Milgrim knew better than to offer an opinion on this.

“But this is New York,” Brown said.

“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, tentatively.

“You look like a junkie. Cop thinks you’re doing a Transit Authority car, then sees you’re cuffed to it, alone, not good.”

“No,” said Milgrim.

“So no cuffs.”

Milgrim said nothing.

“I’m going to need these cuffs today,” said Brown, and smiled. Milgrim couldn’t remember having seen Brown smile. “You, on the other hand, are going to need the dope in this bag, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, having already come to the same conclusion, a few minutes before.

“I get back to this car and your ass isn’t in it, you’re finished.”

Milgrim wondered what Brown thought constituted deeper shit, for Milgrim, in his current situation, although having benzo-seizures while homeless and penniless on the streets of Manhattan actually did fully qualify, by Milgrim’s own standards, and maybe Brown knew it. “I hear you,” Milgrim said, trying for a tone that would match Brown’s, but not antagonize him. He had a feeling, though, that Brown’s “finished” meant dead, and that was a more peculiar feeling than he would have expected.

“Copy,” Brown said, to the voices in his ear. “Copy.”

37. FREERUNNERS

T he Guerreros took him up Broadway, through the sunlight. He hadn’t expected this, assuming he’d reach Union Square by subway, then round and circle until the time of his meeting. But no, and so he walked with them, just as they led him. And soon he was simply a man walking, the orishas spread through a seemingly ordinary awareness, invisible as drops of ink in a volume of water, his pulse steady, enjoying the look of the sun on the floral ironwork that supported many of these old buildings. This was, he knew, though he avoided directly considering it, a still higher state of readiness.

A part of him felt dismay at the thought that he very probably would leave this city soon, perhaps before sunset. It seemed impossible, somehow, but once it must have seemed impossible that he would leave Havana. He couldn’t remember if it had, though he’d left Cuba on equally short notice, taking nothing but the clothes he’d been wearing when his mother had fetched him from a restaurant. He’d been eating a ham sandwich. He could still remember the taste of the bread, a type of square bun that had been a feature of his childhood. Where would he be, tomorrow?

He crossed Houston. Pigeons flew up from the crosswalk.

The summer before, he’d met two NYU students in Washington Square. They were freerunners, devotees of something loosely akin to systema, and also practitioners of what they called tricking. They were black, and had assumed him to be Dominican, though they’d called him “China.” He wondered, now, continuing north, whether this sun would bring them to Washington Square today. He’d enjoyed their company, the demonstrations and exchanges of lesser techniques. He learned the backtucks and other tricks they practiced, incorporating them into his systema, but declined to join them in freerunning, for which they had already been charged with minor infractions of trespass or public safety. He had been looking forward to seeing them again.

He passed Bleecker, then Great Jones Street, the namesake of the latter always imagined as some giant, a creature from the age of iron-framed buildings, bowler-hatted, shoulders level with second-story windows. A figment of Alejandro’s, from the days of his apprenticeship to Juana. He remembered Alejandro sending him into Strand Books, which he soon would be passing, for titles printed in particular years, in particular countries, on various specific types of stock. To be purchased for no content other than the blank endpapers, pages Tito had thought of as stories left unwritten, to be filled in by Alejandro with intricately constructed identities.

He walked on, never looking back, confident that he wasn’t being followed by anyone who wasn’t a relative; had it been otherwise, he would have been alerted by one or another family member from the team he knew was keeping pace with him, scattered along a constantly moving two-block stretch of either sidewalk, continually trading off positions according to a KGB protocol older than Juana.

Now he saw his cousin Marcos stepping off the curb, half a block ahead. Marcos the conjuror, the pickpocket, with his dark curls.

He walked on.

HAVING DISCARDED his phone, he began to check the time on clocks, through the windows of banks and dry cleaners, as he neared the southern end of Union Square. Clock time was not for the orishas. It would be up to him to coordinate his arrival.

Fifteen to one. On East Fourteenth, beneath the weird art numbers frantically telling a time nobody could read, he looked with Oshosi toward the distant canvas stalls of the market.

And then they passed him, laughing, his two freerunners from the summer and Washington Square. They hadn’t seen him. He remembered, now, that they lived in NYU dorms, here in Union Square. He watched them go, wishing he could go with them, while around him the orishas briefly and very faintly rippled the air, like heat rising above August pavement.

38. TUBAL

S he lay very still, on her back, the sheet forming a cool dark tunnel, and gave her body explicit permission to relax. This made her remember doing the same thing in an overhead berth on a tour bus, but with a sleeping bag instead of sheets, and foam earplugs instead of asking the desk to hold her calls, and setting the ring on her cell to silent.

Inchmale had called it womb-return, but she knew it was the opposite, really; not so much the calm of not yet having been born, but the stillness of already having died. She didn’t want to feel like a fetus, but like the recumbent figure carved atop a sarcophagus, cool stone. When she’d explained that to Jimmy Carlyle, once, he’d cheerfully told her that was pretty much exactly what he was after with heroin. Something about that exchange had left her very glad she’d never been much attracted to drugs, other than garden-variety cigarettes.

But anything that shook her sufficiently, really hard, could get her into tube mode, preferably in a darkened room. The departures of serious boyfriends had done it, as had the end of the Curfew, her initial major losses when the dot-com bubble had popped (the fact of those holdings having been residue of a serious boyfriend, if you wanted to look at it that way) had done it, and her subsequent (and she supposed possibly final, the way things were headed) major financial loss had done it as well, when her friend Jardine’s ambitious shot at an indie music emporium in Brooklyn had not so unexpectedly failed. Investment in that had initially seemed like a sort of hobby move, something fun and open-ended and potentially even profitable, that she could afford to take a chance on, given the dot-coms had briefly made her worth some single-digit number of millions, at least on paper. Inchmale, of course, had lobbied for her to dump the start-up stocks at what she now knew had been their white-hot and utterly evanescent peak. Inchmale, being Inchmale, had by then already dumped his own, which had driven acquaintances crazy, as they’d all believed he was throwing away the future. Inchmale had told them that some futures needed throwing away, badly. And Inchmale, of course, had never sunk a quarter of his net worth into founding a large, aggressively indie, bricks-and-mortar retail establishment. Selling music on the full variety of what were, after all, Inchmale had insisted, dead platforms.

Now, she knew, she’d been returned to the tunnel by that sudden stab of weird fear, in Starbucks; fear that Bigend had gotten her into something that might be at once hugely and esoterically dangerous. Or, she thought, if you looked at it as process, by the cumulative strangeness of what she’d encountered since she’d accepted the assignment from Node. If indeed Node existed. Bigend seemed to be saying that Node only existed to whatever extent he might ultimately need it to.