Things changed. National Guardsmen roamed the subway terminals now in their fatigues and black berets, brand-new assault rifles cradled in their arms. The homeless were suddenly visible again. Irony had reached the far end of its arc—Johnny Cash was covering Depeche Mode’s homage to Johnny Cash. It was a confusing time for me, after my neighbor went missing.

“Who?” Jenny said.

“The guy in 2B,” I said. “I forget his name. But it’s been days since I’ve seen him.”

At 6:45 every evening, my neighbor and I would converge from opposite ends of the block like somebody walking up to a mirror. Once at the stoop, we’d grimace at each other and say, “Hey, what’s up, thanks, cool, alright.” We’d enjoy the mailbox moment, inspecting our envelopes with the focus of men at adjacent urinals; then, eyes on the floor, saunter in a way that suggested we were not following each other up the stairs. After a round of key jangling, we’d open our doors at opposite ends of the hall and, with a last glance-and-grin before crossing the threshold, shut doors and lock locks.

Static from the outer reaches of the universe came to me through the phone receiver. Finally, Jenny said, “So what are we doing this weekend?”

“I think it was Maximus.”

“Anyway, that whole thing with the ringing turned out to be nothing. Did I tell you?” She knew she had. Telling me a second time was her way of chastising me for forgetting to follow up about it. “I got them irrigated and now my clothes hiss when I move and the sound of my own chewing’s driving me crazy.” Truthfully, I had trouble keeping up with the various ailing tracts in her body.

“Geronimus?” I asked. “Heronimus? Something Roman. You told me so obviously you know.”

“I’m talking to a deaf person here. Can we talk about something real for once? Can we? And not some bullshit fantasy of yours?”

The residue of past arguments made it impossible for us to ever have a pure moment. It was combustible stuff, this residue—and each word a spark—making every conversation an exercise in damage control, in taking and offering the least offense.

I unscrewed the cap on my beer and, holding the phone’s mouthpiece to my forehead, pulled a long, sudsy gulp. “OK,” I gasped. “When are you coming over?”

The real problem was that Jenny was just Jenny to me. Her lips were no longer the kiss-raw genital echo they’d been those inaugural weeks; now they were plain old Jenny lips, cracked and bleeding in winter, greasy while slurping Thai noodles, painted on increasingly rarer occasions. She had become, as of late, so unmoored from me that we found ourselves—on our way back, say, from Sunday brunch somewhere—drifting as far as five or six paces from each other. A stop-and-linger at the local kitsch store window led to half a block of catching up on days I felt like catching up, or—on days that I didn’t—a phone call (after not finding her at my apartment) trying to untangle the misunderstanding around what the plan after brunch was exactly. “I told you I had work to do.” “You don’t just disappear!”

I interpreted the permanent interment of her contacts in their little screw-top coffins and the donning the black horn-rims as an act of hostility. I couldn’t remember the last time she took her hair out of its ponytail, pulled back so tightly that dead-on she looked bald. And it wasn’t like she didn’t own slinky dresses or a decent pair of fuck-me boots. These days on “date night” she bounced along beside me like someone being baby-sat. She came to me on the days she worked in her chinos and bleach-yellowed oxford smelling of fried onions and boiled chicken. All of this I took as personal affronts, so that by the time she opened her mouth to say something at the end of a day, she was already at a disadvantage.

And who had I become—to her, to myself? Lately, with Jenny, I seemed to be someone else entirely. He was a mask, a foil, some part she had driven me to play. I detested this guy.

As I started in on the dishes, I continued our bickering in my head. I squeezed out some dish soap into the stagnant pool. An orange grease-slick dilated like something shocked, revealing a sunken pot with burnt meat sauce stuck to the bottom. I turned on the faucet and let the water froth, then left the dishes to soak. Wandering the confines of my apartment aborting tasks, I imagined myself being filmed—opening a pile of mail, looking for a CD to play, separating the strewn clothes into a Mine pile and a Jenny pile, leaving the two mounds as I went on to start something else—an imaginary camera on me the entire time, my self-esteem bolstered by millions of viewers, fans and critics interpreting my inability to stay focused, my meandering around the house as meaningful meandering, important meandering, a semiotic-generational meandering. I pictured this raw, aimless footage—me staring into the empty fridge, me flipping through the Daily News television insert for twenty minutes before realizing it was three months old—being edited into something funny and tragic and hopeful.

But we were careful with each other that night. I opened the door to Jenny, flushed and pink-cheeked, snow melting into drops on her coat. She found the odd root vegetable or two in my crisper. She cut off the flowering portions and popped open dried and canned stuff I didn’t even know I had. She boiled a pot of water. She chopped and sautéed dinner, the peculiar odor of dust baking off the long-disused broiler preceding the more pleasant one of things being caramelized.

At that moment I was grateful. I felt as though I were being rescued.

The evening, however, went downhill after that. We sat on my futon. I wanted to say something but she preempted it by switching on the tube. We descended into a labyrinth of reality game shows and cop dramas and fell asleep without a word. I woke at three and turned off the television. Jenny, in a stupor, undressed. I did the same. We lay naked next to one another. I slipped into a dream where we were fucking and got up several hours later to find her, and her pile of laundry, gone.

I hesitate to mention what I did for work in an effort to avoid it defining me. I am not what I do, contrary to what’s said about that; or rather, I am not what I do for a living. Who would hold a person to the eight hours spent sleeping as a measure of the kind of man he was? My eight hours at work were just as compulsory, and as inert. It required of me a certain mode of dress, a certain conduct toward others. My interior life there was busied with the usual fantasies: that gust of courage which might allow me to say certain things to my superiors, to coworkers I despised, to subordinates I longed for. I was required to remember things and relay these things to others. I gave input when prompted. Sometimes I delegated. There were lunch breaks, coffee breaks and cigarette breaks (until I quit smoking, at which time I began taking fresh-air breaks). I went to this place five times a week, no more, and took off the occasional nationally appointed three-day weekend. My work schedule made me a good candidate for one of those cards you could swipe through a turnstile every seventeen minutes for a month, but I found myself these days walking back to the apartment rather than completing the circuit on the subway.

Then it was Saturday. I was coming back from an overnight at Jenny’s. A postal handcart with its rubberbanded handle was parked by the front steps. I unlocked the front door and caught the mailman mid-sort: the entire row of mailboxes was tilted forward so as to allow him access to each through the top. We exchanged hellos. He asked my apartment and then offered several envelopes out of his stack.

“You wouldn’t happen to know by any chance,” I asked, “if the guy in 2B did a change of address in the last month or so, would you?”
“No,” he said, “but if he doesn’t come for it soon I’ll be filling out a fifteen-oh-nine on him. Will you look at it in there?”

I peered into the box and saw a tubed mass of envelopes and catalogues. “I could hold them,” I offered.

“And I could go to jail. I can’t just hand this off to you, just like that. He gives you the key, that’s between you and him.”

Shortly after that, however, my neighbor’s mail began appearing in with mine, and as a result I learned some things about him. For instance: his first name was “Darius,” last name “Mies” or “Mieskowicz”; he was eligible for several major credit cards; and apparently his subscription to Guitar Player had run out. Also, I learned it was exactly five brisk strides from my door across the hall to his and with an ear pressed to the door, one got a thrumming, submarine hum—which was either coming from the apartment or from inside one’s own ear. The door handle was icy and, when turned, opened. The mail I’d slid under his door lay scattered on the other side among an accumulated litter of take-out menus.

“Hello,” I asked into the darkness. I felt something move, and as I was piecing together a reason why I was bothering him, I heard a voice.

“Hey there!”

I stepped back and shut the door.

The voice had come from above me. It was a neighbor, coming down the steps. She appeared on the second-floor landing holding a potted plant.

“Locked out?” She was young, pretty.

“I wasn’t thinking,” I said, and then, patting myself down, “I must have left them in my other jacket.” Even as I said it I realized that I wasn’t wearing a jacket. Or shoes.

“Do you have a fire escape?” She leaned the plant onto her hip and jingled the keys in her pocket. “Because, if you promise you’re not a burglar or a rapist, I could let you climb down through mine.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, there’s no fire escape.”

She gestured with her chin at my neighbor’s apartment. “You live there?”

“Yes,” I said. We both regarded the crooked gold sticker-stencils, “2B,” on the door with the measured silence one gives to a painting at an art gallery.

“Because the guy I’m staying at’s is right above you,” she said, “and there’s a fire escape up there. That’s weird, isn’t it? It should come down right outside your window.”

Sweat prickled my scalp. I felt strangely disoriented in this lie, expecting at any moment my neighbor to open the door and ask what was going on. “The problem is,” I said, “I do, but the window that goes out to it’s locked.”

She seemed satisfied with this. A moment of silence passed.

“It’s probably best,” she said. “I’m only crashing there while he’s away. He’d be pissed if he came back and found out I let some stranger into his place, right? I’m totally the worst housesitter! Look at this thing.”

She held out the plant, which I noticed now was dead. It rattled as she turned it this way, then that, dry husks floating to the floor by her feet. “I need to find a replacement. But do you think that’ll work?”

I shifted my posture—the whole time I’d been holding onto the door knob, which had become warm in my palm—and before I knew what I’d done, my wrist turned and the door clicked open.

This, of course, didn’t escape her notice.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s lucky! You should have that fixed, huh? Just think if you actually were a burglar or a rapist. Well of course if it were actually you, you’d be doing it to yourself, so I guess it wouldn’t be so bad, or at least not a crime. But if it was me? I could just go on in there and do whatever I wanted, wreak havoc, which for me is, like, not watering your plants.”

She seemed to be waiting for me to make a move.

I said, “There’s a hardware store down on Seventh that has plants in the window. I don’t know if they’re for sale, but it’s worth a shot, I guess.” My cheek muscles ached from smiling politely. I examined my socks. It occurred to me that she knew I was lying, and was, for some reason, playing coy. Was this a dare? I let the conversation lapse, but she continued to wait there. I stood my ground until I couldn’t stand it anymore. The only place for me to go now seemed to be through my neighbor’s door. “Well,” I said, “Good luck.” I turned and stared at the rusty nameplate beneath the peephole for a moment before stepping inside.

It was cold in here, and still. I swayed awhile just on the other side of the shut door, listening for her footfalls down the steps. Through an open window somewhere a truck rumbled past. I felt along the wall for a light and turned it on.

The place was empty.

My neighbor had been what kept me from lingering too long on my walk home from work (thirty-seven blocks door to door, four of them avenue-sized), double-timing the blinking crosswalks rather than waiting for the next light. If I left exactly at six, I might see him coming up the street at 6:45.

But without him at the far end of the journey, I had come untethered, and found myself slowing down (even as it got brisker and people began to hurry more desperately to their destinations), letting things catch my eye, then following them to see where they might lead. This time between work and home became, for me, free time—in the most liberating sense of that phrase—not only idle time, or spare time, but permissive time, consequenceless time. I felt emboldened by this three-quarters of an hour, and began looking forward to it, depending on it and, as a result of it, came into possession of a new sort of confidence. I would look at passing strangers full in the face now. I noticed couples clutching at each other with stunned, smitten grins. Why couldn’t I have that, I thought. I also thought, I’m not married. So it would be accurate to say that during one of these forty-five minute intervals, feeling confident—feeling desirable in my confidence—the idea of cheating on Jenny occurred to me.

It was February, and I’d just emerged from a windowless coffee bar near work with my afternoon two percent almond steamer buzzing hot in my hands. The weather had broken while I’d been inside. The sun was out. The gutters were streaming, and the roofs and awnings and window ledges ticked and dripped; and it seemed that even color itself had thawed because Duane Reade’s neon sign had never been more saturatedly red or blue than it was right then, and I thought, My God, I’m alive! I breathed deep, deep, and held out my arms. I twirled and knew, twirling, that I must have looked like an idiot, but didn’t care enough to stop myself. I felt suddenly, inexplicably glad for my life and all its possibilities.

A woman nearby, waiting at the intersection, smiled.

I smiled back. “Finally!”

“I wouldn’t get too excited,” she said. “It’s supposed to get into the teens again tomorrow.”

I felt strapping, like a soap-opera doctor about to ask his naughty co-star to scoot up onto the examining table. “You have nice lips,” I said.

We both seemed a little shocked at that. Her expression flickered. “I don’t think I like where this is going,” she said.

“Tell me your name.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Listen.” I stumbled on. It was exhilarating. “What are you doing now? Talk to me, just for a bit. I’m harmless, really.”

“This is talking, right now. What do you want?”

“I mean to sit down, have a cup of coffee with me. Or here—” I held out my steamer. “I didn’t drink from it yet. I promise. Come on, I’ll buy myself another.” The light had changed and the woman was already halfway across the street. I called after her, “But I’m not the kind of guy you think!”

Someone next to me said, “What kind of guy are you then?”

It was the woman from upstairs. I hadn’t seen her since our encounter in the hallway. My confidence wilted before her. “That’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like that.”

“You didn’t do all that much,” she said. “Look, she’s getting away! If you hope to get anywhere with some women, let me tell you, you’re going to have to be a lot more persistent.”

“I’m on lunch,” I said, as if this explained something essential.

“Where do you work? Are there any openings?” Her sense of personal space was off by an inch or two. There was a glittering diamond blemish in the crook of her left nostril. I must have had my hand out still because she took my drink from me and had a sip. “I was thinking about checking out the park myself. You have a girlfriend, don’t you? I can tell.”

This was the crazy younger sister of the woman I’d just propositioned, I thought; she seemed to be in receipt, at any rate, of someone’s hand-me-downs. The furry hood of an enormous parka rimmed her little face. She had on a flowered peasant dress, striped leggings and purple sneakers.

She said, “When you twirled around like that? I totally felt the same way. Isn’t it—” A crosstown bus huffed around a corner, nearly sideswiping her. She didn’t seem to notice. “Life’s just—Ah! Too much sometimes, I don’t know what to do with myself, I get so worked up about it.” There was, as well, a kind of ravaged look to her—or so I fantasized—like she’d hastily reassembled herself after being fucked in a stairwell. I had a picture, suddenly, of her inner thighs glistening post-coitally, her panties stuffed in a coat pocket.

We found ourselves back at the dim coffee bar, men in suits lined up in front of us. What was gloomy about this place before now made it seem warm, cozy.

She said, “You should get an eggnog latte. Doesn’t that sound gross?” She made a face and took another sip of my drink. “These gourmet lids make you feel like breast-feeding again, don’t they?” She made a suckling gesture. I ordered something, and we made our way out onto the street again.

“You don’t know of anybody who wants a freeloading roommate,” she asked, “do you? I was staying with a cousin of mine in Queens for a while, but things kind of fell through there. Besides, it was Queens.

That was after housesitting for that guy.”

“How’d everything work out with that?”

“He wasn’t too happy. It’s harder to find a plant-double than you might think. I ended up getting him a gift certificate instead and a card apologizing.”

“Where from?”

“Kmart. The card and the gift certificate. I didn’t really know what he was into—he was kind of older. Now I’m staying at a hostel around here. It’s a total cash drain, you know? A twenty-seven-dollar-a-day-sized hole. So I’m looking for another place to crash till I can find a job or something. Come with me to my room for a minute?” It didn’t seem to be a question. “I have something to drop off, and then we can hit the park.”

“OK,” I said. There was a kind of abandonment in this utterance, with its two little syllables. O-kay. My kidneys throbbed. I tried not to think of my girlfriend.

We walked west along 57th Street. What was happening here? I had somehow tripped through a hidden back door in the maze of my day, and with every step was traveling inexorably away from that life and toward some dangerous, uncharted territory. It was incredible. My only fear was that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back.

“Jenny!” I called. She had just walked into a roar of oncoming traffic.
She gave me, stepping back onto the curb, a kind of reappraising frown. “I’m pretty sure I never told you my name.”

“That was my—my girlfriend’s name is Jennifer.”

“Oh, wow. I’m Ginny. Ginger. That’s a smart policy, though—only cheat on people with the same name. Ha! Did I just make that up? It protects you against any give-away slips of the tongue.”

I was thinking that this girl might possibly be insane—bipolar or something—or into drugs or some darker thing. I was also thinking about evolution for some reason, how some guy a while ago had debunked the notion of natural selection as a gentle slope toward refinement in favor of this earthquake model—static eons punctuated by violent, singular shifts. I didn’t know if the theory had gone on to be supplanted by yet a third one, but I sensed in the air this afternoon a certain geologic trembling. “I’ve never cheated,” I said “on anyone.”

“What’s your name anyway?”

“Darius,” I fumbled; giving away my real name seemed unwise. My neighbor’s was the only one I could think of, though it came out more like Dare Eros.

“Sounds like the name of a band. Do you play? I think musicians are too hot!”

I wondered what she had to drop off at her place: her hands swung at her sides, empty.

“Look at that lady,” she said. “Did someone stub a cigar out on her face? Oh, wait, them too.” A pair of men in suits passed with identical smudges on their foreheads.

“There’s nothing like Ash Wednesday,” I said, “to make you feel like you’re among the Pod People.”

“The who? Hey, don’t you have to go back to work?”

I thought about this for a moment and said, quite to my own amazement, “I may have just quit.”

We kept to the sunlit stretches of sidewalk. From my periphery I noticed that every now and then Ginny would squint up at the sun, then over at me, and smile. We stopped into a public atrium and strolled among the tourists. There was a megalithic sculpture of a typewriter eraser—the pink wheel big as a jumbo jet’s, the brush bristles thick as PVC pipe. “We’d have to be the size of ants!” she exclaimed. Even though I’d come to work in this part of the city for the better part of a decade I let myself be led on this tour as if I’d never seen any of it before.

At a certain point, we found ourselves by a little roundabout at the southeastern edge of the park. Pigeons swarmed and fluttered around us, ferociously cooing. It stunk of horse manure. The facades of The Plaza, The Ritz-Carlton and The St. Pierre stood massively across the avenue, and under their awnings uniformed men wheeled luggage carts around and chirped for taxis. “You ever stay at one of those places?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Whenever I’m in town on business.”

Ginny sat down on a bench and tended to a shoe that had come wildly untied. A surge of wind blew across Central Park South, sending the pigeons aloft and all the hotels’ flags, the entire row of them, flapping like laundry on a line. When Ginny got up, the bottom half of her dress was wet. She didn’t seem to notice and I didn’t say anything.

She said, “You want to see the best view? Better than any loser’s going to find in his tour book?”

“Of the park?”

“I’ll show you.”

She guided me into Bergdorf’s. It was smaller than a typical department store, more intimate, and achieved a kind of art gallery hush. The displays seemed sparse, arbitrary. We browsed like newlyweds shopping for love-baubles to bestow upon one another. Moving among the wealthy Koreans, we pointed out things we liked and didn’t like, silently, picking up an item and running our hands over it: a purse, a sweater, a shoe. Ginny’s coat with its cavernous pockets must have sent up all kinds of red flags because I noticed we were being tailed by security.

We boarded an elevator and, as it was closing, a uniformed guard slipped in behind us.

Ginny caught my eye in the door’s smoky reflection and winked; then, looking at the security guy, said (to me or him, it wasn’t clear), “You strike me as a someone who’s enjoyed giving another man a blowjob.”
The guard’s eyes went to us, and then to his hands, which were folded over his groin.

“Let me say, though” she continued, “in all sincerity, I mean it as a compliment. Guys and guys is hot and hot, don’t you think?”

“You’re insane,” I said, looking up at the floor numbers.

“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Trying to keep the smile out of my voice and looking at the guard’s reflection, I said, “Sure. I’ve had my share of cock.” It was true, though. I’d never told anyone! “What about you?”

She said, “Women? I wish.”

We headed down a curving aisle with racks of satiny dresses. Great windows along the opposite wall blazed opaquely with sunlight. At the end of this aisle we found ourselves in a kind of foyer. Ginny disappeared through a swinging door plaqued “Ladies.”

I looked around at the baroque tchotchke housed in glass display cupboards. At a nearby register, a lady with bird-boned hands was polishing a group of crystal figurines collected in front of her.

Ginny poked her head out and motioned me forward. “All clear.”

The floor was carpeted. They had managed to take the bathroomness out of this place. There was a table beneath a large window. On it was a deep copper bowl surrounded by bath products and a vase of fresh cut flowers. It felt like an antechamber to some grander space—the facing door easily could have led to either a toilet stall or a chandeliered ballroom. Ginny, who was staring out the window, now turned to look at me fully, it seemed for the first time, in the face. Her eye contact was frank, intimate. “Well?”

I felt flushed, embarrassed—of my nervousness, of my desire. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, or how to respond. If there was some secret word or phrase that might initiate this sort of quasi-anonymous sex act in a public restroom, for the life of me I couldn’t think of what it might be. I was tensed, readying to close the distance; great eternities of silence passed between us. Finally, I said, “I don’t think I can do this.”

She looked puzzled. “This?”

Hearing this word repeated back to me broke the spell. This. Whatever writhings my libido had been churning beneath our small talk suddenly went still. For one, she couldn’t have been a day over fifteen. Was she a runaway? It seemed clear to me now that she was. And if so, was it my duty now to shepherd her back to her parents? Further, I recognized that she shared none of the fantasies I’d had of where this afternoon was headed—that “this,” so freighted for me with sex and betrayal and everything else, on her lips, was all but a foreign word.

Ginny said, “I know it would be cooler to be like, ‘I discovered this’ but to be honest with you, I read about it in Time Out.” I followed her gaze out the window. “Isn’t it rad, though?”

The park lay before us as a camouflage blanket—wooly trees and quilted patches of lawn. A stitch of slowly moving traffic trimmed its borders. I could see the spot where we’d stopped to tie Ginny’s shoe. From up here, the pigeons were a single, dense shadow that every few seconds exploded then swept itself back together. The view revealed the city, breathing, in a way that could only be observed from an eighth-story window—high enough to see the greater swell, the pulse a crowd will make with a changing traffic light, but not so high that you couldn’t pick out what color hat someone happened to be wearing.
Although at the time, standing there, all I could think of to say was,

“Oh.”

Which was about the time security came barging in.

A guy with a walrus mustache said to me, “You need to leave.” He wore a badge on a chain around his neck. “Ma’am, I’ll need to have a word with you if you don’t mind.”

I backed out. My body was humming.

The woman by the register eyed me primly, and the guard from the elevator stood nearby, hands still folded over his groin. I watched the Ladies’ Room door for a good two minutes before realizing there was something serious going on inside. I hovered on the edge of going back in until some lady came by and pushed open the door.

“You have no right,” came Ginny’s voice.

I heard the guy with the badge say to the woman who’d just entered, “I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s a situation here.” Ginny said, “Why don’t you search her pockets? You know this is totally, totally illegal and I’m not going to stand here, you know? Fine, get the cops! I know my rights!”

This was my cue.

I re-traced my way through the store, the uniformed guard (“Sir, we need you to stay where you are!”) on my heels, and back onto the street, the broad pale pavement of Fifth Avenue firm and flat before me. I walked a few blocks, allowing the confluence of bodies to direct me—past the expensive chain boutiques and amusement-park stores—downtown. Tourists were wearing their ash marks ironically, self-consciously, as though they were sampling a curious local custom. This was the year of ashes, it seemed. It was in our lungs, on storefront awnings, on the foreheads of our visitors. They came by the thousands to Lower Manhattan and stared into the mile square pit under which the subways wouldn’t run. It was a new, morbid sort of tourism. I passed the statue of Atlas by Rockefeller Center. I’d never noticed before that the world he held on his back was really only a sketch, a few curved bands describing a sphere. I looked through it at the stormhead rolling in over the tops of the buildings. I took out my hat and gloves.

People flocked the steps of St. Patty’s. I entered an atmosphere of festive chattering and flash-popping. Entire clans of Italian tourists roamed the aisles and transepts, carrying on full-volume, matching up the salient details of the place to their open guidebooks. Wasn’t this supposed to be a solemn day? As if in confirmation, a bishop, who I could only make out as a shimmering scrap of scarlet and ivory, boomed through a loudspeaker above my head, “We wear this mark as a symbol of our renunciation to thee, Lord, and in recognition of thy sacrifice. Please rise to receive the sacrament.”

A rumble that I could feel in my chest bore the crowd to its feet. I was in the main vessel now, and found myself trapped in on either side. Feeling somewhat desperate I shuffled—step by intermittent step—altar-ward, racking my brain to recover some lost train of thought or other. It seemed as though I’d understood everything perfectly yesterday and today, for the life of me, that understanding was gone.

I sat inside my neighbor’s empty apartment awhile. Empty isn’t the word, perhaps. There were remnants. A mug on the counter, a sponge in the sink. Bare hooks, like idle flies, dotted the walls. A plaid couch was situated off-center of the room, as if someone had decided mid-haul to just leave the damn thing. I lay sprawled across its pebbly surface, nursing a beer and listening to a paint-splattered radio blare indeterminate music. There were empty boxes and crumpled wads of months-old newspaper. I had, I think, been holding onto the romantic notion that I was going to find Darius “Mies” Mieskowicz’s face one day among the Xerox faces of the dead, posted to a bus shelter, or a chain link fence—age 33, Tower One, 98th floor—but it seemed that he’d found a somewhat mundaner fortune. Darius had simply moved out. It was the kind of thing that happened every day to people, disappearing from one part of the city and showing up in another.

There was a noise in the hallway.

I got up to investigate. Through the peephole I caught a fisheye view of the second-floor landing—at the far end of which stood Jenny, her back to me, ringing the doorbell to my apartment.

Maybe, I thought, it was time for me to disappear as well.

Chris Hacker graduated from the Columbia University’s MFA program in
creative writing. He lives in Connecticut and working on a novel.