Then he saw what was at the corner of Second and Forty-sixth and stopped after all—skidded to a halt, in fact, on the heels of his loafers. He stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, hands clenched, his breath rasping harshly in and out of his lungs, his hair falling back onto his forehead in sweaty clumps.

“No,” he almost whimpered. “No!” But his near-frantic negation did not change what he saw, which was nothing at all. There was nothing to see but a short board fence and a littered, weedy lot beyond it.

The building which had stood there had been demolished.

16

JAKE STOOD OUTSIDE THE fence without moving for almost two minutes, surveying the vacant lot with dull eyes. One corner of his mouth twitched randomly. He could feel his hope, his absolute certainty, draining out of him. The feeling which was replacing it was the deepest, bitterest despair he had ever known.

Just another false alarm, he thought when the shock had abated enough so he could think anything at all. Another false alarm, blind alley, dry well. Now the voices will start up again, and when they do, I think I’m going to start screaming. And that’s okay. Because I’m tired of toughing this thing out. I’m tired of going crazy. If this is what going crazy is like, then I just want to hurry up and get there so somebody will take me to the hospital and give me something that’ll knock me out. I give up. This is the end of the line—I’m through.

But the voices did not come back—at least, not yet. And as he began to think about what he was seeing, he realized that the lot wasn’t completely empty, after all. Standing in the middle of the trash-littered, weedy waste ground was a sign.

Coming soon? Maybe... but Jake had his doubts. The letters on the sign were faded and it was sagging a little. At least one graffiti artist, BANGO SKANK by name, had left his mark across the artist’s drawing of the Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums in bright blue spray-paint. Jake wondered if the project had been postponed or if it had maybe just gone belly-up. He remembered hearing his father talking on the telephone to his business advisor not two weeks ago, yelling at the man to stay away from any more condo investments. “I don’t care how good the tax-picture looks!” he’d nearly screamed (this was, so far as Jake could tell, his father’s normal tone of voice when discussing business matters—the coke in the desk drawer might have had something to do with that). “When they’re offering a goddamn TV set just so you’ll come down and look at a blueprint, something’s wrong!”

The board fence surrounding the lot was chin-high to Jake. It had been plastered with handbills—Olivia Newton-John at Radio City, a group called G. Gordon Liddy and the Grots at a club in the East Village, a film called War of the Zombies which had come and gone earlier that spring. NO TRESPASSING signs had also been nailed up at intervals along the fence, but most of them had been papered over by ambitious bill-posters. A little way farther along, another graffito had been spray-painted on the fence—this one in what had once undoubtedly been a bright red but which had now faded to the dusky pink of late-summer roses. Jake whispered the words aloud, his eyes wide and fascinated: