He kept talking.

I had stopped listening years before.

I believed in the magic of the Westside. I had seen flowers bloom and die in an hour; I had heard the songs of birds known nowhere else on earth. That a woman might be stolen by the dark was no more peculiar, and yet, I could not believe Bruce’s story, because that would mean admitting that my father might have been right.

It did not matter what I thought. The pain on his face was real.

“After that, they moved me across the street,” he said. “Put me in with some other family, had taken in a bunch of kids whose parents were gone. They felt bad for me. Gave me the best bed—right by the window, so every day, minute I wake up, I could see that painting where my life used to be.”

“Have you a knife?”

“I’m a boy, ain’t I?”

I told him what to do. I returned to the street the way we had come, but he stayed behind. I was half a block away when I heard the unique sound of forty feet of canvas tumbling to the earth. The streets went silent, and guardsmen charged the scene to stop the crowd from trampling Van Alen’s great monument to himself. They tried to get into the building, but the fallen painting blocked their way. From the street, there was no sign of anyone on the roof.

“It just fell,” said an old woman selling flowers from a basket over her arm.

“Just one of those Westside things,” I said and walked on.

I loathe the Upper West, but it has certain luxuries in abundance. It has churches that haven’t been converted to saloons, and a few makeshift schools. There are chophouses above the Borderline, and gardens, and of course, there is the bazaar. There is also a library, and that is why I came.

Before it was converted for academic use, the Eighth Avenue free library was a boxing gymnasium, and the tang of sweaty feet clung to every book they had. The shelves were a mess, but the librarians, a stooped old couple with hair as soft and white as fresh cotton, knew the collection by heart.

“I’m looking for books on gloves,” I said. “Or leatherworking. Maybe one about corsets too, and general fashion history. But mostly, I need to know about gloves.”

They brought me what they had. The books were strange, disreputable academic treatises with half-finished indices and incoherent sourcing. At any reputable library, they would have been pulped, but they were the best the Westside had to offer, and they were far better than what I would find below the Borderline. An optimistic young teacher had tried to open a free library on the Lower West once. The shelves were ransacked within a week, and the would-be librarian was never seen again.