I have a minute now my friends are finally courteously (slowly, then suddenly all too quickly) dead. All of it remembers like some inlander’s tale of a great luxury liner that sank. It fell asleep, and settled on the bottom, and only a few of us woke up in time, got out.

Now, lucky, later, we are allowed to dive back down among the wreckage, gathering precious evidence. Here, a long name on one piece of paint, the magic beans—retrieved. I finally get to spill them.

Unfair, my friends are dead. Unfair, I’m left alive. And yet, here’s what’s miraculous:

We have only just begun to know each other!

Oh, but we thought we were truly something.

Boy, but I have really meant to get to this.

BEFORE
The Thrust of the Launch

No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

—E. B. WHITE, “Here Is New York”

here are just three days in the history of Manhattan: the day you first see it, the day you get to move there, and the day you, far smarter, much less intact, still find the strength to leave.

Seeking my fortune, I swept into the city two years before the ultimate careerist, a disease, did.

The Pastoral Symphony offered shepherds an idyll, quickly followed by a storm. I arrived just in time to witness the exuberant peasant dance, midglade, midtown. I felt those first fat playful droplets cool the dancers before lightning struck us. With malice aforethought and damn good aim.

For the next decade and more, I somehow kept myself afloat on a pure stone island overstocked with jesters royal, too many contenders for King, and a whole of lot of queens. I founded my own handhold on this piece of castle rock surrounded by moat. With friends’ help, no thanks to centrifugal force, I clung there all those years and for dear life.

Everybody knows NYC is a cliff dwellers’, mud daubers’ generative and wondrous mess. Weaklings don’t last long here. This town is reserved for what Strindberg called “the Stronger.”

I unzipped both plaid canvas bags when I, newly into address book number seven, was thirty-three. I’d planned on becoming a New Yorker since the age of eight. You must hail from rusticated eastern North Carolina—its topography flat as a table—to understand how very much the erect and steely city truly means. Being so upright, it is visible, self-reflective, from a long way off. From the chem swamps of stinky reedy New Jersey. A citadel for hopefuls, it looks mainly at its own profiles in the cubistic caverns of sky-like mirror it provides itself. Open compacts everywhere.