I took a step backward. The guardsmen flanking the door took a step forward, twisting their clubs in their hands. I decided it would be better if I did not move anymore.

My guardsman bounded through the longhouse door. I shifted in my boots, sweating, and wondered if I might sprint back across the Borderline before the guards rallied to stop me. I did not trust myself to make it in time.

The door burst open and my guardsman emerged. He offered me an icy silver cup. A sensible man would have put bourbon in it, but it was filled with clean, pure Westside water.

“Please,” he said.

I drained the cup, and thanked him.

“Don’t thank me. That comes courtesy of Glen-Richard Van Alen.”

“I thought you were going to detain me.”

“For what? For coming to visit?”

“For being a stranger.”

“This, madam, this is not the Lower West.”

He looked hurt. Mumbling something cheerful, I made my escape.

Too many people clogged the streets. Not nearly as many as on the Eastside, but far more than I could stand. They lounged on their stoops, tended their gardens, sold trinkets from pushcarts, and mended clothes in the open air. No one drank beer, no one danced, and no one really laughed.

At the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twentieth Street, an abandoned apartment house paid tribute to the man who made this mawkish society possible: A massive canvas hung from the building’s cornice, wrapping around the street corner and dangling five stories to the ground. The banner showed Van Alen, sturdy as a grizzly bear, kneeling low to present a lit candle to a trio of grateful urchins. Behind them stretched the whole of the Upper West, from the Borderline to the heights of Manhattan, lit by Van Alen’s fires.

Across the street, a pubescent boy in long-outgrown shorts sneered at the painting from beneath a pitiful moustache. He hopped off the sidewalk, then back up, and then leapt forward and charged at the canvas. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to climb it or tear it down, but two guardsmen were on him before he could get a decent handhold. They yanked him off the canvas, sending ripples along its great surface, and threw him into the gutter. Two quick kicks blunted his anger, but the guardsmen weren’t finished. One raised his club over his head and was about to bring it down on the boy’s skull when I put myself in the way.

“Please don’t hurt him!” I cried, as helplessly as I could manage.

“You his mother?”

“He’s my baby brother. He’s harmless. Please.”

“He was trying to deface the artwork.”

“He’s troubled. He doesn’t understand. Please—just let me take him home.”