The man was giving her a cautious look, and Trudy Damascus suddenly felt tired. She had an idea this was a look she was going to get used to. The sign said WALK again, and the man who’d spoken to her started across, swinging his briefcase.

“Mister!”

He didn’t stop walking, but did look back over his shoulder.

“What used to be here, back when you used to stop by for acne treatments?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It was just a vacant lot behind a fence. I thought it would stop—that nice sound—when they built on the site, but it never did.”

He gained the far curb. Walked off up Second Avenue. Trudy stood where she was, lost in thought. I thought it would stop, but it never did.

“Now why would that be?” she asked, and turned to look more directly at 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza. The Black Tower. The humming was stronger now that she was concentrating on it. And sweeter. Not just one voice but many of them. Like a choir. Then it was gone. Disappeared as suddenly as the black woman had done the opposite.

No it didn’t, Trudy thought. I just lost the knack of hearing it, that’s all. If I stood here long enough, I bet it would come back. Boy, this is nuts. I’m nuts.

Did she believe that? The truth was that she did not. All at once the world seemed very thin to her, more an idea than an actual thing, and barely there at all. She had never felt less hard-headed in her life. What she felt was weak in her knees and sick to her stomach and on the verge of passing out.

FOUR

There was a little park on the other side of Second Avenue. In it was a fountain; nearby was a metal sculpture of a turtle, its shell gleaming wetly in the fountain’s spray. She cared nothing for fountains or sculptures, but there was also a bench.

WALK had come around again. Trudy tottered across Second Avenue, like a woman of eighty-three instead of thirty-eight, and sat down. She began to take long, slow breaths, and after three minutes or so felt a little better.

Beside the bench was a trash receptacle with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE stenciled on the side. Below this, in pink spray-paint, was an odd little graffito: See the TURTLE of enormous girth. Trudy saw the turtle, but didn’t think much of its girth; the sculpture was quite modest. She saw something else, as well: a copy of the New York Times, rolled up as she always rolled hers, if she wanted to keep it a little longer and happened to have a bag to stow it in. Of course there were probably at least a million copies of that day’s Times floating around Manhattan, but this one was hers. She knew it even before fishing it out of the litter basket and verifying what she knew by turning to the crossword, which she’d mostly completed over lunch, in her distinctive lilac-colored ink.