I said, curious now: “How long have you been away from home, Michael?” and as I asked the question I realized that perhaps the real answer was possibly from the moment of his birth. But he had apparently stayed awhile. “Ten years,” he said, so that made him sixteen when he’d actually left. It was either early enough or late enough, I wasn’t sure. I imagined his parents, wishing other things for him, had violently objected. Well: not exactly, he said. He hadn’t told them. He was sixteen, and one morning, in the spring, he’d left. Apparently, like that. No announcement. No tugging at the silver cord. No setting out with a father’s blessing or a father’s curse. He’d just, he said, casually, taken the subway downtown. An interborough goodbye. That night he’d slept in Grand Central Station. Marvelous flophouse. Just transient enough to please him. The next night, with a bit of money he’d won and saved in an essay contest at school, he’d moved into a furnished room. It wasn’t exactly on the Bowery: contiguous to it, he explained. And it wasn’t exactly a room he’d moved into either: say, a fruitcrate with fascinating wallpaper. He hadn’t even paused long enough, in his irrevocable departure, to take a pair of pajamas with him. He grinned at me.

“I was over the wall,” he said. “Next stop: Freedomsville.”

Well, he got into bed. Kee-rist. Freedomsville jumped. He got up, turned on the light again, the bed was loaded. Mattress rabbits: an army of them. Somebody’d blown reveille. He stood there, and he said to nothing in particular or everything in general: “Baby, it’s the bugs or the Bronx.” He found some string. He tied the feet of his pants and the cuffs of his shirt. Tight. Then he crawled back into the bed and joined the war. “All right,” he said, in the dark, to nothing in particular and everything in general, “bite, you little bastards, but I ain’t going home.” And didn’t. In the morning he heaved the mattress out of the window. Freedoms-ville.

Oh, he’d worked too. I musn’t think this (his accompanying me) was his first job. No, sirree. He’d earned his bread by the sweat of his whatcha-macallit. His whatchamacallit that sweated had been employed in the shipping room of a large, reputable book wholesaler. For an infinite, that is measured in terms of his boredom, period. Four months. But then, there was this sling he made.

“Sling?”

“You know: like a hood’s under-the-arm holster?”

I nodded.

Well: the manager (some acne’d bastard in the shipping room must have seen him and squealed) caught him. He was practically out of the door, too. He sighed. The book weighted in the sling had been so nicely concealed.

“What was the book?”

“Merlin the Enchanter.”

“Oh?”

“Beautiful edition.”

I frowned. Merlin the Enchanter? That sounded like something a bit weird to steal.

“Rimbaud read it,” he said. I was back in the hotel room. Being handed, again, like Pasternak’s laundry mark, some priceless item. Rimbaud read it.