It’s too early to walk the three blocks to the store, a place where I am known not so much for being a buyer or a browser of books (though I have been both) but for being an old acquaintance of the person most often there tending the tidy shelves and the unruly piles—an acquaintance from a time past, when drugs and love intersected in a clear and particular way in my life, the temporary sway of one leading regularly to the temporary sway of the other via the temporary sway of highly curated, multiply participatory sex.

The bookstore clerk—who was not yet a bookstore clerk but a barkeep—was the director of, and sometimes a participant-observer in, these sessions, connecting the desires of others, instructing, watching, assisting when assistance was needed. The sessions had ended when she disappeared without warning—someone thought Florida, which is where I pictured her for years, when I didn’t picture her dead in a gutter somewhere, in the oversize wool sweater her aunt had sent from Peru, also wearing her signature cherry lip-stick, her signature lips.

Twelve years later, she showed up at the bookstore, or rather I showed up at the bookstore to find her unaccountably there, and she slipped out from behind the counter to give me a kiss.

I make coffee and shower.

To get dressed without being visible from the playground, the bodega, or the café, I have to position myself behind the door that connects the kitchen to the room where I sleep. I finish the coffee, now cold, and walk the three blocks, arriving just as the grate is being lifted. My clerk isn’t there—it’s the other clerk, the one with the forgettable name and the memorable hands. Leaning across the piles of books on the counter, the other clerk passes me a small package wrapped in newspaper and twine. “Someone likes you,” they declare, deadpan, sitting back down.

At the corner café, I tear open the package. S has written no note to accompany the vintage paperback, which is yellowed and falling apart, tiny shards of brittle paper expelling themselves from its guts and onto my lap. I turn to the first page and read its opening sentence: “Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.” I read its last sentence: “In the morning, he was always very tender toward himself, his head full of dreams, and broad daylight, cold water, the coarse bristles of the brush made him suffer brutal injustices.”

I can’t tell how interested I am in knowing what occurs between the two sentences. I close the book. On the cover, a detail from a painting of a woman draped in a blue sheet, her nails and lips red, eyes closed in solipsistic pleasure, or total disinterest, or sleep.