Perhaps to Michael, walking, hands buried in his coat pockets, beside me, it was like walking not through a city but a shrouded warehouse, an afternoon spent in some vast checking room with all the stuff in it, dusty and tagged, that nobody was ever going to come to claim again. I could see he might feel that. Christ: what was I in, the resurrection business? But I wanted his interest. I wanted him to see something, not a peeling tenement so much as a continuity, a thing that had been there and must, must have left a deposit of some sort. A sediment, a soil. Across Broadway. Through the park. Blocks of windowed concrete with spy-eyes in the vestibules. Slow smoke in the air. A time of conviction followed by a time of war. A time of war followed by a time of peace. A time of peace followed by a time of. Ah, there was the rub. Ambiguous moment. In which we sought ourselves. Fleeing down the bright aisles of spotless supermarkets. On our knees in attitudes of anguished prayer in the used-car lots. Standing with clouded eyes at the teller’s window trying to remember what it was we had come to put in the bank. I had paid for the boy’s attention. His contemporary ear. His, though bought, empathy. Walking, I’d led him through a ghost’s history. From economic cataclysm (here: the closed bank, the deprived winter) to military upheaval (December 7th and myself having eggs at that one-arm joint and the radio over the electric toaster that Sunday morning) and on to political ambiguity (myself the example, history concentrated in me, in my slightly receding hairline, in my dentures, in the furtive arch-supports of my shoes). Changes rung on le grand clochard. We were walking down Christopher Street.

And stopped. And stared up again. A summer’s afternoon. What was her name? In the small rear bedroom twelve dollars a month. Lying there on Guk’s bed nude the professor’s wife. And walking in absolutely without a stitch mind you just trying with the thermometer up in the nineties that day to get a breath of air. And standing there that frozen moment having my shirt sticking to me her breasts large dark-nippled the tuft triangular dark my coming in so abruptly had surprised beyond even hiding going to her not a word we didn’t say a word she’d just run away her marriage was breaking up she was in love with Frank he was an engineer a civil engineer and the Professor looking for her and Guk looking for Frank she had a yarn store that was it thirty years ago she sold yarn right up there that house Christopher Street one summer’s afternoon and she didn’t say a word I didn’t either a fan going in the room I didn’t know her name she didn’t ask mine large breasts dark-nippled I just walked to her sat down on the bed was it a bed a davenport with a sheet thrown over it a sheet rumpled by her in her sleep looking at me too exhausted by the heat by the running away by all the emotion I never did understand sat down bent down not a word kissed the dark nipple put my hand on the dark tuft she was leaving the Professor she was in love with Frank Guk did nothing but cry a summer afternoon it was so hot and I came in she’d been asleep not a word the heat God the heat thirty years ago up there that window to the right that was my bedroom twelve dollars a month a couple of years before the war before I went into the army before I got divorced before I got married again before I had money before the money stopped before I crawled out of the bush and away from the window and ran.