The asphalt showed off its grit, trash rising and floating. The water showed off its glitter. Water shimmered and shuddered in puddles. Water flowed toward sewer gratings. Water splashed as tires drove through puddles. Imagine if blood was drained of its color and ran clear and took its character from all the things that it touched as it flowed through the night.

—

We went up Flatbush.

Junior’s on the left. LIU on the right, in the building that used to be the Brooklyn Paramount, where Alan Freed staged his rock ‘n’ roll shows: Chuck Berry, Frankie Avalon, Jackie Wilson, Bobby Rydell, Santo & Johnny, The Elegants, The Royal Teens, Duane Eddy, The Cleftones, King Curtis, The Del Vikings.

An easy uphill slope, past the corner of Myrtle Avenue, where there used to be an el, then onto the upper level of the Manhattan Bridge. There was nothing to block the wind. It came harder, battering the windows with rain, the wipers, whop, whop, whop, one of them with a little whine as it dragged on the glass. It was hard to see the cars in front of us. No matter. We were on the bridge, nowhere to go but straight. Once we were off it, in a landscape ruled by traffic lights and the rules randomly and constantly disrupted by vehicles double parking, trying to make turns, and maneuvering around each other, following was going to become difficult. It was time to think. Lift the game out of mere physical reality, up into the realm of thought. Go from the movement of a machine into a construct of the mind that dictated it. An obscenely fancy way to say guess where they’re going. Yet that’s how the figuring felt, as if I were lifting that small part of the pattern they had already created, extending it into the pattern they were going to create, and seeing it as if it already existed, as if the car would be driven by predestination, going where it must and where I must follow.

They took that first early exit, on to Chrystie Street. They went straight and made the light where Chrystie ended, at East Houston. We did not. The cabbie turned to me. I said, “Left when we get the light. Try to catch them. If you can’t, I have a bet with myself where they’re going.”

“I was hoping for a fare to JFK,” he said.

“Bullshit, you would have been lucky to get a couple of hipsters going fifteen blocks to Bed-Stuy.”

“Or even LaGuardia,” he said. “Everybody wants to fly somewhere.” I passed a twenty up to the front. He said, “OK.”

We got the light. He pushed it as hard as a sensible man would on a rainy night in Manhattan. We spotted a big black Lincoln sedan. He did his best to catch it. We didn’t quite make it.

“We’ll go north on Sixth,” I said.