So of course I talked.

This talking, when it strayed from description of accomplished fake murder or of fake murder slated to be accomplished, was admittedly not much, but neither Mr. Kindt nor Tulip seemed greatly inclined to interrupt me. It was in this way that I came to discuss — with a level of bitterness that I only afterward and only vaguely wondered at — my unhappy early years in the city, the endless days spent working as a messenger in the basement at Forty-second and First, my dismissal, the brief and pleasant spell on severance and then unemployment, one or two incidents, my job shifting garbage and objects at the little antique shop on Second, my first attempted theft and its embarrassing result, a stint as a freelance writer for a weekly paper, the dismal try at a pulp novel, a Parisianesque girlfriend, several related episodes, including being dragged to poetry events at St. Mark’s Church and the KGB Bar, my general distrust of these events, where people either moved too much when they read or too little, the strange excitement of all the references to long-dead poets, the episode with my poor little cat, the Parisianesque girlfriend’s abrupt and not unviolent and indeed heartbreaking departure from my life, my inability to make rent, certain family problems to do with my aunt, renewed attempts at theft, sketchy business opportunities, life on the streets, time in the hospital, where I was treated for my injuries, forcibly detoxed, given an opportunity to fill my pockets with some saleable pharmaceuticals, then discharged — in short, the whole sad story until Tulip walked up to me at a party, etc. Both Tulip and Mr. Kindt seemed sympathetic during my ramblings on this and other not especially related subjects, and at one juncture, when I was having an especially hard time describing something unpleasant that had occurred one night not too far from my old apartment, they told me to come sit between them on the couch.

You’re past that and on to other things now, Henry, Mr. Kindt said.

Yes, Tulip said.

Anyway, generally speaking, they were both nice to me during these episodes. Mr. Kindt would say a few comforting words then gently steer me back to the subject of my escapades, and Tulip didn’t get up and walk out of the room whenever I started talking, like she would have before. So it was all pretty agreeable.

Incidentally, I offer (or let stand) the above-mentioned biographical details, merely pointed to as they are, only to provide further context for my subsequent actions — to acknowledge, in a sense, that I had started my sad-sack downward slide long before Mr. Kindt, Tulip, Cornelius, and his posse entered my life, and that what was to happen very soon afterward, had as much to do with my own shortcomings — by that I mean my own idiocy — as with any particular external forces. Sure, there were machinations being conducted around me, but the truth is I had plenty of warning. To take one instance, the day of what I called the pinecone murder, in fact, Anthony appeared out of nowhere as I was heading over to Mr. Kindt’s, grabbed my arm, and told me that he had been hearing things and that if I was smart I would put as much distance between myself and Mr. Kindt et al as I could. Instead of asking him why, what he’d been hearing, etc., what I did — and you will see that no matter how many questions I did actually ask I was to repeat the essence of this gesture several times in the days to come — was hold up the pinecone and say, Nice, huh?

TWENTY

There are two New Yorks. One of them is the one you go out into every day and every day it smacks you in the face and maybe you laugh a little and the people walk down the street and trucks blow their horns and you are happy or you are not, but your heart is beating. Your heart is beating as you walk, say, through a steady drizzle, your beat-up umbrella bumping other beat-up umbrellas, muttering excuse me, skirting small, dirty puddles and drifts of dark sediment, stepping out of the way of the young woman or young man on a cell phone who didn’t see you coming, didn’t notice you had stepped out of the way, didn’t give a shit, didn’t hear you say, because of this, fuck you, saying fuck you with your heart beating faster, feeling pretty good about saying fuck you, suddenly maybe feeling good about the drizzle, about the brilliant beads of water on the cabs going too fast down Prince, on the delicate ends of the oak branches as you cross Elizabeth, on the chain-link mesh as you move along the street. Your heart beats fast then slow then fast again as you cross Lafayette, the rainy vista extending all the way to Astor Place, then move across the shiny remnants of cobbles as you negotiate Crosby, the old, converted factory buildings surrounding you until you hit Broadway, where you can see up and down the shop-infested lower spine of New York, and you stop for a time and think about verticality, then compromised verticality, then rubble, about steaming ruins, about vanished buildings, and wonder where you’re going, though not why. With money in your pocket and no place to be, why is not a question you are obliged to ask yourself as you start up again, a location in mind now, up Broadway past Houston then across Third, back to the East Village — home. There isn’t any why as you wait at the light to cross Bowery, as you flip off a bike messenger who takes a puddle hard and sprays you with it, as you walk fast, in familiar territory again, as you stop in a bar and have a Cape Cod, as you smile a little but talk to no one, as you light a cigarette and close your eyes and lean back in your booth. For a short time then you subtract yourself from the proceedings, leave the cabs and chain link and cell phones outside, and, thinking of steam and rubble, drift. Down dark, windswept hallways, across empty public spaces, past vanished water-tasting stations and stopped-up springs, along oily waterways littered with rusting barges and sleeping gulls, down abandoned subway tunnels and the sparking guts of disused power stations: into the second New York. The one in which a heartbeat is at best a temporary anomaly, a troubling aftershock, an instance of unanswerable déjà vu. Which is much bigger than the first, and is for the most part, in your current condition, inaccessible to you, you think, although sometimes, like sitting in the bar drifting, or lying on your bed surrounded by lights and strangers, you can catch a glimpse.

You have caught glimpses at other times. Once was in a puddle on the asphalt one clear night after a long rain. You were walking along First Avenue, right above Forty-second, and had just gotten smacked by the flower truck, and you were on your hands and knees leaning over and there it was, or there you were, in those vast lands of the other city, the other New York, pale and scary, but not for long. Another time, earlier, you got a better look. This is how you know how big it is. This was when you still lived on the Lower East Side, not too far from the apartment you were about to lose, and you were getting the shit beaten out of you for having impolitely refused someone with bulging arm muscles and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth a sip of your Coke. Beaten so bad you had broken bones in your face and suffered partial memory loss and could only suppose what had happened after you had said, fuck no. So suppose you did. He had left you there with a screwdriver (fortunately only its butt was used) lying by your face — this became, in your imaginings: shot you up with a gat; chopped your shit with an ax; curbed you; stuck a grenade in your mouth; propped you up against a wall and smashed the back of a Buick into you; carried you up on top of one of the tenements and dropped you; cut your throat; poured gas on you and lit it; dragged you behind a lowrider; did something with a corkscrew; did something with a bat. You actually — and here your memory is unimpaired — spoke to yourself this time. You said to yourself, O.K., fine, all right, that’s it, good-bye now, time to vanish, let’s cruise. And you did. You left and wandered both alone and in company, walked arm in arm with yourself and with a couple million others, up and down the windy, gleaming streets of the necropolis, New York number two.