My dentist leaned over me: the drill burred in my helpless mouth. After fifty, he said, and the drill burred, it’s all downhill.

The album on the writing desk at the hotel testified to what I’d been. What I’d been what things had been what I was now what things had become. I walked. In a music shop I stared at the gaudy cover of an album of records. The title was French. “Voulez vous venir en surprise-party avec moi?” Did I? Was there one going on somewhere? Was that what I needed? I’d been discarded. They didn’t, as the man said, want me for duck soup. For refried beans. For stale tortillas. I walked on. Girls, as young as Aurora, were everywhere. I looked at the white eyelids; the fantastic clothes. There must be a rock, I thought, somewhere, on which they sit and sing. In the East River? With the slow wash of oil? Did the captains of the barges, over the scummed waters, plug their hairy ears? I took a bus downtown. And then walked. Here was a coffee house. Someone named Dayle was singing these evenings at something called The Blue Guitar. Miss Dayle was billed as “A Child of Hollow Times.” I assumed it was a tiny hamlet not far from Dogpatch. I was in the hat district now. The buildings old, the stores cluttered with sample boxes. I glanced up. A factory. The Ideal Leather Corporation. Occupying the first floor. Presses. Forms. A tubercular blue light. An old man in an undershirt a cigarette suspended from his mouth working at some machine. He trod. The machine hissed, the broad lips closed. A whistle. Somewhere. Past noon. The old man stopped the machine. His shirt and jacket hung nearby on a coathanger. He put them on. Slowly. He buttoned his shirt, slowly. He put on an overcoat. He put on a felt hat with a dark band. An old hat. He turned out the fluorescent tube over the motionless machine. He had not removed the cigarette suspended from his mouth. He disappeared. How many years had he worked for the Ideal Leather Corporation? Was it ideal? I walked on.

14

Coming up the stairs of the three-story brownstone, I heard a child crying. I thought it odd. I hadn’t expected Michael to be living in a place where there were children.

On the third floor, a girl appeared when I knocked at what seemed to be the only visible door and what seemed to be the top of the house. She had a great scar across her forehead.

I said: “I’m looking for Michael Bey.”

She pointed to a flight of stairs, uncarpeted, narrower than the stairs I had ascended. They seemed stairs that could only lead to the roof. But they led to a door. The door opened into a bare studio. The studio had a huge slanting skylight.

The boy looked as though he had slept badly and had just awakened. Isn’t he the most awful somnambulist? I remembered Aurora’s words. Nevertheless, it was almost noon.