A few hours later I’m on the street. It isn’t much better. I don’t feel liberated. I don’t treasure my freedom. Everywhere I go I feel as if I’m pulling a sadness-drogue behind me.

The next day I call up Po-Mo, but he’s got nothing for me, not even a letter of recommendation. Not even a phone call on my behalf. On a lark I go see Invigilator and Steadfast but they don’t do anything but laugh. I widen the search nationally, then internationally, but nothing comes up even when I offer to pulse for low-rent operations that have never had a pulse anywhere on-site. I offer uni prices, sub-uni prices, to no avail. That night when I see my mug shot on the Retention Sciences Today Web site, I realize that my infamy is global.

That was fast.

I don’t bother tidying up my apartment or buying new clothes. I sit, sleep, eat on shredded furniture. I wear clothes cut into streamers. I retrieve Chester Wellington III from the floor, wipe the blood off his hat, and set him up on top of the fridge in a position of honor.

“You win,” I tell him.

I fail to dispose of the bra. It still has a ghost charge of female electricity in it. It still crackles with Charlie. I have to leave it where it lies, slain-looking, and avoid that spot like a blight, a zone of alienation in silk and lace.

That night I write Kong a note. Sorry about what happened, I say. I didn’t mean for it to happen like that. I didn’t tell the cops anything about you. You’re clean. I’m including here an expression of apology. It’s sincere. It’s legit. It’s all yours.

I enclose the title to my boat and mail the letter to Kong care of the Foxhole.

The “Polecat” story hits hard71 and for a few weeks everywhere I go I’m followed by meerkatty packs of guys with telephoto lenses. I don’t fight them. They want a zoom-close look at grief? They got it. They hound me with questions— everyone wants to hear the story of the sad-sack pulse who loved the thief who stole his whole life—but that I don’t give them. I don’t talk to them. If I can help it, I don’t talk to anyone.

It doesn’t prevent the unchecked dissemination of the image of my face, however. Bedizened with bruises and blood, extinguished by sadness, it stares back at me from TVs in Rope,72 the windows of PC Richard, even on that little bus-stop screen in front of Neergaard on the B63 line. It has more hits online than that actor who is supposed to look like me. Printed in the crumpled and smudgy ink of the Daily News and Post, it tumbleweeds in the gutters on DeKalb and Myrtle.