ALTHOUGH THE PLACE was only a few blocks away from her apartment, Leora only happened to go there on an assignment related to work. There had been a wire story entitled “Missing Link Found in New York Shop,” and her magazine sent her to check it out. It seemed that recently, a mysterious man had made a sale to the owner of a curio shop on Amsterdam Avenue. The man, a mere messenger disposing of a deceased collector’s estate, gave no indication that his wares—largely a series of human and animal bones—were anything out of the ordinary, and the store kept few records of the materials’ source. But when a scientist from the nearby Museum of Natural History stopped inside while shopping for a friend’s birthday gift, he noticed that one of the skulls on the store’s shelves, a generic-looking extinct primate skull to the casual observer, did not fit into any of the extant categories of evolutionary man.

Without actually buying the skull, which lay far beyond his price range, the man brought a team of paleobiologists to the store. The ensuing examination confirmed his suspicions. The skull did not match that of any existing animal, or even any known extinct one. It resembled, in various ways, both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, had some traits of Java man and others of Peking man and others of Neanderthal man, but it wasn’t any one thing or the other—it was somewhere, disturbingly, in between. The skull was the only trace of a vast period in human history, or human prehistory, or prehuman prehistory, the sole remains of a lost fifty thousand years, and it had randomly turned up in New York. Its owner, who probably had never had a name in his lifetime—probably one of the last people in prehuman prehistory to have no name whatsoever—was labeled “Amsterdam Avenue man.” Or, for short, the missing link.

The store where the skull had appeared was called “Random Accessories.” With a name like that, Leora felt, it had no excuse not to be called “Random Access” or, better yet, “Random Excess.” Store names like “Random Accessories” were the sort of thing Leora found insulting in daily life. She had always wanted, for instance, to open a maternity shop for the sole purpose of naming it “Great Expectations.” Instead she found herself forced to walk through a city filled with maternity stores with names like “Expecting Great Things.” A maze of unfulfilled possibilities and missed opportunities catalogued by street number.