The city floated, half-submerged in a dark sea of mist. Far below, the lustrous skyscrapers hung a corona around the clouds. Saint Elmo’s fire flickered and danced along the wingtips of the endlessly circling plane. And then, with a deafening death rattle, the craft staggered, lost altitude, crashed blindly into the clouds, emerged in a gastric-lurching dive, and dropped its tires and passengers sighing with relief on the rain-slick runway. Immediately the passengers went into a self-important dance con brio, standing in the aisles (ignoring the directives of the stewardess), pulling on jackets and children, pulling down carry-ons, as if they hadn’t been scared witless within their seat belts not more than a minute ago.

The rain had stopped. Steam rose from the still-wet tarmac like ectoplasm. People with the gait of androids scurried along an unpleasantly moist tunnel. At the end of the ramp were a cluster of men, each with a hand-painted sign hanging from a necklace of string like a blind man’s pectoral. The man with my name on his chest touched a knuckle to his soiled chauffeur’s cap and ran interference for me, blindsiding everybody in his inflexible impulsion through the terminal. A stretch limo awaited us, a long gray coffin.

Grady had arranged everything, including an advance on my salary toward the purchase of New York summer regimentals—a seersucker suit, a few button-down shirts, a couple of ties—and the loan of a posh company flat usually reserved for visiting VIPs, not that I qualified, and only until I could find a place of my own.

Our relationship, of protégé to patron, was a bit unusual. He never tried to teach me anything; if anything he was indifferent to my progress. My days were undercrowded because his demands were minimal. I churned up obits for the living or lavished hosannas on the Calvary Construction Co., a spin-off of RAT, whose uplift had become my province, and shoveled my harvest of hype to Grady, but the totality of his unconcern led me to suspect that he never read it. And yet, contradictorily, in our few encounters, I felt he had great plans for me. Or maybe the feeling was no more than wishful on my part; I wanted his attention. Christ, I needed the attention of somebody.

So I’d zero in on my Old Man. Once, when I was about five, when he took me to the circus. And once, on a crowded city street somewhere, when he took my hand.