Finally, one of the guards in a room with Warhols walked up to me. He had these kind eyes, and I could tell he didn’t want to fuck with me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I just wanted to see the shitty fucking paintings,” I said, finally honest. “Isn’t that what they’re there for?”

“You smell,” he said to me quietly, as if he was trying to spare my feelings. I knew I smelled bad. I’d been on the road for weeks, no shower, no bed, no change of clothes. “You smell and you’re disturbing the other patrons. Please just leave.”

I’m not sure why, but I got tears in my eyes. I think it was the way he lowered his voice, like he didn’t want to embarrass me. I didn’t want him to see that I was crying, so I started making a scene.

“What the fuck are you?” I asked. “The fucking patron saint of odor? Fuck you, motherfucker!”

I ended up getting thrown out. Like, literally. They said that I was lucky they didn’t call the cops.

Pittsburgh. Whatever.

So back in New York, looking at The Met, seeing all those guards, I waved for José and Sebastian to cross the street.

“This isn’t the right place for us,” I said. “We’ll try somewhere else.”

2 We kept walking.

“What about Ellis Island?” Sebastian asked. “And the Statue of Liberty? I’ve never seen those.”

“How would we get there?” José said, somewhat derisively. “We’re going to have a hard enough time getting to Brooklyn with all the bridges down. Should we swim to Ellis Island?”

“I don’t know,” Sebastian said. “It was just an idea.”

“We’ll find somewhere cool,” I said. “That whole city is ours now, right? There’s got to be some place we want to see that we’ve never seen before.”

We walked downtown with lighter steps. We were laughing and joking, and even José who’s normally such a miserable jack-off slowed down and walked and joked with us. The destroyed landscape had nothing on us. I hadn’t felt this way since that night that we were goofing off and Lux disappeared.

As soon as I thought of her I stopped laughing. What if she was in one of those awful hospitals where people would call her sir and treat her like a man because she’d never had the money to do anything besides take hormones? I’ve heard of places like that, she’d been in one before. They had taken her to New Jersey, I was pretty sure. What if she was in some awful situation right now and here I was laughing and joking?