He walks across the swing bridge and hears them in the streets and then he begins to see them. They're walking across the public park to the stadium, across the fields and pathways, and they're coming down from the elevated train, men and boys in long streams turning the bends in the high stairways, and they're laughing and singing.

He sees flags waving on the stadium roof and World Series bunting hung high on the outer wall. He sees fires on the pavement, they're building fires in fifty-five-gallon drums, and he is struck a little dumb by the masses of people out to buy tickets at this time of night. His mouth hangs a little open and he is wide-eyed dumb. He paces himself to the crowd, feeling pulled along, feeling frankly happy to be among them, and they're carrying food and chairs, webbed chairs for the beach that fold up light, and they have sleeping bags strapped to their backs, a dozen college boys with their hair clipped short, and they're passing thermos bottles that smoke up when you screw off the lid, strong coffee to keep them awake and warm.

He sees fathers and sons standing around the fires to warm themselves, masses of people if you could count them, and mounted police with horses breathing steam, and he feels a rare elation, a wanting-to-be-among-them, and he is pulled along a little slack-jawed because it's a great thing to see, and they're singing roaring warring songs, they're back-and-forthing on the street with rough-and-tumble humor, all these ball fans striding toward the ticket lines at two or three in the morning or whatever the actual hour.

Manx is wearing a watch that stopped running six weeks ago. This is a situation he will direct his attention to when his life gets back to being regular.

PART 4. COCKSUCKER BLUES

1

It was the rooftop summer, drinks or dinner, a wedged garden with a wrought iron table that's spored along its curved legs with oxide blight, and maybe those are old French roses climbing the chimney pot, a color called maiden's blush, or a long terrace with a slate surface and birch trees in copper tubs and the laughter of a dozen people sounding small and precious in the night, floating over the cold soup toward skylights and domes and water tanks, or a hurry-up lunch, an old friend, beach chairs and takeout Chinese and how the snapdragons smell buttery in the sun.

This was Klara Sax's summer at the roofline. She found a hidden city above the grid of fever streets. Walk and Dont Walk. Ten million bobbing heads that ride above the tideline of taxi stripes, all brain-waved differently, and yes the street abounds in idiosyncrasy, in the human veer, but you have to go to roof level to see the thing distinct, preserved in masonry and brass. She looked across the crowded sky of ventilators and antennas and suddenly there's a quirk, some unaccountable gesture that isolates itself. Angels with butterfly wings tucked under a,cornice on Bleecker Street. Or the mystery of a white clapboard cottage on the roof of an office building. Or the odd deco heads, sort of Easter Islandish, attached to the corners of a midtown tower. She found these things encouraging, dozens such that hung unauthored, with bridge cables in the distance and occasional booming skies, the false storms of summer.

She was fifty-four now, let that number rumble in your head-fifty-four and between projects and humanly invisible and waiting to go back to work, to make and shape and modify and build.

The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building-about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort, European.

"I think of it as one, not two," she said. "Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single entity, isn't it?"

"Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think."

"Yes, you have to look."

And they were out of ideas for a while, standing at the ledge and taking in the baleful view together, uncomfortably, she thought, because esthetic judgments feel superficial when you share them with a stranger, and finally she sensed a rustle, a disturbance in his bearing that was meant to mark a change of subject, earnest and determined, and he said to her, still looking toward the towers, he whispered actu-ally, "I like your work, you know."

"Yes?"

"Very sympathetic."

It was so humid some nights you could not close your door. You had to shoulder your door closed. Bridges expanded and sidewalks cracked and there was garbage in the streets and you had to sort of talk to your door before it would close for you.

She loved the nights that were electrical, a static in the air and lightning in soft pulses, in great shapeless beats, you can almost read the rhythmic pattern, slow and protoplasmal, and maybe a Cinzano awning fixed to a table on a higher terrace-you can't identify that gunshot sound until you spot the striped awning, edges snapping in the breeze.

Klara was happy in a guarded way, keeping it folded close. She had a sense of being favored, fairly well-regarded for recent work, feeling good again after a spell of back pain and insomnia, clear-minded after a brief depression, saving her money after a spending spree, getting out and seeing friends and standing at parapets, quietly happy, looking better than she had in years-they all said so.

It was the time of Nixon's fall from office but she didn't enjoy it the way her friends did. Nixon made her think of her father, another man of frazzled mind, rehearsed in his very step, his physical address, bitter and distant at times, with a loser's bent frame, all head and hands.

She stood at parapets and wondered who had worked the stones, shaped these details of the suavest nuance, chevrons and rosettes, urns on balustrades, the classical swags of fruit, the scroll brackets supporting a balcony, and she thought they must have been immigrants, Italian stone carvers probably, unremembered, artists anonymous of the early century, buried in the sky.

She wasn't used to being recognized. She was recognized in certain situations but only rarely and it made her feel that someone was taking measurements of her body in a small mirrored room. She tended to be unseen except by friends. She was mostly invisible, humanly invisible to people in the market down the street and not just youngsters hurrying past a hazy shape in the aisles, the unfocused stuff of middle age, but people in general-okay, men in general-who gave her generic status at best.

It was not an issue. She wasn't lonely or unloved. Well, she was unloved in the deeper senses of the word but that was fine, she'd had enough love of the deeper types, painful and ever echoing, the rancorous marriages that make it hard for you to earn a dependable solitude. It was a curiosity only, and a bracing form of self-awareness, learning to be unseen.

Miles Lightman came around a lot that summer. There was something about Miles that made her think he ate off dirty dishes but she began to get used to him, to like him a lot-he was kinetic and unre-flective, essentially artless, blank to the schemes of conceit that ruin many a budding love.

She wore long ruffled skirts, she wore denim skirts with floriated hems.

She stood on the roof of a factory building, a space made available for the evening so that a small theater group might launch a fund drive, and fifty people drank tepid wine out of plastic cups and said, We need theater.