“I’m afraid it does. I don’t think he left the city, either. I think he moved a subway stop away, picked himself a new name, and checked into another furnished room. There’s something like half a million illegals in the five boroughs. He doesn’t have to be Houdini to hide where we’re not gonna find him.”

“You could get lucky.”

“Always a chance. I’ll check the morgue first, and then the airlines. We’ll stand the best chance if he’s dead or out of the country.” He laughed, and I asked what was so funny. “If he’s dead or out of the country,” he said, “he’s not gonna be a whole lot of good to us, is he?”

The train back to Manhattan was one of the worst, its interior vandalized beyond recognition. I sat in a corner and tried to fight off a wave of despair. My life was an ice floe that had broken up at sea, with the different chunks floating off in different directions. Nothing was ever going to come together, in this case or out of it. Everything was senseless, pointless, and hopeless.

Nobody’s going to buy me emeralds. Nobody’s going to give me babies. Nobody’s going to save my life.

All the good times are gone.

Eight million ways to die, and among them there’s a wide variety suitable for the do-it-yourselfer. For all that was wrong with the subways, they still did the job when you threw yourself in front of them. And the city has no end of bridges and high windows, and stores stay open twenty-four hours a day selling razor blades and clothesline and pills.

I had a .32 in my dresser drawer, and my hotel room window was far enough from the pavement to make death a certainty. But I’ve never tried that sort of thing, and I’ve somehow always known I never will. I’m either too scared or too stubborn, or perhaps my particular despair is never as unequivocal as I think it is. Something seems to keep me going.

Of course all bets were off if I drank. I’d heard a man at a meeting who told of coming out of a blackout on the Brooklyn Bridge. He was over the railing and he had one foot in space when he came to. He retrieved the foot, climbed back over the railing, and got the hell out of there.

Suppose he’d come to a second later, with both feet in the air.

If I drank I’d feel better.