On the northwest corner, a pockmarked black man in ripped jeans is selling surgical masks out of a cardboard box. He is wearing one on top of his fro.

“Do you think there could be some kind of disease?” the driver asks Mike, nervously over the partition. “From the bomb?”

“It was a plane,” Mike says.

“Yes, you are right. Disease would be the worst, though. There is not a good health plan for taxi drivers.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Mike, though he does not.

His father had managed a hedge fund and there had always been plenty of money. Now it all went to him and Lyle. Mike could live well for the rest of his life—and health care wouldn’t be a problem. The only problem had been sorting it all out after the fire, but there were money guys who worked with his father, and they were OK. One accountant in particular, an old family friend, helped them sell the apartment on the Upper East Side, organized the money into trusts so they had enough every month, and invested the rest for whenever they might need or want it. The reservations Mike had about wealth died with his parents.

It is getting hotter in the backseat. Mike sneezes from the heat and the driver closes the partition.

“Excuse me,” they both say.

Mike’s phone rings. It’s Jane, but he can barely hear her voice and then the call dies. He wonders where she is. The number was her cell phone, so maybe she is on the way home. He tries to call her back.

NO NETWORK.

Traffic is moving again. As the light at Seventy-second Street turns back to red, one last cab tries to run through. It doesn’t make it and swerves to avoid hitting a crosstown bus. The bus horn blasts. The cab runs up onto the sidewalk, striking a thin, middle-aged man in running clothes. When Mike sees this, he thinks he hears the man’s legs crack, like a tree branch. The cab rams a pay phone and stops, smoking.

65

“You know, if that’s the only way he’s crazy that’s not that so bad,” Jane said.

They were in back their place, a dive off Second Avenue. It was a place that had served them in high school. Now that Mike had transferred to Columbia and they were together all the time, being here was sort of like high school again.

“Like some kind of fucked up time machine,” Mike said.

“Could be a lot less interesting,” she said.

Before Mike went to Asia, he had been on a kick about how they all had to live the most interesting lives they could. Their joke was that Lyle had become too interesting. Now she was mocking him, and he frowned at her.

“He’s not going to kill himself,” she said.