—You and I, we’re the same. We know what we want, Grey. To give love, to feel love. Girls, boys, it’s all the same. We want to love them, as they need to be loved. Do you want it, Grey? Do you want to feel that again?

He did. He knew it then.

—Yes. That’s what I want.

I need to go home, Grey. I want to take you with me, to show you.

Grey saw it again, in his mind’s eye, rising up around him: the great city, New York. All around him, humming, buzzing, its energies passing through each stone and brick, following unseen lines of connectedness into the soles of his feet. It was dark, and he felt the darkness as something wonderful, something he belonged to. It flowed into him, down his throat and into his lungs, a great, easeful drowning. He was everywhere and nowhere all at once, moving not over the landscape but through it, into and out of it, breathing the dark city that was also breathing him.

Then he saw her. There she was. A girl. She was alone, walking the path between the school buildings—a dormitory of laughing students; a library of quiet hallways, its wide windows fogged by frost; an empty office where a lone cleaning woman, listening to Motown on headphones, bent to rinse her mop in a wheeled bucket. He knew it all, he could hear the laughter and the sounds of quiet studying and count the books on the shelves, he could hear the words of the song as the woman with the bucket hummed along, whenever you’re near … uh-uh … I hear a symphony—and the girl, ahead on the pathway, her solitary figure shimmering, pulsing with life. She was walking straight toward him, her head tipped against the wind, her shoulders lifted in a delicate hunch beneath her heavy coat to tell him she was holding something in her arms. The girl, hurrying home. So alone. She had stayed out late, studying the words of the book she held to her chest, and now she was afraid. Grey knew he had something to tell her, before she slipped away. You like this, is that what you like, I’ll show you. He was lifting, he was rising up, he was falling down upon her—

Love her, Grey. Take her.

Then he was ill. He rocked forward in his chair and in a single spasm released the contents of his stomach onto the floor: the soup and salad, the pickled beets, the mashies and the ham. His head was between his knees; a long string of spittle was swinging from his lips.

What the hell. What the goddamn.