his chest jammed up against the dashboard, but the fact that Blaine went around to check on the damage that was done to our car, the smashed headlight, the crumpled fender, like our years together, something broken, while behind us we could hear the sirens already on their way, and he let out a little groan of despair, and I knew it was for the car, and our unsold canvases, and what would happen to us shortly, and I said to him: Come on, let’s go, quick, get in, Blaine, quick, get a move on.

IN ′73 BLAINE AND I had swapped our lives in the Village for another life altogether, and we went to live in a cabin in upstate New York. We had been almost a year off the drugs, even a few months off the booze, until the night before the accident. Just a one-night blowout. We’d slept in that morning, in the Chelsea Hotel, and we were returning to the old Grandma notion of sitting on the porch swing and watching the poison disappear from our bodies.

On the way home, silence was all we had. We ducked off the FDR, drove north, over the Willis Avenue Bridge, into the Bronx, off the highway, along the two-lane road, by the lake, down the dirt track toward home. The cabin was an hour and a half from New York City. It was set back in a grove of trees on the edge of a second, smaller lake. A pond, really. Lily pads and river plants. The cabin had been built fifty years before, in the 1920s, out of red cedar. No electricity. Water from a spring well. A woodstove, a rickety outhouse, a gravity-fed shower, a hut we used for a garage. Raspberry bushes grew up and around the back windows. You could lift the sashes to birdsong. The wind made the reeds gossip.

It was the type of place where you could easily learn to forget that we had just seen a girl killed in a highway smash, perhaps a man too — we didn’t know.

Evening was falling when we pulled up. The sun touched the top of the trees. We saw a belted kingfisher bashing a fish upon the dock. It ate its prey and then we sat watching its wheeling flight away — something so beautiful about it. I stepped out and along the dock. Blaine took out the paintings from the backseat, propped them against the side of the hut, pulled open the huge wooden doors where we kept the Pontiac. He parked the car and locked the hut with a padlock and then swept the car tracks with a broom. Halfway through the sweeping, he looked up and gave me a wave that was also a half-shrug, and he set to sweeping again. After a while, there was no sign that we had even left the cabin.

The night was cool. A chill had silenced the insects.

Blaine sat beside me on the dock, kicked off his shoes, dangled his feet out over the water, fished in the pockets of his pleated trousers. The burned-out shadows of his eyes. He still had a three-quarter-full bag of cocaine from the night before. Forty or fifty dollars’ worth. He opened it and shoved the long thin padlock key into the coke, scooped up some powder. He cupped his hands around the key and held it to my nostril. I shook my head no.

— Just a hit, he said. Take the edge off.

It was the first snort since the night before — what we used to call the cure, the healer, the turpentine, the thing that cleaned our brushes. It kicked hard and burned straight through to the back of my throat. Like wading into snow-shocked water. He dipped into the bag and took three long snorts for himself, reared his head back, shook himself side to side, let out a long sigh, put his arm around my shoulder. I could almost smell the crash on my clothes, like I’d just crumpled my fender, sent myself spinning, about to smash into the guardrail.

— Wasn’t our fault, babe, he said.

— She was so young.

— Not our fault, sweetie, you hear me?

— Did you see her on the ground?

— I’m telling you, said Blaine, the idiot hit his brakes. Did you see him? I mean, his brake lights weren’t even working. Nothing I could do. I mean, shit, what was I supposed to do? He was driving like an idiot.

— Her feet were so white. The bottoms of them.

— Bad luck’s a trip I don’t go on, babe.

— Jesus, Blaine, there was blood everywhere.

— You’ve gotta forget it.

— She was just lying there.

— You didn’t see a goddamn thing. You listening to me? We saw nothing.

— We’re driving a ′27 Pontiac. You think nobody saw us?

— Wasn’t our fault, he said again. Just forget it. What could we do? He hit his goddamn brakes. I’m telling you, he was driving that thing like it was a goddamn boat.

— D’you think he’s dead too? The driver? You think he’s dead?

— Take a hit, honey.

— What?

— You gotta forget it happened, nothing happened, not a goddamn thing.

He stuffed the small plastic bag into the inside of his jacket pocket and stuck his fingers under the shoulder of his vest. We had both been wearing old-fashioned clothes for the better part of a year. It was part of our back-to-the-twenties kick. It seemed so ridiculous now. Bit players in a bad theater. There’d been two other New York artists, Brett and Delaney, who had gone back to the forties, living the lifestyle and the clothes, and they had made a killing from it, became famous, had even hit the New York Times style pages.

We had gone further than Brett and Delaney, had moved out of the city, kept our prize car — our only concession — and had lived without electricity, read books from another era, finished our paintings in the style of the time, hid ourselves away, saw ourselves as reclusive, cutting-edge, academic. At our core, even we knew we weren’t being original. In Max’s the night before — pumped up on ourselves — we had been stopped by the bouncers, who didn’t recognize who we were. They wouldn’t let us into the back room. A waitress pulled a curtain tight. She took pleasure in her refusal. None of our old friends were around. We spun backward, went up to the bar, the canvases in our arms. Blaine bought a bag of coke from the bartender, the only one to compliment our work. He leaned across the counter and gazed at the canvases, ten seconds, at most. Wow, he said. Wow. That’ll be sixty bucks, man. Wow. If you want some Panama Red, man, I got that too. Some Cheeba Cheeba. Wow. Just say the word. Wow.

— Get rid of the coke, I said to Blaine. Just throw it in the water.

— Later, babe.

— Throw it away, please.

— Later, sweetie, okay? I’m chomping now. I mean, that guy, come on! He couldn’t drive. I mean what type of fucking idiot hits the brakes in the middle of the FDR? And you see her? She wasn’t even wearing any clothes. I mean, maybe she was blowing him or something. I bet that’s it. She was sucking him off.

— She was in a pool of blood, Blaine.

— Not my fault.

— She was all smashed up. And that guy. He was just lying there against the steering wheel.

— You were the one told me to leave the scene. You’re the one said, Let’s go. Don’t forget it, you’re the one, you made the decision!

I slapped him once across the face, surprised at how hard it stung my hand. I rose from the dock. The wooden boards creaked. The dock was old and useless, jutting out into the pond like a taunt. I walked over the hard mud, toward the cabin. Up on the porch, I pushed open the door, stood in the middle of the room. It smelled so musty inside. Like months of bad cooking.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

We had been happy, Blaine and me, in the cabin over the past year. We had chased the drugs from our bodies. Rose each morning clear-headed. Worked and painted. Carved out a life in the quiet. That was gone now. It was just an accident, I told myself. We had done the right thing. Sure, we’d left the scene, but maybe they would have searched us, discovered the coke, the weed, maybe they would have set Blaine up, or found out my family name, put it all over the newspapers.

I looked out the window. A thin stream of moonlight skidded on the water. The stars above were little pinpoints of light. The longer I looked the more they seemed like claw marks. Blaine was still on the dock, but stretched out lengthwise, almost a seal shape, cold and black, as if ready to slip away off the dock.

I made my way through the dark to the kerosene lamp. Matches on the table. I flicked the lamp alive. Turned the mirror around. I didn’t want to see my face. The cocaine was still pumping through me. I turned the lamp higher and felt its heat rise. A bead of sweat at my brow. I left the dress in a puddled heap, stepped to the bed. I fell against the soft mattress, lay facedown, naked, under the sheets.

I could still see her. Most of all it was the bottoms of her feet, I had no idea why, I could see them there, against the dark of the tarmac. What is it that had made them so very white? An old song came back to me, my late grandfather singing about feet of clay. I buried my face further in the pillow.

The latch on the door clicked. I lay still and trembling — it seemed possible to do both at once. Blaine’s footsteps sounded across the floor. His breathing was shallow. I could hear his shoes being tossed near the stove. He turned the kerosene lamp down. The wick whispered. The edges of the world got a little darker. The flame trembled and righted itself.

— Lara, he said. Sweetie.

— What is it?

— Look, I didn’t mean to shout. Really.

He came to the bed and bent down over me. I could feel his breath against my neck. It felt cool, like the other side of a pillow. I’ve got something for us, he said. He pulled the sheet down to my thighs. I could feel the cocaine being sprinkled on my back. It was what we had done together years ago. I did not move. His chin in the hollow at my low back. The bristle where he hadn’t shaved. His arm draped against my ribcage and his mouth at the center of my spine. I felt the run of his face down along the back of my body and the very touch of his lips, aloof and rootless. He sprinkled the powder again, a rough line that he licked with his tongue.

He was rampant now and had pulled the sheet fully off me. We hadn’t made love in a few days, not even in the Chelsea Hotel. He turned me over and told me not to sweat, that it would make the cocaine clump.

— Sorry, he said again, sprinkling the coke low on my stomach. I shouldn’t have shouted like that.

I pulled him down by the hair. Beyond his shoulder the faint knots in the ceiling wood looked like keyholes.

Blaine whispered in my ear: Sorry, sorry, sorry.

WE HAD ORIGINALLY made our money in New York City, Blaine and me. In the late sixties he had directed four black-and-white art films. His most famous film, Antioch, was a portrait of an old building being demolished on the waterfront. Beautiful, patient shots of cranes and juggernauts and swinging headache balls caught on sixteen-millimeter. It anticipated much of the art that came behind it — light filtering in through smashed warehouse walls, window frames lying over puddles, new architectural spaces created by fracture. The film was bought by a well-known collector. Afterward Blaine published an essay on the onanism of moviemakers: films, he said, created a form of life to which life had to aspire, a desire for themselves only. The essay itself finished in midsentence. It was published in an obscure art journal, but it did get him noticed in the circles where he wanted to be seen. He was a dynamo of ambition. Another film, Calypso, had Blaine eating breakfast on the roof of the Clock Tower Building as the clock behind him slowly ticked. On each of the clock hands he had pasted photographs of Vietnam, the second hand holding a burning monk going around and around the face.

The films were all the rage for a while. The phone rang incessantly. Parties were thrown. Art dealers tried to doorstep us. Vogue profiled him. Their photographer had him dress in nothing but a long strategic scarf. We lapped up the praise, but if you stand in the same river for too long, even the banks will trickle past you. He got a Guggenheim but after a while most of the money was going toward our habits. Coke, speed, Valium, black beauties, sensimilla, ’ludes, Tuinals, Benzedrine: whatever we could find. Blaine and I spent whole weeks in the city hardly sleeping. We moved among the loud-mouthed sinners of the Village. Hardcore parties, where we walked through the pulsing music and lost each other for an hour, two hours, three hours, on end. It didn’t bother us when we found the other in someone else’s arms: we laughed and went on. Sex parties. Swap parties. Speed parties. At Studio 54, we inhaled poppers and gorged on champagne. This is happiness, we screamed at each other across the floor.

A fashion designer made me a purple dress with yellow buttons made from amphetamines. Blaine bit the buttons off one by one as we danced. The more stoned he got, the more open my dress fell.

We were coming in at exits and going out at entrances. Nighttime wasn’t just a dark thing anymore; it had actually acquired the light of morning — it seemed nothing to think of night as having a sunrise in it, or a noontime alarm. We used to drive all the way up to Park Avenue just to laugh at the bleary-eyed doormen. We caught early movies in the Times Square grind houses. Two-Trouser Sister. Panty Raid. Girls on Fire. We greeted sunrises on the tar beaches of Manhattan’s rooftops. We picked our friends up from the psych ward at Bellevue and drove them straight to Trader Vic’s.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

There had been a tic in my left eye. I tried to ignore it but it felt like one of Blaine’s clock hands, moving time around my face. I had been lovely once, Lara Liveman, midwestern girl, blond child of privilege, my father the owner of an automobile empire, my mother a Norwegian model. I am not afraid to say it — I’d had enough beauty to get taxi drivers fighting. But I could feel the late nights draining me. My teeth were turning a tinge darker from too much Benzedrine. My eyes were dull. Sometimes it seemed that they were even taking my hair color. An odd sensation, the life disappearing through the follicles, a sort of tingling.

Instead of working on my own art, I went to the hairdresser, twice, three times a week. Twenty-five dollars a time. I tipped her another fifteen and walked down the avenue, crying. I would get back to painting again. I was sure of it. All I needed was another day. Another hour.

The less work we did, the more valuable we thought we had become. I had been working toward abstract urban landscapes. A few collectors had been hovering at the edges. I just needed to find the stamina to finish. But instead of my studio, I stepped from the sunlight in Union Square into the comfortable dark of Max’s. All the bouncers knew me. A cocktail was placed on the table: a Manhattan first, washed down with a White Russian. I was airborne within minutes. I wandered around, chatted, flirted, laughed. Rock stars in the back room and artists in the front. Men in the women’s bathroom. Women in the men’s, smoking, talking, kissing, fucking. Trays of hash brownies carried around. Men snorting lines of coke through the carcasses of pens. Time was in jeopardy when I was at Max’s. People wore their watches with the faces turned against their skin. By the time dinner rolled around it could have been the next day. Sometimes it was three days later when I finally got out. The light hit my eyes when I opened the door onto Park Avenue South and Seventeenth Street. Occasionally Blaine was with me, more often he wasn’t, and there were times, quite honestly, I wasn’t sure.

The parties rolled on like rain. Down in the Village, the door of our dealer, Billy Lee, was always open. He was a tall, thin, handsome man. He had a set of dice that we used for sex games. There was a joke around that people came and went in Billy’s place, but mostly they came. His apartment was littered with stolen prescription pads, each script in triplicate with an individual BNDD number. He had stolen them from doctors’ offices on the Upper East Side; he used to go along the ground-floor offices on Park and Madison, kick the air conditioners in, and then crawl through the open window. We knew a doctor on the Lower East Side who would write the prescriptions. Billy was popping twenty pills a day. He said sometimes his heart felt as if it wrapped itself around his tongue. He had a thing for the waitresses at Max’s. The only one who eluded him was a blonde named Debbie. Sometimes I substituted for whichever waitress didn’t make it. Billy recited passages from Finnegans Wake in my ear. The father of fornicationists. He had learned twenty pages by heart. It sounded like a sort of jazz. Later I could hear his voice ringing in my ear.

In Blaine’s and my apartment, there were a few citations for loud music, once an arrest for possession, but it was a police raid that finally stalled us. A crashing through the door. The cops swarming around the place. Get to your feet. One of them bashed my ankle with a nightstick. I was too scared to scream. It was no ordinary raid. Billy was lifted from our couch, kicked to the floor, strip-searched in front of us. He was taken away in cuffs, part of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics sting. We got away with a warning: they were watching us, they said.

Blaine and I crawled around the city looking for a bump. Nobody we knew was selling. Max’s was closed for the night. The tough-eyed queers on Little West Twelfth Street wouldn’t let us into their clubs. There was a haze over Manhattan. We bought a bag on Houston but it turned out to be baking soda. We still stuffed it up our noses in case there was a small remnant of coke. We walked to the Bowery among the plainsong drunks and got smashed against a grocery store grate and robbed at knifepoint by three Filipino kids in lettered jackets.

We ended up in the doorway of an East Side pharmacy. Look what we’ve done to ourselves, said Blaine. Blood all over his shirt front. I couldn’t stop my eye from pulsing. I lay there, the wet of the ground seeping into my bones. Not even enough desire to weep.

An early-morning greaseball threw a quarter at our feet. E pluribus unum.

It was one of those moments from which I knew there would be no return. There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance. We sold the loft we owned in SoHo and bought the log cabin so far upstate that it would be a long walk back to Max’s ever again.

What Blaine had wanted was a year or two, maybe more, in the sticks. No distraction. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn’t a hippie idea. Both of us had always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from the hippies. We were the edge, the definers. We developed our idea to live in the twenties, a Scott and Zelda going clean. We kept our antique car, even got it refurbished, the seats re-upholstered, the dashboard buffed. I cut my hair flapper-style. We loaded up on provisions: eggs, flour, milk, sugar, salt, honey, oregano, chili, and racks of cured meat that we hung from a nail in the ceiling. We wiped away the cobwebs and filled the cupboards with rice, grain, jams, marshmallows — we believed we’d eventually be that clean. Blaine had decided it was time to go back to canvas, to paint in the style of Thomas Benton, or John Steuart Curry. He wanted that moment of purity, regionalism. He was sick of the colleagues he’d gone to Cornell with, the Smithsons and the Turleys and the Matta-Clarks. They had done as much as they possibly could, he said, there was no going further for them. Their spiral jetties and split houses and pilfered garbage cans were passé.

Me too — I’d decided that I wanted the pulse of the trees in my work, the journey of grass, some dirt. I thought I might be able to capture water in some new and startling way.

We had painted the new landscapes separately — the pond, the kingfisher, the silence, the moon perched on the saddle of the trees, the slashes of redwings among the leaves. We had kicked the drugs. We had made love. It all went so well, so very very well, until our trip back to Manhattan.

A BLUE DAWN stretched in the room. Blaine lay like a stranded thing, all the way across the bed. Impossible to wake. Grinding his teeth in his sleep. A thinness to him, his cheekbones too pronounced, but he was not unhandsome: there were times he still reminded me of a polo player.

I left him in bed and went out onto the porch. It was just before sunrise and already the heat had burned the night rain off the grass. A light wind riffled across the surface of the lake. I could hear the faintest sounds of traffic from the highway a few miles away, a low gurgle.

A single jet stream cut across the sky, like a line of disappearing coke.

My head was pounding, my throat dry. It took a moment to realize that the previous two days had actually occurred: our trip to Manhattan, the humiliation at Max’s, the car crash, a night of sex. What had been a quiet life had gotten its noise again.

I looked over at the hut where Blaine had hidden the Pontiac. We had forgotten the paintings. Left them out in the rain. We hadn’t even covered them in plastic. They sat, ruined, leaning against the side of the hut, by some old wagon wheels. I bent down and flicked through. A whole year’s work. The water and paint had bled down into the grass. The frames would soon warp. Fabulous irony. All the wasted work. The cutting of canvas. The pulling of hair from brushes. The months and months spent painting.

You clip a van, you watch your life fade away.

I let Blaine be, didn’t tell him, spent the whole day avoiding him. I walked in the woods, around the lake, out onto the dirt roads. Gather all around the things that you love, I thought, and prepare to lose them. I sat, pulling the roots of vines off trees: it felt like the only valuable thing I could do. That night I went to bed while Blaine stared out over the water, licking the very last of the coke from the inside of the plastic baggie.

The following morning, with the paintings still out by the garage, I walked toward town. At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign. Halfway down the road a group of starlings flew up from a pile of discarded car batteries.

THE TROPHY DINER was at the end of Main Street, in the shadow of the bell-tower church. A row of pickup trucks stood outside with empty gun racks in their windows. A few station wagons were parked on the church grounds. Weeds had cracked through the pavement at the door. The bell clanged. The locals on the swivel seats turned to check me out. More of them than usual. Baseball caps and cigarettes. They turned quickly away again, huddled and chatting. It didn’t bother me. They never had much time for me anyway.

I smiled across at the waitress but she didn’t gesture back. I took one of the red booths under a painting of ducks in flight. Some sugar packets, straws, and napkins were scattered on the table. I wiped the formica top clean, made a structure out of toothpicks.

The men along the stools were loud and charged up but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was a momentary panic that they somehow knew of the accident, but it seemed beyond the bounds of logic.

Calm down. Sit. Eat breakfast. Watch the world slide by.

The waitress finally came and slid the menu across the table, placed a coffee in front of me without even asking. She usually wore her weariness like an autograph, but there was something jumped-up about her as she hurried back to the counter and settled in once more among the men.

There were small drip marks on the white coffee mug where it hadn’t been washed properly. I scrubbed it with a paper napkin. On the floor beneath me there was a newspaper, folded over and egg-stained. The New York Times. I hadn’t read a paper in almost a year. In the cabin we had a radio with a crank arm that we had to wind up if we wanted to listen to the outside world. I kicked the paper under the far side of the booth. The prospect of news was nothing in the face of the accident and the paintings we had lost as a result. A full year’s work gone. I wondered what might happen when Blaine found out. I could see him rising from bed, tousled, shirtless, scratching himself, the male crotch adjust, walking outside and looking over at the hut, shaking himself awake, running through the long grass, which would rebound behind him.

He didn’t have much of a temper — one of the things I still loved about him — but I could foresee the cabin strewn with bits and pieces of the smashed frames.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time.

But there it was again, the girl’s spreading bloodstain.

I tried to catch the waitress’s eye. She was leaning on her elbows on the counter, chatting with the men. Something about their urgency trilled through the room. I coughed loudly and smiled across at her again. She sighed as if to say that she’d be there, for God’s sake, don’t push me. She rounded the counter, but stopped once more, in the middle of the floor, laughed at some intimate joke.

One of the men had unfolded his paper. Nixon’s face on the front page rolled briefly before me. All slicked back and rehearsed and gluttonous. I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come. My father had part-owned a car company in Detroit and the whole enormity of our family wealth had disappeared in the past few years. It wasn’t that I wanted the inheritance — I didn’t, not at all — but I could see my youth receding in front of me, those good moments when my father had carried me on his shoulders and tickled my underarms and even tucked me in bed, kissed my cheek, those days gone now, made increasingly distant by change.

— What’s going on?

My voice as casual as possible. The waitress with her pen poised over her writing pad.

— You didn’t hear? Nixon’s gone.

— Shot?

— Hell, no. Resigned.

— Today?

— No, tomorrow, honey. Next week. Christmas.

—’Scuse me?

She tapped her pen against the sharp of her chin.

— Whaddaya want?

I stammered an order for a western omelet and sipped from the water in the hard plastic glass.

A quickshot image across my mind. Before I met Blaine — before the drugs and the art and the Village — I had been in love with a boy from Dearborn. He’d volunteered for Vietnam, came home with the thousand-yard stare and a piece of bullet lodged perfectly in his spine. In his wheelchair he stunned me by campaigning for Nixon in ′68, going around the inner city, still giving his approval to all he couldn’t understand. We had broken up over the campaign. I thought I knew what Vietnam was — we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak. The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth. He had swallowed them all, even plastered his wheelchair with stickers. NIXON LOVES JESUS. He went door to door, spreading rumors about Hubert Humphrey. He even bought me a little chain with a Republican elephant. I had worn it to please him, to give him back his legs, but it was like the firelight had faded on the inside of his eyelids and his mind was punched away in a little drawer. I still wondered what might have happened if I had stayed with him and learned to praise ignorance. He had written to me that he had seen Blaine’s Clock Tower film and it had made him laugh so hard he had fallen out of his chair, he couldn’t get up, now he was crawling, was it possible to help him up? At the end of the letter he said, Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry. Still, when I recalled him I would always see him waiting for me under the silver high school bleachers with a smile on his face and thirty-two perfect shining white teeth.

The mind makes its shotgun leaps: punch them away, yes, in a drawer.

I saw the girl from the crash again, her face appearing over his shoulder. It was not the whites of her feet this time. She was full and pretty. No eye shadow, no makeup, no pretense. She was smiling at me and asking me why I had driven away, did I not want to talk to her, why didn’t I stop, come, come, please, did I not want to see the piece of metal that had ripped open her spine, and how about the pavement she had caressed at fifty miles per hour?

— You all right? asked the waitress, sliding the plate of food across the table.

— Fine, yeah.

She peered into the full cup and said: Something wrong?

— Just not in the mood.

She looked at me like I was quite possibly alien. No coffee? Call the House of Un-American Activities.

Hell with you, I thought. Leave me be. Go back to your unwashed cups.

I sat silently and smiled at her. The omelet was wet and runny. I took a single bite and could feel the grease unsettling my stomach. I bent down and extended my foot under the table, pulled in yesterday’s newspaper, lifted it up. It was open to an article about a man who had walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers. He had, it seemed, scoped out the building for six years and had finally not just walked, but danced, across, even lay down on the cable. He said that if he saw oranges he wanted to juggle them, if he saw skyscrapers he wanted to walk between them. I wondered what he might do if he walked into the diner and found the scattered pieces of me, lying around, too many of them to juggle.

I flicked through the rest of the pages. Some Cyprus, some water treatment, a murder in Brooklyn, but mostly Nixon and Ford and Watergate. I didn’t know much about the scandal. It was not something Blaine and I had followed: establishment politics at its coldest. Another sort of napalm, descending at home. I was happy to see Nixon resign, but it would hardly usher in a revolution. Nothing much more would happen than Ford might have a hundred days and then he too would put in an order for more bombs. It seemed to me that nothing much good had happened since the day Sirhan Sirhan had pulled the malevolent trigger. The idyll was over. Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn’t much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.

In the paper there was no mention of a crash on the FDR Drive, not even a little paragraph buried below the fold.

But there she was, still looking at me. It wasn’t the driver who struck me at all — I didn’t know why — it was still her, only her. I was wading up through the shadows toward her and the car engine was still whining and she was haloed in bits of broken glass. How great are you, God? Save her. Pick her up off the pavement and dust the glass from her hair. Wash the fake blood off the ground. Save her here and now, put her mangled body back together again.

I had a headache. My mind reeling. I could almost feel myself swaying in the booth. Maybe it was the drugs flushing out of my body. I picked up a piece of toast and just held it at my lips, but even the smell of the butter nauseated me.

Out the window I saw an antique car with whitewall tires pull up against the curb. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t a hallucination, something cinematic hauled from memory. The door opened and a shoe hit the ground. Blaine climbed out and shielded his eyes. It was almost the exact same gesture as on the highway two days before. He was wearing a lumber shirt and jeans. No old-fashioned clothes. He looked like he belonged upstate. He flicked the hair back from his eyes. As he crossed the road, the small-town traffic paused for him. Hands deep in his pockets, he strolled along the windows of the diner and threw me a smile. There was a puzzling jaunt in his step, walking with his upper body cocked back a notch. He looked like an adman, all patently false. I could see him, suddenly, in a seersucker suit. He smiled again. Perhaps he had heard about Nixon. More likely he hadn’t yet seen the paintings, ruined beyond repair.

The bell sounded on the door and I saw him wave across to the waitress and nod to the men. He had a palette knife sticking out of his shirt pocket.

— You look pale, honey.

— Nixon resigned, I said.

He smiled broadly as he leaned over the table and kissed me.

— Big swinging Dickey. Guess what? I found the paintings.

I shuddered.

— They’re far out, he said.

— What?

— They got left out in the rain the other night.

— I saw that.

— Utterly changed.

— I’m sorry.

— You’re sorry?

— Yeah, I’m sorry, Blaine, I’m sorry.

— Whoa, whoa.

— Whoa what, Blaine?

— Don’t you see? he said. You give it a different ending. It becomes new. You can’t see that?

I turned my face up to his, looked him square in the eye, and said, No, I didn’t see. I couldn’t see anything, not a goddamn thing.

— That girl was killed, I said.

— Oh, Christ. Not that again.

— Again? It was the day before yesterday, Blaine.

— How many times am I gonna have to tell you? Not our fault. Lighten up. And keep your fucking voice down, Lara, in here, for crying out loud.

He reached across and took my hand, his eyes narrow and intent: Not our fault, not our fault, not our fault.

It wasn’t as if he’d been speeding, he said, or had had an intention to go rear-end some asshole who couldn’t drive. Things happen. Things collide.

He speared a piece of my omelet. He held the fork out and half pointed it at me. He lowered his eyes, ate the food, chewed it slowly.

— I’ve just discovered something and you’re not listening.

It was like he wanted to prod me with a dumb joke.

— A moment of satori, he said.

— Is it about her?

— You have to stop, Lara. You have to pull yourself together. Listen to me.

— About Nixon?

— No, it’s not about Nixon. Fuck Nixon. History will take care of Nixon. Listen to me, please. You’re acting crazy.

— There was a dead girl.

— Enough already. Lighten the fuck up.

— He might be dead too, the guy.

— Shut. The. Fuck. It was just a tap, that’s all, nothing else. His brake lights weren’t working.

Just then the waitress came over and Blaine released my hand. He ordered himself a Trophy special with eggs, extra bacon, and venison sausage. The waitress backed away and he smiled at her, watched her go, the sway of her.

— Look, he said, it’s about time. When you think about it. They’re about time.

— What’s about time?

— The paintings. They’re a comment on time.

— Oh, Jesus, Blaine.

There was a shine in his eyes unlike any I’d seen in quite a while. He sliced open some packets of sugar, dumped them in his coffee. Some extra grains spilled out on the table.

— Listen. We made our twenties paintings, right? And we lived in that time, right? There’s a mastery there, I mean, they were steady-keeled, the paintings, you said so yourself. And they referred back to that time, right?

They maintained their formal manners. A stylistic armor about them, right? Even a monotony. They happened on purpose. We cultivated them. But did you see what the weather did to them?

— I saw, yeah.

— Well, I went out there this morning and the damn things floored me. But then I started looking through them. And they were beautiful and ruined. Don’t you see?

— No.

— What happens if we make a series of paintings and we leave them out in the weather? We allow the present to work on the past. We could do something radical here. Do the formal paintings in the style of the past and have the present destroy them. You let the weather become the imaginative force. The real world works on your art. So you give it a new ending. And then you reinterpret it. It’s perfect, dig?

— The girl died, Blaine.

— Give it over.

— No, I won’t give it over.

He threw up his hands and then slammed them down on the table. The solitary sugar grains jumped. Some men at the counter turned and flicked a look at us.

— Oh, fuck, he said. There’s no use talking to you.

His breakfast came and he ate it sullenly. He kept looking up at me, like I might suddenly change, become the beauty he had once married, but his eyes were blue and hateful. He ate the sausage with a sort of savagery, stabbed at it as if it angered him, this thing once alive. A little bit of egg stuck at the side of his mouth where he hadn’t shaved properly. He tried to talk of his new project, that a man could find meaning anywhere. His voice buzzed like a trapped fly. His desire for surety, for meaning. He needed me as part of his patterns. I felt the urge to tell Blaine that I had in fact spent my whole life really loving the Nixon boy in the wheelchair, and that it had all been pabulum since then, and juvenile, and useless, and tiresome, all of our art, all our projects, all our failures, it was just pure cast-off, and none of it mattered, but instead I just sat there, saying nothing, listening to the faint hum of voices from the counter, and the rattle of the forks against the plates.

— We’re finished here, he said.

Blaine snapped his fingers and the waitress came running. He left an extravagant tip and we stepped outside into the sunlight.

Blaine tipped a pair of giant sunglasses over his eyes, extended his stride, and walked toward the garage at the end of Main Street. I followed a couple of paces behind. He didn’t turn, didn’t wait.

— Hey, man, can you get a special order? he said to a pair of legs that were extended from underneath a car.

The mechanic wheeled himself out, stared upward, blinked.

— What can I get you, bud?

— A replacement headlight for a 1927 Pontiac. And a front fender.

— A what?

— Can you get them or not?

— This is America, chief.

— Get them, then.

— It takes time, man. And money.

— No problem, said Blaine. I got both.

The mechanic picked at his teeth, then grinned. He labored over toward a cluttered desk: files and pencil shavings and pinup calendar girls. Blaine’s hands were shaking, but he didn’t care; he was caught up on himself now and what he would do with his paintings once the car was fixed. As soon as the light and the fender could get repaired the whole matter would be forgotten and then he’d work. I had no idea how long this new obsession might last for him — an hour, another year, a lifetime?

— You coming? said Blaine as we stepped out of the garage.

— I’d rather walk.

— We should film this, he said. Y’know, how this new series gets painted and all. All from the very beginning. Make a document of it, don’t you think?

A ROW OF SMOKERS stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety-eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.

I walked through the gauntlet. It was the fifth receiving room I had visited, and I had begun to think that perhaps both the driver and the young woman had been killed on impact and were taken immediately to a morgue.

A security guard pointed me toward an information booth. A window was cut into the wall of an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. A stout woman sat framed by it. From a distance it looked as if she sat in a television set. Her eyeglasses dangled at her neck. I sidled up to the window and whispered about a man and woman who might have been brought in from a crash on Wednesday afternoon.

— Oh, you’re a relative? she said, not even glancing up at me.

— Yes, I stammered. A cousin.

— You’re here for his things?

— His what?

She gave me a quick once-over.

— His things?

— Yes.

— You’ll have to sign for them.

Within fifteen minutes I found myself standing with a box of the late John A. Corrigan’s possessions. They consisted of a pair of black trousers that had been slit up the side with hospital scissors, a black shirt, a stained white undershirt, underwear, and socks in a plastic bag, a religious medal, a pair of dark sneakers with the soles worn through, his driver’s license, a ticket for parking illegally on John Street at 7:44 A.M. on Wednesday, August 7, a packet of rolling tobacco, some papers, a few dollars, and, oddly, a key chain with a picture of two young black children on it. There was also a baby-pink lighter, which seemed at odds with all the other things. I didn’t want the box. I had taken it out of embarrassment, out of a sense of duty to my lie, an obligation to save face, and perhaps even to save my hide. I had begun to think that perhaps leaving the scene of the crime was manslaughter, or at least some sort of felony, and now there was a second crime, hardly momentous, but it sickened me. I wanted to leave the box on the steps of the hospital and run away from myself. I had set all these events in motion and all they got for me was a handful of a dead man’s things. I was clearly out of my depth. Now it was time to go home, but I had taken on this man’s bloodstained baggage. I stared at the license. He looked younger than my freeze-frame memory had made him. A pair of oddly frightened eyes, looking way beyond the camera.

— And the girl?

— She was D.O.A., said the woman like it was a traffic signal.

She looked up at me and adjusted her glasses on her nose.

— Anything else?

— No thanks, I stammered.

The only things I could really jigsaw together was that John A. Corrigan — born January 15, 1943, five foot ten, 156 pounds, blue eyes — was probably the father of two young black children in the Bronx. Perhaps he had been married to the girl who was thrown through the windshield. Maybe the girls in the key chain were his daughters, grown now. Or perhaps it was something clandestine, as Blaine had said, he could’ve been having an affair with the dead woman.

A photocopy of some medical information was folded at the bottom of the box: his sign-out chart. The scrawl was almost indecipherable. Cardiac tamponade. Clindamycin, 300 mg. I was for a moment out on the highway again. The fender touched the back of his van and I was spinning now in his big brown van. Walls, water, guardrails.

The scent of his shirt rose up as I walked out into the fresh air. I had the odd desire to distribute his tobacco to the smokers hanging around outside.

A crowd of Puerto Rican kids were hanging around in front of the Pontiac. They wore colored sneakers and wide flares and had cigarette packets shoved under their T-shirt sleeves. They could smell my nerves as I sidled through. A tall, thin boy reached over my shoulder and pulled out the plastic bag of Corrigan’s underwear, gave a fake shriek, dropped them to the ground. The others laughed a pack laugh. I bent down to pick up the bag but felt a brush of a hand against my breast.

I drew myself as tall as I possibly could and stared in the boy’s eyes.

— Don’t you dare.

I felt so much older than my twenty-eight years, as if I’d taken on decades in the last few days. He backed off two paces.

— Only looking.

— Well, don’t.

— Gimme a ride.

— Pontiac! shouted one boy. Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac!

— Gimme one, lady.

More giggles.

Over his shoulder I could see a hospital security guard making his way toward us. He wore a kufi and loped as he came across, talking into a radio. The kids scattered and ran down the street, whooping.

— You all right, ma’am? said the security guard.

I was fumbling with the keys at the door of the car. I kept thinking the guard was going to walk around the front and see the smashed headlight and put two and two together, but he just guided me out into the traffic. In the rearview mirror I saw him picking up the plastic bag of underwear I’d left on the pavement. He held them in the air a moment and then shrugged, threw them in the garbage can at the side of the road.

I turned the corner toward Second Avenue, weeping.

I had gone to the city ostensibly to buy a newfangled video camera for Blaine, to record the journey of his new paintings. But the only stores I knew were way down on Fourteenth Street, near my old neighborhood. Who was it said that you can’t go home anymore? I found myself driving to the West Side of the city instead. Out to a little parking area in Riverside Park, along by the water. The cardboard box sat in the passenger seat beside me. An unknown man’s life. I had never done anything like this before. My intent had entered the world and become combustible. It had been given to me far too easily, just a simple signature and a thank-you. I thought about dropping it all in the Hudson, but there are certain things we just cannot bring ourselves to do. I stared at his photograph again. It was not he who had led me here, but the girl. I still knew nothing about her. It made no sense. What was I going to do? Practice a new form of resurrection?

I got out of the car and fished in a nearby garbage can for a newspaper and scanned through it to see if I could find any death notices or an obituary. There was one, an editorial, for Nixon’s America, but none for a young black girl caught in a hit-and-run.

I screwed up my courage and drove to the Bronx, toward the address on the license. Entire blocks of abandoned lots. Cyclone fences topped with shredded plastic bags. Stunted catalpa trees bent by the wind. Auto-body shops. New and used. The smell of burning rubber and brick. On a half-wall someone had written: DANTE HAS ALREADY DISAPPEARED.

It took ages to find the place. There were a couple of police cars out under the Major Deegan. Two of the cops had a box of doughnuts sitting on the dashboard between them, like a third-rate TV show. They stared at me, open-mouthed, when I pulled up the car alongside them. I had lost all sense of fear. If they wanted to arrest me for a hit-and-run, then go ahead.

— This is a rough neighborhood, ma’am, one of them said in a New York nasal. Car like that’s going to raise a few eyebrows.

— What can we do for you, ma’am? said the other.

— Maybe not call me ma’am?

— Feisty, huh?

— What you want, lady? Nothing but trouble here.

As if to confirm, a huge refrigerator truck slowed down as it came through the traffic lights, and the driver rolled down the window and eased over to the curb, looked out, then suddenly gunned it when he saw the police car.

— No nig-knock today, shouted the cop to the passing truck.

The short one blanched a little when he looked back at me, and he gave a thin smile that creased his eyelids. He ran his hands over a tube of fat that bulged out at his waist.

— No trade today, he said, almost apologetically.

— So, what can we do for you, miss? said the other.

— I’m looking to return something.

— Oh, yeah?

— I have these things here. In my car.

— Where’d you get that? What is it? Like the 1850s?

— It’s my husband’s.

Two thin smiles, but they looked happy enough that I’d broken their tedium. They stepped over to my car and rumbled around, running their hands along the wooden dash, marveling at the hand brake. I had often wondered if Blaine and I had gone on our twenties kick simply so we could keep our car. We had bought it as a wedding present for ourselves. Every time I sat in it, it felt like a return to simpler times.

The second cop peered into the box of possessions. They were disgusting, but I was hardly in a position to say anything. I felt a sudden pang of guilt for the plastic bag of underwear that I had left behind at the hospital, as if it somehow might be needed now, to complete the person who was not around. The cop picked up the parking ticket and then the license from the bottom of the box. The younger one nodded.

— Hey, that’s the Irish guy, the priest.

— Sure is.

— The one that was giving us shit. About the hookers. He drove that funky van.

— He’s up there on the fifth floor. I mean, his brother. Cleaning out his stuff.

— A priest? I said.

— A monk or some such. One of these worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis.

— Theologian, said the other.

— One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.

I felt a shudder of hatred, then told the cops that I was a hospital administrator and that the items needed to be returned — did they mind leaving them with the dead man’s brother?

— Not our job, miss.

— See the path there? Around the side? Follow that to the fourth brown building. In to the left. Take the elevator.

— Or the stairs.

— Be careful, but.

I wondered how many assholes it took to make a police department. They had been made braver and louder by the war. They had a swagger to them. Ten thousand men at the water cannons. Shoot the niggers. Club the radicals. Love it or leave it. Believe nothing unless you hear it from us.

I walked toward the projects. A surge of dread. Hard to calm the heart when it leaps so high. As a child I saw horses trying to step into rivers to cool themselves off. You watch them move from the stand of buckeye trees, down the slope, through the mud, swishing off flies, getting deeper and deeper until they either swim for a moment, or turn back. I recognized it as a pattern of fear, that there was something shameful in it — these high-rises were not a country that existed in my youth or art, or anywhere else. I had been a sheltered girl. Even when drug-addled I would never have gone into a place like this. I tried to persuade myself onward. I counted the cracks in the pavement. Cigarette butts. Unopened letters with footprints on them. Shards of broken glass. Someone whistled but I didn’t look his way. Some pot fumes drifted from an open window. For a moment, it wasn’t like I was entering water at all: it was more like I was ferrying buckets of blood away from my own body, and I could feel them slap and spill as I moved.

The dry brown remnants of a floral wreath hung outside the main doors. In the hallway the mailboxes were dented and scorch-marked. There was a reek of roach spray. The overhead lights were spray-painted black for some reason.

A large middle-aged lady in a floral-patterned dress waited at the elevator. She kicked aside a used needle with a deep sigh. It settled into the corner, a small bubble of blood at its tip. I returned her nod and smile. Her white teeth. The bounce of imitation pearls at her neck.

— Nice weather, I said to her, though both of us knew exactly what sort of weather it was.

The elevator rose. Horses into rivers. Watch me drown.

I said good-bye to her on the fifth floor as she continued upward, the sound of the cables like the crack of old branches.

A few people were gathered outside the doorway, black women, mostly, in dark mourning clothes that looked as if they didn’t belong to them, as if they’d hired the clothes for the day. Their makeup was the thing that betrayed them, loud and gaudy and one with silver sparkles around her eyes, which looked so tired and worn-down. The cops had said something about hookers: it struck me that maybe the young girl had just been a prostitute. I felt a momentary sigh of gratitude, and then the awareness stopped me cold, the walls pulsed in on me. How cheap was I?

What I was doing was unpardonable and I knew it. I could feel my chest thumping in my blouse, but the women parted for me, and I went through their curtain of grief.

The door was open. Inside, a young woman was sweeping the floor clean. She had a face that looked like it came from a Spanish mosaic. Her eyes were darkened with streaks of mascara. A simple silver chain around her neck. She was clearly no hooker. I felt immediately under-dressed, like I was barging in on her silence. Beyond her, a replica of the man from the photo on the license, only heavier, jowlier, more sparsely stubbled. The sight of him knocked the oxygen out of me. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie and a jacket. His face was broad and slightly florid, his eyes puffy with grief. I stammered that I was from the hospital and that I was here to drop off the things that had belonged to a certain Mr. Corrigan.

— Ciaran Corrigan, he said, coming across and shaking my hand.

He seemed to me first the sort of man who would be quite happy doing crosswords in bed. He took the box and looked down, searched through it. He came to the keyring and gazed at it a moment, put it in his pocket.

— Thanks, he said. We forgot to pick these things up.

He had a touch of an accent to him, not very strong, but he carried his body like I had seen other Irishmen carry themselves, hunched into himself, yet still hyperaware. The Spanish woman took the shirt and brought it into the kitchen. She was standing by the sink and sniffing the cloth deeply. The black bloodstains were still visible. She looked across at me, lowered her gaze to the floor. Her small chest heaved. She suddenly ran the tap and plunged the cloth into the water and began wringing it, as if John A. Corrigan might suddenly appear and want to wear it again. It was quite obvious that I wasn’t wanted or needed, but something held me there.

— We’ve got a funeral service in forty-five minutes, he said. If you’ll excuse me.

A toilet flushed in the apartment above.

— There was a young girl too, I said.

— Yes, it’s her funeral. Her mother’s getting out of jail. That’s what we heard. For an hour or two. My brother’s service is tomorrow. Cremation. There’ve been some complications. Nothing to worry about.

— I see.

— If you’ll excuse me.

— Of course.

A short heavyset priest made his way into the apartment, announcing himself as a Father Marek. The Irishman shook his hand. He glanced at me as if to ask why I was still there. I went to the door, stopped, and turned around. It looked like the door locks had been jimmied a number of times.

The Spanish woman was still in the kitchen, where she suspended the wet shirt from a hanger above the sink. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember. She put her face in the shirt again.

I turned and stammered.

— Would you mind if I went to the girl’s service?

He shrugged and looked at the priest, who scribbled a quick map on a scrap of paper, as if he was glad for something to do. He took me by the elbow and then down the corridor.

— Do you have any influence? the priest asked.

— Influence? I asked.

— Well, his brother has insisted on getting him cremated before he goes back to Ireland. Tomorrow. And I was wondering if you could talk him out of it.

— Why?

— It’s against our faith, he said.

Down the corridor, one of the women had begun wailing. She stopped, though, when the Irishman stepped out the door. He had jammed his tie high on his neck and his jacket was pulled tight across his shoulders. He was followed by the Spanish woman, who had a stately pride about her. The corridor was hushed. He pressed the button for the elevator and looked at me.

— Sorry, I said to the priest. I don’t have any influence.

I pulled away from him and hurried toward the elevator as it was closing. The Irishman put his hand in the gap and pulled the door open for me, and then we were gone. The Spanish woman gave me a guarded smile and said she was sorry she couldn’t go to the girl’s funeral, she had to go home and look after her own children, but she was glad that Ciaran had someone to go with.

I offered him a lift without thinking, but he said no, that he had been asked to travel in the funeral cortege, he didn’t know why.

He wrung his hands nervously as he stepped out into the sunlight.

— I didn’t even know the girl, he said.

— What was her name?

— I don’t know. Her mother’s Tillie.

He said it with a downward finality, but then he added: I think it’s Jazzlyn, or something.

I PARKED THE CAR outside St. Raymond’s cemetery in Throgs Neck, far enough away that nobody could see it. A hum came from the expressway, but the closer I got to the graveyard the more the smell of fresh-cut grass filled the air. A faint whiff of the Long Island Sound.

The trees were tall and the light fell in shafts among them. It was hard to believe that this was the Bronx, although I saw the graffiti scrawled on the side of a few mausoleums, and some of the headstones near the gate had been vandalized. There were a few funerals in progress, mostly in the new cemetery, but it was easy enough to tell which group was the girl’s. They were carrying the coffin down the tree-lined road toward the old cemetery. The children were dressed in perfect white, but the women’s clothes looked like they had been cobbled together, the skirts too short, the heels too high, their cleavage covered with wraparound scarves. It was like they had gone to a strange garage sale: the bright expensive clothes hidden with bits and pieces of dark. The Irishman looked so pale among them, so very white.

A man in a gaudy suit, wearing a hat with a purple feather, followed at the back of the procession. He looked drugged-up and malevolent. Under his suit jacket he wore a tight black turtleneck and a gold chain on his neck, a spoon hanging from it.

A boy who was no more than eight played a saxophone, beautifully, like some strange drummer boy from the Civil War. The music rang out in punctuated bursts over the graveyard.

I stayed in the background, near the road in a patch of overgrown grass, but as the service began, John A. Corrigan’s brother caught my eye and beckoned me forward. There were no more than twenty people gathered around the graveside but a few young women wailed deeply.

— Ciaran, he said again, extending his hand, as if I might have forgotten. He gave me a thin, embarrassed smile. We were the only white people there. I wanted to reach up and adjust his tie, fix his scattered hair, primp him.

A woman — she could only have been the dead girl’s mother — stood sobbing beside two men in suits. Another, younger woman stepped up to her. She took off a beautiful black shawl and draped it on the mother’s shoulders.

— Thanks, Ange.

The preacher — a thin, elegant black man — coughed and the crowd fell silent. He talked about the spirit being triumphant in the body’s fall, and how we must learn to recognize the absence of the body and praise the presence of what is left behind. Jazzlyn had a hard life, he said. Death could not justify or explain it. A grave does not equal what we have had in our lifetime. It was maybe not the time or the place, he said, but he was going to talk about justice anyway. Justice, he repeated. Only candor and truth win out in the end. The house of justice had been vandalized, he said. Young girls like Jazzlyn were forced to do horrific things. As they grew older the world had demanded terrible things of them. This was a vile world. It forced her into vile things. She had not asked for it. It had become vile for her, he said. She was under the yoke of tyranny. Slavery may be over and gone, he said, but it was still apparent. The only way to fight it was with charity, justice, and goodness. It was not a simple plea, he said, not at all. Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter — it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

— Justice, said Jazzlyn’s mother.

The preacher nodded, then looked up toward the high trees. Jazzlyn had been a child who grew up in Cleveland and New York City, he said, and she had seen those distant hills of goodness and she knew that one day she was going to get there. It was always going to be a difficult journey. She had seen too much evil on the way, he said. She had some friends and confidants, like John A. Corrigan, who had perished with her, but mostly the world had tried her and sentenced her and taken advantage of her kindness. But life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty, he said, and now she was on her way to a place where there were no governments to chain her or enslave her, no miscreants to demand the wrong thing, and none of her own people who were going to turn her flesh to profit. He stood tall then and said: Let it be said that she was not ashamed.

A wave of nods went around the crowd.

— Shame on those who wanted to shame her.

— Yes, came the reply.

— Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.

— Yes.

— That bad life. That vile life. In front of you will stretch goodness. You will follow the path and it will be good. Not easy, but good. Full of terror and difficulty maybe, but the windows will open to the sky and your heart will be purified and you will take wing.

I had a sudden, terrible vision of Jazzlyn flying through the windshield. I felt dizzy. The preacher’s lips moved, but for a moment I couldn’t hear. He was looking at a single place in the crowd, his vision fixed on the man in the purple hat behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. The man was biting his upper lip in anger and his body seemed to curl into itself, coiling and getting ready to strike. The hat shadowed him but he looked to have a glass eye.

— The snakes will perish with the snakes, said the preacher.

— Yessir, came a woman’s voice.

— They’ll be gone.

— Yes they will.

— Be they out of here.

The man in the purple hat didn’t move. Nobody moved.

— Go on! shouted Jazzlyn’s mother, contorting herself. She looked like she was strapped down but she was wriggling and squirming out of it. One of the men in suits touched her arm. Her shoulders were going from side to side and her voice was raw with rage.

— Get the fuck out of here!

I wondered for a horrific moment if she was shouting at me, but she was staring beyond me, at the man in the feathered hat. The chorus of shouts rose higher. The preacher held his hands out and asked for calm. It was only then I realized that Jazzlyn’s mother had kept her arms behind her back the whole time, shackled with handcuffs. The two black men in suits beside her were city cops.

— Get the fuck out, Birdhouse, she said.

The man in the hat waited a moment, stretched upward, gave a smile that showed all his teeth. He touched the brim, tilted it, turned, and walked away. A small cheer went up from the mourners. They watched the pimp disappear down the road. He raised his hat one time, without turning around, waved it in the air, like a man who was not really saying good-bye.

— The snakes are gone, said the preacher. Let them stay gone.

Ciaran steadied my arm. I was feeling cold and dirty: it was like putting on a fourth-hand blouse. I had no right to be there. I was treading on their territory. But something in the service was pure and true: Behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.

The wailing had stopped and Jazzlyn’s mother said: Take these goddamn things off me.

Both cops stared straight ahead.

— I said take these goddamn things off me!

Finally, one of them stepped behind her and unlocked the handcuffs.

— Thank Jesus.

She shook her hands out and walked around the open grave, over toward Ciaran. Her scarf fell slightly and revealed the depth of her cleavage. Ciaran flushed red and embarrassed.

— I got a little story to tell, she said.

She cleared her throat and a swell went around the crowd.

— My Jazzlyn, she was ten. And she see’d a picture of a castle in a magazine somewheres. She went, clipped it out, and taped it on the wall above her bed. Like I say, nothing much to it, I never really thought that much about it. But when she met Corrigan …

She pointed over toward Ciaran, who looked to the ground.

— … and one day he was bringing around some coffee and she told him all about it, the castle — maybe she was bored, just wanted something to say, I don’t know. But you know Corrigan — that cat would listen to just about anything. He had an ear. And, of course, Corrie got a kick out of that. He said he knew castles just like that where he growed up. And he said he’d bring her to a castle just like it one day. Promised her solid. Every day he’d come out and bring her coffee and he’d say to my little girl that he was getting that castle ready, just you wait. One day he’d tell her that he was getting the moat right. The next he said he was working on the chains that go to the gate bridge. Then he said he was working on the turrets. Then he’d say he was getting the banquet all squared away. They were gonna have mead — that’s like wine — and lots of good food and there was gonna be harps playing and lots of dancing.

— Yes, said a woman in spangled makeup.

— Every day he had a new thing to say about that castle. That was their own little game, and Jazzlyn loved playing it, word.

She grabbed hold of Ciaran’s arm.

— That’s all, she said. That’s all I have to say. That’s it. That’s fucking it, ’scuse me for saying it.

A chorus of amens went around the gathered crowd and then she turned to some of the other women and made a comment of some sorts, something strange and clipped about going to the bathroom in the castle. A ripple of laughter went around a portion of the crowd and an odd thing occurred — she began quoting some poet whose name I didn’t catch, a line about open doors and a single beam of sunlight that struck right to the center of the floor. Her Bronx accent threw the poem around until it seemed to fall at her feet. She looked down sadly at it, its failure, but then she said that Corrigan was full of open doors, and he and Jazzlyn would have a heck of a time of it wherever they happened to be; every single door would be open, especially the one to that castle.

She leaned then against Ciaran’s shoulder and started to weep: I’ve been a bad mother, she said, I’ve been a terrible goddamn mother.

— No, no, you’re fine.

— There weren’t ever no goddamn castle.

— There’s a castle for sure, he said.

— I’m not an idiot, she said. You don’t have to treat me like a child.

— It’s okay.

— I let her shoot up.

— You don’t have to be so hard on yourself…

— She shot up in my arms.

She turned her face to the sky and then grasped the nearest lapel.

— Where’re my babies?

— She’s in heaven now, don’t you worry.

— My babies, she said. My baby’s babies.

— They’re just fine, Till, said a woman near the grave.

— They’re being looked after.

— They’ll come see you, T.

— You promise me? Who’s got them? Where are they?

— I swear it, Till. They’re okay.

— Promise me.

— God’s honest, said a woman.

— You better fucking promise, Angie.

— I promise. All right already, T. I promise.

She leaned against Ciaran and then turned her face, looked him in the eye, and said: You remember what we done? You ’member me?

Ciaran looked like he was handling a stick of dynamite. He wasn’t sure whether to hold it and smother it, or throw it as far away from himself as he could. He flicked a quick look at me, then the preacher, but then he turned to her and put his arms around her and held her very tight. He said: I miss Corrie too. The other women came around and they took their turns with him. They were hugging him, it seemed, as if he were the embodiment of his brother. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows, but there was something good and proper about it — one after the other they came.

He reached into his pocket and took out the keyring with the pictures of the babies, handed it to Jazzlyn’s mother. She stared at it, smiled, then suddenly pulled away and slapped Ciaran’s face. He looked like he was grateful for it. One of the cops half grinned. Ciaran nodded and pursed his lips, then stepped backward toward me.

I had no idea what sort of complications I had stepped myself into.

The preacher coughed and asked for silence and said he had a few final words. He went through the formalities of prayer and the old biblical Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but then he said that it was his firm belief that ashes could someday return to wood, that was the miracle not just of heaven, but the miracle of the actual world, that things could be reconstituted and the dead could come alive, most especially in our hearts, and that’s how he’d like to end things, and it was time to lay Jazzlyn to rest because that’s what he wanted her to do, rest.

When the service was ended the cops put the handcuffs back on Tillie’s wrists. She wailed just one single time. The cops walked her off. She broke down into soundless sobs.

I accompanied Ciaran out of the cemetery. He took off his jacket and hung it over his shoulder, not nonchalantly, but to beat the heat. We went down the pathway toward the gates on Lafayette Avenue. Ciaran walked a quarter of a step in front of me. People can look different from hour to hour depending on the angle of daylight. He was older than me, in his mid-thirties or so, but he looked younger a moment, and I felt protective of him, the soft walk, the little bit of jowliness to him, the roll of tubbiness at his waist. He stopped and watched a squirrel climb over a large tombstone. It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to make sense. The squirrel scampered up a tree trunk, the sound of its nails like water in a tub.

— Why was she in handcuffs?

— She got eight months or something. For a robbery charge on top of the prostitution.

— So they only let her out for the funeral?

— Yeah, from what I can gather.

There was nothing to say. The preacher had already said it. We walked out the gates and turned together in the same direction, toward the expressway, but he stopped and went to shake my hand.

— I’ll give you a lift home, I said.

— Home? he said, with a half-laugh. Can your car swim?

— Sorry?

— Nothing, he said, shaking his head.

We went down along Quincy, where I had parked the car. I suppose he knew it the minute he saw the Pontiac. It was parked with its front facing us. One wheel was up on the curb. The smashed headlight was apparent and the fender dented. He stopped a moment in the middle of the road, half nodded, as if it all made sense to him now. His face fell in upon itself, like a sandcastle in time lapse. I found myself shaking as I got into the driver’s side, leaned across to open up the passenger door.

— This is the car, isn’t it?

I sat a long time, running my fingers over the dashboard, dusty with pollen.

— It was an accident, I said.

— This is the car, he repeated.

— I didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t mean for it to happen.

— We? he said.

I sounded exactly like Blaine, I knew. All I was doing was holding my hand up against the guilt. Avoiding the failure, the drugs, the recklessness. I felt so foolish and inadequate. It was as if I had burned the whole house down and was searching through the rubble for bits of how it used to be, but found only the match that had sparked it all. I was clawing around frantically, looking for any justification. And yet there was still another part of me that thought perhaps I was being honest, or as honest as I could get, having left the scene of the crime, having run away from the truth. Blaine had said that things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.

I kept cleaning the dashboard, rubbing the dust and pollen on the leg of my jeans. The mind always seeks another, simpler place, less weighted. I wanted to rev the engine alive and drive into the nearest river. What could have been a simple touch of the brakes, or a minuscule swerve, had become unfathomable. I needed to be airborne. I wanted to be one of those animals that needed to fly in order to eat.

— You don’t work for the hospital at all, then?

— No.

— Were you driving it? The car?

— Was I what?

— Were you driving it or not?

— I guess I was.

It was the only lie I’ve ever told that has made any sense to me. There was the faint crackle of something between us: cars as bodies, crashing.

Ciaran sat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. A little sound came from him that was closer to a laugh than anything else. He rolled the window up and down, ran his fingers along the ledge, then tapped the glass with his knuckles, like he was figuring a means of escape.

— I’m going to say one thing, he said.

I felt the glass was being tapped all around me: soon it would splinter and crumble.

— One thing, that’s all.

— Please, I said.

— You should have stopped.

He thumped the dashboard with the heel of his hand. I wanted him to curse me, to damn me from a height, for trying to calm my own conscience, for lying, for letting me get away with it, for appearing at his brother’s apartment. A further part of me wanted him to actually turn and hit me, really hit me, draw blood, hurt me, ruin me.

— Right, he said. I’m gone.

He had his hand on the handle. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped partly out, then closed it again, leaned back in the seat, exhausted.

— You should’ve fucking stopped. Why didn’t you?

Another car pulled into the gap in front of us to parallel-park, a big blue Oldsmobile with silver fins. We sat silently watching it trying to maneuver into the space between us and the car in front. It had just enough room. It angled in, then pulled out, then angled back in again. We watched it like it was the most important thing in the world. Not a movement between us. The driver leaned over his shoulder and cranked the wheel. Just before he put it in park he reversed once more and gently touched against the grille of my car. We heard a tinkle: the last of the glass left in the broken headlight. The driver jumped out, his arms held high in surrender, but I waved him away. He was an owl-faced creature, with spectacles, and the surprise of it made his face half comic. He hurried off down the road, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure.

— I don’t know, I said. I just don’t know. There’s no explanation. I was scared. I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough.

— Shit, he said.

He lit a cigarette, cracked the window slightly and blew smoke sideways out of his mouth, then looked away.

— Listen, he said finally. I need to get away from here. Just drop me off.

— Where?

— I don’t know. You want to go for a coffee somewhere? A drink?

Both of us were flummoxed by what was traveling between us. I had witnessed the death of his brother. Smashed that life shut. I didn’t say a word, just nodded and put the car in gear, squeezed it out of the gap, pulled out into the empty road. A quiet drink in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

Later that night, when I got home — if home was what I could call it anymore — I went swimming. The water was murky and full of odd plants. Strange leaves and tendrils. The stars looked like nail heads in the sky — pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall. Blaine had completed a couple of paintings and had set them up around the lake in various parts of the forest and around the water edge. A doubt had kicked in, as if he knew it was a stupid idea, but still wanted to experiment with it.

There’s nothing so absurd that you can’t find at least one person to buy it. I stayed in the water, hoping that he’d leave and go to sleep, but he sat on the dock on a blanket and when I rose from the water, he shrouded me with it. Arm around my shoulder, he walked me back to the cabin. The last thing I wanted was a kerosene lamp. I needed switches and electricity. Blaine tried to guide me to the bed but I simply said no, that I wasn’t interested.

— Just go to bed, I said to him.

I sat at the kitchen table and sketched. It had been a while since I had done anything with charcoal. Things took shape on the page. I recalled that, when we got married, Blaine had raised a glass in front of our guests and said with a grin: ’Til life do us part. It was his sort of joke. We were married, I thought then — we would watch each other’s last breath.

But it struck me, as I sketched, that all I wanted to do was to walk out into a clean elsewhere.

NOTHING MUCH HAD happened, earlier, with Ciaran, or nothing much had seemed to happen anyway, at least not at first. It seemed ordinary enough, the rest of the day. We had simply driven away from the cemetery, through the Bronx, and over the Third Avenue bridge, avoiding the FDR.

The weather was warm and the sky bright blue. We kept the windows down. His hair wisped in the wind. In Harlem he asked me to slow down, amazed by the storefront churches.

— They look like shops, he said.

We sat outside and listened to a choir practice in the Baptist Church on 123rd Street. The voices were high and angelic, singing about being in the bright valleys of the Lord. Ciaran tapped his fingers absently on the dashboard. It looked like the music had entered him and was bouncing around. He said something about his brother and him not having a dancing bone in their bodies, but their mother had played the piano when they were young. There was one time when his brother had wheeled the piano out into the street along the seafront in Dublin, he couldn’t now for the life of him remember why. That, he said, was the funny thing about memory. It came along at the oddest moments. He hadn’t remembered it in a long time. They had wheeled the piano along the beach in the sunshine. It was the one time in his life that he remembered being mistaken for his brother. His mother had mixed up the names and called him John—Here, John, come here, love—and even though he was the older brother it was a moment when he saw himself as firmly rooted in childhood, and maybe he was still there, now, today, and forever, his dead brother nowhere to be found.

He cursed and kicked his foot against the lower panels of the car: Let’s get that drink.

At a Park Avenue overpass a kid swung on a harness and ropes, spray-painting the bridge. I thought of Blaine’s paintings. They were a sort of graffiti too, nothing more.

We drove down the Upper East Side, along Lexington Avenue, and found a dumpy little joint around about Sixty-fourth Street. A young bartender in a giant white apron hardly looked us over as we strolled in. We blinked against the beer light. No jukebox. Peanut shells all over the floor. A few men with fewer teeth sat at the counter, listening to a baseball game on the radio. The mirrors were brown and freckled with age. The smell of stale fryer oil. A sign on the wall read: BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF THE BEHOLDER.

We slid into a booth, against the red leather seats, and ordered two Bloody Marys. The back of my blouse was damp against the seat. A candle wavered between us, a small lambent glow. Flecks of dirt swam in the liquid wax. Ciaran tore his paper napkin into tiny pieces and told me all about his brother. He was going to bring him home the next day, after cremation, and sprinkle him in the water around Dublin Bay. To him, it didn’t seem nostalgic at all. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Bring him home. He’d walk along the waterfront and wait for the tide to come in, then scatter Corrigan in the wind. It wasn’t against his faith at all. Corrigan had never mentioned a funeral of any sort and Ciaran felt certain that he’d rather be a part of many things.

What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn’t think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go to. Even dead, he’d still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.

— What then?

— No idea. Maybe travel. Or stay in Dublin. Maybe come back here and make a go of it.

He didn’t like it all that much when he first came — all the rubbish and the rush — but it was growing on him, it wasn’t half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn’t matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

— You never know, in a place like this, he said. You just never know.

— You’ll be back, then? Sometime?

— Maybe. Corrigan never thought he’d stay here. Then he met someone. I think he was going to stay here forever.

— He was in love?

— Yeah.

— Why d’you call him Corrigan?

— Just happened that way.

— Never John?

— John was too ordinary for him.

He let the pieces of the napkin flutter to the floor and said something strange about words being good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t. He looked away. The neon in the window brightened as the light went down outside.

His hand brushed against mine. That old human flaw of desire.

I stayed another hour. Silence most of the time. Ordinary language escaped me. I stood up, a hollowness to my legs, gooseflesh along my bare arms.

— I wasn’t driving, I said.

Ciaran folded his body all the way across the table, kissed me.

— I figured that.

He pointed to the wedding ring on my finger.

— What’s he like?

He smiled when I didn’t reply, but it was a smile with all the world of sadness in it. He turned toward the bartender, waved at him, ordered two more Bloody Marys.

— I have to go.

— I’ll just drink them both myself, he said.

One for his brother, I thought.

— You do that.

— I will, he said.

Outside, there were two tickets in the window of the Pontiac — a parking fine, and one for a smashed headlight. It was enough to almost knock me sideways. Before I drove home to the cabin, I went back to the window of the bar and shaded my eyes against the glass, looked in. Ciaran was at the counter, his arms folded and his chin on his wrist, talking to the bartender. He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.

There is, I think, a fear of love.

There is a fear of love.

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN FOREVER DOWN

WHAT HE HAS SEEN OFTEN in the meadow: a nest of three red-tailed hawks, chicks, on the ledge of a tree branch, in a thick intertwine of twigs. The chicks could tell when the mother was returning, even from far away. They began to squawk, a happiness in advance. Their beaks scissored open, and a moment later she winged down toward them, a pigeon in one foot, held by the talons. She hovered and alighted, one wing still stretched out, shielding half the nest from view. She tore off red hunks of flesh and dropped them into the open mouths of the chicks. All of it done with the sort of ease that there was no vocabulary for. The balance of talon and wing. The perfect drop of red flesh into their mouths.

It was moments like this that kept his training on track. Six years in so many different places. The meadow just one of them. The grass stretched for the better part of a half mile, though the line ran only 250 feet along the middle of the meadow, where there was the most wind. The cable was guy-lined by a number of well-tightened cavallettis. Sometimes he loosened them so the cable would sway. It improved his balance. He went to the middle of the wire, where it was most difficult. He would try hopping from one foot to the other. He carried a balancing pole that was too heavy, just to instruct his body in change. If a friend was visiting he would get him to thump the high wire with a two-by-four so that the cable swung and he learned to sway side to side. He even got the friend to jump on the wire to see if he could knock him off.

His favorite moment was running along the wire without a balancing pole — it was the purest bodyflow he could get. What he understood, even when training, was this: he could not be at the top and bottom all at once. There was no such thing as an attempt. He could catch himself with his hands, or by wrapping his feet around the wire, but that was a failure. He hunted endlessly for new exercises: the full turn, the tiptoe, the pretend fall, the cartwheel, bouncing a soccer ball on his head, the bound walk, with his ankles tied together. But they were exercises, not moves he would contemplate on a walk.

Once, during a thunderstorm, he rode the wire as if it were a surfboard. He loosened the guy cables so the wire was more reckless than ever. The waves the sway created were three feet high, brutal, erratic, side to side, up and down. Wind and rain all around him. The balancing pole touched against the tip of the grass, but never the ground. He laughed into the teeth of the wind.

He thought only later, as he went back to the cabin, that the pole in his hand had been a lightning rod: he could have been lit up with the storm — a steel cable, a balancing pole, a wide-open meadow.

The wood cabin had been deserted for several years. A single room, three windows, and a door. He had to unscrew the shutters to get light. The wind came in wet. A rusted water pipe hung from the roof and once he forgot and knocked himself out on it. He watched the acrobatics of flies bouncing on cobwebs. He felt at ease, even with the rats scratching at the floorboards. He decided to climb out the windows instead of through the door: an odd habit — he didn’t know where it came from. He put the pole on his shoulder and walked out into the long grass toward the wire.

Sometimes there were Rocky Mountain elk that came to graze at the meadow edge. They raised their heads and peered at him and disappeared back into the treeline. He had wondered what they saw, and how they saw it. The sway of his body. The bar held out in the air. He was ecstatic when the elk began to stay. Clumps of two or three of them, keeping close to the treeline, but venturing forward a little more each day. He wondered if they would come and rub against the giant wooden poles that he had inserted into the ground, or if they would chew them and gnaw them away, leave the line to sag.

He came back one winter, not to train, but to relax and to go over the plans. He stayed in the log cabin, on a ridge overlooking the meadow. He spread the plans and photographs of the towers out across the rough-hewn table at the small window that looked out and down at the emptiness.

One afternoon he was astounded by a coyote stepping through the snow and jumping playfully just under his wire. At its lowest point in summer the wire had been fifteen feet in the air, but the snow was so deep now that the coyote could have leaped over.

After a while he went to put some wood in the stove and then suddenly the coyote was gone, like an apparition. He was sure he had dreamed it, except when he looked through binoculars there were still some paw marks in the snow. He went out in the cold to the path he had dug in the snow, wearing only boots, jeans, a lumber shirt, a scarf. He climbed the pegs in the pole, walked the wire without a balancing pole, and traveled out to meet the tracks. The whiteness thrilled him. It seemed to him that it was like stepping along the spine of a horse toward a cool lake. The snow reinstructed the light, bent it, colored it, bounced it. He was exuberant, almost stoned. I should jump inside and swim. Dive into it. He put one foot out and then hopped, arms stretched, palms flat. But in midflight he realized what he’d done. He didn’t even have time to curse. The snow was crisp and dense, and he had jumped feet-first off the wire, like a man into a pool. I should just have fallen backward, given myself a different form. He was chest-deep in it and could not get out. Trapped, he tried swishing back and forth. His legs felt wrong, neither heavy nor light. He was encased, a cell of snow. He broke free with his elbows and tried to grab the wire above him but he was too far down. The snow leaked along his ankle, down into his boots. His shirt had ridden up on his body. It was like landing in a cold wet skin. He could feel the crystals on his ribcage, his navel, his chest. It was his business to live, to fight for it — it would be, he thought, his whole life’s work just to get himself out of there. He gritted his teeth and tried inching himself upward. A long, tugging pain in his body. He sank back into his original form. The threat of gray sunset coming down. The far line of trees like sentries, watching.

He was the sort of man who could do chin-ups on one finger, but there was nothing to reach for — the wire was out of his grasp. There was the momentary thought of remaining there, frozen, until a thaw came, and he’d descend with the thaw until he was fifteen feet under the wire again, rotting, the slowest sort of falling, until he reached the ground, perhaps even gnawed at by the same coyote he admired.

His hands were fully free and he warmed them by tightening and untightening. He removed the scarf from his neck, slowly, in measured motion — he knew his heart would be slowing in the cold — and he looped the wire with it and tugged. Little beads of snow shook from the scarf. He could feel the scarf threads stretch. He knew the wire, the soul of it: it would not betray him, but the scarf, he thought, was old and worn. It could stretch or rip. Kicking his feet out beneath him, through the snow, making room, looking for somewhere compact. Don’t fall backward. Each time he rose, the scarf stretched. He clawed upward and pulled himself higher. It was possible now. The sun had dipped all the way behind the trees. He made circles with his feet to loosen them, pushed his body sideways through the snow, exploded upward, tore his right foot from the snow and swung his leg, touched the wire, found grace.

He pulled his body onto the cable, kneeled, then lay a moment, looked at the sky, felt the cable become his spinal cord.

Never again did he walk in the snow: he allowed that sort of beauty to remind him of what could happen. He hung the scarf on a hook on the door and the next night he saw the coyote again, sniffing aimlessly around where his imprint still lay.

He sometimes went into the local town, along the main street, to the bar where the ranchers gathered. Hard men, they looked at him as if he were small, ineffectual, effete. The truth was that he was stronger than any of them. Sometimes a ranch hand would challenge him to an arm wrestle or a fight but he had to keep his body in tune. A torn ligament would be disaster. A separated shoulder would set him back six months. He placated them, showed them card tricks, juggled coasters. On leaving the bar he slapped their backs, pickpocketed their keys, moved their pickup trucks half a block, left the keys in the ignitions, walked home in the starlight, laughing.

Tacked inside his cabin door was a sign: NOBODY FALLS HALFWAY.

He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen only once while training — once exactly, so he felt it couldn’t happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty there had to be one small thread left hanging. But the fall had smashed several ribs and sometimes, when he took a deep breath, it was like a tiny reminder, a prod near his heart.

At times he practiced naked just to see how his body worked. He tuned himself to the wind. He listened not just for the gust, but for the anticipation of the gust. It was all down to whispers. Suggestion. He would use the very moisture in his eyes to test for it. Here it comes. After a while he learned to pluck every sound from the wind. Even the pace of insects instructed him. He loved those days when the wind rushed across the meadow with a fury and he would whistle into it. If the wind became too strong he would stop whistling and brace his whole self against it. The wind came from so many different angles, sometimes all at once, carrying treesmell, bogwaft, elkspray.

There were times when he was so at ease that he could watch the elk, or trace the wisps of smoke from the forest fires, or watch the red-tail perning above the nest, but at his best his mind remained free of sight. What he had to do was reimagine things, make an impression in his head, a tower at the far end of his vision, a cityline below him. He could freeze that image and then concentrate his body to the wire. He sometimes resented it, bringing the city to the meadow, but he had to meld the landscapes together in his imagination, the grass, the city, the sky. It was almost like he was walking upward through his mind on another wire.

There were other places where he practiced — a field in upstate New York, the empty lot of a waterfront warehouse, a patch of isolated sea marsh in eastern Long Island — but it was the meadow that was hardest to leave. He’d look over his shoulder and see that figure, neck-deep in snow, waving good-bye to himself.

He entered the noise of the city. The concrete and glass made a racket. The thrup of the traffic. The pedestrians moving like water around him. He felt like an ancient immigrant: he had stepped onto new shores. He would walk the perimeter of the city but seldom out of sight of the towers. It was the limit of what a man could do. Nobody else had even dreamed it. He could feel his body swelling with the audacity. Secretly, he scouted the towers. Past the guards. Up the stairwell. The south tower was still unfinished. Much of the building was still unoccupied, nursed in scaffold. He wondered who the others walking around were, what their purpose was. He walked out onto the unfinished roof, wearing a construction hat to avoid detection. He took a mold of the towers in his head. The vision of the double cavallettis on the roof. The y-shaped spread of the wires as they would eventually be. The reflections from the windows and how they would mirror him, at angles, from below. He put one foot out over the edge and dipped his shoe in the air, did a handstand at the very edge of the roof.

When he left the rooftop he felt he was waving to his old friend again: neck-deep, this time a quarter of a mile in the sky.

He was checking the perimeter of the south tower one dawn, marking out the schedules of delivery trucks, when he saw a woman in a green jumpsuit, bent down as if tying her shoelaces, over and over again, around the base of the towers. Little bursts of feathers came from the woman’s hands. She was putting the dead birds in little ziploc bags. White-throated sparrows mostly, some songbirds too. They migrated late at night, when the air currents were calmest. Dazzled by the building lights, they crashed into the glass, or flew endlessly around the towers until exhaustion got them, their natural navigational abilities stunned. She handed him a feather from a black-throated warbler, and when he left the city again he brought it to the meadow and tacked that too just inside the cabin wall. Another reminder.

Everything had purpose, signal, meaning.

But in the end he knew that it all came down to the wire. Him and the cable. Two hundred and ten feet and the distance it bridged. The towers had been designed to sway a full three feet in a storm. A violent gust or even a sudden change in temperature would force the buildings to sway and the wire could tighten and bounce. It was one of the few things that came down to chance. If he was on it, he would have to ride out the bounce or else he’d go flying. A sway of the buildings could snap the wire in two. The frayed end of a cord could even chop a man’s head clean off in midflight. He needed to be meticulous to get it all right: the winch, the come-along, the spanners, the straightening, the aligning, the mathematics, the measuring of resistance. He wanted the wire at a tension of three tons. But the tighter a cable, the more grease that might ooze out of it. Even a change in weather could make a touch of grease slip from the core.

He went over the plans with friends. They would have to sneak into the other tower, put the cavallettis in place, winch the wire tight, look out for security guards, keep him up to date on an intercom. The walk would be impossible otherwise. They spread out plans of the building and learned them by heart. The stairwells. The guard stations. They knew hiding places where they would never be found. It was like they were planning a bank raid. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d wander alone down to the toneless streets near the World Trade Center: in the distance, lights on, the buildings seemed one. He’d stop at a street corner and bring himself up there, imagine himself into the sky, a figure darker than the darkness.

The night before the walk he stretched the cable out the full length of a city block. Drivers stared at him as he unfurled it. He needed to clean the wire. Meticulously he went along and scrubbed it with a rag soaked in gasoline, then rubbed it with emery. He had to make sure there were no stray strands that might poke his foot through the slippers. A single splinter — a meat hook — could be deadly. And there were spaces in each cable where the wires needed to be seated. There could be no surprises. The cable had its own moods. The worst of all was an internal torque, where the cable turned inside itself, like a snake moving through a skin.

The cable was six strands thick with nineteen wires in each. Seven eighths of an inch in diameter. Braided to perfection. The strands had been wound around the core in a lay configuration, which gave his feet the most grip. He and his friends walked along the cable and pretended that they were high in the air.

On the night of the walk it took them ten hours to string the furtive cable. He was exhausted. He hadn’t brought enough water. He thought perhaps he mightn’t even be able to walk, so dehydrated that his body would crack on movement. But the simple sight of the cable tightened between the towers thrilled him. The call came across the intercom from the far tower. They were ready. He felt a bolt of pure energy move through him: he was new again. The silence seemed made for him to sway about in. The morning light climbed over the dockyards, the river, the gray waterfront, over the low squalor of the East Side, where it spread and diffused — doorway, awning, cornice piece, window ledge, brickwork, railing, roofline — until it took a lengthy leap and hit the hard space of downtown. He whispered into the intercom and waved to the waiting figure on the south tower. Time to go.

One foot on the wire — his better foot, the balancing foot. First he slid his toes, then his sole, then his heel. The cable nested between his big and second toes for grip. His slippers were thin, the soles made of buffalo hide. He paused there a moment, pulled the line tighter by the strength of his eyes. He played out the aluminum pole along his hands. The coolness rolled across his palm. The pole was fifty-five pounds, half the weight of a woman. She moved on his skin like water. He had wrapped rubber tubing around its center to keep it from slipping. With a curve of his left fingers he was able to tighten his right-hand calf muscle. The little finger played out the shape of his shoulder. It was the thumb that held the bar in place. He tilted upward right and the body came slightly left. The roll in the hand was so tiny no naked eye could see it. His mind shifted space to receive his old practiced self. No tiredness in his body anymore. He held the bar in muscular memory and in one flow went forward.

What happened then was that, for an instant, almost nothing happened. He wasn’t even there. Failure didn’t even cross his mind. It felt like a sort of floating. He could have been in the meadow. His body loosened and took on the shape of the wind. The play of the shoulder could instruct the ankle. His throat could soothe his heel and moisten the ligaments at his ankle. A touch of the tongue against the teeth could relax the thigh. His elbow could brother his knee. If he tightened his neck he could feel it correcting in his hip. At his center he never moved. He thought of his stomach as a bowl of water. If he got it wrong, the bowl would right itself. He felt for the curve of the cable with the arch and then sole of his foot. A second step and a third. He went out beyond the first guy lines, all of him in synch.

Within seconds he was pureness moving, and he could do anything he liked. He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past, and this gave him the offhand vaunt to his walk. He was carrying his life from one side to the other. On the lookout for the moment when he wasn’t even aware of his breath.

The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.