They did the handclasp and half hug. "Why are we here?"

"You ain't heard?"

Eric said, "What?"

Kozmo batted himself in the chest, reverently. "Brutha Fez."

"What?"

"Dead."

"No. What. Can't be."

"Dead. Died. Early today."

"I don't know this?"

"Funeral's been in progress all day. The family wants to give the city a chance to pay respect. The record label wants an exploitation event. Big and loud. Street to street. Right through the night."

"I don't know this? How can this be? I love his music. I have his music in my elevator. I know the man."

He knew the man. The sadness, the plangency of this remark was echoed in the music itself, the gawwali model of devotional rhythms and improvisations, over a thousand years old, growing louder now as the funeral cortege came down the avenue, which had been cleared of extraneous traffic and parked cars.

"What, they shot him?"

First the squad of motorcycles, city police in wedge formation. Two private security vans followed, flanking a police cruiser. It was so completely clear, another dead rapper, the protocol of the rap star who goes down humming in a spatter of gunshots after he fails to pay feudal tribute in the form of respect or money or women to some skittish individual. This was the day, was it not, for influential men to come to sudden messy ends.

Kozmo was looking askance.

" Fez been having cardiac problems for years. Since high school. Been seeing specialists, been seeing faith healers. Heart just wore out. This ain't a thug down some alley. The man never been breathalyzed, barely, since he was seventeen."

Then came the flower cars, ten of them, banked with white roses rippling in the breeze. The hearse came next, an open car with Fez lying in state at the rear in a coffin angled upward to make the body visible, asphodels everywhere, fleshy pink, the flowers of Hades, where souls of the dead come to find meadowy rest.

The dead man's amplified voice sounded from farther back in the procession, singing in slow hypnotic syncopation, accompanied by harmonium and hand drums.

"Hope you're not disappointed."

"Disappointed."

"That our man here wasn't shot. Hope he didn't let you down. Natural causes. That's a letdown."

Kozmo jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder.

"What happened to your stretch? Letting a fine machine degrade in public. That's a scandal, man."

"Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it."

"I'm hearing voices in the night. Because I know it can't be you that's saying this."

Scores of women walked alongside the limousines, in headscarves and djellabas, hands stained with henna, and barefoot, and wailing. Kozmo struck his chest again and so did Eric. He thought his friend was impressive in repose, wearing a full beard and a white silk caftan with hood folded back and the iconic red fez on his head, stylishly tilted, and how affecting it was for the man to be lying in the spiral of his own vocal adaptations of ancient Sufi music, rapping in Punjabi and Urdu and in the blackswagger English of the street.

Gettin' shot is easy Tried it seven times Now I'm just a solo poet Workin' on my rhymes

The crowd was large and hushed, deepening along the sidewalks, and people in nightclothes watched from tenement windows. Four of Fez 's personal bodyguards accompanied the hearse, slow-marching, one off each point of the car. They were in Western dress, dark suits and ties, polished oxfords, with combat shotguns held at port arms.

Eric liked that. Bodyguards even in death. Eric thought yes.

Then came the breakdancers, in pressed jeans and sneakers, here to affirm the history of the deceased, born Raymond Gathers in the Bronx, once a breaker of some fame. These were his contemporaries, six men ranged across the six lanes of the avenue, in their mid-thirties now, back in the streets after all these years to do their windmills and reels, their impossible axial headspins.

"Ask me do I love this shit," said Kozmo.

But the energy and dazzle brought something melancholy to the crowd, more regret than excitation. Even the younger people seemed subdued, over-respectful, as the breakers wheeled on their elbows and flared their bodies parallel to the ground, running in horizontal frenzy.

Grief should be powerful, Eric thought. But the crowd was still learning how to mourn a singular rapper such as Fez, who mixed languages, tempos and themes.

Only Kozmo was alive and popping.

"Me being big as I am, and a retro-nigger, I have to love what I'm seeing. Because this is something I could never dream of doing in my thinnest day on earth."

Yes, they spun on their heads, bodies upright and legs spread slightly, and one of the breakers had his hands cuffed behind his back. Eric thought there was something mystical about this, well beyond the scan of human encompassment, the half-crazed passion of a desert saint. How lost to the world he must be, here in the grease and tar of Ninth Avenue.

Family and friends came next, in thirty-six white stretch limousines, three abreast, with the mayor and police commissioner in sober profile, and a dozen members of Congress, and the mothers of unarmed blacks shot by police, and fellow rappers in the middle phalanx, and there were media executives, foreign dignitaries, faces from film and TV, and mingled throughout were figures of world religion in their robes, cowls, kimonos, sandals and soutanes.

Four news choppers passed overhead.

"He liked having his clergy nearby," Kozmo said. "He showed up in my office once with an imam and two white boys from Utah in suits. He was always excusing himself so he could pray"

"He lived in a minaret for a while, in Los Angeles."

"I heard that."

"I went to visit once. He built it next to his house and then moved out of the house and into the minaret."

The dead man's voice was louder now as the sound truck approached. His best songs were sensational and even the ones that were not good were good.

Behind his voice the handclapping of the chorus became intense, driving Fez into improvised rhythms that sounded reckless and unsustainable. There were great howls of devotion, whoops and street shouts. The clapping spread from the recorded track to the people in the limos and the crowd on the sidewalks and it brought a clear emotion to the night, a joy of intoxicating wholeness, he and they, the dead and provisionally living.

A line of elderly Catholic nuns in full habit recited the rosary, teachers from the grade school he'd attended.

His voice was going ever faster, in Urdu, then slurry English, and it was pierced by the shrill cries of a female member of the chorus. There was rapture in this, fierce elation, and something else that was inexpressible, dropping off the edge, all meaning exhausted until nothing was left but charismatic speech, words sprawling over themselves, without drums or handclaps or the woman's pitched cries.

The voice fell into silence finally. People thought the event was over now. They were shaking and drained. Eric's delight in going broke seemed blessed and authenticated here. He'd been emptied of everything but a sense of surpassing stillness, a fatedness that felt disinterested and free.

Then he thought about his own funeral. He felt unworthy and pathetic. Never mind the bodyguards, four versus three. What set of elements might be configured that could possibly match what was happening here? Who would come to see him laid out? (An embalmed term in search of a matching cadaver.) Men he'd crushed, to nourish their rancor. Those he'd presumed to be wallpaper, to stand over him and gloat. He would be the powdered body in the mummy case, the one they'd all lived long enough to mock.

It was dispiriting, then, to think about this collection of mourners. Here was a spectacle he could clearly not command. And the funeral wasn't over yet.