If he hadn’t put three guys in the hospital, there would have been no need to come out to California in the first place.

Six months back, he was still in New York, living in a rent-controlled place up in Yonkers, and pretty content with his life. He had a job on a new apartment building in Williamsburg, down by the water—part of this hipster-gentrification movement whereby what used to be riverfront industry was being slowly transformed into the kind of area where guys who wore little hats liked to buy coffee.

He worked five days on and two off, and enjoyed the predictability of it. The past fifteen years, he’d been all over the world and never really experienced what might be considered a normal routine—at least not for any extended period. So, the anodyne was actually a novelty. He liked taking the bus down through Harlem in the morning, the streets looking bruised and glum, and then the 6 Train to Union Square and the short ride across to Brooklyn on the L, the train wild-fast on that short stretch beneath the river and the pressure so great it made his ears pop.

The other guys on the job called him The Librarian. Vincent understood this as a reproach for his break-time habit. What he liked about this new life—normal life—was he could be out in the world and not be hyper-vigilant. Relaxation didn’t seem to attract any kind of existential risk, and so he’d set himself the task of getting through Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books. His colleagues seemed to regard this as some kind of show of elitism—or at least a grab at the bottom rung of the white-collar ladder. The problem was, the principal theme of job-talk seemed to be gross insults, generally directed toward wives or girlfriends or mothers, and typically sexual in nature. Vincent decided he was better off with Phil.

If he’d had no friends, he could have avoided trouble completely. But there were a few people on the job he got along with, one of whom was this guy Billy Ellis, who lived only a few blocks up from him in Yonkers. Vincent had been going in his front door one evening and heard a shout of, ‘Librarian!’—turned around and there was Billy riding past in the back of an old Plymouth, grin on his face and a finger aimed at Vincent through the open window.