Blood Acre

6 A.M.

He falls in sleep into the windless pocket of a rowboat, squinting one eye then the other, seesawing the pale gray light across the bridge of his nose. It is midday, or seems to be. The sun, what he can see of it, is a high dim peephole into a suspended furnace. The surf slides away against the rocks, pinching white geysers into the air. Strewn about in the seawrack the green faces and the splayed legs of women dragging their toes in the foam, their robes pooling beneath them. Their breasts afloat on the rocks. Ropes of hair fanned as if to dry. A cloud of frenzied gulls darkens the sky. The birds shuttle back and forth from their midair float to the bodies below, gangs of them carrying out coordinated sorties on one and then the other. Amongst them, on no particular rock, a sandwiched pair scuffles, the woman beneath gulping, the man on top arching rhythmically, doughy buttocks and head bucking. The man turns his head toward the sea. It is Nathan himself. Nathan watches himself smile menacingly, turn away, concentrate downward. jammed in the last of the boulders lining the beach the first of three rows of crosses faces the ocean, the crosspieces like the arms of irritable fathers hoisting their dozing sons, picking at their sagging elbows to keep their eyes on the show. The wind is stiff and wet and when it drops he can hear the cries from the back row of crosses where the blood-oiled wood glistens in the sun. The heads tick-tock like metronomes. Pinned wrists and ankles pry at the iron tacks. He sees himself stand from the rock. The woman below is not moving. He knows that face, he knows her name, and he can see himself clearly, can see himself clearly-

What time is it when he senses someone or something nearby? Nathan opens his eyes to the cloth ceiling of the car, fingering a birthmark on his own neck. His blazer is laid over his chest like a blanket, the steering wheel crowding him, the dashboard clock blinks its odd hour in incandescent green, while outside nothing at all is clear. The growing dawn-if that's what this is-is violent and webby. It is still sleeting, or sleeting again.

He wipes away his stale breath from the glass and looks up to the high parlor windows of 11 Cheever Place. Its sweeps of white curtain, the soft glow of the lamppost. The flower boxes are empty, which he thinks strange until he reminds himself again what month this is. Here and there the stoop lights have been kept on, beacons of happiness, ways home. Furry tinsel rims the windows; plastic reindeer graze the little yard of blue-stone slate a few doors down. A young father in an undershirt leans out a doorway, bending for the morning paper in the snow as though offering the invisible authority of the day his freshly washed head. Nothing seems to have changed. The same beaten trash cans, a few more cracks in the sidewalk. The same neighborhood on the wrong side of the edge of respectability.

Claire must be up. She'll have court, she'll prepare notes at the table letting out on the little garden, pour herself a second cup of coffee then let it grow cold and leave it for the office-

"Honey," she will say. "Look at me-there's nothing keeping us here anymore."

Nathan is sweating, his whole frame trembling.

"What are you afraid of?"

"Everything.

"Let's go. Let's go today."

He puts his arm around her for support, dropping his damp head on her shoulder like a child. A shield of tenderness and guardianship has fallen around them. "Why not," he says. "Let's get away now while we can."

– piercing the wild sky, the roiling clouds, toward the perfect golden yolk of sun, the crisp mountains stretching end to end along the horizon-

"Do you mean it?"

"I mean it. I mean this. But, Claire-I've fallen, somehow. I won't be the same."

Sweetly, a hurried whisper: "Never mind."

"I can’t do what I used to do."

"Yes.”

"But, Claire-"

"I don't expect you to. I know it will be hard."

"But we could be happy, couldn't we?"

"Yes," Claire says. "We could be happy."

– and far across the ocean, the little bungalow, the unseen roar of surf beating the sand, the strong clean onshore wind-all of it waiting-

It is six in the morning. The thunderclaps above, and the thunderclaps just beneath the surface of his skull. And yes, that is Errol Santos's Chevrolet parked out front.

Nathan tries to send back his confusion like a bad meal but he can't. Blinking, he stretches his legs, slowly focusing on the readout display of his beeper, fourteen messages: New York Times… Doctor E … Errol Santos … New York Post … Errol Santos… Errol Santos … it goes on, but he doesn't, he can't, he aims the beeper at Baron, who is sitting upright in the passenger seat beside him. "What do you think? Staying silent, I see. Of course, you're right, as always." Clipping the beeper safely to his belt, Nathan presses thumb and forefinger, his messages flying off to wherever they fly, to message heaven, the graveyard of electronically snubbed pleas and particles of undesired need. His memory now clear, he slips in a CD, Ben Webster and "Soulville," slow and heavy as a dirge, recasting the gray day as a blue idea. Now he knows where this day is going, how it ends. And it will end, it must.

The dog's eyes, meanwhile, are following some distraction outside the window: the red sedan, drifting slowly down the street between the rows of motionless cars. Its windows have fogged, but Nathan can make out the father-and-son shapes of the driver and passenger sipping at paper cups of coffee, struggling with wrapped doughnuts. Blurry-eyed-they must be tired-they pass on, slowing as they drive by Claire's. One seems to be peering into Errol's car and writing something down. Then they drift away, turn the corner, satisfied for the moment, it seems, to have merely taken the temperature of the situation.

Quickly Nathan lifts his head. The living room curtain has fallen. Or has it? Maybe it was a draft? He remembers old number 11, those big windows with their shaky panes and chalky glazing; the breath of the day threading through, hot or cold, even in the stillest weather. But the curtain settles, and now Baron's behavior has begun to interest him. The dog has caught something-maybe a fly, hatched obviously in the warmth of the garaged car-but instead of swallowing, he seems to hold it on his tongue, playing it in his teeth, as if to present it to Nathan alive, fetched for the master to devour himself. Nathan feels a surge of paternal pride, and he is happy for his hunting dog, all that mass of purebred instinct finally coming to use. Utility. How that must feel.

Nathan reaches over and gives the dog a good scratch behind the ears. Baron, his grimace easily mistaken for a smile, clamps his long teeth, jailing the insect, and swallows.

Errol Santos is standing in the doorway, squinting worriedly upward, hugging himself against the cold. Halfway down the stoop he picks up Claire's Times, unfolds it, then, obviously seeing something he doesn't like, releases it, dropping it in the snow. Nathan watches him drive away as his own little cube of environment swells with a throaty ballad and the tall-lights on the Chevrolet recede to mere punctuations in the early morning.

Baron, whimpering now punches at the glass, ripping loose squeals and farts. Nathan opens his door and the dog hurdles him, bolts into the day, snout to its first solid ground in ten hours. Proudly, he lifts his leg and pisses a hard stream across the driver door. "Jesus christ," Nathan moans, then snatches the dog by the collar and drags him to a dead tree stump where he prances reluctantly, as though with something else in mind. Sad and self-conscious, Baron eyes Nathan, who obligingly turns as the dog squats, strains, and finishes up with a little downward dab. Nathan stands peering at the steaming, gleaming pile, obsessing on it like a drunk, then kicks it under the wheel of the next car, dragging the toe of his shoe along the sidewalk. "In," he cornmands, pointing the way toward the open car door.

A little wobbly but steady on his feet, following the faint blue shadow the light behind him casts down on the walk, Nathan heads for Claire's door. He shakes the paper free of the snow. There on the front page of the Metro section, just beneath the fold, is Isabel, Isabel young and silly, not the Isabel he knows. A three-inch column continues inside deep alongside the seam separating Sports from National Weather where beach volleyball is the new rage and the Yankees are contemplating an off-season deal and a quadriplegic ex-lineman for the jets preaches legislation against licensed aggression. Then Nathan's eyes flit across his own name, his father's, Errol Santos's. He turns the page where a kidnap victim demands retribution. Meanwhile, in Croatia. Meanwhile, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center where the Riverside Drive jogger. In Mexico City, meanwhile. Meanwhile, Nathan doesn't fold the paper but rolls it into a tube, panicky, he pats himself down for his phone, flipping it open and presses buttons. Messages, messages, where did they go? Tell me I am alive. Tell me I will live.

Halfway to calling his own 900 number he disconnects. How strange that would be, to be billed a hundred dollars by none other than yourself. Whom would you owe? Whom would you pay? And if you didn't? If you ignored the billing, as you always do, driving it to the brink, waiting for the collection agencies to send the registered letter, to serve the subpoena-could you be defendant and plaintiff in the same case, Stein vs. Stein, in which the defendant, Nathaniel Stein, rightfully billed $99.99 for the legitimate use of phone number 1-900-945-5343, commonly known as 1-900-W-I-L-L-D-I-E, owes owner of said number, Nathaniel Stein? So fine. He's making, what, twenty grand, forty? He can afford to be merciful just this one time, let himself off the hook, forgive the debt.

A single clap of thunder explodes midair just behind, over the river. The slate beneath Nathan's feet gives a little jolt. Holding out his hand for the rain, he peers up at a sea-green sky. Smears of black smoke descend behind the buildings.

The heavy, well-oiled door still makes no noise as it swings open. Unhurriedly, meticulously, Nathan lifts his face to Claire, who is cinching tight a robe he remembers from winters past. She looks radiant, youthful, even angelic. Though not stunning. Those slightly jumbled teeth, a flaw that always gave her imperious beauty its vulnerability, a way in. The long red hair wispy and electric. Nothing has abandoned her over the years, not her simple hairdo, not the crimp in the corners of a mouth that still seems ready in equal measure to smile or frown.

"Don't look at me like that," she says.

"I'm sorry."

Claire lifts her head with wonder up to the spindly trees. "I don't think I ever heard you say that."

"Yes, you did. I just didn't mean it."

She hesitates but he makes no move. He and his little blast of honesty have confused her.

She holds out her hand: "My paper?"

Nathan tosses it into a trash can. "Everything's terrible. You wouldn't want to know. Surprised to see me?"

But Claire just stares. She's sniffed out danger, poised to leap. That long body, perfectly still-she's all kinetic potential.

Trying to calm her, Nathan replies with that particular smile of his, the one that can agree with you or fight you, depending on the depth of your disbelief.

She sighs wearily, and her free hand, palm upward, involuntarily indicates the air, as if in irritation, or an unconscious plea. "No," she says. "I'm not surprised. Nothing you do would surprise me. You just missed Errol."

"I'm sorry."

"There it is again."

"But I saw him last night," Nathan says.

"Did you. He said afternoon. He didn't mention anything about last night."

Another explosion, double, nearer. Black clouds like swarms of bees crisscross at a low elevation.

"They're saying it's going to be the storm of the century," she says. "You'd better come in."

Claire leans into the trash and picks out the paper, then heads with it into the dark of the hallway, leaving the door open behind her.

Inside, at the sudden change in temperature, the shift in pressure, every nook in the apartment nudges a remembered cranny in his brain; every chink in the wall snags on the irregularities in his mind. But willfully he won't remember, until he sits at the old table and runs a finger along its worn edge. "We used to love these early mornings," he says. His voice, though not his hand, is steady now. But feeling something on his tongue he wouldn't like to actually say, he swallows hard, tamping it back down.

She is staring at the paper. "You never think these things happen to someone you know."

"Which thing?"

Claire's eyes widen with alarm. "But you know, don't you?"

"The Riverside jogger?"

“-dead, Nathan. They found her, Isabel, out on-"

"Yes."

"Have you spoken with Errol? Yes, of course, yesterday afternoon." Claire looks down at him. "What happened to your hand?"

He covers one with the other, though that one is no better. The bites have become infected, damp. "I was fixing a flat."

"You? That's likely. What was her name?"

Nathan focuses on a kitchen window across the little yard, the back of the next block of brownstones. He used to watch the tenant here, a hugely fat man, leaning into the sauces steaming on the stove.

"By the way, Errol was wrong," Claire says. "You look terrible. Did I say that yet?"

She says it not to him but to the window, at his reflection superimposed on the fat man's building. As though the distance the glass grants them provides a vacuum of time, making him harmless, unthreatening-someone else, out of reach. And she is right, he sees. He looks awful: sallow, his lips bluish, the hollows below his cheek bones, once sculpted, sunk to divots.

"But you look good," he says.

"What do you want, Nathan?"

"I was in the neighborhood."

"At six in the morning?"

"Is that what time it is?"

"You look so tired," she says in a voice near a whisper. Sitting beside him, her hands falling away, into her lap, she is still addressing his reflection: "You look so tired. I was going to fax you, actually. Until this thing with Isabel. I just thought you should know, I took one of your cases."

"Regina Nunez," he says flatly.

"So she's already fired you. Good for her. Maybe she's not as stupid as-"

"I saw her last night."

"Well, don't do that again. She needs help. She doesn't need you. She's about to give birth, Nathan. Or didn't you notice? You've abandoned her. You've missed her court dates."

"Abandoned her?"

"What else would you call it?"

"I'm going to help her," he says.

Laughing, she shakes out her hair. "You and your delusions."

The phone interrupts and Claire, startled, is on her feet before the first ring falls out of the air.

"Why don't you let the machine get it," he says. "That's what they're for."

"That's not what they're for, Nathan," she says, and then before she can stop herself: "You never answered the phone. God forbid you ever did without screening it or making me, running across the room drawing your finger across your throat, whispering, I'm not home, I'm not home, without even knowing who it was." She pauses, blushing. "God forbid you got lassoed into something you couldn't control."

Nathan gazes at her, at the conversation exactly as it was left years ago. Its preservation is a biological condition, he assumes, an instinct to keep us from returning to old used lovers again and again across eternity. Across all the time and the silence Claire has not stopped piling on the complaints and Nathan has not stopped slithering out from under them. "Who is it this early?"

But Claire is having none of it, heading already into the silence that has followed another ring, standing across the room over the phone, waiting. "It's none of your business. You don't live here anymore, remember? Hello-?"

Nathan, his hands together in that same attitude of prayer, remembers.

Her back turned, Claire's hands cup the mouthpiece. She is mumbling, but she does nod her head, once, turning obliquely to the wall, Nathan assumes, to keep him there, in peripheral view.

"Yes," Claire is saying, holding tight to the phone one beat longer than she should. As though afraid of floating off.

"Who was that?"

Again addressing his reflection, his ghost, transparent, half gone. "Nobody. Work."

"Errol."

"No. He's got more important things-"

"Maria is dead," Nathan says. "I thought you should know."

Claire is looking at him, finally, Nathan in the flesh. Her pale eyes, bottomless, little circles of reflected sky, examining, rationing attention in measured doses. "You mean Isabel."

"And Maria."

"Jesus. What, am I next?" She gives a little laugh, then touches her mouth as if to rearrange it. "I'm sorry," she says flatly. "No, I'm really sorry. It's terrible. How, how did it happen?"

Nathan has wrung a paper napkin to shreds. "It's complicated.

"It's awful.

He doesn't even believe she thinks that's true. “So where are you now?" Nathan knows that the question can be read a dozen ways; whichever road they travel will be her decision.

“Sorry, but don't tell me this is all about tbat. This little visit. You're free now, you have what, some time? That you're here because Errol's left for work, because Maria's-"

"I am going away,” he says, startling even himself. "I want-I’d like it if – ” The words roll off his tongue before he knows it, slipping out of him from he doesn't know where. Is it really true? He has no idea. As if he is caught in a continuum of possible emotions, from which he plucks the most fascinating without considering the consequences. First he tells a lie, then the lie tells a lie-

“- if you came with me."

“Don't joke."

“This isn't a joke."

“Of course it's not a joke."

“I mean I'm not joking."

They sit a moment in silence, both of them weighing the multitude of possible replies. Claire lifts the backs of her hands to her eyes.

“I'm not talking about a vacation, Claire."

"You want to run. You always wanted to run. Well, too bad."

“Claire-"

“Just hold on, Nathan. just please, all right? Just don't let's start with that curious tidbit."

" Curious-?

"Because you're a freak!" she sputters, clutching at her hair with one hand, pointing back at the silent phone with the other. As if news of his character had just come through it. "You sit here and it's years and years later. So Maria is dead now. And Isabel, God help her. And now here you are. Always after something new. But you forgot, Nathan, I'm not new anymore. Whatever you liked me for is what you ended up hating me for. You don't like me if I'm strong, you don't like me if I'm weak. You don't like me if I'm funny or if I'm sad. You don't like me if I'm ugly, you don't like me if I'm beautiful. You don't like me if I'm white, you certainly don't like me if I'm Hispanic."

She tilts her head to the side, as if she sees she's hit the mark: "There's something wrong with you, isn't there. You look terrible. Is that what Ruth meant?"

" Ruth? "

But Claire is waving him away. "You haven't changed, Nathan. How can you stand it?"

Mouth open, he can feel his face go numb, her anger like dentist's gas, shutting him down. Outside, traits of snowdust rip away from the roof and pass on the horizontal gusts. Somewhere down there, in the tiny plots of greenery, in some herb garden, wind chimes clang at regular intervals, as at the opening of a Catholic service, announcing-what? He doesn't know. He doesn't know what Catholics actually do. Something, he's sure. Something practical. He'd like to know.

Leaning on one hip, Claire has been watching him. "So what are you going to do?"

He looks confused. "Do?"

"She has a son, remember? Doesn't-" She looks fearful. "Didn't Maria have a son? Don't you two have a child?"

The boy's sweet pastiness rises to his eyes like a flash card, both sides -word and meaning-of a vocabulary of some life not his. "Benny," he remembers.

"Benny. What are you going to do about Benny? Your son."

"He's not mine, really."

"How does that feel, Nathan, to be a father?"

"I'm going to keep him," he says, surprising himself again. Is this why he came here, to hear out this strange-maybe better – version of himself?

She stares and stares. "They won't let you do it, Nathan. Not you."

"Of course not." He glances at his watch, half rising out of his chair. "I should go see him before school. I should tell him."

She frowns. "Tell him?"

"About his mother."

"You mean he doesn't know?"

"How could he know? It happened last night, they weren't going to call bim, after all? The kid's nine, or something."

"Or something. Excellent, Nathan. You haven't even told that boy his mother's dead? What are you, mad?" She's in the doorway, wringing her hands, blowing a wisp of hair away from her eyes.

"Who was on the phone?"

She has his coat in her arms. The front door is open. "Get out." She is sobbing. "I have to be in court in an hour. Get away."

He lifts his hand to touch her. "Who was it?"

Leveling at him a fiery gaze, "Don't you dare!" Her face bunching and her eyes bitter, her hand rises in a parody of a karate chop and whip-snaps, knocking away his purpling swollen fingers and swatting him in the tender cushion between jaw and neck. Both of them gasping at the cold. With the tip of his tongue Nathan probes his lip. Claire's hair is scattered, her robe pulled aside revealing the pale slope of her breast. Hands still clawed. She comes down a step, bereaved and grief-stricken. "Don't say anything," she pants.

"I-" he says, beginning yet another thing he can't finish, I, I, I, I -

"Hey, remember me?" he asks the next brownstone down, the next block, the day, the world. “Remember?" A last appeal.

Claire steps up, backward, retreating. "Please go away."

The door crashes shut, the tapping brass knocker punctuating Claire's final words with a fading ellipsis.

She lies for long minutes on her bed, the coffee within reach on her bedstand untouched and cold. She listens to the sidewalk patter of the Jehovah's Witnesses heading off to their little Kingdom, their slice of waterfront heaven beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the young women in their long coats, their hair stiff and brilliant even in the storm-mothers all of them, she is sure, their apartments crawling with bright, blue-eyed babies-the men combing and buttoning, clasping their Bibles while the dregs they pass-she, her neighbors, friends-seem more disheveled and what children have survived are less defined and more quiet and more ill, everybody more in need than ever.

She looks up, quickly, as if at a sudden sound. There, before her, is the winter Sunday years ago, their last year of law school, when she and Nathan and Errol were strolling arm-in-arm together with a forgotten purpose down this street, that street, alongside the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway stretched out below them in an open pit. Traffic whizzing by and kicking up clouds of road grease and mist. Alongside, finally, a school-yard fence.

In the muffled quiet of that winter day, six boys were playing baseball. Like apparitions, she remembers, one kid with a bat stood in the corner, penned in by the skeleton of a backstop either half built or half gone, the others spread over the asphalt. Basketball stanchions stooped at the perimeter, the rims netless halos.

Like inmates, she, Nathan, and Errol stood with their fingers clawed to the little diamonds of fence, watching as the one with the bat tossed the ball and swung for the school beyond the outfield and missed everything. The kid, seeing them in the corner of his eye, picked the ball out of the snow again and again and eventually reconsidered and tapped a few around the yard, grounders, skippers, getting the others involved.

Then-not a word had passed between them-Nathan and Errol palmed down their hair and ducked through a space where the fence had been pried away. The clop of their footsteps lifted the kids' heads, three Chicano, three black. Nathan and Errol walked like gunslingers, mercenaries. They cinched their coats. Dressed the way they were, Claire knew the kids thought they were cops. The kids' eyes slid and stared.

Errol's voice echoed off the back of the school. "Strange time of year for baseball?"

Nathan headed for the kid with the bat and held out his hand, a gesture vaguely menacing. Warily, the kid handed him the bat and grabbed his glove and took his place atop a small island of snow in center field.

Setting his feet with care, Nathan flipped up the ball and caught it in the palm of his hand. From the fence Claire saw its leather skin was all but gone. Only the mysterious petrified core was left, which was nothing like what she'd expected inside a baseball; it seemed insidious, full of worms. Nathan was rolling it nervously in the fingers of his left hand, jiggling the small wooden bat in his right, searching for minor adjustments he may have thought he'd forgotten to make but hadn't. Errol called out for him to hit the damn thing, to show them what he's still got, and Nathan takes a practice swing, panels of the overcoat straining, the lapels in his face. Claire can see this feels good to him, this twisting, this uncoiling like a human spring again. He looks light, almost heroic. The body machine. Metal and rubber and grease never forget. The body doesn't either, in its way. With a mind of its own, it will reach down through the years to fly again despite you and all your aspirations. The past etches itself on your tendons and bones, even if it's the last thing it does.

She can see Nathan breathing hard already. Errol bends forward, his hands on his knees, pensive, as if there is something more at stake, them and the kids, them against the kids, to prove something, to her, maybe, about time and the body. Just a few years before such a close target as the school wouldn't have inspired in Nathan even a thrill. Now it's the cheap seats, looming high and far as he tosses the ball and the kids disappear from view and Claire looks up into the luminous murk, waiting as Nathan brings the bat around, intending to connect up near his eyes. But he swings through it, and the ball bounces and settles amidst the shards of a broken bottle at his feet. It's his body that lets the bat go. It falls to the ground, pointing somewhere like an hour hand, or the point of a compass. Where it points Claire-watching Nathan's eyes – doesn't know. Nathan steps over the bat looking apprehensively to center field at the kid he's taken the bat from, the hitter. Claire's mouth fills with the metallic taste of unquenched thirst, rage for Nathan, on his behalf, at the kid, at the bat. At herself; for she sees something in Nathan's face that terrifies her, not the disappointment but the apathy, the letting go so easily of what used to be his to keep. He doesn't fight for it. He doesn't take another swing or even seem to care, but walks off with a shrug.

"Fuck you," Errol says at something one of the kids said, covering Nathan's escape.

"Yeah, fuck you," Claire mutters. She is feeling testy, closed in, intensely loyal, intensely afraid, and she doesn't know why. Nathan has been frightening her, letting things go right and left, sloughing off the little things he was, ballplayer, musician, the lives he'd wanted to lead.

Errol follows Nathan through the fence.

Nathan waves. "See you around."

"We will," Claire says fiercely, hooking an arm in each of theirs and pulling them on. "The punks. One day they'll walk into the wrong side of our office. All those kids."

They stride with purpose, it seems, toward Court Street. Church bells peal in the distance. The federal court with its scrubbed and spotlit colonial splendor would make a convincing birthday cake. A Disney set surrounded by the grime of downtown Brooklyn. New York is inside out, Claire knows: the old looks fresh and better preserved, the brand new already tired and out of date. It's the past creeping up on you and the future falling apart. The surrounding office buildings-blank and anonymous as cliffs-are wrapped in an alpen glow. Borough Hall. The board of ed. Labor. Night court. Empty, abandoned weekends and after hours.

And then, at the curb in front of Barney's Cut Rate, there is a throng of people, strange for a Sunday. On weekdays those corners are choked with city bureaucrats and their attendant beggars and hot dog carts. And by Sunday the Friday papers usually have the whole street to themselves to tumble happily around and pile up in the lees of doorways. A strange collection has gathered: Chinese waiters, the help at McDonald's, a smattering of homeless, a few locals in slippers and housecoats. A lone dog wearing boots of grime. They all look to be waiting for a bus.

An ambulance pulls up at an angle against the curb. A policewoman stands in the street waiting to direct traffic that isn't coming. A bank clock has nothing to add, frozen in neither morning nor light.

"Jesus," Errol says, and stops.

Two police cars pull up. In this light everything is fluid, including the time; everything an apparition of itself, full of shadowy possibilities and illusory goodness. Like the man standing on the ledge of the apartment house in the middle of the next block. There are fifteen or twenty stories between him and the street. The balconies are filled up and down with spectators, as if they are lining the route of a vertical race. The jumper is in a parka, arms straight out, measuring his dive.

Claire bites down a chill. "He wouldn't dare," she mutters, still in her feisty mood. As if it would be something to admire.

Nathan seems wrapped in a preternatural calm. It's that apathy again, that waiting as if for a cue. Something is missing.

The police, meanwhile, seem bothered, milling around helplessly with no one to arrest. There are no psychologists or experts and there is no giant trampoline. Just the wide river of street and a few parked cars and the crowd on the corner looking upward expectantly.

In the corner of her eye Claire can see Nathan peering upward.

"Jump," she whispers, half because she wants to prick him, spark him, maybe to impress him with her morbid sense of humor; half because she knows the jumper never will.

But Errol is gripping her elbow. "Don't say that."

And he is right, Claire sees, because she looks up and feels the jumper already dead; he is still up there, but he has nothing left to give. He is no faker, he is not screwing around, just gathering the courage, aligning his powers with gravity's.

"What did he do?" Nathan wonders aloud.

"What didn't he, more likely," Errol replies.

"He needs a lawyer."

Something up the block catches Claire's eye. Another police cruiser is making its way over, lights off, in no hurry, trailed by a dark ambulance. Something is already done. They're coming-but who for? By the time Claire turns back someone is already screaming, someone near. The shriek trills off all that glass, the concrete barriers and orange barrier tape of a nearby construction zone, off the parked cars and uplifted faces. Then a loud explosion, a crisp report, like a rifle shot, and for a second Claire thinks the police car hit something, maybe the ambulance. Nervously, she lifts her eyes: the roof ledge is empty. Everyone is peering off the balconies, following the route down. In the street lies a level mound of clothes and shoes. In the middle of it something is heaving. A fist clenches and unclenches then freezes in a claw. There is no blood, a clean harmless bundle too compact and flat to be an actual human being. We're small in death, Claire thinks, but then sees the jumper has sprung a leak. Steaming, it begins to spread beneath, black and thick as oil, as though he is melting into the frozen asphalt.

No one approaches the corpse. The police turn their backs, focusing on crowd control now, on something they can do. Claire's hand crawls into Nathan's and begins to probe. She hears herself crying softly. "Oh God," she says-

And she says it now, again, "Oh God," seeing ten or so years too late, the curious familiar glare in Nathan's eyes, the blank stare that terrified her to the end, a kind of inward-facing dread, that eventually swung outward and swept over everything, denying everything, that swept over, turned on, and denied her.

And there, as Claire lies on her bed, in the pit of her mind is the image of a woman-not a man, not the jumper-a woman very like herself twitching like a marionette, throwing her fists again and again at the ground.

"Why," she says aloud, "did you do it, did you do it, did you do it?"

Quickly, to steady herself with other news, she scans her Times. Spotting something absurd she brings it closer. In parts of the Bronx and Spanish Harlem, she reads, South and Central American women with unbaptized children are hurrying in droves to their neighborhood churches and storefront chapels and lining up their babies for emergency baptism. Word has spread that the Antichrist s coming this Christmas and will murder the unanointed. Those women merely pregnant, in a panic, are having their bellies blessed. No one knows where the rumor originated, or why. Outside, the icy rain still falls. The day is silent, but it is not calm. She hears distant foghorns and sees the windows flicker as the lightning flies, and waits, in vain it seems, for the thunder. The storm seems to come and go at will.

She notices the time and runs to her closet. She runs through her apartment, through the door, through the sleet.

8 A. M.

Will this work, this jangling? Nathan shakes the keys at the door like a shaman with his amulet. Eventually spotting the downtown ring he tries one key from that, then remembers that he is uptown and picks still another. Finally, less with luck than with random interest, he finds a key that fits. But the door is already open, the lock half-cocked. The red sedan comes to mind. He looks behind him and through the window in the lobby door finds only a square of empty street. He lurches in, calling, "Benny?"

In the half-dark of the living room the old woman sits upright on the couch, her hands rooted deep in a heavy, coarse overcoat. Simple black dress beneath the coat's hem. A pair of orthopedic shoes. The room around her is tidied, books reshelved, CDs stacked, his clothes folded and piled on the kitchen table.

"Mrs. Rosa. I'm sorry. Maria-"

The sink is empty, the dishes done and put away. Nathan looks over his shoulder. "Where's Benny?" he asks, and pokes his head into the small side room. The boy there is sprawled across the bed, the blankets bunched and kicked aside, his head twisted violently away from his shoulder, as if fallen from a roof, left randomly on the sidewalk.

Nathan sees his own bed is made. Maria's clothes, once everywhere, are nowhere. Her drawers, her side of the closet, empty. Boxes, suitcases, plastic bags-there is nothing left. The sink has been scrubbed. Also the floor, and that ring in the bathtub. Maria's mother came every day so that Benny did not return from school to an empty house, but she never once cleaned; didn't bother, Nathan always assumed. Now, everything after all these years gleams. As though with Maria's last exhalation all signs of her and her belongings all over town vaporized, accompanying her to the steamy other side.

He squints at the clock. "Benny has to get to school."

She addresses her hands: "He isn't going to school today."

“Did you tell him?"

"Maria's brothers are waiting at my apartment. I will take him there. He will be with his family when he learns."

"Of course, you all want to be there." Nathan glances at his watch. "What time do you want me?"

"No-" Up comes her hand, her face, insistent. "No."

"I thought I'd be the one to break it to him."

She folds her arms across her chest and turns her head to the window.

"We've been living together, I should be the one," he says, trying to keep up with his own logic. After a long pause, he floats the idea, like a trial balloon: "I'd like to keep the boy."

Her eyes widening in fear, she slips forward on the couch, ready to stand, or spring. "I am taking him away from here," she says.

His nod is less an affirmation than a failure to deny the truth of it. Of course it is a ridiculous idea. "I have to go to the hospital now."

"Go look at my girl," she says.

Across town the traffic in the St. Luke's lobby is already heavy. No one asks his name or offers a direction. On the sixth floor an unmanned cart bristling with brooms and mops and clean linens Sits stalled outside a room near Maria's. A male nurse at INFORMATION sends Nathan to the basement.

The gurneys are lined up end to end along the stainless-steel cabinets, the mounds blanketed in baby-blue paper. Here and there a manila tag tied to a leached and shriven toe.

Nathan rubs his eyes. "Busy night."

"Busy week, month, whatever," the attendant replies. "They're dying of everything."

When the steel slab slides out on its silent bearings, Nathan is sure there has been some mistake.

"This is her?"

"There's been some swelling, just so you're prepared," the attendant says, and, without delaying-Nathan wishes he'd wait just a minute-lifts the sheet, making a loose tent down which Nathan can see all. He reaches toward her as a blind person might. Darkened leather face senseless as a handbag. Eyes, halfclosed, squint dully into the middle distance. She looks to Nathan punched out, bruised. Even the bridge of her nose has spread.

Below she is as shapeless and bunched as a baby. The sheet flutters down.

"Sign here."

When all the words are written, the attendant feeds Maria back in with a little shove, the throbbing hum of the hospital boiler just the other side of the wall some suggestion of where she's going. Nathan steps back against the massive cabinet. "You all right?" the attendant lamely asks. Nathan turns to rest the side of his face against the refrigerated metal, choking on a sorrow he has never known, but which, like his death itself, has hunted him these months and years.

"She wanted you to do it, no one else."

Nathan raises his head to find the attendant gone. In his place is a short man in a black pants suit with his throat clutched in a white cleric's collar. His head outsized and closely trimmed, perched on his neck like a golf ball on a tee.

"Cleary," he says, holding out a hand.

The priest seems about Nathan's age, and oddly it's the near-baldness that makes him look that young. Coming down from the rarefied air of fight and recovery into the basement of the damned and defeated, Cleary, robust, energetic, seems to thrive where he can admire his work, the fermenting corpses stretched out like loaves in their individual ovens, rising, getting ready to go. Cleary gives Nathan's hand a special squeeze, and for a second Nathan is sure the priest will never let go. Maybe he's sizing him up, taking Nathan's spiritual pulse while he adds together all Maria has confessed with what he now sees before him. So, here, finally, Nathan Stein.

"Maria," Cleary says, finally dropping his hand and nodding toward Maria's drawer, "spoke of you all the time. Especially toward the end. I heard you were down here. I've been wanting to meet you."

"I bet you have."

Cleary seems almost glad for the opportunity, glad even for the circumstance. Strange how the professionally faithful seem to run right over social nuance, as if their faith has shielded, or freed, them from the necessity.

"She knew just when she was going to die," Cleary plows on.

Nathan pictures their own non-goodbye, Maria preoccupied with her tranquilized neighbor, and he slipping out from under her blank stare. He'd assumed she was staring at him, but now he knows it wasn't him she was seeing at all. How long after he'd left had she actually stopped breathing? He should have gone up last night. He would at least have liked to say something to her, anything at all. Though what it would have been he has no idea. "She knew yesterday afternoon?"

Cleary's nod turns into a continuous, mechanized bob, smug with amazed discovery. "Down to the day. The hour. Yes, she knew." Inclining his head, the priest leans against the enormous cabinet, the fluorescent light glancing off both his shiny forehead and the wall of stainless steel behind him, ankles and arms crossed, as if waiting for the bus in the cold sun. "Yes, Maria spoke about you quite a bit."

But Nathan just stares, bracing himself, unwilling to rise to this bait. He is starting to resent the way Cleary isn't letting him have it, giving him a stern talking-to, like Maria would have. Either he doesn't know his job or it's part of that grand strategy they all seem to have of letting you probe yourself, reprimand yourself, levy your own fine. Nathan can feel the growing annoyance in his gut. When was the last time he ate? He slaps his coat pockets for his pills.

"Looking for a smoke?" Cleary asks hopefully, and brings out a heavy silver lighter.

But Nathan shakes his head. "Not for years."

"All, self-improvement. You're a more honorable man than I." Cleary squints and pauses, then raises at Nathan a pair of startled eyebrows. He clears his throat, smiles. "Should I take that back?"

Nathan shrugs. "Go ahead." He searches for signs of wear on Cleary's face-every day here a Sunday, every day requiring hurried, last-minute conversions-but finds nothing. He envies for a moment the priest's ability to fend off all the chaotic lives that end, muddled and humiliated, in his hands. All the weeping families, all the bodily fluids. Until it all lies here, all his little experiments, sent away every one of them. And he'll never know where to-or even if-until he follows them himself.

"So why me?" Nathan asks. "Why not her mother, or any of her brothers? To ID her."

"I guess she wanted you to see," Cleary suggests.

Nathan's reply is automatic: See what? But he holds it in, knowing the confessional game to follow: see what he saw, and what did he see? As though this exchange will bring him to say, "himself," then cry and weep and beg forgiveness.

"She looks terrible," he says instead.

"Yes," Cleary agrees." She does."

"Was anyone else with her?"

"She said goodbye to everyone else, then made them go. She was waiting for you. She was filled with remorse. She wanted to apologize."

An unlit cigarette has appeared in Cleary's fingers. He rolls it in his fingers, then finally puts it to his lips. Nathan is surprised at his own indignation. The cloud of felonies around him pulling apart to reveal this single misdemeanor. "Are you allowed to do that in here?"

Cleary's lighter pops. He inhales, squints, and raises his eyes to the cabinet. "I doubt anyone here would mind." He waves his hand, trailing flags of smoke. "Anyway, you didn't come back."

Nathan lifts a hand in protest, "But I did," then drops it, "in a way."

The priest nods, a disapproving twinkle in his eye. "She thought you might actually be with her.She thought you'd know to do that. She gave you a lot of credit that way. She believed you were highly intelligent."

Nathan wrinkles his nose at the gauze of smoke. The priest looks pleasantly surprised, as if to say, Does this offend you?

"So you were with her when she-"

"Stopped breathing, yes," Cleary says.

"She wanted you to be?"

Cleary's smile turns apologetic. "People do. She requested her own last rites. That's never happened to me before."

“You don't know her," Nathan begins, marveling at the urge to tell him this: "When I met her, guys left and right, drugs."

Cleary frowns. "That wasn't her. There's always someone who wants to be found." He nods toward the steel wall. "Who she was just before she died, that's who she always wanted to be."

"Well, at least she wasn't alone," Nathan says.

"She was looking for answers. When she came in to the hospital this time she was paralyzed with fear. She knew she was going to die, and she didn't know what to believe, or if she should bother trying. She had a lot of questions. She really was a religious woman, she just didn't know it. For instance, one question she had was, What did she do to make you leave? Beside the obvious, of course."

"Me? I didn't leave. I don't know what you mean. I've stuck it out these last three years while she was sick."

"Maybe I'm asking the wrong question."

Nathan eyes hi in warily. "I have court soon."

“Just tell me this, Nathan," Cleary says in a tone eerily familiar, as if he's known Nathan all his life, or men like Nathan, legions of Nathans marching lockstep into the chapel since the beginning of time. "Why are you here?"

"Maria wanted me to identify her body."

"And why you?"

"I don't know what you're driving at."

Did you always do what Maria wanted, or only this one last favor?" Cleary lifts his chin, observing Nathan down the length of his nose.

"Look, Chaplain-" Nathan says.

"Reverend is fine."

" This-" Nathan gestures to Maria's door. "This isn't my fault. I didn't do this."

Deftly, Cleary pats Nathan over the heart, summoning his mercy: "We have to take care of what we have left. I can't forgive you."

"Forgive me for what? She did this to me."

Cleary bows his head.

"So everything, then?" Nathan says. "I'm responsible for every thing?

"Only for what you do. We do what we can but then it's ours to keep. You can't keep cutting your losses, Nathan. Eventually, there is nothing left to cut."

Nathan looks to his wrist for the time but the watch face is a blur.

"Isn't the reason you came down here that you really wanted to see?" Cleary says. "You know, what it's like, what it'll be like for you in a few months or, God willing, a few years? Don't you think Maria had that in mind, too?"

Nathan is tapping his foot, looking up, away, anywhere.

The priest regards with doubt what's left of his cigarette then stubs it out against the handle of one of the square steel doors.

"Okay, let me ask you this," he says behind his lighter's flame. "Do you believe in God?"

Nathan wants to laugh but can't find the spark. "Should I?"

Cleary's eyes latch on to Nathan's, his curious gaze narrowing to a hostile glare, rounding out to something like horror.

"So what about you?" Nathan asks. "You believe in God?"

Staring at Cleary's pinched collar Nathan is not sure the question is off the mark. Something about the priest is smug to the point of defensiveness, insecurity, self-convincing. Still, Nathan knows he's committed the cardinal sin, drummed over and over by Sid Frankel into his head: don't ask a question in court you don't know the answer to. Don't hunt, don't fish, don't set your self up for an ambush.

But Cleary turns out to be less savvy than he first gives off. "I do right now," is the meager answer.

At first Nathan is startled by the ease with which Cleary offered that up, this nugget that seems to carry the weight if not of truth, then of honesty. Nathan is impressed. "But not always?"

Cleary toes the floor. "No, not always." His head comes up inhaling, the cords of his neck unwound, nostrils flared. Unconsciously, he has moved back a step. "Why do you ask?"

Nathan looks skittishly to Maria's door, as if she could answer for him. Though now he's not sure which address is hers; his eyes skip from one compartment to the other.

Boiler rumble surges beneath Nathan's feet, or the subway, or tectonic wind. The mounds of dead bumper-to-bumper along the walls seem to lurch, inching forward. He grits his teeth against the chill, blinks at the sting in his eyes.

"You're sweating, Nathan."

Nathan clears his throat. "What about Hell?"

Cleary doesn't hesitate: "Hell I believe in."

Up and outside in the day, a veil of thin rain, Nathan circles the block for his car, his overcoat billowing behind him. His slow aimless orbit. The car is nowhere. Tapping his coat pockets for his pills, he uncaps them, pouring nothing into his palm. He shakes the empty vials, tosses them into the street, under the cars, and follows after them, wading into the twitchy morning traffic. Endless strings of abuse are turned on him from all sides. He cups his hands over his ears and all disappears but the exploding sun. Church bells, samba music, the concussion of fireworks leaping off the Coney Island beach like mortars, their harlequin rainbow umbrellas reflected in a pair of raven-black eyes narrowing at him out of a gargoyle's head. Hideous pariah. Two men squatting against the hospital's retaining wall, blackened and shredded blankets and feet of gauze, peer over like birds of prey. In the silence someone touches Nathan's shoulder. When he turns no one is there.

Errol Santos leans back in his old chair. Barbados is walking quickly toward him. The two are surrounded by empty desks. In the corner a civilian secretary attends to her nails. Faces are everywhere, primitive sketches and Christmas photos and dated school portraits pinned and Scotch-taped to the walls and peering up from the desks atop piles of more faces. The back edge of Santos's desk is layered with stacks of manila folders, unsolved cases, cases nearing solution, and cases, like his sister's, that have just begun. The office has one window, but it looks out on the brick face of the building next door, offering little hint of actual outside, even less of sky.

"Are you going to tell me what Stein said to you last night?" Barbados asks.

Santos looks woodenly at the photo atop the pile on his desk, as though the figure in it will offer some reply: Isabel lying in the wan light of the crime scene photographer's flash, seaweed strewn through her hair like a crown of wildflowers, the shredded cloth of her thin dress clinging across her cold nipples and across her pouched belly and thighs. Her blue lips parted. Then there is nothing for him to look at except the place where the body had lain, a scooped and smooth bed of sand.

“Sign out, Errol. Go home. This is not helping."

"What do they have?"

"You know you're off this case. You should be working something else, probably shouldn't be here at all."

"Tell me what they have."

"It's all in the folder. But it's not much. They think they might have hair. They think they have a time, but that's it."

"Blood?"

Barbados shakes his head. "And the fingernails were clean, like you saw."

"What was the time?"

"Twelve to three the night before."

Santos nods. "She was still with Stein. They have a cause?"

"Errol."

"Just say it."

"Her neck was snapped."

Santos drags his hand over his face. What he can't stop considering is the possibility that it took her a while to die. He can't stop seeing it. He looks around the room.

"She knew something," he says. "She had to. Krivit knows more than he's saying."

"The rat smells bad," Barbados agrees.

"Cleaned up afterward to keep the innocent innocent," Santos mumbles to himself.

"Look at me, Errol. If you know something, now is the time to say it. I don't know what the man said to you, but go home, leave your gun in your desk. Don't go down with this guy."

The pinned and taped faces Santos passes watch through the windowframes their photographs make. As he goes by they turn and follow him with their eyes.

Rocking side to side in a subway car sprinkled sparsely with riders, he watches the subterranean world pass like a filmstrip through the windows. Graffittied darkness then flashes of light, the subway car, empty in Brooklyn, filling as the train heads uptown through lower Manhattan. Old people laboring past the poles with their plastic bags of toys; black families with sleepy children teetering in their eggcup plastic seats. A transit cop going past, pulling himself from pole to pole. A leak sprung in the tunnel showers the car, the beads of street water racing across the windowpanes as if from a sudden rain. Fulton Street, City Hall, like various small towns each stop a station in a life Santos can identify with a day, a night, a face. Three A.m. rides in subway cars like this, giddy-drunk with Nathan and Claire swinging on the poles, the three of them singing, the two of them pawing at each other. Errol the dateless third wheel, the loyal butler, Nathan's man Friday. He has known Nathan, looked on him with adoration, all his life. He has coveted his woman, then divorced his own to take her. Which makes him what?-an agent provocateur, a double agent, assassin. Where do his allegiances lie? He feels himself reaching back for ancient guidance. Looking for answers, he squints upward at the illuminated advertisements overhead. Remedies for hemorrhoids, foot fungus, ripped earlobes, unwanted pregnancy, male pattern baldness, bikini wax, allergies, fecal urgency, diminutive and surplus (mostly female) body parts, the ailments, the plagues, the toll-free numbers to make it all go away. What of emptiness, what of ruin?

At Union Square, the doors open and the cold from outside fills the subway car. He rises and exits, proceeding through other weather. Santos with his miles to go, his immeasurable desires to correct. To still things in motion. Aboveground, hailstones nip at his face, but something in the wild day other than rain and snow is shouting down at him.

Showing his badge he is let through a service gate behind the brownstones along West Ninth. He hops fences and crosses frozen gardens and jungle gyms encased in ice. In the middle of the block he stops at a dog's shit field. His old shoes creak in the dry snow like chalk. He shrugs at his overcoat. Frozen lines of salt rim his nose and upper lip. He has been crying. He taps at the french doors, drawing his gun halfway out of its holster.

"Nathan," he calls.

But his voice is soft, and he half desires no answer. He tries the handle and finds it turns easily in his hand and he stands there looking at it. He pushes on the door an inch or two and waits for the dog's snarl and the avalanche of paws, but he hears nothing. He throws open the door and starts in. When he hears something he doesn't like he stops where he is, pools of snowmelt collecting under his feet. The lights are on. There is nothing to be afraid of that he can see but much that he can't. For instance why he is here: because his sister is dead; because she was Nathan's sister, too, and because Nathan seduced her, or he didn't seduce her, or because he won't say; because the ties to him have become more tight and less clear and are bound to become less clear still; because there are no absolutes in human misery and things will always get worse; and because he has believed that Nathan has done nothing wrong all these years, though now he believes Nathan might do-have done-anything. He has always seen in Nathan what he envies most. Now he sees what he most despises. For every single thing about him that he once agreed with, or wanted more of, he now has another reason to see him dead. The same Nathan, who once, more than anyone he knows-certainly more than he himself-had more reasons to live.

"Nathan," he calls again. He raises his gun. "Nathan-" Somewhere, a radiator hisses.

After a while, he returns the gun to his belt, closes the door softly behind him, hops the fence and goes away into the morning.

The clutch of birds streaks across his cracked windshield at the entrance ramp to the FDR, knocking and darkening the glass, sweeping Nathan through a reverse car wash of water sounds and whirring feathers and mechanical squeal, finally peeling away to reveal a dozen lightning strikes of viscous drool. He reaches for the wipers, but he must have sucked the plastic tank dry on the Belt Parkway last night because the glass smears white as noon.

He gets out brandishing a torn square of tissue before he notices that the road he wants has been closed. The East River is running level with it, its testy new edge, white and scummy, has begun to snake across the merge. Ahead, across the river to the east, the darker clouds are steadily climbing. A new round of snow veined with mute lightning.

Nathan backs onto York and heads down Second Avenue. His cell-phone rings as this sector of lights is turning to a string of reds. His hand crawls through the glove box, landing the electric shaver and-ignoring the complaints of cabs and grocery trucks stacking up behind him-tugs at the rear-view mirror and scrubs the shaver across his face. An alarm-is it time? He sees but does not consider the face in the mirror, a face not his own. He swipes at the halo of wispy tangle atop the head, then works the shaver methodically, digging at the cleft in the chin. Finally he draws the phone, mid-ring, and leaves it mouthpiece-down amid the heather of dog hair on the seat. Some voice buzzes its protest. He calibrates the volume knob on the CD against Serena's high-pitched drone and closes his eyes on his first peaceful dark in days, in which Coltrane-the stars, the moon, the morphine sedation-is in full serenade. Depthless float. The peace and slide of a life that should have been. Other numberless and nameless things that should be. Gently, Nathan's fingers touch out a new rhythm on the steering wheel. Flamenco Sketches. The side-step lilt into the Spanish bridge, that call to the good old days, while behind, Bill Evans on his piano all sweetness and light, then like the day itself, like this day itself, turns dark and ominous. Nathan's eyelashes dampen shut. Miles, muted, the call of the lark, heralding – what, a new day or the end of this one? Sad now-not this is where we've been, but this is where we're heading. The tears are real, and adhesive. He will not open his eyes until the music ends, and it does end, badly, with a hitched fade-out. And his eyes do open, on themselves, in the rear-view mirror. He finds there chips of green ice so pale now it is hard even for him to see that there is anything behind them. So pale they look blind.

The cop in the window, an eclipse of the already sunless day, is tapping impatiently with the end of a nightstick. Nathan doesn't look. He can't bear it, or doesn't care to. Dead ahead, ahead, ahead, he blinks and toes the accelerator, the car lurches, the cop staggers back. On through the red, sending the traffic charging at his door into a screeching hook slide. He slaloms downtown around the emissions of the breathing ground, foul clouds rising from the pierced sewerlids.

Against all logic, it has grown even darker, greener. Tornado weather. Thunder explodes just overhead. Before him the vertical world, the craggy skyline, the faceless columns of the World Trade Center, has drawn nearer, towering up over the little ants, little humanity.

Alone on the sidewalk, Nathan peers up at the old building, spitting distance from the courts, a layer cake of bail bondsmen, immigration lawyers, slip-and-fall, import-exporters. All those endless hallways and their frosted doors. Milton had bought for Nathan and himself a share of an office of high-class transients, a traffic lawyer and a man named Chang, who, with his cadre of stunning and stealthy Asian secretaries, hordes secrets and smooths out the indignities caused by various anonymous factions of theChinese mob. Milton brought to the mix his own son, Nathan, Isabel, her mother, and, of course, the irrepressible Oliver Schreck.

Two red-and-white NYC sheriff cruisers, country cousins to the more officious police, squat at the curb. Some deadbeat getting snared for child support, no doubt. Or parking tickets. Nathan's got piles of his own for this car, that one, the other.

Nathan winces at the door. Is he going in? Must he go in? It seems he must.

At the sight of Nathan, the lobby man Jorge-a mere allusion to security in his toy soldier's uniform complete with gold shoulder boards-looks stricken. Nathan knows he's not looking his best. Today of all days he must make an impression.

"Que pasa."

"Que pasa."

"Un momentito, senor," Jorge suggests, finger raised as if testing the wind. "Con permiso-"

But there is court. The judge won't mind his relaxed attire. East Hampton in the offing-if anyone will understand, it will be a judge. And he is late, he is always late. But the question is, How late? He must hurry.

And that deposition to be taken uptown later -or after later? – Isabel had said so. There must also be preparations for the Riverside Drive case. Milton will be upstairs fielding calls. And now-it strikes him gravely-they have no secretary. Busy, busy, busy. -

"Hasta la vista, Jorge," Nathan says, giving a little wave.

The twenty-second-floor hallway, usually bustling at this hour, is deserted, though anything but silent. It echoes with ticking: his watch, his heart, the heels of his shoes, his conscience, impatient fingernails on some desk, the one thousand clocks of this building tracking appointments kept, appointments lost.

He stands. Has he sat? It seems he is always falling and having to get up. Now he slows. Someone, it appears, has left the door to his office open at the end of the hall. The yellow light of the reception area spills into the hallway, splashing up the opposite wall. Behind him the elevator doors clatter open and pause. No one emerges. Then no one still.

Nathan whirls. "Isabel, why is the door-?" He stops himself. The reception desk, cheap plastic veneer, sits unmanned. But the waiting room, as quiet as the hall, crawls with life. Ruth and Schreck, changed since last night into blue-black court attire; the traffic lawyer wearing below his droopy mustache a gray leisure suit and loafers, ready to field his 1-800 calls about fender benders and lawsuits for untimely deaths; and slippery Chang in his double-breasted Armani and wing tips, surrounded like a pop star by his four young secretaries, a small mercenary army. Before them stand four New York County sheriffs, like troopers in their Smokey the Bear hats and striped trousers; as if, having taken the wrong exit off the thruway, here they are to ask directions. The guests hold their breath. A sheriff steps forward, parting the claws of his handcuffs: "Nathan Stein?"

Nathan recognizes the voice from the movies; the formality that authority seems to require of itself. Then he recalls the dozens of scenes from the films of his clients' lives. How many times has he himself stood beside a lone, doomed figure before the bench, always on the right, always the right.

Nathan shuffles to the right. Maddeningly, black dots do-si-do before his eyes. "Isn't it a little early?" he asks. He feels a giddy drunk coming on.

The three other sheriffs step forward.

"Don't say a thing," Ruth instructs from the rear.

Nathan looks at her, slightly amused. Then at Schreck, grimly, and says, as to Judas: "Do what you're here to do." One arm then the other is seized and pinned behind him. "I told Errol Santos everything I know."

Ruth is gripping his arm. "No, Nathan-"

"My father?"

"He's on his way."

Nathan faces the sheriffs: "Don't you know who my lawyer is? Don't you know who my father is?"

One of the sheriffs addresses the silent crowd: "This is Stein?"

"That's him," Schreck says quickly.

Nathan nods his appreciation. "Thank you, Oliver."

"He doesn't feel well," Ruth warns them.

Schreck looks at his watch and mumbles, "Milton said he'd be in at ten."

Pimples of sweat pop to the surface of Nathan's face. "Then he's not on his way?"

"Hang in there," Schreck says. He makes a consoling fist indicating some vague fraternal bond.

"Oliver, I saw the damned billboard. And Maria's will. Were you going to tell me-?"

"You have the right to remain silent-"

"I know this part. Somebody, Baron is in the car. He'll be hungry.

"We'll take care of the dog," Schreck says, a comment vaguely menacing.

The traffic lawyer, hiding his eyes, walks away shaking his head, his loafers zipping across the gray industrial carpet.

Nathan staggers forward, but the doorway fills, blocking the way. Already with the handkerchief blotting the back of his neck, the crescents of hair around the ears dark with damp. "Well well," Krivit says.

Ruth points at him. "Not a word."

An ironic smirk crosses Krivit's face. "What did he do?"

It is a good question. It hasn't crossed Nathan's mind to ask. Though these are sheriffs, not police officers; that limits the possibilities. This can't be about Isabel. Nathan looks up with genuine interest. "What did I-?"

"Nothing," Ruth blurts before Nathan can finish asking. "You pissed on a judge. It was the tax returns."

Nathan wants to laugh. "This is for that? Judge Acevedo actually called my bluff?" He'd like to say, Good for her, but thinks it imprudent.

Krivit eyes Nathan. "Contempt of court?" he says archly. "Now that's rich."

Contrite, Nathan shrugs, "Ask my lawyer," and raises his head to the room full of them, of which, suddenly, he is no member.

Krivit lowers a brow. "Did you finish?"

"Did he finish what?" Schreck asks.

"Be quiet," Ruth snaps.

Krivit squints at Schreck. "What do you mean what? You know what. Where the hell is it?"

Nathan nods at the little drama unfolding before him. Schreck knows about the writ; he said so. Of course Ruth knows that Schreck knows. They all know everything. Even the little rat, Krivit.

He hears in his ears again the pledge he'd made to himself early this morning that despite Claire he would have Amparo's cousin released. A slam dunk at redemption if there ever was one: call the A.D.A., finesse the girl's charges, tug lightly on the string or two still left him, pay the $500 himself if he has to. He can still work a deal. Consider the baby, he'd have begun, as with everything, he would have begun so well-

"I hope this won't take long. I have to be in court," he says, then spins, remembering Regina Nunez's file. "I need something in my office."

The sheriffs murmur and look uncertain, then stand aside and follow Nathan toward the back of the suite, past the mahogany-lined rooms, Milton's with the cases of law books and journals and diplomas fixed haphazardly, like fieldstones over the walls, and the glass-topped desk with the view of rolling sky, into which Milton and Nathan separately stared while seeding secretaries and clients' wives and their girlfriends past and present and their sisters and selected members-females, all but one-of the building maintenance crew. And the time when Milton kept an office full of clients waiting for an hour and a half. One impatient client stood and marched toward the door and flung it open, revealing for all to see a woman spread among the depositions and pen sets on Milton's desk, her skirt hiked, her legs splayed, Milton kneeling below and between, his head nodding-

Nathan stands at the threshold to his own office. The sheriffs are behind him and Ruth and Schreck behind them, all wondering, Nathan is sure, what it is he could possibly need.

"What is the charge?" he asks again, trying to narrow his search: himself or Regina Nunez, he's already forgotten who he's supposed to help. But he answers before they can, with a nod, "Contempt," and steps in.

Negotiating the crowded floor, he looks about. No credentials here. His diplomas peek out from behind cracked glass amid towers of paper and newsprint climbing the walls to the ceiling. CDs in staggered columns, collapsed like his mail across the bookless shelves. A clearing in the woods for the gleaming stereo. Nathan's desk is buried beneath the scatter of books and year-old magazines and styrofoam cups. Atop it all a laptop, still on, possibly for days, seems to be in charge. Piled in the office's corners the empty boxes for the stereo, the computer, the new phone, old phone, coffeemaker, other appliances long gone, and just empty boxes whose duty-coming/going, in/out?-remains a mystery. The overwhelmed file cabinet and its three tiers of manila folders hangs open. A room with no chronology. No order. No language. Only the now, the tick of time occupied by this moment's breath, gone already with the exhalation into a container of everything before. A blind distant past housed here in this mausoleum of lives tried and pled, of briefs and writs begun past deadline, set down for the morning paper and forgotten and left unfiled to mulch beneath the compost of new paper, new briefs, obsolete news.

"Mr. Stein-?"

He looks about. As he had, standing last week at the open door to the Church of the Immaculate Conception on Fordham Road. Serena had begged him to come to mass. Purge and be purified. Be cured. Inside, the acrid sweetness of incense hung in the air. Pausing by a plastic seashell filled with foggy water, he peered down the long aislle through the halfdark where a chipped and sallow Christ hung spotlit and suspended from invisible wires over the altar, not unlike a trapeze artist. Oblivious beneath his spiked crown. Pierced palms and extruded ribs drained by the wounds freshly repainted with lipstick. Ankles crossed and riveted, the toes curled in, which Nathan thought a nice touch, feminine. Mater Dolorosa hanging stage left. Serena eased Nathan-it was not one of his best days-into a pew halfway down. Four figures slumped against the dimness of the nave, the light upon their shoulders and heads making of them silhouettes, targets, contestants, saints. Before him a wooden container missing the Bible it once offered up. A long felt bench stretching aisle to aisle, bleached and dimpled in evenly spaced pairs, as if the nexus of the spirit were the connection between knee joint and floor. Feeling the thousand hours he'd spent in his synagogue in Ozone Park, the sin-riven and unrepentant target of Rabbi Jupiter's pearls of wisdom, the virtues of a virgin's pregnancy were not lost on him.

Serena in leather pants and a gauzy blouse entered the confessional. He heard her crying. A dark figure in dark robes slipped through the wooden locker's curtains and the slide shot back and instantly there was a faint murmuring, as if from an old endless ramble never interrupted. Nathan kept his watchful eye on the statuary, expecting the worst. The stained glass of the windows deadened by the day's hazy overcast. Random panels replaced with murky plexiglass. Here and there, a saint was pierced and lit in cobalt blue and a diluted orange among the pews. The distant hiss of traffic on the Grand Concourse. In four or five months, during the quiet of a Sunday mass, Nathan knew the pagan roar from Yankee Stadium would inspire the lines of little Christian boys in white fitted frocks to near riot and the material ghosts slumped in the nave to titters.

In the confessional Serena's admissions became a singsong chant, and Nathan, having seen it before, saw her then: eyes glued with tears, hands twitchy, her pouched lips puckered and waving at the air to let out the stumbling flood, failing to keep up with the list of her transgressions: the lines of coke; the unmade phone calls to a grandmother left in San Juan like an old plant too dusty to clean; her obsessions with the gringo out in the pews, the accelerant to an already aimless life. Meanwhile, in Nathan's ears, the church-building murmured with tales of misdemeanors and fratricide and a shepherd in search of his flock and women sentenced to eternal damnation and a ram slaughtered and disemboweled and offered up to an unrepentant and hungry Lord. No respecter of persons. Nathan's grief at what he had done. These evil-doing and sex-crazed vagabonds. Good men gone to seed, bringing on the great storm. A drowned race of perilous incurables. Six-hundred-year-old Noah captaining his floating zoo. And that was only Genesis.

A hand shook Nathan gently. He had been sleeping. He looked up into a wan and featureless face, very like that of his clients, a man in powder-blue jumpsuit and clerical collar. Serena close behind him, clutching her sequined handbag as though it contained the ashes of her incinerated misdeeds.

The priest, in Puerto Rican accent: "Are you waiting to confess?"

Nathan slowly pushed himself off the bench. A shadow off to the side scuttled for the deeper dark. A string of whoops from a passing fire engine approached, whined by, and bent into the distance. Movement above, in the lightless rafters, the flutter of birds.

No.

Serena threw the priest a knowing and resigned look.

"I'm tired," Nathan said.

"Nathan," Serena begged.

The priest tilted his head, confused. "Excuse me?"

"I'd just fallen asleep."

Nathan sidestepped into the aisle, his hand raised protectively to his forehead. "Maybe tomorrow," he murmured.

Serena's voice raised to a shriek, a little girl on the run, a tearful drizzle. "Nathan, just say sorry!"

The priest was waiting. Was he? Am I, am I? "Of course," Nathan replied. "I'm sorry."

" Stein?

"Nathan?"

Ruth stands before him, her face bunched with concern. Nathan feels the brick of cash in his inside blazer pocket and, lifting his head, closes his eyes. Milton will reel him back in. Hours from now he’ll be out. Another forty-eight, and, offshore, the sunlight will snake its way through and he will inspect the changeless shapes of the sky and study the thunder of surf. He will drink tequila while standing ankle-deep in white sand.

"Ready to go?" the sheriff asks.

Nathan blinks, afraid of the answer. "Where?"

10 A. M.

An hour passes as the hours will pass here. In this concrete room the iron door clanks shut the wrong way. The holding cell murmurs with the hyperintensity of men who are not yet the state's wards, prisoners only of the moment, still with lives to lose. Nathan receives sidelong glances from jailers he's known for years, men he's paid off for a variety of client services, women, food, extra minutes. Now his pockets hang down along his legs like socks. His shoes, stripped of their laces, flop like slippers. He clutches his blazer to his chest like a life preserver. A high naked bulb dangles from the ceiling, directing the light nowhere.

He hangs on the bars and peers out. Someone in an orange jumpsuit is coming backward down the hallway dragging a plastic bucket on wheels by a mop submerged in brown sludge. Across the hall, in another cell, a darker corner sputters in laughter. Nathan catches the eye of the man there, a shawl over his shoulders, his face darkly greased, the eyes and mouth whited out like a miner's. "Don't look at me," he says.

Nathan turns and finds himself admired by a man cradling himself in his reedy arms, a horse whinny leaping from his lips, as if identifying him as either potential prey or long-lost kindred spirit. Nathan rolls his blazer and curls on the only spot left him, a square of concrete slab beside an unflushed porcelain bowl half filled with liquid shit. Pale winter light falls through the welded iron windows. He can see upside down the crown of Yankee Stadium; the belly of a plane vanishing, crashing the wrong way into the clouds. He shuts his eyes to sleep, but on the back of his lids sees mirrored there his own pale stare.

"What are you?"

Nathan raises his head to a huge black man seated against the wall, his legs stretched before him. His neck spreads like armored wings to the nubs of his shoulders.

"Same as you," Nathan says.

"I don't believe so." He looks at Nathan's shoes. He looks at the bites and scratches on Nathan's arms. They are beginning to stink. "What did you do, yell at your wife?"

"I'm not married."

"I'm not married either. Not after this morning. I just killed her. Her and her boyfriend. Ice pick, man." He brings down his arm once, slowly, to demonstrate. "Daily News said I'm tomorrow's page one."

"Impressive."

The black man shrugs. "But I don't know anymore since that fucker came in." He aims his finger like a rifle across the room. "Dude did the same thing, but he used an ax."

Like a child lost in a parade Nathan peers through the crooks of elbows and crotches at the man who was scrutinizing him. A beacon of peaceful madness in the hubbub. His lips are waving, his head twitching, as if in animated conversation.

Nathan turns back to the double murderer. Hands pillowy and worn like leather mitts, like tools. "Maybe you shouldn't admit things so freely."

"It's what I did."

"The beauty of things," Nathan replies, eyes fluttering closed for an instant, as if awaiting a symphony's fateful moment. "It doesn't matter what you actually do. It's what you say."

A small smile creases the face. "You aren't a lawyer, are you?"

Nathan shrugs.

"Shoot. Legal counsel." He slaps Nathan's shoulder. Others have overheard and squint uncertainty in Nathan's direction. "I'm going to need a lawyer."

"I can't help you."

"You'll get out. What did you do, anyway?"

Nathan sees no reason to hold back. In here, a sort of homecoming. He's with his kind. Anyway, he's with what he knows.

"Pissed off a judge."

"Hell. How did you do it?"

"She wanted to see my taxes."

"Why didn't you give the judge your taxes?"

Nathan shrugs. "I never file them."

The man laughs. "My kind of lawyer."

Nathan can't resist. It comes to him as easy as breath. "Then one thing."

"What's that?"

"The best angle, the best and most successful defense."Tell me."

"The irrelevance of your guilt in a court of law."

The double murderer, smiling goofily, waves his hands before his eyes. "Shoot."

Nathan blinks through his grin at his new friend, superimposing upon him images of a man and woman lying in a briny pool of blood and vomit on a ragged carpet, the man's leg twitching, an ice pick quivering like a flag planted for God and country in the woman's heaving chest. The black sits, knees up against the wall, humming at the ceiling. As though beneath a tree on a hot summer's day, not a care in the world. Glad to be rid of her, glad to lighten the load. My successes, Nathan knows, are society's failures.

A young kid grasps the bars of the window, hauling himself up, his arms shivering with the strain. All he can see is the same wedge of sky with the same plane as Nathan. Feet anchored against the wall, he heaves himself up higher and he freezes. Nathan can tell he's caught the same slice of Yankee Stadium, maybe a glimpse of tarpaulined field. Beyond that the low rubble of East Harlem, which the kid beams at as if he's spotted a beach, a woman spreading out a towel and stripping off blouse and skirt in the wavy gas of heat. Her arms raised, pinning back her hair-

A man has straddled the bowl overhead, his pants shackling his knees. Nathan rolls away just in time, gathering his blazer and finding himself against the opposite wall squatting beside the axwielder. The murderer smells of swamp and unholy death. But then Nathan compares favorably the cuts and scratches on his own arms with his neighbor's and turns aside to dream old dreams of Sid Frankel's face as he led a prosecution witness to stand the truth on end, to look for all the world like confusion and certain acquittal.

The kid hanging from the window bars holds on as long as he can then drops to the floor. "Man, that's beautiful."

His name is sounded and he rises and enters the wrong end of the arraignment hall and sits on a bench, his face hidden from the gallery like a game-show mystery guest. Shoulder to shoulder with wife batterers and car thieves, weekend warriors, others who may have done worse. No one has done nothing. At his back, he knows, is the matinee audience of mothers and sisters. The dignitaries in the front row, the private lawyers and Legal Aid catching cases, nod Nathan's way and whisper among themselves. The court officers are smugly amused at this little soap opera, a ripple in their days of sodomizers and pickpockets.

"Mr. Stein." It is a small voice at the end of the bench. Possibly the voice of conscience, he believes, a voice he had spent his life drowning and refashioning in the guise of Puccini and Coltrane. But Nathan leans, just to be sure: Regina Nunez, Amparo's peasant cousin, sits at the end of the same bench holding her swollen belly in her hands. His face heating with embarrassment, Nathan gives her a little wave.

"Amparo-" the girl begins to explain, her expression dark, full of foreboding.

"I wanted to help you today," he tries to explain.

In through the crack in the door flood commitments and forgotten pledges, but they are too much and so amount to nothing, easily forgotten. Nathan offers no defense. Briefly, he considers a plea. Then he simply leans back, out of the girl's peripheral view, ending his torment.

Claire, though, can't be far away, he knows. He peeks over his shoulder, and there, in the front row, in her nimbus of virtue and decorum, sits his own counsel, Ruth, in black dress and pearls, a manila folder in her lap. But she is too stiff, too indignant, as if she's stonewalling someone's gaze. And as Nathan untwists he catches in the corner of his eye a flash of red hair. A stack of manilla folders and yellow legal pads clutched to her chest like a shield, Claire is staring at him, her face blank with disbelief.

Nathan grabs the back of the bench and begins to stand. Two court officers half rise, hands on the stocks of their pistols, and he lowers himself, clutching his own thighs, surprised to find them sinewy, atrophied.

At the bridge officer's call, four of Nathan's neighbors rise. Boys with round faces, hands clasped with contrition and eyes filled with mischief. Four attorneys-friends, colleagues, sworn enemies of Milton-meet them elbow to elbow in the middle of the floor and escort them like groomsmen to the table and face the black-robed judge and the calendar Scotch-taped to the front of her bench. A dozen women in the first rows of the gallery lift their chins to hear. Their hair teased and their faces freshly painted; their church clothes unearthed and pressed for their brothers and sons. Five court officers rise together, hands poised near their guns, covering the angles between the suspects and the gallery.

At his lectern, a rookie assistant district attorney with slick blond hair reads from a manila folder a harrowing tale of a posse of young men roaming the subways, leaving a trail of fear and broken ribs and empty pockets. These four young suspects surrounded a couple and threatened them with box cutters. Removed from said couple's possession: one radio, one watch, one wallet containing thirteen dollars cash. The audience utters not a sound. One attorney after another, feverishly picking over the files-some of them, Nathan knows, for the first time-speaks in reverent tones of his client as a community asset, of his rock-solid family. Two of them work as stock boys in a warehouse. At 2 A.M. they were merely returning from work, your honor. They were imploring the alleged victims for change to make phone calls home, nothing more, they were late, their mothers-all present, your honor, to show their support-were worried. Panhandling at best. The box cutters not weapons but tradesmen's tools, evidence of their willingness to work for their families' survival. The whole thing was a misunderstanding, an overreaction. You honor, everybody is worked up over the case of the Riverside Drive jogger. These men are not animals. We're all a little tense, all a little trigger-happy.

Nathan would like to laugh. He could have done better.

The judge, grim-faced, does not lift her eyes. Bail is requested at $10,000 each by the assistant district attorney. A collective gasp rises from the women relatives. The judge grants the A.D.A.'s wishes without hesitation and the women begin to wail. They reach over the partition. They hug each other. The victimized boys glance back, all innocence and light. The court officers hold their ground as the women exit weeping.

Nathan hears his name and immediately rises. And immediately the floor seems to fall from him. He watches his feet cross the floor. Ruth grabs his elbow smelling of flowers and country nights, of the perfumed nylons that contain her thighs. Nathan, for a moment, shuts his eyes.

"Are you going to be all right?" Ruth asks.

He stands rocking from side to side before a judge he has danced with in court often enough and eviscerated just as often outside of it. He's made fun of her pocked face and heavily painted lips, her floppy jowls and buoyant hairdo. But she's no joke now. She levels at him a scrutinous glare, as though consid ering all the battles she's lost and all the directions she can now go. Sweat traces the back of his head.

Ruth leans in to whisper: "The disciplinary committee called."

Nathan waves his hand.

"It's not just not filing 1099s."

"They have nothing."

"They have fraud."

"They have nothing."

"They have larceny by false promise."

"It's nothing."

"Trickery by deceit."

"The burden of proof is too high. The disciplinary committee is not reasonable doubt. It's moral certainty."

Ruth shifts on her feet. "They have it, Nathan. They have moral certainty."

Nathan presses his lips together like a prig. "Moral certainty," he says, and lowers a brow at her, as though to say, Don't be dramatic, what is that?

The bridge officer states: "Docket number ending 483. The State of New York vs. Nathan Stein. If the attorney has not yet appeared before the court."

"Ruth Gutman appearing on behalf of Nathan Stein."

Nathan sneaks a peek at the legal pad in her hands. On it is written nothing at all. Nathan manages a rueful smile. Touché. "Where's Milton?"

Ruth squeezes his elbow.

"Counsel, do you waive the reading of the rights and charges?"

"So waived.”

"Where is he?"

Ruth subsides into a berated doctor's stony silence.

The judge, leaning forward, glowers. "Step up, counsel."

Ruth and the A.D.A. approach the bench.

"What the hell is Mr. Stein doing before me?" the judge asks.

"Mr. Stein was taken into custody this morning at his office," the A.D.A. states. "Judge Acevedo so ordered because Mr. Stein has failed to produce tax returns she requested."

Ruth turns aside so that Nathan can hear: "Mr. Stein is a respected attorney."

"I know what Mr. Stein is," grumbles the judge. "I understand there is also a disciplinary action filed against him. What is the nature of the proceeding?"

The A.D.A. breaks in. "A pattern of various client abuses, your honor. Theft of bond. Larceny by false promise. Theft by deceit."

Ruth does not flinch. "Mr. Stein is an upstanding member of the community. He's stood before this bench on a number of occasions. His community ties are manifest. He is not a flight risk. I urge you to release my client on his own recognizance while he works this out with Judge Acevedo."

"Step back, counselors. For the record. People?"

Back at the lectern, the A.D.A. duplicates his performance in a slurred monotone: "Charges of contempt against Mr. Stein derive from his failure to produce tax returns requested by Judge Acevedo.

"Mr. Stein is a respected attorney, your honor."

The judge has hunched over, going at her paperwork with a bureaucrat's joyless determination. Scratching out a note, she does not raise her head. "Nature of proceeding?"

"A pattern of client abuse, your honor," the A.D.A. says, the efficiency of his performance bordering on neglect. "Theft of bond. Larceny by false promise. Theft by deceit."

Ruth clasps her hands behind her back, rises up on her toes and down. "Mr. Stein is an upstanding member of the community. He's stood before this bench countless times. His ties to the community and its ties to him are manifest. All his family and friends are here in this city. He will not flee. He doesn't even like to travel. Your honor, you should release Mr. Stein on his own recognizance."

The court clerk is whispering in the judge's ear, handing her a sheet of paper. The judge looks it over, initials it, returns it with a smile.

Ruth sighs. "Mr. Stein is an upstanding-"

"I heard you the first time, counselor. People?" With her eyes the Judge cues the A.D.A.

"Your honor, the people request Mr. Stein serve the maximum thirty days unless he produces his tax returns."

Ruth knows, apparently, as Nathan himself knows, that to fight is pointless. Still, there is the show. Nathan nudges her onward.

"Your honor, Mr. Stein will not flee," she says quickly. "He has"-she hesitates, continues-"nowhere to go."

Nathan bobs his head in full agreement.

But the judge has turned to her clerk before Ruth is done. "Mr. Stein shall remain incarcerated while in contempt up to but not beyond the maximum thirty-day period. We'll have a recess here."

"I'll need a couple hours," Ruth tells him.

"I have some money at the property desk. It's fifty thousand, no forty, maybe thirty. It should be enough."

"It's not enough. It's not going to get you out of this."

Thunder shakes the panes of the courtroom. The lights dim, flicker, then surge as before.

“What will?"

Ignoring him, Ruth gives the ceiling a dirty look. "Maria's wake is at three o'clock."

"Today?"

"They want to get her in the ground. New Life Missionary Baptist Church in Bushwick."

"Well, they wouldn't want me there."

Ruth's black eyes darken deeper with a disapproval Nathan knows well. "Benny will be there. And what about her will, Nathan?

"Will?"

"They want to know where it is."

"She didn't have anything worth leaving, Ruth."

"They want to know what it says."

"Where is Milton?" he asks.

She looks at him. "I'll need a couple of hours to arrange everything. Sit tight. Don't get hurt in there."

"Don't worry. I've made friends."

"What about the will, Nathan? You didn't answer my question."

"You didn't answer mine. Where's my father?"

Ruth sighs, squeezes his elbow, hushing him. "It'll be over soon. "

"Nathan."

It is Claire, he sees, standing at the gate. In a boyish reflex of embarrassment he blushes and stands to his full height, trying for any advantage. Are her eyes really sweeping over him sympathetically? Then the light goes out and they harden, and as quickly as she opened to him she has sealed shut again.

"I told you I'd make it to Regina Nunez's hearing," he says.

"Look at you, Nathan. Finally in handcuffs."

"Contempt of court has a nice ring to it," Nathan says.

"Tax evasion doesn't. And whatever else. Even when you think you're coming through on your white horse to save Regina Nunez you are incapable of not screwing it up. Eventually you get in the way of everything good you try."

He bends forward, near her ear. "Come with me," he says, believing, for once, at his own risk, his own certainty. Then he sees her expression, and reality, the day, comes crashing down around him. She has begun to walk away. "Claire," he says quickly. "Then do me one favor. Maria's memorial service is at three. Obviously, I can't make it."

"You have got to be kidding."

"She respected you."

"That's not fair."

"It's true. She deserves attendance-" he begins to say, then stops himself. But it is true. She deserves. "Somebody's got to be there.

He cranes his neck, catching the double doors at the back of the courtroom beating like wings then punching closed. In the little square window Claire's hair recedes, flecks of light in the murky hallway, the catch of his life, slipping away.

12 Noon

He runs toward the sound of her retreat, her clippety-clop across the mosaic floor of the courthouse atrium. "Claire!"

She turns. Her wild red hair, her eyes red-rimmed and damp. "Errol? What are you doing here?"

"Where is he?"

"You mean Nathan." Claire sighs. "News certainly does travel fast. So the celebration has extended to Brooklyn. But isn't there some place you should be? Your family-"

"What about the bail?"

"You think that judge would deprive herself of the pleasure of saying to Nathan, 'Bail denied'? Now that he's in the system she'll put it to him every chance she gets."

Santos peers at her. "I don't understand. This isn't funny."

"You don't think Nathan arrested for contempt of court is funny? "

"Contempt of-?"

“-court. Not that there isn't a soul on earth Nathan isn't contemptuous of." She lifts a hand and presses the back of it cold and clammy to his cheek. "You have bigger fish to fry right now. You didn't sleep at all. I felt you tossing and turning all night. Nathan can take care of himself. It'll be good for him."

Santos's face goes blank. He touches her elbow. "Look, where are you going now?"

"Back inside. I have to clean up that little mess of Nathan's. Poor pregnant kid he's left rotting-what's wrong? Please, Errol, go home. You look terrible." He doesn't seem to be responding. She sighs, looks at her watch. "I have ten minutes."

They stop at the door, beyond the metal detectors, to gaze outside. Sculpted regiments of black cloud march across the sky beneath the overcast. The McDonald's across the street lists like a plastic Ark, its playground drowned. A trail of penny candy stores, five-and-tens, discounters, makes it way upstream against a current of water and its attendant trash.

"My god, if this isn't Hell," Claire says.

He takes her briefcase and puts it on the floor then takes both her hands in his. "I have to ask you something."

She looks at him first in one eye then the other and back, to confirm. "I don't like what I see."

"They were out together," he says. "He and Isabel."

"He's always out. And never alone, let me add."

"They were out that night."

"What night?"

"Saturday night."

"Who told you that? Saturday night Isabel was dead. What are you saying?"

"I can't get into that."

"Oh, no, please do."

He rakes his fingers through his hair. "This is ridiculous."

"Nothing, you should know, if it's about Nathan, is ridiculous," she says, then stops and tilts her head, as if to inspect from another angle. "Christ, Errol, you're investigating him. Now look, listen to me. Nathan is a lot of things but he's no"-she laughs nervously-"murderer. He couldn't have done tbat. He doesn't have it in him. He talks and talks and has all these grand plans, but he never goes anywhere except to the opera, and that ridiculous mansion of his. He's steeped in gooey nostalgia. He's lost in it. He wouldn't harm a fly."

"I want to know one thing. I want to know if you ever in the back of your mind believed that Isabel was-"

She puts a hand to his chest, stop: "Are you asking me if he and your sister could have been sleeping together, because as unpleasant as the thought might be to you, knowing Nathan and that father of his, I'm sure you don't need me to give you the answer. After all those years of you and him running wild. It was inevitable. I don't know why you let her work in that place."

"I know they were sleeping together. That's not what I'm asking you."

Her breathing slows with the realization of someone who has considered all avenues of attack except this one, the one great perilous possibility, unspoken and unaddressed and feared all the same.

He says, "Nathan told me she is-was-related to him." Then, looking at her, seeing the change in her face, in the shape of it, the color, he stops talking, bows his head.

"Interesting," Claire says scientifically. "I thought you were about to ask me if your sister was Milton Stein's daughter."

"That is what I'm asking you."

"You're right, this is ridiculous."

"You know what I'm saying."

"You bet I do. Is that what he told you? Because you know how he lies. You know how he creates his life as he walks down the street. It's all that opera he listens to. He thinks he's Rudolfo, he thinks he's Marcello, he thinks sometimes he's Romeo."

"I am not talking about opera. I am not talking about a story. This is real. You know them as well as anyone. Everything you've heard, everything you've seen, could it be possible-?"

Claire leans forward, whispering, "I would like to know what it is you imagine you're saying."

"Just tell me if it's possible and I'll tell you what it says."

She lurches. Her hand appears, as someone else's, an attacker's, from below, clamping over her mouth, choking off a cry.

He studies her there in her cage.

"And do you know what that would make you?" she manages to say, her voice hardly a whisper. "I figured Milton had to have children all over town, but are you his, too? Are you and Nathan brothers?

He reaches. "No- I don't know."

"Don't touch me, Errol, you don't know? You mean you might be? Jesus Christ, Nathan had his little senoritas and now you have me, and you've passed me on like frat brothers, passed me on like a little trophy."

"Claire, this isn't about us."

"It's all about everything. It's all a web, a trap. I've waited and I've waited, hoping all the shit would just vanish. And my god, Errol, you want a baby?" She throws out her hands. "You wanted to bring a child into this? You carry around that inhaler all the time, but I'm the one who can't breathe. Why don't you just hang my head on your wall-"

She turns away, waving as if at fire. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm sorry I said that. I know you haven't talked to Nathan in years, not until you saw him yesterday. I know you gave him up. And now Isabel-I'm going to be sick."

Her shoulders bobble. He refuses to run and steps around her and wraps her in, stilling her, his chin on the crown of her head.

"Do you think he can kill?" she asks the air. "He's your, what, your brother for god's sake-"

"I don't know that, I don't know-"

"Of course you do. He is. He has to be. It's the only thing that makes sense now. That nothing at all makes sense. What twisted life is this?"

She turns now, faces him head on. "Did he do it, Errol? Did he do it?"

Santos lifts his eyes to the mural painted on the dome above, helmeted justice atop her horse-drawn chariot, in all her various guises: muse, gatekeeper, executioner.

"Yes.

The prisoners go like dreamers, following a yellow line painted on the floor out the long corridor to a caged school bus with RIKERS ISLAND Scrawled on ripped cardboard in the window. Through the beams of klieg lights pass cyclones of paper and hail and rain. The water on his face is warm and granular, smelling not of the sea but faintly of musty loam, as if whole acres of farm have been scraped up in the Midwest and carried here.

A hand grabs Nathan as he is about to step aboard and pulls him out of line. A guard says, "You're gone."

Wrists pinned in plastic cuffs, Nathan follows him in. Another guard approaches with a pair of snips and frees his hands and leads him to the property desk. There in a cage of wire mesh sits an old friend in a cop's uniform, a ham sandwich before him in creased waxed paper.

A clipboard comes through the slot. "Sign here, Mr. Stein."

"Thanks, Harry."

The sandwich comes through. "I expect you haven't had your lunch.

I'm okay."

"You're welcome to share with me if you like."

"No, no. Thank you, though."

Harry takes back the clipboard and considers Nathan. "I don't know why a guy in your position would put himself in jail."

"It's a living."

Harry considers his sandwich. "How's your father?"

"He didn't come down?"

Harry shakes his head. He slides through the slot a zip-lock pouch. "Well, there you go, then."

Nathan holds it up. His life in a plastic sandwich bag very much like the one they sell goldfish in. One Rolex watch. Four prescription vials. Various coinage and rubber bands, one pair shoelaces. His beeper, his cell-phone. He removes the bundles of hundred-dollar bills and weighs them in his hand.

"Want to count that?"

Nathan purses his lips.

"You ought to count that."

Nathan slips the bundles in his inside pocket. "No one came by for this?"

"Now you know I couldn't do that."

"Of course you couldn't." They exchange a smile.

Harry leans forward over his sandwich. "And I didn't," he adds.

Nathan slips on his watch. "So if my father didn't come down, who sprang me?"

The property man shrugs. "Someone from your office. Very good-looking. You have a new secretary? She said your people called your accountant."

"My accountant?" He has never had a need.

"She brought down your tax returns. Isn't that all they wanted?

Nathan holds his breath. He hasn't filed a return in three or four years.

"What did she look like?"

"Chinese, or Japanese, or something. Great legs."

Nathan squints at the ceiling. "One of Chang's?" he considers.

"Whose?"

Nathan waves his hand. "No, never mind." He bends and snakes his shoelaces through their eyelets and crosses them and ties them. "Okay," he tells himself. He brings up twelve messages on his beeper, Serena, Serena, Amparo. What was Regina Nunez saying about her? Errol Santos. And now Chang. He erases them all. "Okay."

Harry says, "No need to hurry away."

Nathan eyes the wire cage. "I'd better go."

As he gets to the door Harry calls out. "You watch yourself, now. You know what I'm saying."

In continuous guerrilla assaults the rain and snow combine forces. The wind juggles it all back in a swirling stew of grit and road grease. Overhead the sky is the color of bruise, a vertical massing of purple and blue eddies. The storm that came all at once yesterday afternoon and just as quickly seemed to pull apart must be traveling in a circle: the real onslaught is upon us.

There is no sign of Ruth. None of Milton. So no one has met him. He squints through the headlight glare at the line of cars idling across the street. Drivers slump in the windows. Passing gypsy cabs beaten and pitted like discarded tins. A riderless city bus kneels by the curb, its wipers swinging at the hail.

His eyes stop on the red sedan at the curb. His two friends are standing a few steps from the car, their collars up against the cold. One gives him an almost friendly nod, as if Nathan's imprisonment-his short brush with safety-had been a little prank they'd all enjoyed together. One actually gives him a wave, and Nathan feels a sudden nervousness at this sign of intimacy, as though it suggests more intimate moments to come. His being in jail was obviously an inconvenience to somebody. Now Nathan is back in play.

He thinks food, to go with the simplicity he sees now in everything, and turns up his collar and pivots left, toward the Stadium, and quickens his pace. Though he knows he is thinning by the minute the rollicking of his body feels heavy. His thighs drag. The flat stretch of sidewalk grows steeper. His wet clothes are plastered to his legs and back, but the cold is still vague and distant, as if he has sunk into a kind of anesthetized drunk. Still, he hugs himself, and, with a vacant pleasure at life's little things, strolls on. The neighborhood around the courthouse a blur of brick and pigeon-stained facade and window holes blinded with sheets of plywood, speechless in asking the question, Why does anyone live here? This underside of a universe that contains grand boulevards, parks, monuments, opera houses, seas. Traffic lights that twirl like toy lanterns. He heads toward the illuminated globes for the C and D lines, watching the speeding clouds through the tracks of the El above. At the subway entrance, an unmanned cargo van sits parked at the curb, its side panels asking ARE YOU SAVED YET? A pair of pink cherubs with wings hover in profile, facing each other across a sliding side door airbrushed with gold leaf to depict pearly gates. The quarterpanel offers to make, free of charge, Nathan's travel arrangements to the beyond, 1-800-FLY-HOME.

He teeters at the top step, peering down into the subway, propped by the dank air blasting up at him and the icy rain at his back, taking measure of his options. He makes a mental note: call Planetarium Travel about ticket to Roatdn, one-way. Though for this trip out to the house he needs only his car, his bag, the dog. They will be downtown at his office. If Schreck didn't give them away. Or take them himself; the pictures float by: Schreck sitting behind his desk, Schreck walkin Baron, sleeping in his bed, driving his car, eating dinner with Mom and Dad, the son they never had; standing on Claire's step, ringing her bell. A tasty thought: could that have been him calling her this morning? Would it have been him? There has been no consistency to his self-deceptions, why should there be a logic to the cast of his deceivers? Why can't they all-all his people, all his lies-know one another? Why don't they? But they must.

All around him crowds are heading for the subway. But there is something peculiar. They are all young women, Dominicans and Hondurans-Nathan overhears them as they pass-either pregnant or cradling fresh babies or with small children in tow. They seem to come mostly from the direction of the storefront Good News Chapel and Prayer Hall behind him. Nathan follows them down.

Before the token booth, the crowd has drawn around a huge black man in a white judo suit cinched with a black belt. Between the women and the martial artist stands a ring of white teenagers, mostly blond, the boys dressed in ironed khakis and argyle sweaters and the girls in the candy-striped dresses of Connecticut WASPS. The tallest boy holds before him a stack of five stubby planks.

The martial artist rolls his sleeves. "This isn't going to get it, no!" he booms. He makes a sweeping gesture back behind them and up the subway stairs and out into the streets above. "No, this just isn't going to do it. Friends, this isn't where it's at. The power of God, friends, the power of baptism, surges through my arms, my legs, my feet. It's here, it's here-"

Leaning back and lifting his right leg, the black-belt preacher uncoils at the stack of planks and halves it with his heel with a sharp crack that matches a peal of thunder overhead. His assistant displays the shattered wood to the audience like a game-show hostess.

Your children can have this power, they can all be saved this very day, the preacher says. "You will need the strength to flee the clutches of the Antichrist. Because he is among us, friends. You have all heard it. That is why I am here, running from the storm in the bowels of this great city. I pledge to you on my faith he will make himself known on Christmas Day and will mark for doom all those guilty of disbelief and all those unsprinkled with holy waters. Look at the storm over our heads. I'm telling you the born and the unborn and the almost dead-it don't matter to the Antichrist. All those unbaptized will suffer and burn beside him in Hell."

The preacher is grinning. The teenagers, their eyes twinkling with love, are handing out pamphlets. As if in exchange the parents offer up their babies. Those merely pregnant eye with dismay and panic their swollen bellies.

"You. What about you. Are you saved?"

Nathan looks at the preacher, who had picked him out and peers at him over the crowd.

The preacher answers himself: "No."

Nathan rests both hands on his chest in false modesty. "I'm Jewish," he says, and almost chokes on the excuse. It's half a lie, the bigger half. He'd be a fallen Jew if Jews actually fell; but here they remain working the earth, working it hard.

The preacher points. "This one isn't saved," he cries, as if it isn't obvious, Nathan and his soaked clothes and stubbled jaw and filthy hands. "He thinks because he's a Jew that makes him ineligible." He makes a motion and a girl in a blue print dress comes forward with a porcelain bowl of water. "Friend, don't miss the point. The Lord doesn't care what you are."

"I think He would," Nathan replies softly.

The preacher glares and makes it simple: "Come beside me if you want to be saved."

Nathan gives his head a shake.

"If not you, then who?"

It is a good question. Nathan considers Claire but, figuring news of this gift in her honor would get back to her, does not want to add to her resentment. Willfully, he draws a blank.

But the preacher is patient. He'll wait. He has all day, all eternity. And it must be obvious Nathan is trying. Then a solution does actually strike him. "A friend," Nathan finally says.

The preacher's grin widens. "Born or unborn?"

Nathan steps by, twisting through the crowd and the phalanx of purebred angels and stops toe-to-toe with the preacher. He is reminded of his moment in the sun on his bar mitzvah morning, standing beside the rabbi staring out at the tuxedo sea, the gangster faces imported for the day by Milton, drug lords and porn kings, assistant district attorneys and even a pair of judges, as on those Thanksgiving mornings a truce called, battle lines forgotten for a holy importance. Sunbeams crashing down like piano chords from the stained-glass synagogue windows. His mother swaddled in pastel gauze. His father-he still can't see the fat face hidden behind his glasses, behind a carpetbagging smile. Soft-focus rite of man. Entrance into adulthood's blood cult.

The preacher dips a ladle in the water and lifts it high and Nathan raises his hands to ward it off.

"Not me," he insists.

The preacher, not missing a beat, closes his eyes, bends his head at a solemn angle and, genuflecting slowmotion over the empty space beside Nathan, begins, "In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost-"

The others mouth the words to themselves, and Nathan is alone amongst them. But not entirely alone. There are the hanging stalactites overhead. Nathan feels more in common with them than the flock gathered around. More even than with the empty space beside him, the empty shell of his potential.

Something hits Nathan all at once. jealousy. Envy. He glares at the empty spot, as if at an old friend about to leave, and before he can stop himself he ducks under the preacher's ladle and away, catching a drop of water on the back of his neck, which he fingers then smears on his cheeks and his lips, where it might do him some good.

Fruitlessly he shoves through the bulletproof plexiglass toward the subway collector the only kind of bill he has, a hundred, for a single token. But the collector refuses old Ben with an officious shake of his head, so Nathan stands at the turnstile in his wrinkled turtleneck and soiled blazer with nautical insignia and herringbone slacks like a gentleman farmer who has lost his way, without a small denomination to his name, rocking on his feet, asking mothers pushing carriages and even their children in tow for change of a hundred. Crazy stares, wild looks. A new brand of beggar, harbinger of times to come. He falls for long minutes and eventually hangs his head and seems to drift into a restless snooze. Far off, the subway trains rumble through, the horns blowing like trumpet blasts while the preacher one by one works his way through the crowd of children and embryos until the last one standing in the tunnel is Nathan himself. Someone puts in his palm a token then turns the hand over to examine the festering wounds, then quickly drops it. Nathan opens his eyes. It is one of the biblecamp teenagers, a pudgy boy with a cherub's head, staring at him nearsightedly through horn-rimmed glasses. The remains of a sweet grin hangs off his droopy mouth. Something made him frown. Nathan looks at his own hands and finds wounds there he doesn't remember, circles in his palms like bloody blisters.

He loves Hell. And now, finally, he is back there.

Downtown, up on the street, Nathan ducks through an old familiar door. A narrow space with a long, empty floor and empty stools. The barroom deserted, the jukebox with its old 45s dark. The ceiling mottled with the blue light of a mute TV.

"Cy," he says.

An old man rises from a stool at the far end of the bar. He rests on Nathan's shoulder a liver-spotted hand. "Haven't seen you in a while. Hit that door, will you?"

Nathan shuts the door, letting in a distant noise from far below, of surging water, or subterranean ruin. "Business slow?"

"You and your father are neck deep in shit."

"I wouldn't know."

Cy looks at him, then cracks a sly grin. "Just do me the favor, when you get the little fucks off keep them away from my place."

"They're Harlem kids, Cy," Nathan says.

Cy shakes his head. "Here, there, they don't care." He touches Nathan on the shoulder. "You all right, son?"

Nathan pouches his cheeks, unsure. "Maybe a little drink. Scotch rocks."

He leans back, elbows cocked on the bar. Faded jerseys of dead ballplayers hang from the rafters. Maris. The Mick. Posters announcing the fights of boxers long retired. The warning click of an approaching train, then the screech and groan of fatigued metal. Gusts of icy rain drum the windows. Everything in the bar shifts at its joints, loosened like a fighter's teeth by the years of blows. The noise outsi 'de grows to a roar but no train appears, then the roar fades, come and gone like a ghost, and Nathan glances nervously at the door, feeling less sheltered than he expected.

"Say," Cy says down the bar, "that girl they're talking about, the one that drowned out at Coney Island. She isn't yours is she?"

Nathan twirls his glass in the yellow barlight.

"I just saw her last week. It's a terrible shame."

Nathan lifts his head.

"She was with your father," Cy says. "Carrying his briefcase. Looking pretty chummy. She was quite a dish. Your father always had taste." Cy nods his head toward the TV. "Well now, how about them apples."

Nathan looks up to the screen to find his own pale eyes peering back at him, his own chin hidden there under all that fat. On the TV on the wall, Milton's face is bearded by a clutch of microphones.

Cy aims the remote and turns up the sound. Milton has lowered his own volume, chosen solemnity for his emotion du jour.

"I have no problem with representing Kevin Williams," he is saying. "Everyone has a right to a fair trial."

Another question. This case so obviously not about just a mugging. The kids used bottles, they used a bat.

Milton looks at his questioner with the intensity of a man actually listening. "The facts are cloudy," he is saying, for the thousandth time, Nathan believes. The five thousandth. Nathan mouths the words along with his father: "What are facts? What do we know about what really happened? What will we ever really know? Kevin Williams is a pathetically abused kid. Everything about this case is still speculation at this point. Representation for the disadvantaged-it's what's made this country great."

Other questions, other words, and Nathan finds himself, head up with the desperation of a little boy, nodding over and over in agreement. The mountainous man is great, impressive, the best, and Nathan, deciding on an emotion as on a stuffed toy on a shelf, would buy pride if only he could afford it.

"He's a good one, your father," Cy says. "Wish he was mine."

"You need a lawyer?"

Cy shrugs. "I figure we all do."

But then something pricks Nathan, some idea, some piece to a puzzle he has not known he is assembling. The Williams case is monstrous, extraordinary, and nothing at all about the rape of a Madison Avenue executive. How good it is for his father. How good it is for his person. And how good, suddenly, for this news of Isabel, to have lost someone so close to him. The Santos family was so loyal; Isabel a second-generation secretary. And to have lost her so viciously, so coincidentally now. How human it will make Milton, how big, how vulnerable, how moral, how intensely, intensely real.

Nathan stares and stares, feeling his father's own overblown affections collapsed within him. Arbiter of dead souls.

On the TV, a last microphone is thrust in Milton's face. "I understand the body of the young woman found at Coney Island yesterday was your secretary. What about her murderer, Mr. Stein? Would you be able to defend him?"

Milton's pillowy face fills the screen. He stares hard into the camera. Father and son square off, Milton looking out through the window of bright lights and sunny endings. His eyes, pale and blank, moisten, and Nathan, peering in, doesn't fight off the desolation. Nor does he search his way out of the blackness in which he sits. He can see the calculations in his father's eye, which way to play it: straight and cold and lawyerly or let it go and pull out handkerchief and gut-wrench? Because this is now not just about a rape case. This is the human condition writ large, loss and gain and tragedy and deliverance. Ours. And Milton, maybe now by his own design, has cause to represent us all.

Milton Stein offers his reply slowly and quietly, but Nathan has already heard it. And the TV picture, in a crafty bit of programming, cuts away to file footage of the Coney Island beach. Maybe Isabel is even more of a convenience for his father than he thought. And maybe she's no coincidence. Maybe she was his idea from beginning to her end.

Without looking up, Nathan leaves a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and leaves.

He sags with relief, briefly, against a plate-glass window on the safe side of the revolving door at his Broadway office building. Jorge is nowhere in sight. In his place behind the little booth sits a sullen stranger. His suit is too big and he wears jorge's name tag and looks vaguely like the Mexican delivery boy from the dell down the street.

Where's Jorge?"

The imposter shrugs.

Nathan nods at the name tag. "You're a Jorge, too?"

The boy, apparently not hearing, looks up at Nathan with adolescent gloom.

"Where is everyone? Is everyone in the building gone?"

This elicits a second, even less committal, shrug.

"Is this a fire drill? No? Is it the storm? Hello?"

Nathan heads for the elevators. The doors about to close, a pudgy hand wedges them open and Krivit enters. His overcoat is dry.

They watch the floor numbers pass. Krivit's breath whistles through his nose.

The elevator car passes ten. "It feels like everyone's left town," Nathan says.

It's every man for himself."

"Well, I hope you weren't waiting long."

"I heard you got out."

"You had nothing to do with that, of course."

“You worry about you."

Nathan nods. "Words to live by."

"Don't fuck with me," Krivit says sharply. "Not after last night." Out comes his hanky. His forehead has beaded with sweat. "Where is the writ?"

"It's all upstairs," Nathan assures him, listening to himself almost in surprise. As if it really were done and by his own efforts the little Russian weasel, the little Pushkin, will only hours from now be free to roam Brighton Beach, eat a knish then whack the kids who sold him out then fly home and be king.

The elevator car passes twenty.

Nathan says, quietly, as if not to offend, "You know of course what you've done."

Krivit hits the button for twenty-one and the elevator halts, the doors open. Nathan expects something dramatic in the hallway, as in the movies, a crowd, a gun, a clue. But nothing at all is there.

Krivit braces the doors as if shoring up the world, no mere middleman now but something much more dangerous, someone much farther toward one end, someone in general command. Nathan remembers what Santos said yesterday morning, that he didn't trust Krivit. But it's not that simple. Trust, what is that? He knows his father doesn't trust the fat middleman but he sees now that that doesn't much matter. Krivit is a beautiful thing. Nathan hasn't, over the years, given Krivit enough credit. Not enough credit at all.

"You have one hour to get to court," Krivit says. "They've already postponed twice."

Nathan is sweating again. The air breathes hot, as nightmares will. And the buzz in his ears, the roar lingering from the subway, he'd thought, is instead steadily approaching, getting closer. "You know of course they'll want to talk to you about Isabel."

Krivit's upper lip begins to quiver, as a dog's does at the first evidence of something to defend against, or devour.

But Nathan goes on. "I saw you there Saturday night. I saw your car. I haven't told anyone."

The bag man is holding it in, tolerating him as he would a child.

"Just tell me why," Nathan says, "and who? You wouldn't have done it without orders. Or would you?"

"Just get to court," Krivit snaps, and, as if at the climax of a magic trick, abruptly claps his hands and holds up his quilted palms, scrubbed and empty, setting free the birds. "That, my friend, is you."

Nathan looks upward, away; nothing there, tricked. "That's me."

"I've delivered the message. You're on your own now, buddy boy.

Nathan shrugs. "Like you said. Every man for himself."

Krivit steps back and the doors shut and Nathan, alone, proceeds one flight up, where, whistling, he strolls down the empty and half-lit hallway. The writ in his throat like a wedged lozenge. Swallowing, working it down, he can feel it actually drop, in with the other refuse, the false assurances, the vows disregarded as they were made, dissolving in their juices, adding to his blood the nutrients of his efforts: the money, the blow jobs, the occasional hug of deep thanks, once a declaration of love, one with possibilities – from Claire, who only wanted groceries to whip up her modest recipe for happiness: occasional affection, loyalty, new small life fluttering in their hands, the curbing of his unacceptable pleasures. Was it so much to ask?

The office door of Stein & Stein is locked.

"Hello?" he calls to the presswood veneer, but the door doesn't reply. "Anyone here?" he meekly asks the floor. He pokes at the lock one key after another, achieving, he thinks, success, then leans in with his shoulder, once again breaking into a place he knows and to which he presumably belongs.

The lights are off. Except one. His, he believes, down the hall, the empty fluorescent white splashing out of the open doorway across the floor and up the opposite wall. Two o'clock Monday afternoon, the biggest week in the short, happyish life of Stein Stein and the twenty-second-floor office is vacant, abandoned, it seems-as does the entire building-for even higher ground.

Nathan pauses inside his office. Etched into his windows he finds himself, and he is alone, an outline scribbled in with patches of blazer but otherwise blank. Beyond him, despite the hour, hovers inky night. Sheets of rain coat the glass. Three fingers of lightning split the sky into a map of white rivers, and for a long moment the sky and office and he himself vanish in white flame.

Reluctantly, he opens his eyes. At his feet Baron is draped like a sphinx over his $500 portmanteau, icicles of drool melting on the burgundy leather, his long leash wound twice around the desk. A parking stub for the lot around the block is wedged into the collar, along with a note saying only: He has been fed. A message spike blooming like a flower with little pink slips has fallen to the floor. In the air, the rancid odor of fresh piss. Baron's goopy, sad-sack eyes stare back at Nathan, as if to say, What did you expect?

Nathan drops to his knees to praise and pat the dog, who cocks his massive, purebred head in confusion. Nathan slips him some Cheez-lts bought downstairs then turns to his stereo and calmly, as if he has all the time in the world, contemplates his office music collection, his mood inversely proportional to the chaos outside. He has chosen for this moment Monteverdi. Angelic lamentations bridged by long silences. Bending to address his messages, he peels the papers one sheet at a time, peeking at the names. The paper shivers in his grip, which means his hands must be shaking, too. He's now been two days without sleep, or is it three?

There must be thirty messages, dutifully scribed in impeccable, acquiescent penmanship, obviously by one of Chang's cadre. The usual suspects: Clarido twice, Schreck once, as if he could have forgotten where Nathan was-unless, of course, he knew he'd be back. Amparo called three times; her last message reads: Left me here to rot. Called brother. Look over your shoulder. Look again. Look forever.

Despite himself, Nathan does look, and sees: empty hallway. A spectacular refrain of conflicted violins and cellos reaches his ears.

Another message: Errol Santos. Friend, foe. Curious, Nathan fishes out his beeper: There is Errol Santos, in fact, three more times.

He considers all his messages, voice mail, beeper, answering service: who takes them down? Nathan wonders. Someone on the other end, someone alive. The innocuous, neutral answering service has the power to concoct one's entire life, a life out of reach, telling you who your friends are, who your enemies are. Who called? Who cared? Who didn't? Who won't? It's up to those operators, his message-makers. They are his window out, conspiring with someone or by themselves to paint the view.

He snatches the phone and punches in Serena's number in the Bronx. The phone is picked up instantly. A man barks, "Yeah."

Nathan scrolls through the men in Serena's life, brothers, father-mad, stupid, and dead, he knows them all. Briefly, he attempts to conjure Serena herself but can come up only with general island features, raven-black hair, eyes as black as undreamt night. He seems to recall pink panties. Lately she's been nothing but a miniature readout. Giddily-another joke at his expense – he wonders if this man, this gruff voice, could be Serena, if Serena exists at all.

Nathan hangs up, dials again, this time his 900 number. "This is Nathan Stein and you have fifteen seconds to terminate this call before being charged $99.99." He will pay this bill. He will owe himself. All of him collecting in this one container.

Seated, Nathan dials a new number altogether and hears on the other end a calm, cheerful voice, a man, his proxy: "Nathan Stein's answering service. Message please?"

In the background, the murmur of other operators, keyboards clacking. The world may be falling to pieces, but there will always be messages to leave.

Officiously, Nathan declares, "This is Nathan Stein."

He commiserates with the confusion in the operator's silence. Then he listens for and detects the disapproval. Imagine all that this clerk has heard. All the piss of Nathan's life that has run through the tips of his fingers, collecting as through a catheter in the electronic pouch at Nathan's waist. Despite the doctors and the tests and the retests and the diagnoses and the pills, it is of this that he is dying.

"Message please?" the operator says with tight obedience.

Nathan's eyes widen at the opportunity. His mouth opens. Outside, another round of twitchy lightning. There is a pause in the thunder. Listening for it, he hears instead soft cries and lamentations, wandering, carried by the wind.

"None," Nathan says, and hangs up.

3 P.M.

Hunched low to the ground, the walls patched with corrugated aluminum, the New Life Missionary Baptist Church sits like a converted outlet for discount beverages, a cross fastened like a hood ornament to the front peak over the open door. The inside is a single cavernous room carpeted with mauve industrial wall-to-cinder-block-wall, exploding up front, as if someone has thrown a grenade of violent color: hothouse flowers surround a casket with handles of painted gold. At first Nathan's body will not respond to an order of WALK. The fatigue is one reason. But there is another, and it is naked fear. He has been spotted. Strange eyes aim his way. He does not know their owners, but willing his clay feet to move one then the other he crosses the room smiling soberly and shaking hands, mumbling thank-you's to offers of sympathy and turning from inquiries after his own health. Maria's mother, older sister, and young female cousin have arranged themselves before the open casket, the mother's hand on the shoulder of the one daughter left her. Inspecting him as he comes up the aisle with his hands empty. Nathan's abandoned family.

It is the sister, Carmen, who steps forward slowly, numb with grief, the room hushing in the presence of this gravity, the soulless dance between those with competing claims. The derelict that they had all taken for the son of light himself stands before them chalky pale, withered seduction artist, thief of sweet Maria's soul.

The bloated corpse levitates behind them, the open coffin resting on a platform in a ring of flowers. Why is it open? Maria looks worse. They've greased shut her eyelids and lips; and she looks waxy, like a figurine, as if they've melted and reconstituted her in the black dress he bought for her five years ago on their first spree. Her speckled hands, crossed over her chest, clutch to her heart her thumb-worn Bible. Though after all that they couldn't carve an expression into her: her brow clear, she lies poker-faced before eternity.

Nathan bends to kiss Carmen, but she reaches up to his face as a blind person might and holds him steady, peering into his eyes as if inspecting what-if anything-lives behind them, then quickly snatches away her hands.

"Please go," Carmen whispers.

"Where is the burial?"

"We didn't think you'd be able to come."

Nathan says, half appalled, "I wouldn't have missed it." Then it strikes him that he was let out especially for this purpose. He looks over his shoulder. Two men in cheap suits stand at the doorway like bookends, full of menace rather than comfort, like prison guards, happy to let people in but blocking their escape.

"It's at Evergreens," she says, "in Queens. But you wouldn't come.

"Of course."

She exhales through her teeth a derisive laugh. "Please."

"Where's Benny?"

"No. Say nothing to him."

Nathan spots the boy sitting against the wall in a sharp double-breasted suit, his feet dangling above the floor, staring at his mother's remains. Then, lifting his head as if he's heard a whistle, he quickly bounds over, wrapping his arms around Nathan's leg and burying his face in his crotch. Nathan's hand hovers trembling over the boy's head, repulsed as if by an electric field. He lets it drop, crowning the boy with it, bestowing Benny with – what? – but crowning him nevertheless. He reaches around the boy's head and strokes the soft patch under the cranium, button of innocence, feeling in his fingertips a pulse, sign of beating life.

He is despising this, this little melodrama. Still, his eyes have begun to sting and he wraps his other arm around Benny's shoulders in full embrace, leaning into the boy's hair, sniffing his earthy, vegetable sweetness of sleep.

"Come, Benny."

It is Maria's mother who has taken the boy by the shoulders and for a moment Benny is tugged in both directions, disputed over, actually wanted. Her nostrils flaring wet and red with grief, Carmen protests, not on behalf of one side or the other, just the contest itself. A hand lands softly on Nathan's shoulder and he quickly turns his head and again, as before, finds no one there. Thus warned. He snatches back his hands as from a trap and lets Benny go. Maria's mother steers the boy to safety, handing him off to her daughter.

His face burns. His embarrassment is fierce. The entire room is looking at him. Why is he here? Why did he bother to come at all? Didn't he say his good-byes to Maria this morning with no witnesses but the dead and maybe that priest to clear the way? But here Nathan feels close to the truth, just the simple factual truth. Just as Maria last night watched, spellbound and terrified, her neighbor in her death throes, now Nathan has come to observe Maria, out of the hospital, on her way. His own dress rehearsal. And there lies her outer crust, her pod.

He wipes his hand across his sweaty forehead. "You shouldn't let Benny see his mother like that," he says.

But someone insists, "No, he should see." It is Cleary standing before him, taller somehow than this morning. The priest looks nervous, his face with that blushed, babyish swollenness of someone just woken, or sick with worry.

"Isn't all this a little fast, the funeral, the burial?" Nathan protests. "Don't you have to wait a while or something?"

Cleary's expression darkens. He glances nervously toward the door.

"Who are your friends?" Nathan asks.

"I don't know who they are," Cleary assures him. "I half believed they came with you."

"They may have," Nathan murmurs. Nearby, the heads of those talking quietly wheel around. Nathan looks at his watch. "It's getting late."

Cleary nods. "Yes, it is."

"I'm tired.”

"I understand."

"I don't think you do," Nathan replies, wondering if the pain in his stomach comes from eating nothing but his pills. He looks longingly to the back table where food is piled high.

"This tragedy will unite you and Christ in a sacred way, Cleary says.

His mind shut down behind that delicious hermetic seal, Nathan sidesteps the priest and heads for the back and picks a shortbread cookie of no identifiable shape. He slips it past his teeth. His eyes close. He can taste nothing; there is no feeling on his tongue or the roof of his mouth. The tips of his fingers, for that matter, feel like brass thimbles. It's been climbing him these last two days, this slow paralysis, giving him the strange sensation that he is turning to stone. Bites of cookie thud like pebbles at the bottom of the pail inside. This last pleasure gone.

"Nathan."

Blindly, Nathan extends his hand. But it is Cleary again.

"Do you hear me?" he asks.

"Sure.”

"You should make amends."

"What for?"

"Because a man lives his life and he has to make that important. Whether he's a priest or a lawyer. Or a bum."

"Did Maria?" Nathan demands.

Cleary squints, his expression bitter, as if Nathan has insulted his kid sister. "That woman looked death straight in the eye."

"She was Catholic," Nathan insists, as if that matters somehow, an emotional stand grounded on nothing.

"That doesn't have anything to do with it," Cleary says. "However she did it, she took death in and made it her own. She was in charge. She stopped breathing when she knew exactly who and what she was, what she accomplished."

"No one finishes all of his tasks," Nathan says, hateful, then gives Cleary a sharp nod, hoping he'll go away, or burn himself out.

Instead, a small inconclusive smile plays on the priest's lips. "You are, of course, talking about yourself."

But before Nathan can protest, Cleary's hand comes up. The priest isn't through: "You didn't know her, Nathan," he says. "You don't know what you had."

"I think I do."

"No, you knew her body. Understand me-she was stunning. I don't fault you for wanting her. But your women are piled high, one on top of the other. You know something about the way they look but what do you know of their souls? You've kept yourself busy like a rat in his little cage, running his treadmill, faster faster, wanting more and getting it, but in the end only standing still. You treat them all indifferently and only care where the next one is coming from."

Nathan holds fiercely to the cookie, sniffs it, and smells-now he expects it-nothing. She gave it to me, he wants to say, but Cleary has backed away and receded, just one tree in the forest now, and like the others-all the others-is blank with shock and horror. The crowd has hushed. The priest heads up the aisle toward Maria.

Where the hell is everyone? Nathan wonders, looking around. Where are my parents? Ruth? Even Schreck, the fuck? Where's their respect?

He sits amidst strangers, his face bunched and spotted like a baby's, poised to come undone. The long pews keep filling. Blacks, whites, Hispanics. Nathan is astonished Maria knew so many people, people of different stripes and heights and weights and ages, until he realizes she didn't, that these are merely church members, Cleary's recruits, commanded by some inner voice to show up to the unveiling of every coffin that comes through these smoked-glass doors, to fill out the audience, to loan their respect, so that no one, especially paying customers, should go out so alone. Women in pillbox hats, boys in powder-blue tuxedos, old men like storks in their black summer-weight suits, the blacks of this ruined neighborhood who drop their tithe into the mahogany box at the head of the aisle, below the church scoreboard, the letters and numbers replaceable from the back like an old baseball scoreboard, the church's 537 paying customers in attendance last Sunday, the scales tipping, last week's eighty-seven dollars and fifty-nine cents against Lucifer's untold millions, bottom of the ninth and the church needs one hundred and forty-five dollars to fix the pews, to fix the men's toilet, to replace the broken windowpanes, the colored cellophane-

The choir stands, its adolescent singers, jogging up the aisles to the front like the faithful rushing to the man laying hands and healing them of their limp gawkiness and their very youth. Here and there the cellophane sucks in and out in time to night's heavy breathing. The windows flash. The choir raises its voice over the volleys of thunder. All of it to Nathan like a final prayer meeting on a ship hit and sinking in battle. He wants out. He wants out of it, this, everything, and looks once to the casket, as if for permission. He is crying. He is, in fact, crying hysterically. And Maria, lying there in her plasticine stillness, willfully says nothing.

Claire watches from the door as Nathan pushes himself up from the front bench and slides awkwardly along the wall, to the exit, not surprised to see him running. Though she is taken aback by his tears.

She touches his arm as he passes. "I want to talk to you."

"What are you doing here?" he asks, quickly trying to compose himself. He glances over his shoulder, toward Maria in her casket. A reflex, Claire knows, by now as quick and natural to him as drawing breath. He will always try to keep his women apart, keep them from knowing about each other, even when they already do, and even in death when it wouldn't matter.

Claire smiles. Maria's death, somehow, is registering with her unexpectedly. Maria is taking with her a piece of Claire as well.

"You asked me to come, remember?" she says. "As your representative. Then I heard you got your little gift, your get-out-of-jailfree card, but I decided to come anyway. Out of respect, as you said yourself. That was a nice little trick, by the way, coming up with those tax returns. I thought the judge could have made the condition a moonwalk and you'd be as likely to fulfill it. I underestimated you."

"They weren't my returns, Claire. I'm being set up."

"You're being set up? Please, Nathan."

He nervously scans the room. "Someone sprang me. Someone wants me in the game."

"Don't flatter yourself," she says.

Nathan looks at her, uncomposed. "Thanks, anyway, for coming."

Now he is peering through her fearfully, toward the door, the weather out there.

"And too bad Errol missed you at your office. He has something he wants to say."

"My office, what? Errol?"

"Someone told him you'd gone to the office to pick up some brief. That awful little man, I think, that Krivit-"

Not a muscle on Nathan's face moves but the ones that work his mouth. "Krivit told Errol where I was?"

"But I beeped him when I saw you here. He's on his way, if you want to wait. Then again, you never wait."

"Krivit," Nathan says again.

Lightly, she touches his wrist. "But I have something important to tell you before you go."

"This sounds like a farewell speech," he says.

"You are the one who said you're going away."

"There's always the phone."

She takes his elbow and draws him down. "This seems a good time to tell you. I know about Isabel, Nathan. We all do.”

She can feel him twist to get away, but she tightens her grip, shocked to feel her fingertips hit bone. He is too weak to resist. This man who once lay atop her so heavily. She could hardly hold him with her arms, her knees, his wide hips bruised the inside of her thighs. "Errol's on his way. I really think he'd appreciate it if you waited. It'll be just a few minutes."

"I don t know what you're talking about-what about Isabel do you know?"

"I don't hate you, Nathan. I half pity you. I'd try to save you if I thought there was anything left. Errol agrees. But I will not spend another minute of my life trying to get over you." Squeezing him she draws him closer. "You should be doing more here than you know. There's something I want to say, Nathan. Benny's a beautiful kid. He'll be fine."

Nathan tries to look back. "Yes, he's-"

Her lips against his ear. "I hope he's young enough to forget you."

From his left ear she crosses his face, her lips brushing his, to his right, telling both sides now: "I want you to know that there's a funeral you missed. I never told you. We should have been there together."

Nathan again tries to pull free. She can smell it now: he has begun to scare, to sweat. A gurgle rises in his throat.

"We had a son, Nathan. It was your goodbye gift. You were so oblivious you didn't notice me at three months pregnant, at four. You should have. I was radiant. You didn't notice when I'd take. time off. You didn't see I was gone."

Again, she switches sides. Cruel, petulant. "I won't tell you what his name was. He didn't keep it long. He died in my hands. But he was beautiful, a beautiful baby boy. He had green eyes. He looked just like you."

Claire reaches up and cups Nathan's face. Her fingers, her palms, have him memorized still. She presses on the new divots, the crevasses. His skin, once robust, thick, florid, is now thin and brittle as carbon paper.

She rises up on her toes. "I loved you once. You would have loved our boy. He would have been brave, like you were once. You don't want to wait for Errol? I can see you're anxious to go. Okay, Nathan, then just do what you do so well. Say good-bye."

She faces the congregation. The door opens behind her. The rain and snow, she hears, is falling more heavily. A gust of wind pushes at her and she turns to look: across the street, a little playground is empty. Nathan is gone. But something, she senses, is menacingly wrong.

"Where is he?"

Santos stands before her in the doorway, panting for breath.

His car idles at the curb.

"But he just left," she says.

He grimaces, scrapes his fingers through his hair. "And you just let him go?"

"What do you mean just? You know where he's going, Errol. Where he always runs. But why do you need to see him so badly?" Then she looks at him. Her hands come up. "Don't-I don't want to know."

"It's him, Claire. Nathan killed Isabel. His prints are everywhere. The time of death, the place, someone can put them there together."

“There?"

“Coney Island."

"I will not-I refuse- Who is it, Errol, who is the someone?"

"He and Nathan were supposed to meet but Nathan called to cancel. Nathan and Isabel were there. He saw them in the car. He saw them fighting. It was Nathan, Claire."

"Who was it, Errol? Who saw them?"

"I can't tell you that."

"Was it that Krivit? Just give me that. Tell me, was it him?"

Santos says nothing and outside in the horizontal rain, across the street, but only for an instant, Nathan stands in the playground amidst the plastic chutes and tunnels. But only Claire has seen him.

6 P. M.

Like hour hands gone awry, the windshield wipers sweep at the deluge, accelerating the twilight to midnight darkness. Strands of ground fog move with menace along the Long Island Expressway. Across the median the opposing traffic comes steadily down the lanes like a parade of motorboats, passing in clouds of vapor and vanishing in explosions of red mist.

In the mirror a pair of headlights holds at fifty yards, as for the last hour, no closer, then no closer.

But in here, in this hairy and coffee-stained car, the CD changer shifts around and it is the Philharmonic doing the Saint Matthew Passion. It was Maria's favorite piece of music. He remembers her ust months ago as she stood in the living room in East Hampton surrounded by night-blackened glass doors, still beautiful in a seamless black sheath, her lips curled in an impish grin, sweeping her withering arms-the crooks IV-punctured, as bruised as rotting pears-conducting, it seemed, her own march down the Via Dolorosa, her demise; and Nathan sitting immobile in the white leather chair, the music deafening, the floorboards vibrating, pinning him there-

He lifts the remote control and fires, and the brooding ends. Maria slips away. Now Paul Desmond's schmaltzy breeze, big band and all, a clarion call to some greater, unpeopled civility. Safety in here, to do as he likes, this place that he loves, his little space capsule on the go. He has his dog, his music, this sanctuary, his little womb-box of paradise, his past vanishing in the mirror and the objects of his desire pulling into view. And he sees his house perched high on a bluff, dry and safe and innocent with its angelic wind chimes and vaulted ceilings and sunken pool, silent now; a fridge stocked with a family's worth of food; in the morning the hummingbirds will approach the sliding glass doors and, wings ablur, peck pleasantly at their reflections. Another day beside his azure square of water, an evening before his largescreen TV, watching the Philharmonic on laser disc, wrapped in the graces of someone else's genius. The glory, the music, the paradise of his loneliness, the paradise of his despair-

East Hampton is abandoned. A squad car sits against the curb, its wheels splayed, the roadside trees bound with darkened Christmas lights. The antique salons, the boutiques, the Realtors with their posted yearbook photos of dreamhomes, the white flowerboxes-everything lovely and elegant is now encased in ice. In giant display windows, drifts of virtuous cotton, spotlit scenes of nutcracker soldiers and cherubs and iceskating angels. Electric trains orbit toy towns very like this one. The glass before everything taped with giant X's to withstand the storm, though to Nathan they read CANCELLED, and seem to offer as targets w at glitters behind them.

He threads the car through the debris in the streets and is drawn like a moth to the lit windows of a diner. The snow sweetly sifts on a car or two parked in front. But headlights swing into the parking lot, holding him steady. And between the beams, in the diner window, sits Krivit reading the newspaper-the beefy head, the pudgy fingers, half his meal down the front of his shirt. Nathan flicks on his high beams and Krivit turns, squinting outside, shielding his eyes. Baron collapses against the door as Nathan pulls out and the car fishtails across the vast lot. The dog understands the urgency: he hangs his head alongside Nathan's, eyes quivering, hypnotizing himself with the frantic wipers.

Nathan's beeper, like everything else, is quiet now. Even Serena. He snaps open his cell-phone and tries for a dial tone and hears only the dead plastic of the earpiece rustle against his ear. The circuitry, the lifeline, is quiet. Everything is quiet.

Letting his head drop against the headrest, he sees now the Coney Island pier where he and Isabel began to fight. He had wanted to bring her there. He had wanted to show her, tell her about the old times with Milton: This is us, he wanted to say. This is the you you don't know. But he can still hear his bitter accusations, his voice louder than the rest-there seemed to be more people in the car than just the two of them; there seemed three people, five, ten people in the car-he thought he spoke for them all. But one of the voices was Isabel's. Another was Claire's. They were both pleading. But it was Isabel who was kissing him beautifully. Her hand was on his thigh. Why couldn't they be married, have a baby, live like human beings?

He hears his pathetic somethingorother reply.

She went on, her reasons accelerating, making perfect sense: It would be a fairy tale. Like a movie, like one of those operas you always go to see. My mother worked for your father for years. Errol would be so happy, it would bring you two together like the brothers you once were… grew up together… practically family anyway… no one knows you better… husband and wife…

What, again, did he say?

She began to cry.

There are no tracks where he goes now. Slow and solitary, the road out of town is cracked into geometric sections like melting ice floes. In the mirror the streetlights fade behind columns of standing mist. The tires rip through the steady sleet-

After his brilliant arguments in his own defense, he had opened the door and strolled to the boardwalk. She didn't move in the passenger seat. Then she did. She came after him. He stood at the rail, the water below so black, so cold, so still it seemed a sheer drop down to the bottom of a ravine. The heights were terrifying. He held on to the rail. She held on to him. He closed his eyes. How long ago, how strange, how sad, distant as his memory of first love, Claire stood by the window of the printer's shop picking out their wedding invitations; then Claire left his mind and the hands he held to his face were Isabel's and the eyes that met his were Isabel's, were his, really, his father's, actually. Maybe Errol's, too, for all he knew. He saw only faces. Enclosed and surrounded by faces. And the faces seemed to be mirrors in which he saw and watched himself. And he knew them all better than he knew himself, the fear and puzzlement and the fatigue. He was so tired.

In the rear-view mirror headlights dart in and out of the trees, patient, staying back. Blades of light in the corner of his eye, pinlights twirling before him. Closer, they hold steady in ordered pairs. Elfish eyes. The headlights illuminate snouts, racks of antler, breastplates of white fur; a doe's nose no bigger than a rubber doorstop.

We are finished, he said, waving his hand. Tell her, he said. She asked, Tell me what?

Their father authored their humiliation but the orders Nathan followed were no one's but his. There had to be, Nathan knew, some things for which fathers cannot be accused and held responsible.

But I love you, Nathan, she said.

How many times had they slept together? He was going to be sick. His thinking began to slow. It slowed like a wheel turning through the sand and finally hitting the water, slowing and grinding down and stopping. And then he was sick-

He hears the explosion before he sees it. The steering wheel raps him squarely on the forehead. Baron spills into the front seat, kicking in all directions with panic, clipping Nathan across the cheek. A squealing spiral of brown and white fur in the glass. Nathan throws up his hands when the car is already stopped and a small doe is splayed across the hood, its loose head, cleaved above the eyes, slapped back and forth by the wipers. Bloody snow rinses across the glass. The doe's round eyes stare in, then blink slowly. Still alive. Howling, Baron jumps the seats, back and forth, wanting at it. Nathan puts the car into reverse and spins the wheels, but the car jolts hard; the back fender has crumpled; a tree spotlit red in the brake lights. The doe doesn't slide. Wheels spinning, Nathan pulls forward and skids to a stop and reverses again but the doe won't move. Baron is turning circles in the back, looking to unload.

Cursing, Nathan is out in the sleet, shielding his eyes, instantly soaked, his shoes full of slush. In the ambient glow of the one headlight left he can see the doe's chest fluttering. He staggers forward waving his hands, and, grabbing above the hooves, pulls hard. Corded mouth snapping, the doe pours off the hood and flips to its back. Nathan stands over it, blinking in the driven snow. Tiny convulsions beneath its fur. It kicks once, twice, then ills, head back, legs upright, like the legs of a table. The eyes glass over, their sight gone. Nathan exchanges the stare, dead with dead, and again finds himself low to the ground, on his knees, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that is like a deep, twisting visceral pain. The snow showers the back of his neck with a child's kisses; like those of some angel, some mother's desire to treat him gently, like those perhaps of his and Claire's nameless an cries, and, boy's, to announce himself: I am. "I didn't-" Nathan cries, and, blinking, opens his mouth and on his knees he releases the doe and opens his hands before him to find nothing, and the night filled with no reply. I am. He grabs up at the falling snow, grabbing at her, at the doe-it was dead-at Isabel, but she was already gone. She was clip-clopping down the boardwalk, pausing finally to unstrap her high heels and throw them into the surf, barefoot on the ice, quickly fading out of his view. He started after her but he couldn't breathe, his knees wouldn't hold, and he ran until he couldn't, and he stopped. Then she stopped. They stared down the boardwalk at each other, panting, expectant, terrified, like gunfighters. Behind her the dark Wonderwheel and serpent-backed roller coaster like the ruins of a great city. Against his heels he felt the edge of that steep ravine, at his back the interminable drop to the bottom. He stepped away, toward her, and she stepped back and he stepped back against the edge again and she stepped forward. She would not move. Then his cell-phone rang. "Krivit," he said. "I'm glad you called. I’m having a little trouble here. I can't meet tonight. We'll do it tomorrow. Don't worry, yes, I'll be there." Then he was sick again and hanging over the rail and she came at him and he lifted his head and she slapped him hard. His glasses flew off his head. And she was crying. He closed his eyes from that and when he opened them she was in his arms and he first hugged her then took her around the neck, aware of the murderous power pulling him on, forcing him while he remained dispassionately aware of the consequences. He could almost hear his father: Do me the favor. Her teeth were up and down his arms. Pleading up at him with his own eyes. He released her. Coughing, she clutched her throat. He thought for a minute, with a detached, almost amused calm, of the infinite night that waited for him no matter what he did. Leave her, love her, marry her, kill her, they would both burn. And he would drop, into that ravine. But if he could release her, he knew, at least she would live. Then he left her.

In his rear-view mirror he saw her standing against the rail. She was alive. And down Surf Avenue, she was alive still.

At Famous's, as he turned for the Belt Parkway, a car along the curb turned off its headlights. Nathan slowed and saw it was Krivit's car. Krivit was sitting with his hands on the wheel, staring ahead and through Nathan to the boardwalk. Of course he'd have to be somewhere nearby. They were to meet, after all. Krivit had probably watched Nathan while he made his call, his excuses. Nathan drove on.

But at the last minute he glanced again in the mirror and Krivit's car was moving, turning the corner, passing Famous's, heading up Surf. Nathan stopped, turned and followed. Krivit's car stood at the spot of boardwalk where he'd left Isabel. Krivit was not in the car. Isabel was not on the boardwalk. He thought, Get out of the car. He thought, Save her.

Then, he put it together again, for the hundredth time: He'd been fucking her. He was dead. She wouldn't live. She was already dead.

The big house perches high on a hill, its windows punched dark like the portholes of a ship stripped and looted and set adrift. All the windows but one-Nathan can see light in the trees in the back. Even beneath the snow, a yard in ruins. The stripped shrubbery, once manicured, grows beyond any pattern, gnashing at the downspouts, tugging at the gutters, slithering across front steps gnawed by dryrot.

He opens the back door of the car and the dog explodes into the night, slaloming through the trees, kicking up sprays of snow. He slides to a halt and, shivering, trickles on a treetrunk, then is off toward the back. Nathan, as is his habit, follows. The concrete patio is shot through with weedy flourishes gone to seed. A lavish pool half drained and rancid, a frozen shallow brown syrup dropped further beneath an incremental set of scum lines marking other longer periods of neglect and the comings and goings of ice. Old leaves and twigs and snow. A deflated Yankee cap Nathan remembers on his own head now encased in ice. The diving board has been torn out and made off with.

Nathan feels for the back steps under the snow and stops before the open kitchen door. The small window beside the knob has been shattered, the wind whistling through the shards. Inside, a drift of snow has begun to climb the stove. He hears a voice echoing down the hall, and steps in. "Hello," he calls.

Baron shoves by him and skates clicking and clawing along the floors.

Nathan follows a dim path of light toward the living room. The rooms he passes are tossed, the mattresses overturned, the pillows disemboweled, drawers flung into the corners, the mug shots of his life's suspects crossing before him with each clop of his shoes, Maria, Serena, Amparo, his mother, Ruth, room after room where the pickled floors climb blank walls that spire high to a cathedral 'ling. In the dimness above, fans hang like dead and dried flowers.

"We're doing the best we can," the voice says, then abruptly stops. "I'll have to call you back." A phone is replaced on its cradle. "I saw the new Land Cruiser in the carport, Nathan." Beside a floor lamp, a figure the size of a stubby child on a couch, clutching her knees. "Nice. It's just what you need. Whose is-I mean, was-it?"

"You like it? It's yours." Nathan sits on the chair opposite, unsurprised-in fact he realizes he's expected her.

Ruth's face shifts and reshapes in the dark hood of her coat. She is sullen. She wears mittens. "But you're soaked," she says. "You'll catch pneumonia."

Nathan lifts his palms, as if to say, Look, no hands. "Bring it on," he says.

Ruth points. "And your hands are bleeding."

"So they are. Take off your coat, stay awhile. The pool is ruine. It'll have to be relined."

"Why bother? You never swam."

"But you did."

"And never liked the sun for that matter. You were always covering up."

"Skin cancer," Nathan points out. "You can't be too careful." Ruth begins to say one thing then stops herself. She blows a stream of vapor like cigarette smoke. "I tried the thermostat. When is the last time you paid your gas bill?"

Uninterested in these details, Nathan squints out the glass door, listening for the tinkling of his precious windchime, and notices that the circle of porcelain doves has been shorn off, whoever or whatever leaving just the nubs, like a necklace of broken teeth.

"I thought so," Ruth says. She bends forward and holds out an upturned hand. "Give me five thousand dollars."

Ruth says nothing more and without hesitation Nathan raises one hip and reaches into his pocket. He brings out a handful of bills and deals what is there into Ruth's palm. "Just a minute," he says, and reaches into his jacket pocket for the envelope of cash and tugs out more bills and places them atop the pile.

Ruth takes the money and shapes it into a brick and it disappears somewhere about her person. "For services rendered."

"Any in particular?"

"All," she says flatly.

"Sounds like you're settling your tab."

"Nathan," she begins, and looks at him as if she means to get up and capture him in a hug and lift him back up to the heights from which they have fallen.

But he is already on his feet, heading for the stereo. "I'd like to dance," he announces.

"But you don't dance."

"How about the Duke, for old times' sake, as a warm-up?"

"Nathan."

"Ruth.”

"You re impossi'ble.

"Thank you."

"It won't work now."

"The Duke? He always works, always cheers me, always cheered you, just try and deny it."

"The stereo, Nathan, it won't go on."

"Why not? How do you know?"

"Because I do. The music's over. It's screwed."

"The music is perfect," Nathan insists, feeling a gust of indignation. "It's the only thing that is."

"Maybe a wire's been cut," Ruth suggests.

"Why would they cut a stereo for chrissake? It's not a car."

Ruth turns to look at him: "They?"

But Nathan doesn't miss the catch in her throat, the little hop of fear, like the cap of a kettle about to come to boil. Ruth is very afraid.

Baron, spent, sidles up beside his master and noses his crotch. Overwhelmed with love-or some emotion-Nathan kneels and embraces the dog's head with his hands. Their foreheads meet. Creatures who ask from each other nothing. Baron's tongue passes across Nathan's mouth.

"Is he coming back?" Nathan asks the dog, though calmly, as if inquiring after the weather. "And I'm not talking about Krivit. I know all about him now. I saw him, can you believe it, in town."

Softly, imperceptibly, in the corner of Nathan's eye, Ruth nods. "And Schreck, the asshole?"

Ruth doesn't deny it.

Outside, in the lamplight falling across the patio, Nathan can see that the snow has turned to rain. The drops beat down the crust, chunking the skim ice in the pool.

He straightens, surprising even himself with his resolve. In fact, he is full of energy, as if he's just been given a transfusion. He lifts his hand, as if to issue forth a pronouncement. "A walk," he says to no one in particular.

"But now?" Ruth asks, gripping her seat. "It's raining, or snowing, or whatever."

Just then thunder explodes like a bomb outside the glass doors. The single functioning lamp dims, wavers, strengthens again. "Nathan! "

"We always go to the beach," he addresses the dog. "Don't we, boy?"

Baron, sensing nothing but his most simple pleasure, cranks his tail.

"Don't," Ruth pleads.

Something is wrong, is very wrong. Her mouth moves, it wants to make sound. Ruth's talent for keeping things to herself seems to be failing her. Nathan lifts a hand, gesturing to the dark house, to the greater dark beyond it. Ruth's got it wrong. Obviously, she doesn't see his freedom.

"I should go," he says calmly. "He's coming."

And he sees he's already been. The tire tracks beat him to his favorite trailhead to the beach. But there is no car. Baron is already down the path, at the rail of the stairway down.

"Here, boy!" Nathan calls, but the wind smothers his cry. He begins to jog after him, clutching the dog's leash, though despite the surge of energy his bones feel ready to splinter. He slows to a walk, to baby steps, and alone, doubled over at the rail, he finds it hard to believe he is really going. The boxy, contemporary mansions teetering on the edge of the bluff, looking out over the bay, like abstract fortresses guarding against invasion from the less acceptable North Fork of Long Island. The abandoned lighthouse and its red punctuation at the end of the finger of land. On Roatan he will have this sight for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; this beach, only more so. Clear water. Azure sky.

Nathan can hardly keep upright in the sea spray. The rain and snow, crosshatched, come from three directions at once. One after the other, huge waves commit suicide on the beach. Baron snaps at the foam, plunging in, scurrying back, then stops stone still, wrinkling his nose, dormant birding instincts surfacing, sensing. Something's coming.

Behind Nathan, a snap, a twig, a slab of driftwood, and the dog, belly-deep, is barking up at the trees to Nathan's right. just as a forked tongue of lightning touches down far offshore, a current passes along the horizon and a momentary spit of flame leaps from the woods. A yelp from the beach, and Nathan turns to find the dog rolling like a barrel in the surf.

Clenching his fists, Nathan watches the woods and waits for the next shot.

"If you're coming, come!" he cries.

The stubby trees are kneeling.

He looks up full of questions but the wind nudges him, drives him on.

"We can't be here," Claire insists.

"But we are."

The road from East Hampton to Nathan's house is empty ahead and behind, the ground turning at the last minute, rising beneath them like sea-swells. Claire grips the dashboard tightly, barely conscious of the landmarks Nathan used to point out with a wave of his hand, the little family cemetery with its white picket fence, the little lane on the right, the roadside stand and its outrageously expensive pies.

"Nobody's on the road. Why do you think no one is out? We shouldn't be out."

"It's too late."

She feels her heart melting even as the peace that comes with returning to old, familiar ground falls around her. For a moment it is almost as though she and Nathan are returning home from the market, the dog panting in the back seat, standing guard over the groceries-

"My god-" As they pull up the crescent drive, Claire braces herself. This is the address she remembers but hardly the house. From the hill, the windows, gaping like potholes, breathe down at her old memories and new desolations. Everything she planted, the pines along the base of the house, is gone. Tired of nightmares, she asks the air, "What am I doing here?"

But Santos is already out and knee-deep in snow, his gun drawn. Claire trudges after him, turning her head with the wind to breathe as they walk a lap around the ruined yard.

"Errol-" she calls. "Why do you have your gun out? Your gun-put it away, you're not going to shoot him. Nothing is confirmed. Tests would have to be done. If you're going to arrest him you need samples, hair, skin, blood."

"I don't know if I'm arresting him." He walks on.

"You would kill him?" she calls, trailing him. "Is that why you became a cop, you could decide whether to arrest someone or kill him? Jesus, Errol, it's Nathan. I mean, what if he is your brother?"

Santos stops at a Hertz van backed against the front door. The driveway is rutted with tire tracks.

"You still love him,” he says.

"No- I don't know, I did. Yes, maybe I do. Don't you?" She turns into the snow now, blinking. "Didn't we grow up together?"

"I don't know if that's good enough."

At the open kitchen door there is broken glass and Santos motions for her to stay back. Inside, shadows crisscross the hall, muffled voices, none of them Nathan's. She follows as Santos keeps to the walls, hugging corners. Debris and bags of frozen garbage are piled everywhere. The pristine doors she remembers from years before are scabby and gritty with soot, the room in which she and Nathan once made love charred from disuse.

Sounds of grunts and footsteps in the living room. She follows Santos toward a man cradling a stack of stereo components. Boxes of CD's sit by the front door.

Santos lifts his gun. "Who are you?"

Schreck turns, smiling thinly at the gun. "Errol. And Claire. I didn't expect you. It's been years and years-"

At the sight of Schreck Claire can feel a tic, a reflex, jerk the corner of her mouth. "Oliver," she says, with dread. An ancient memory about him awakes, and she looks up, anywhere, toward the ceiling, out the glass doors where the trees are tossing their bare heads in the wind. Once, when Nathan was in another room, Oliver grabbed her from behind. Another time he'd whispered revolting things in her ear. The dirt returns, those pathetic times of believing bad lies and despising the look of her own reflection. He may not have expected her, but she should have expected him. Hadn't he always chased the ambulance to the scene of some crime?

Ruth emerges from the dark dining room, the hood of her overcoat pitched high like a monk's. "Claire-"

Finally, Santos puts away the gun. "Where is Nathan?" he asks.

Schreck heads out the door with pieces of stereo. Ruth picks the shredded remains of a cushion off the floor, drops it on the empty frame of the couch and sits.

He's gone," she says.

"Where did he go, town?"

Ruth, imperious still, says nothing.

Claire takes in the desolation. "What the hell happened here?"

"Do you want to sit down?"

Schreck returns slapping his hands on his thighs.

"Someone's been searching the house," Santos says.

"Yes," Schreck replies, without hesitation.

"Is all this you?"

"Errol," Ruth interrupts, "as a cop, you're out of your jurisdiction. This isn't Brooklyn."

But he's not here as a cop," Schreck says, "is he? Are you?"

Santos looks from Schreck to Ruth.

Does Nathan know you're taking these things?" Claire asks.

"Why?" Schreck asks. "Do you want something?"

She shakes her head. "Where are you taking it?"

"Where Milton can watch his son's TV, listen to music on his son's speakers-"

Stupidly, she knows, Claire points at a porcelain vase propping open the door. "But I got him that."

"Milton would never know if something small walked out on its own."

"Take it," Ruth suggests.

"You're taking everything," Claire says. "Why is everybody doing this, acting like he's already dead?"

Schreck reaches into his coat and brings out an envelope and offers it to Santos. "I've been holding this for you. This is yours-"

"What is it?" Santos asks, taking the envelope.

"That's your share."

Santos lifts out a sheaf of bills. "You neglected to mention this part last night."

An odd smile crosses Schreck's face. "I never lied to you, Errol. Not last night. And not now. You're here to do a job. A man in your position, a job should be well paid, or else why do it. Do what you've come to do."

Claire is shaking her head, looking from one to the other, but Santos seems to come to an understanding, as if from an old arrangement. He hands back the envelope. "I don't want it," he says.

"We don't have more than a few minutes," Schreck says. "There's no time to argue. Take it."

Claire looks at the money. A wave of nausea washes through her. She lies: "I don't understand."

Santos has backed against the wall. "I'm supposed to finish it."

Schreck nods. "Eye for an eye."

"No one ever accused you of being a sophisticated thinker, Schreck," Santos says.

“Am I wrong?"

“I don't know what you are."

" Let me ask you something," Schreck says, "what would you do with Nathan if you found him?" Santos doesn't answer. "You know, we're a lot alike, Errol. You don't want to admit it, but then again, that always was your problem."

"I don't think so. I'm not like you."

"We are, more than you know."

Santos turns to Claire. "They've set us up. They've set us all up."

Claire, hesitating, stands terrified of moving, as though having reached the edge of an unexpected clearing. She was meant to be here; all these years, all the thousands of days, have led her here. And pointing to the open door of the house, like a road sign, is the feeling, Escape. But another feeling points the other way, back to Nathan, and to Errol and Schreck and Ruth and Milton Stein and a too clean end to something she hadn't known had been begun. She sees clearly where she stands, the two options, the two paths diverging-strange how brilliantly the image comes to her-like the arms of a man being pinned to a cross.

Ruth has withdrawn into the shadows of the adjoining room. Schreck, squatting behind the stereo cabinet to gather wires, calls offhandedly, "Try the beach. Nathan always liked to take Baron to the beach."

Santos is gone before Claire can reach him. At the doorway she catches sight of him zigzagging down the hill, arms flailing. Running Out, calling to him, she feels her footing give way, and slipping, she tries to regain her balance but pitches forward into the snow. Trembling, trying to rise, to turn for the beach, in a brilliant flash of lightning she spots a shadow streaking through the surrounding forest. "Nathan!" she cries, but she can hear it, and it is not Nathan. Something is approaching with a noise that is not the snow or the wind. It is an animal of some sort. She cups her hands over her ears, but her hands, like conch shells, only amplify the half-human panicked whinny of the thunder. The rhythmic thrumping, galloping, it has to have hooves. She scrambles on all fours to get to her feet. Get back. Get away.

"I knew you'd be back. I kept your card."

Breathing hard, Nathan looks back over his shoulder. The drive from East Hampton was fast, an hour and a quarter, the roads mysteriously clear. In spite of the miles out there and back, though, the red sedan ferrying his little friends has pulled up calmly behind him. Generously, though, they stay seated as he slips out and jogs across the street through the flimsy door.

"What a shitty night," the girl says after a volley of thunder. She fingers his damp lapel.

But behind him, miraculously, the black night has turned to a fall day, that crisp molten football sky. He glances over his shoulder at a family strolling past: the mother laughing, opening an umbrella above her head, mocking the bright sunshine, the father off to the side smiling proudly, offering his hands to the two pretty little children who circle his legs, grabbing at their fingers as they skip past as on a carousel. One child, a beautiful little girl with a bow in her hair, turns a series of cartwheels over the pavement. All of them are laughing. Nathan hates the sight of them and they obediently go away, thank god, whisked away and the daylight too-

"I bet you live nice. Manhattan, right?" the girl says.

Nathan can see only her thin legs as she leads him up the creaking stairs, dangling his own pathetic and empty lust up through the narrow stairwell and past the flooded bathroom, the corridor that seems to grow smaller and smaller, darker and darker, past a closed door out of which leaks a sinister cackle.

"Why don't we go back to your place? You can have it all night for a hundred- Hey, you don't look so good."

He can stop it. He won't stop it. They're all down there whoever they are, his people, their people, they all want him-so it is once again him up here in the armpit damp where he knows he belongs. The girl turns her head, moving not in fluid motion but in a broken chain of flinches, as though everything has hit her, and everything will hit her again. He runs his hands over her arms, right over the bruises, stopping on her girlish breasts, her sour pungency, some lingering soap scent drenched with perspiration.

"Why don't you take off your coat." She steps back and sits on the bed, clutching her knees. The bed creaks. She hasn't bothered to remake it, though she did yesterday. The blankets are clawed aside, the sheet ground thin and covered with footmarks, salt rings of old scum, pale bloodstains.

But listening for footfalls in the hall he is afraid. Down to the safety of the bed he goes. The girl draws stiff obedient circles on his belly, three, four, five, then flinging her arms around his neck slides over, arching, she offers her throat, which for the moment is enough like Claire's: faintly blue, a redhead's undercooked translucence, the veins and stringy tendons and serrated windpipe nudging up at him in full view: beating life.

He leans in, touching his teeth to her neck, and the girl's faked moan is so much like the groan of the dying, her cheap imitation thrill like one's last breath, signaling him to bite, penetrating her with panic and self-disgust and the calamity of his own life, god the penetrating pleasurepain suffering giving birth to his own death in this crummy little cubicle.

"Wait a minute, Esquire." Squirming out from under him the girl floats her hand before his face, writhing it like a genie. She opens the drawer of the nightstand and gestures toward an assortment of multicolored condoms scattered like candies across the bottom.

Nathan stares blankly and the girl comes upright, her face hard She stares straight and fearless into Nathan's eyes, then, determining what is there, pushes off the bed to her feet. She leans on one hip, one arm dangling, petulant. "What's with you guys tonight? Something's got you all wacked out. Maybe it's the weather.

Nathan sits up.

She sighs, takes a pull on her cigarette and drags a metal bridge chair from across the room and props it directly in front of him and drops into it. "Okay, look, it's normally five dollars for the first five minutes, but that's already gone doing all this talking, or whatever, and you owe me ten bucks anyway. So that's already fifteen and nothing's happened yet. It's twenty for ten more minutes." She sits back. "And you can masturbate for another ten." She stabs her cigarette in his direction. "Do you want to masturbate?

It sounds like a challenge, if not a threat.

"Nobody's looking, Stein Esquire," she says, a comradely nudge. "Just you and me. You don't have to touch it."

Nathan looks confused.

"The cum. I'll clean it up."

He focuses again on the calendar on the wall behind the bed, the same one from yesterday, the band of white beach, this time the numbers blurring and dissembling. Again, the picture comes to life-he hears the sax playing in the distance-and the girl from Ipanema rises like Venus from the water, passes him up the beach, coming into view. I love you, he says-but the calendar, he sees, is flipped now to the future, to January, next month, next year: where will he be then?

Outside, the small eruptions of car doors closing. He traces the sweat behind his ears and down the back of his neck.

The girl glances at a clock that partially covers a hole in the wall. She taps her foot. "Eight minutes left."

He probes the roof of his mouth with his tongue, searching for water.

"You feel all right?"

He pats his blazer pocket, touching Maria's will, his deed to Roatan. "Fine, I'm fine."

"Come on, Esquire, you going to do it or not?"

Nathan can feel himself straining. His tool has begun to swell but by now it is the last thing in the world he wants. His eyes follow the riversystems of cracks up a wall and across the ceiling. "Que mes?" he asks.

"What? I don't speak that, Spanish, what's that?" She thrusts out her hand. "Thirty-five. Make it an even forty I'll give you something special."

Distractedly: "I have hundreds. I'll need change."

Leaning down she lifts her bag and retrieves a small beaded change purse striped the colors of the rainbow, the sort given by younger brothers as a misguided sign of affection. She sifts through subway tokens and doughnut shop receipts and a stray pink latex condom with nodules and scented cherry for that special pleasure and pulls out five-dollar bills and singles and looks up. "Let's just wait and see honey." Smiling a gapped and rotten smile, shimmying down her pantyhose, shackling her ankles, she tips back the chair, balancing on the two back legs. She parts her knees, her thighs thin and blue, a schoolgirl sitting on a toilet. With one last glance at the clock she transforms, arching backward, her eyes rolling. Her lips part to emit a single moan. That pain again, that cramp or pang of anguish, or something has come to her, a thought, an idea. Nathan hopes. Again she writhes her hand in the air, snaring his attention, and guides it downward where with one set of fingers she pries herself apart and with the other begins expertly to knead.

Nathan's face hardens into a plastic smile.

"Baby, why don't you masturbate?"

Thunder blows open a door down the hall and Nathan whirls on the bed, eyeing the fogged window, the icy radiator.

"Scared?" the girl asks, her eyes filled with maternal certainty that it is the good things that will come to stay. But she's back to work, "Baby baby baby," filling the clammy room with her hasty crescendo, stopping before the climax with a deep-throated "Yes!" drops the chair to all fours and looks up, fully recovered and breathing normally. The idea, as usual, has been no idea at all.

His eyes fall on a dead roach in the corner. "Que hora?"

"I told you, no Spanish. Speak English, hey? Hey, what do you want? "

"Do you have a phone-a phone? I just need-a quick call?"

"A phone? Here?" Eyeing him, the girl quickly covers herself with a dingy robe. "Are you going to throw up?" she says, without sympathy. "You look like you're going to throw up."

Twigs whipping his face, Santos sprints through the corridor of woods. "Nathan!" He has been wandering over an hour. Around him, the snap of splintering branches. His feet numbed by the snow, he braces against the rail. "Nathan!" There is no waterline. Waves explode up and down the beach in random detonations. One rears up and collapses and drops the body of an animal in a boil of driftwood and foam.

Santos takes the stairs two at a time. Nathan's dog is spinning in an eddy. He takes it by the collar and drags it up. One of its eyes has been gouged, or shot through. The other stares emptily, a glass bead, the tongue pooling.

Santos runs, then stops, worried that the exercise will trip the switch that turns on the asthma and shuts down his lungs. He walks the steps slowly, deliberately, then begins a slow jog through the path and along the street toward the house. But, spotting the flickers of light through the trees he is running again, pumping, forgetting himself. Claire is standing at the foot of the driveway, staring emptily upward toward the house. Her hair and clothes are sodden. Her face drenched. "I saw it," she says. "I never believed-"

The door is flung open. The van is gone. Every window is alight. The trees overhead are shrouded in red haze. Yellow flames climbing the back of the house, columns of sparks riding the updraft. Ash pools atop the snow in the front yard. He hears the crackling and everything is burning, the house is burning, his lungs are burning, the dream is burning, but here they stand, he and Claire, inside the house, where everything once seemed fine and the slippery poolwater bathed them in all their incarnations and the air conditioning silently washed them in luxury and the various roads to the future and the law and their affections were secure and they would live forever. There was nothing there. And now the curtains Claire made are crawling with fire, the flames spreading faster and faster, crackling, minor explosions in the kitchen, a large one in the basement, an eruption from below, the world around him now collapsing. The snow around the house is melting. The trees are burning. His chest is burning.

He hears Claire's voice, sobbing now: "Nathan! No! No! Oh god – ”

A figure crosses the front doorway, silhouetted by the orange flames behind. Short, pear-shaped, it is Krivit, he sees, dangling from his hand some sort of container, the kind gasoline is carried in.

Leaning into the wind, gasping for his breath, Santos pats his coat for his inhaler. He finds nothing and runs to the car. He empties the glovebox, flinging its contents behind him. He sweeps his hands inside. Nothing. His lungs are hardening, his air coming in thin. He slips behind the wheel and turns over the engine and begins to back away. Claire is beside him. The wheels grind to a stop in the snow and they look together as flames pour out the upper windows of the house. The wipers flail. The car rocks. The fresh tire tracks before him are all but gone. Where can he go to breathe? Where can they go? Where can they go?

Hugging himself in his blazer, Nathan staggers down an alley toward the boardwalk. Behind him, a pair of headlights flash on, wink off. Above the thunderous surf, the gale winds moan through the spokes of the Wonderwheel, back toward the Luna Park Houses continuous and monotone, as if some collective remembrance of the pillared hotels, the old-monied homes, the lights whose aura could once be seen at night thirty miles from shore when Coney Island was the center of the aristocratic world. The larger, permanent suffering of the freakshow freaks and the whores who worked the hotel lobbies. Those living and dead now passing through the outlying slums.

He picks his way along vacant streets, shutting his eyes often, feeling his way. He knows this place. And he knows of another that waits and sees in his mind's eye his sliver of white beach and understands now that that's not the one; that though it rightly, if not completely legally, belongs to him he'll never get there. He goes through the addresses of his mind to find a door ajar and he pokes his head in to find himself in his bed; he tip-toes to the sleeper but finds no sign of life. Drenched in sea-spray and sweat, Nathan comes on Famous's food, eternal with its marquee lights whirling like birthday sparklers every day of every night, but not now, the lights are off, everything is off, shuttered to the storm. Debris and ice ride the current through the streets.

He wades through to the boardwalk. To face the sea he must put his weight forward, hung by the air. The line between the sea and the sky has been rubbed out, all of it a shade of dark past night. The wave-breaks are overwhelmed, the beach nearly submerged, the water running up to the boardwalk, which is buried in spray ice. Up and down, stretches of rail and walk are gone altogether. The thunder, continuous, no longer distinct from the rumble of the sea. It says, Get out of the car. It says, Save her.

The two shots are spaced, deliberate. At first, on one knee, Nathan feels numb relief, then, with a sigh, feels himself stumble backward and turn on his. stomach. Nonthoughts drift through his mind accompanied by music he can hear only because now he is finally listening: as if it has been there all along. Wagner? No, something funereal, something quiet, like a lullaby, Chopin, maybe, which in the bedlam of the storm is just like a tiny boy's cries of sorrow. That is it. With a groan he begins to claw at the icy slats of the boardwalk, pulling himself along one then the next as up a ladder. Shapes hover around him, holding his hand, tugging on his fingers, trying to help, pulling him on, or still just trying to pick his pockets-the fold of his jacket is pulled back and what is left of his brick of cash jiggled out. Footfalls fade behind him. His life is slithering away, mingling with seawater, and he feels some mild pleasure in the possibility that those things for which he has traveled a long and undesirable way, things he may not necessarily be able to name but which construct his life-long dreams, he will no longer require. With his last effort Nathan Stein laps at the boardwalk and tastes his own metallic and salty warmth, and raises his eyes to look ahead and up and finds himself alone, absolutely alone, wrapped in numbing silence. Where is the Chopin? Where has everyone gone? His face burns. He decides, because he thinks he should, to think of people to forgive – forgiveness is big in his heart – and begins with himself. But he cannot remember his own name. He has begun to scream. But the gale smothers what he says, and choking now, he cannot hear.

Then he rises. Off the boardwalk, his arms lift, then his legs, floppy in dangled flight like a marionette. Nathan can't wait. Here he goes, found by some good samaritan, rushing along, to a hospital, he hopes. He cannot believe in his arms or legs and he cannot move, but he is aloft, heading for shelter, and awaits the soothing voice, the assurances of safety, the needleprick, the saline solution. So the world is good after all. The world is good.

"Are you all right?" he hears, again, a gentle voice this time. And this time, "No," he finally answers, "No," thankful to be permitted to be so honest. "I need help. Please help me."

Rushing, stumbling, the air whistles through his gut. Nathan gasps. Someone closes the door. Another door closes, and another door closes. Some line, some very important line, has been cut.