"Your suicide should take place in a city like Tangier or Port-au-Prince or Auckland, New Zealand. Some semi-mysterious or remote place is probably best for your kind of suicide. That way the news is late, the news is garbled, the news is full of contradictions. A doubt always lingers that way. Even when they produce your body, there's a doubt or a shadow of a doubt. Maybe it's somebody else. Maybe it's a look-alike provided by the local police. The perfect suicide is when people know you're dead on one level but refuse to accept it on a deeper level. It's the final inward plunge, Bucky. It's what you owe us. It really is. We patterned our whole lives after your example. What happens? You decide to pull out. Just like that. You decide to step back into the legend. No good, Bucky. Not acceptable. Obviously it leaves us hanging. We're in the midst of an inward plunge and you suddenly just like that decide to sneak out into the open. Zero acceptability. Suicide's the best answer all around. I think you see that now."

"It's a good answer. But not the best."

"There's a definite second-best. But suicide's the best. How can I tempt you further? Can I say it's what everybody ultimately expects of you, right down to the littlest scribbler of fan mail? Should I say it's a life-affirming gesture for someone in your position? Do I put the whole thing in perspective by arguing that your life and work will draw off additional meaning from an act of this kind? How can I tempt you, Bucky? We're how high up – four stories? Not enough, is it? You want to be sure and I don't blame you one bit. Istanbul, that would be ideal. Better than Auckland, New Zealand, where chances are they do things in a neat tidy manner and we wouldn't have the proper mystery or doubt. Our building on Essex Street is five stories high. Add one for the roof. That's six, which is probably high enough."

"I admit I'm tempted."

"It's by far the best answer."

"Not by jumping though. That's no good at all."

"Let's discuss alternatives," he said.

"Many better methods."

"I'd be happy to discuss them with you. Anything you have to offer in the way of ideas is great with me. Gun's not bad. It's a right-there kind of thing. It's got a brutal purity other methods don't have."

"You're not being serious," I said. "If you were really bearing down on this, you wouldn't make dumb suggestions. It has to be more passive. But not drugs and not gas. An exotic poison maybe, A snake in a basket. Something that harks back to the great days when excess was the style. But I'll tell you the truth, Bo. We're just making noises up here. I have no real intentions. I'm not innocent enough for suicide."

"You have to teach by example, Bucky. Otherwise you're just a salesman."

"I've done things without understanding them fully. This would be one more such thing. Besides I'm not innocent. I've ass-licked around the edges of some mean conceits. You can't kill yourself when you're half-rotten with plague. Only the innocent are received. No suicide gets through unless he's free of attachment. It's murder I've been burning to commit. I'm way beyond suicide."

"Who you plan to kill?"

"I guess nobody anymore. Not even in the vague way I meant it. Four ounces on the meat scale. That's all I'm told I weigh. I was thinking about that while T waited for you to get here. Whether to bother at all with limousines and planes or just take what Bohack's got in store."

"Second-best," he said. "There's a definite second-best."

He put his hands flat against his belly and slid them into his pants up to the knuckles. Under his jacket, opened to the mild afternoon, he wore broad red suspenders. We passed a yawn between us. To the east a drilling crew was blasting rock apart at a construction site. I heard but could not see them. Each blast was preceded by the sound of whistles and followed by pigeons angling in panic to other abutments.

"You found Azarian," I said. "You found Pepper or he found you. You didn't find Watney. Did you find Hanes?"

"Hanes found us."

"That's what I thought."

"The kid finally got around to using his God-given intellect. He offered to do anything we wanted if we'd give him a guarantee for his safety. He couldn't have called at a better time. There was one important service nobody else was in a position to render for us. Hanes was the right man at the right time. I look at your face and see nothing. Isn't Bucky Wunderlick curious about these things? Doesn't he care how the machinery functions? Maybe it's just that the sun's in his eyes. He seems to be blank but it's only the sun."

"I thought I had you measured step by step," I said. "I even awarded myself one extra step. But I have to admit I don't know what service Hanes might be in a position to render Happy Valley. The sun's in my eyes. Otherwise you'd see curiosity lighting up my face."

"We want your silence. You know that. But even if you took your own life right now, we wouldn't have what we want. Why? Because of the mountain tapes. Because the tapes are about to be released. New legends, new sounds, new confusions. In the last few days there have been rumors about the tapes being released. Then Pepper told us you were going on tour. It all fitted together. The only thing we didn't know was how to get at the tapes. Where they were. Who had them. Silence is silence, Bucky. There's no silence with the tapes on the market. It would hurt us. It would cause psychological pain. So Hanes was the right man. We gave him the guarantee he wanted. In return he went through the confidential files at Transparanoia. According to him, it was easy. He had the answer in no time."

"Pittsburgh."

"Cincinnati."

"Just testing," I said.

"Hanes seemed eager to give you maximum knifage. To put the blade in six inches, withdraw it two inches, stick it in three more inches. Seven inches. Maximum knifage among the primitive blood cults."

"I didn't help him when he was in the subways."

"He remembered."

"I see that."

"So Maje and two others are in a car right now on their way to the record plant in Cincinnati. They're carrying about twenty pounds of C-four. We have to play it safe. We don't know what stage of production the record's at. So we're blowing the whole plant. Silence has to be total if it's to be called silence. Am I right or not? In order to earn the name silence, the silence has to be total. I'd like to hear your views on that."

I took eight steps forward and hit him in the stomach, directing the blow at a point equidistant from his thumbs, which were still set against his belly, the only fingers outside his pants, about six inches apart, parallel to his belt line. I walked back to my spot at the brick chimney.

"What was that?" he said.

"Animal urge."

"What for?"

"I know what's ahead. Some dumb instinct made me hit you. No reason though. I walk step for step with you, Bo. It was an animal thing. I know what's ahead. I agree to it. But this animal urge made me hit you anyway."

"You get the faggot violence going. That's the only thing you accomplish with a move like that. The old faggot violence comes raging out of me. I turn bleary. I strike at anything that breathes. That's the meaningless inner faggotry everyone possesses. You roused my faggot-laden soul. Bad stuff, Bucky. No should do. Make nice-nice. No hit people. Heap big trouble."

"I agree to everything."

"It's a nice day," he said. "Let's go for a walk."

We went south on the Bowery without a word. Gray cats slept in the sun among men thawing against the sides of buildings, seated there for a parade of visored riot cops and their whores in snowshoes, or asleep as if in baskets, their bodies shaped against the revolt of bone. I had a yawning seizure then. It was fear, I knew, that caused it – the mechanism in the body that covers up fear in this whimsical way, yawn after yawn. The seizure lasted all the way to the Salvation Army Memorial Hotel, accompanied by popping sounds in my cheekbones. I was suddenly hungry. We stopped at a frankfurter cart on Chrystie Street and I ate three chili dogs and drank Coke and orange soda. I felt sick and tossed the empty Coke bottle over my shoulder, hearing it break politely in the gutter. Bohack never spoke or touched me. People seemed to know him here, although no words were exchanged. We went east into the market streets. I vomited on a parked car. Bohack waited at the distance deemed correct in the etiquette of vomiting. There were no metaphysical testimonies to be made in clarification of this episode. I was traveling a straight line to the end of an idea. It seemed simple arithmetic. For years I'd been heading this way, moment by moment, along a perfectly true line. We reached Essex Street and walked south past the basement companies that manufactured skullcaps. We entered a tenement and started to climb stairs. There were no lights in the hallway. I smelled babies and lush garbage. The tile steps were worn at the edges. Bohack climbed behind me, about three steps back, breathing evenly into the dimness. Great Jones Street, Bond Street, Chrystie Street, Essex Street. It was sixteenth-century London we'd been slouching through in our hands-in-pockets way. I reached the final landing. Puke. Vomit. Splat. Bohack slipped past me and unlocked one of the four metal doors on the top floor, using three keys in the process.