We rode the train for an hour and a half. Mostly she looked out the window at the towns and fields passing by. I saw the orange blue light reflect on her face.

She spoke only once. She turned to me and said, “If you’re some psychopath who’s planning on killing me, don’t bother. You already did.” Then she turned back to the window.

When we left the train we took the subway, then went the final blocks on foot through the bright, crowded city. Everything felt fresh, alive. She didn’t ask where we were going. But when we came to the broad plaza with the central fountain and the glass temple beyond, her face went to recognition, then surprise.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Have you been here before?”

She shook her head.

She looked around, taking the whole piazza in: the men in black tie, the women in regal dresses. There was a look of wonder in her eyes. It was wonderful. Before us was a glass wall, enclosing two giant paintings of angels, each a hundred feet tall, one red, one yellow, both swirling and arching up toward heaven. We walked past the fountain to the Metropolitan Opera’s grand entrance.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Come on.”

“We’re going in?”

I nodded.

“In in?”

I nodded. Her face lit up.

“You look like a kid,” I said.

We walked through the immense atrium. Everything was upholstered in red and gold. We waited as an ancient man in a tuxedo tore our tickets. Then we took our seats under the glass chandeliers that looked like splintered stars, bursting with faint white light.

Sarah kept looking around, soaking it all in.

“How did you know,” she asked, “how I felt about opera?”

“You told me. The night we met.”

The opera was Mozart’s Magic Flute. It was a fairy tale, with dancing animals, a Sun King, and a pair of flirtatious parrots named Papageno and Papagena.

It all would have been ridiculous if it weren’t for the music. I’d never heard anything like it: celestial, pure, gliding like a hummingbird. When the curtain came down, the audience leapt to its feet, roaring with applause. I watched Sarah. She faced the stage, smiling and clapping, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Afterward, we walked the city. We came to a bright street filled with Indian restaurants. Each one was decorated with Christmas lights, inside and out; entire walls and ceilings were covered. Every restaurant seemed to be trying to outdo the ones around it until the whole street was flickering red, yellow, purple, and green in a beautiful, benign arms race. We sat on a bench and watched the people pass in and out of the restaurants.

“Can I ask you a question,” Sarah said.

“Sure.”

“When did you decide to be a lawyer?”

“When I was thirteen.”

“How did you know?”

“I was working at my grandfather’s office for the summer. There was this one case. This little girl was being abused by her mom. The dad came to us. He was scared. He didn’t know what to do. My grandfather made it right. We went to the judge and got the little girl away from the mom. She wasn’t allowed anywhere near her ever again. And I thought, wow, the law did that. It saved that girl.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“My grandpa was a one-man practice. He had a little office with a shingle in front that said William Davis, Attorney and Counselor.”

“He actually had a shingle?”

I nodded. “It was a small town.”

We were quiet for a little bit.

“When I was a teenager,” she said to me, “my mom used to say, when you feel lost, remember the last time you really liked yourself. I was thinking about that today.”

“Did you come up with an answer?”

“I did. The year before I went to medical school, I worked as a librarian at a neighborhood library. I loved that. I loved the little kids, the books.”

She smiled at the memory.

“What about you?”

I thought about it.

“Four years ago,” I said. “I got accepted to Princeton for college, if you can believe that. I was all set to go. And then my dad had a heart attack. A really big one. He was out of work for weeks. My mom needed help. So I decided to skip Princeton and stay at home for school. Help them out.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

“Best decision I ever made.”

“Did you ever wonder if maybe part of you was scared to leave home?”

I should’ve been mad. If anyone else had said it, I probably would have been. But there was something so gentle about her that it seemed like an honest question, without any judgment attached.

“I don’t know. Maybe that was part of it.”

It was getting cold. Sarah shivered and pulled her coat tighter.

“Do you get the feeling,” she said, “that in some alternate universe we’d be engaged by now?”

I was so surprised I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. That just seems… I don’t know… I mean, could we have gotten it more messed up? Not we. Me. Everything I’ve done in the last few months… I wish I could go back and do it over.”

“I should have said yes when you asked me out. I wanted to.”

It felt like a portal had opened up, from my present world to a world of husbands and wives, houses and children. I remembered the windows in her Delacroix painting, warm and orange.

I wanted to kiss her, but I decided not to. We just sat there, and after a while she put her hand on mine.

21

I got back to the dorms and saw a homeless man out front, right by the steps leading up to my entryway. He wore a long gray coat and steadied himself on the railing as he leaned into the bushes, throwing up. I was never sure how to act around homeless people. The town was full of them. What could be more magnetic than five thousand undergraduates with a student’s conscience and a parent’s bank account?

As I approached the stairs, the man swung around and held up his arms defensively. I saw it wasn’t a homeless man at all but Humpty Dumpty, the crown prince of the library, looking like a train had hit him-his bow tie was undone and hanging in two limp strands; his thin white hair was scattered, the part long gone. He reeked of gin. He sheltered a bottle in a brown bag under his arm.

When his eyes fixed on me, they went wide.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said hoarsely. He wiped an arm across his mouth.

This was not good. That much I knew already.

I glanced around. The yard was quiet. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into the shadows behind the bushes.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what,” he said.

“No I don’t.”

“You know.”

“I don’t have time for this.”

He just grinned dumbly and starting laughing.

Enough games.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m done.”

He shook his head like a toddler about to say Don’t wanna.

“I’m done,” I repeated. “I don’t know anything. I have no interest in them. I pose no threat. You tell them that.”

He laughed wheezily, and a plume of sour breath hit me.

“They know it was you.”

A cold shiver went down my neck.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Last night.” His eyes were wide, crazy. “Trying to get into the tunnels. You had a map. They know it was you.”

I shook my head.

Keep it together. Get a poker face, goddammit. But I felt it-the walls crumbling. The skin under his right eye was twitching madly.

“You’re not safe,” he said. “You need to see the dead man.”

I felt fear drip down my back.

What was he talking about, see the dead man? But there it was, the logic unfolding: The V &D party. The red-haired professor. The obituary. Who gave me the obituary? The library clerk. And who ruled over the library?

It was Humpty all along, trying to guide me. I thought of his angry exchange with Bernini in the hall; how he seemed like he was half-in, half-out of Bernini’s secret world; maybe half-insane from what he knew. And now he would take me to the man with the red toupee. Maybe he could help me out of this. If I trusted this nut.