“Down the stairs.” He opened the trapdoor that led down into the building, and he told me his story as we climbed. “I lived in this building my whole life, me and Ma. 3B, right by the fire escape. It was a good building. Even after ’14, it was mostly full, and people were friendly. But then, they started dropping off. Knock on Mrs. Richards’s door, and it just swings open, and the apartment’s bare. Mr. Goodes goes out for midnight Mass, and he never comes back. Ma and me, we laughed it off, and we kept laughing until we’re the only people here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was a story I’d heard before. That didn’t make it any easier to take.

The hallway stank of mold, and rotten food, and worse. We went down a flight of stairs, and he swung open the door to the apartment that had been his home. Creeping vines had come in from outside, shattering the window and taking over the parlor. Brown light filtered through the canvas outside, and I sensed the presence of countless bugs and vermin in the walls and under the floors. By the way he ran his hand along the sagging wallpaper, I could tell it had once been a fine home.

“One night Ma asks me, put the kettle on and fix her tea. She loves tea. So I fill the kettle up in that week’s barrel of water, courtesy of Glen-Richard Van Alen, and I light the fire, and my match hasn’t even gone out when I hear her yell. It’s my name—Bruce. She’s yelling my name. And she only gets out half of it, just ‘Bru—’ before she cuts off. I drop the kettle, and I get back in here, and there ain’t nothing but the night outside and nobody in that chair. She got taken.”

“By who?”

“I told you. By the night.”

Taken by the night. Definitely a story I’d heard before.

The last time I saw my father smile, I assumed he was drunk on Boulton’s Rye. He was, of course, but it was more than that. He told me he had found the breakthrough he’d been looking for: the grand universal theory that tied every tragedy the Westside had ever suffered into one neat, awful bow. It would have been perfect, had it made any sense.

“The night is hungry,” he said, glass loose in his left hand, so tilted that with every word, he spilled a little liquor on the carpet. “The Westside . . . it’s killing us, Gilda. Every one of us, breath by breath. It’s nothing but the night.”

“I’m going to bed,” I said. “You are too.”

“I have notes, I have to get this down. If I could get this to the mayor—no! To the press. I could heal this city, Gilda. I could save so many lives.”