“Max is long gone,” the waiter said. “The place has been alterated three times.”

So there it was, alterated. I had the word. In my absence, in my exile, when I too was long gone, the place, of infinite extension, the remembered place, had been alterated. At least three times. Into what? These fiercer lights? This incredible roundness? These agonized excavations? These juvenescent policemen? I ate my breakfast and went out of the delicatessen.

I stood on a corner. Hands deep in my coat pockets. They were razing an old theatre. The wind blew. I watched the traffic. The great trucks. The delivery vans. Huge-wheeled. General Air Conditioning went by. Heineken Holland’s Proud Brew went by. Braked. Stopped. Waited. Shifted into grinding gear. Rolled. Gross & Co. went by. Brunckhorst’s Boar’s Head Brand Provisions went by. Olin’s Rent-A-Truck went by. Braked. Stopped. Waited. Shifted into grinding gear. Rolled. Krome-coat Brand Cast Coated Paper went by. K. Masucci Bros. went by.

What would they erect when the old theatre was gone, iron-balled into yesterday? Would it be triangular? Hexagonal? Would it spiral, thrust, vault, leap, would it pierce, finally, the smoggy orifice? Transfix from beneath a straddling heaven? I began to walk again.

The four Negroes were in a doorway. The sky had darkened. It was now late in the afternoon and it had turned colder. The four Negroes in the doorway were shivering and stomping their feet. They were standing in the doorway like a musical quartet. The two shorter ones in front and the two taller ones behind them. They all wore long black overcoats that were frayed. The overcoats had frayed velvet collars and were turned up. I leaned into the wind. I had walked all afternoon and I was going back to the hotel. As I got closer to the Negroes in the doorway I heard one of the taller ones in the quartet call softly: “Come here, Lulu.” I was passing them now. The wind swept bitterly around the corner. Now one of the short ones called: “Come here, Lulu baby.” I went around the corner. It was going to snow.

6

But it did not snow. It would snow later. New York was going to be buried in snow and it would be in the buried city that I would make love to Aurora. In the whiteness. In the white silence. Now the wind died and it did not snow. I read the weather reports carefully in the late paper. The sun would rise at 7:05. It would set at 4:29 p.m. The following day the sun would rise at 7:06. It was the only unequivocal thing in the paper. We were in the last quarter of the new moon. Twelve inches of snow had already fallen at West Yellowstone in Montana. Owyhee, in northeast Nevada, had had six inches of snow. The nation was experiencing, along with the wars, the scandals and the crimes, coastal rains and mountain snow. Here, outside the hotel window, a gray drizzle fell.