5

When I’d taken over the lease of the floor below me, Claire and I were still together, though I didn’t understand then that our days were so severely numbered. We’d hoped to make it her floor, move her in more completely so she’d have every bit the space I had. Her studio would be here: we could both be done with Brooklyn and Queens. It had come open when the Becker family, the previous residents, got themselves violently evicted. Their stuff ended up all over the street, and the case against them had been made on the grounds of mild delinquency. That was part of it, anyway. Claire and I had also placed calls to the landlord, Mr. Kiver, and eventually, with his support, to the police, about chronic noise: on the one hand, the three or four angry mongrels crying below night and day—the family kept dogs in place of a security system; and, on the other, the televisions and radios that would play all day at remarkable volumes, which muffled the whimpers and grunts of children being whipped for their own good. The Beckers believed in the belt, even though they were black, which to my mind ought to have given them second thoughts about its virtues.

Now, without my job at the Carrington or any gallery sales, I really didn’t have the funds to carry this extra floor we’d snapped up in a moment of delusion, when we thought it might keep us together. Claire left only six weeks after I’d signed for it for the year, insisting she could help me find someone to move in, but I told her no, I didn’t want anyone else there: certainly no-one she’d hand-picked. I hadn’t even managed to enter the floor since the eviction, so it remained in a state of disarray and decay, the state in which it’d been when the Beckers were removed. Kiver ordinarily would have cleaned it up to find a renter if I hadn’t rushed in with a pre-emptive offer. I felt bad about it all, of course—I mean the role I played in the Beckers’ fate—but I really believed it was going to fulfill a fantasy of domestic bliss for us, the one they themselves couldn’t possibly live out. Neither could we, apparently. Now I didn’t need the space; I needed the money.

A few days after my meeting with Whent, a check arrived in the mail, though it was much smaller than I was counting on and it wasn’t from Whent at all. Karen had sent it. Surprisingly, she and Rick hadn’t minded the Joy Division rough I’d given them in the intervening days, even though I’d left it in precisely the same state as on the morning I saw Whent. Karen probably suspected I’d done it—erased most of the thing, I mean, down to a stage with no actors, and nearly no props—on a lark. That sort of thing certainly wasn’t beneath me, she was right about that; but as it happens, it wasn’t true, not this time.

Ian Curtis erased himself, didn’t he, taking the band back, with one swipe—was it by knife, or some other way?—to the beginning, or before that, even, to an Old Order. Karen deadpanned as much in brilliant blue, her short upright strokes resembling type more than handwriting, extraordinarily legible even with the peculiarly small x-heights; you could read it, as I did, standing up while it lay on the couch cushion beneath me, this inscribed Smythson card I’d tossed to the side so that I might fondle this serviceable but hardly extravagant check. Smythson—she could be sentimental about a staple luxury like this, when in fact the cards Cosquer printed these days were better, materially and typographically. They were in fact set with fonts she and the team designed in-house. But that watermark, I could still hear her say.

Karen liked to reach me this way, through handwritten notes sent via post, though I never once responded in kind, always switching our correspondence over to some simpler or more common medium, telephone or text or email. Her next communiqué, whenever it could wait, would arrive again by post. It’s the same reason she insisted on paper checks, even though I’d been working with her long enough to have justified the arrangement of some simpler, electronic means of payment. Really she was teasing me. She knew I despised nostalgists who clung to print; that I thought it was, at best, the wrong reason for the right act. She liked to play with the idea that she was among nostalgia’s casualties, banking on the intimacy of our friendship to give the lie to this.

As for my redacted version of the band photo, clearly there was something right in it. Rick thought so, too, she wrote. They’d sent my sketch to the band’s management so the remaining members could consider it. Initial signs suggested that it would go through, perhaps with a little tinkering. Hence the advance. The reverse of the card had more for me: it would be nice if I came by the studio to talk over projects, ongoing and future. And actually, did I know that someone had phoned in specifically about my work for Cosquer? What did I think of that? I must be getting better at this commercial tripe. After I’d read these last words, I texted her in fragments: thanks, yes, soon, and also really?

I went downstairs to deposit the check at the short row of ATMs just down the street that locals preferred to keep in a liberated state, propping the doors with beer and soda cans or even the fallen branches of trees. It left me with the feeling, every time I punched in my PIN and someone or other loomed behind me with disagreeable curiosity, that I was about to lose my money and possibly much more. Today there was no-one; it was too early in the day for that. But my relief didn’t last long. Within minutes, the check’s fungible substance disintegrated in the face of the many outstanding bills I began to settle back in my apartment, each secure click on my computer taking my account closer to the void. I paid some of my backrent—Kiver was gentler with me than he was with the Beckers, but he had his limits—most of the phone and internet bills, and the minimum payments on the credit cards, which were especially overburdened now with all the Uber fares from the summer months just passed, when the underground was an inferno and I, delicate as ever, desperately tried to keep to the surface.

The most significant addition to my bills was a cable television subscription with a luxury sports package, which guaranteed me a steady flow of athletics at all hours and on any day. It was a matter of importance, actually. I considered it a kind of medical expense, as I depended, without Claire, on its analgesic properties to carry me through days that were otherwise forlorn. The exact effect of athletics upon me depended on the sport and the season. With baseball, it was the gentle sedation its quiet rhythms afforded, which seemed perfectly to complement the haziness of summer months. With basketball, it was just the opposite, all the jittery, continuous thrills it gave through its endless reversals, in the deepening chill of late autumn. The time for it wasn’t quite here yet, of course; nor was I yet prepared for it. What had just arrived, as fall was coming on, was football, which replaced the slow, methodical procession of the top of a baseball inning with the nuclear-level incident of the drive, leather flashing in the outfield transmogrified now into a discrete and wholly deliberate series of car wrecks, something that none of the other major American team sports could claim. Yes, hockey had plenty of violence to it, but it wasn’t the very point of the game: to lay low the man with the ball before he could score. Nor, in any case, was hockey in the American bloodstream in the way of football. How could it be? Nothing that took place on skates could be properly barbaric.

I probably should have killed the cable. There was enough you could do with your laptop now, with streaming services of every variety, that it wasn’t really necessary, and it was costing me over a hundred and seventy dollars a month, almost entirely for that extravagant sports package. Though I should admit that, for me, there was more to television than sports. There were the old sitcoms I liked to watch late into the night, taking shameful pride in anticipating every line of Gidget or The Honeymooners or Bewitched, a skill I’d won only at great cost, having seen every episode half-a-dozen times or more. And that’s not to mention the cooking and antique shows, the obscure home decoration programming, and the foreign language channels beaming in incomprehensible imagery from Iran or Cambodia—all my various stays against inexistence.

Yet the most profound reason I had for giving up these expenditures was delinquency with my healthcare premium, which, if it weren’t for several minor chronic conditions, and now the matter of a firmly situational depression to deal with, I probably would have let expire months ago in favor of the austerities of catastrophic coverage. I had another two weeks until my contract would void, which meant I had a fortnight to find the money for it: a fortnight with cable. Yes, I was very late on my payment, but in a way now deeply familiar to me and many of my friends. We lived within grace periods. These reprieves—insisted on, of course, only by the law, without which there would be no grace at all in this country—are what made modern life possible, at least in the major cities. And my acute financial fears had now been neatly deferred by the knowledge that Whent’s money would be coming to me in the next days.

What remained of my anxiety was mostly of a higher order, and at that level, it was growing swiftly. What pattern had my life fallen into, I wondered, especially since I’d stopped showing or selling any of my work? What would the flat-lay picture of my life look like now? My coming to the Bronx at all, collapsing my studio directly into my living space in the process, at least partly traced to the diminishing income I knew to be imminent as I withdrew from Hinton Galleries. But the fall in sales had been made far more consequential through the loss of both Claire and my job. Yet the notion of finding relief—social and economic, that is—by taking on a roommate or even two, problematic enough when it was Claire herself, was genuinely unfathomable to me. Simply moving out of the place was equally complicated, particularly since there were almost six months left on the lease and Kiver was not the kind simply to waive his right to payment, given how extractive he’d been with the evictees on the floor below (though I suppose they were black, and that couldn’t be entirely discounted in Kiver’s calculations). This much was obvious: if I didn’t make an adjustment somewhere, in a matter of months there were going to be real problems, of a kind I couldn’t just shrug at.

Freelancing for Cosquer had helped curb the pain, but now I was always juggling assignments, which brought its own kind of despair. Individually, these jobs could be pleasant enough, and there was occasionally genuine artistry involved, given the flexible conditions the design firm operated under. But working to so many deadlines, which I’d never had to do before, and all the picking and choosing of projects, one by one, for suitability, were corrupting the rhythms of my life, which had formed early and depended on having vast allotments of time plotted out for myself, where the deadlines were only self-imposed, even if I did abide them more strenuously than one might expect. The virginal stretches of time I’d once known, even in college, where I was careful to keep my schedule dense with independent studies that were no more than sporadically supervised, had now been sullied by the endless deliberations of the design life. I was not and never had been a man for the committee, so it was only natural that the deadlines and briefs and meetings Karen was encouraging me to involve myself in, which I now pretty much had to involve myself in, were coloring my days and spoiling my mood.

The final results of these projects, theoretically anyway, might have redeemed all of this, but even when the assignments weren’t troublingly commercial or devoid of all life, they were almost always small-bore and disunified: some magazine or newspaper illustrations for a men’s periodical, or identity construction for a software firm or a soft drink. They couldn’t hold my attention for long; finishing them meant finishing with them. They didn’t accumulate meaningfully, instead existing only while you were bringing them into being. At best they posed concrete technical problems for me to solve. But problem solving, again, was so far from the way I thought about art, not just because art offered few solutions these days, but because it was generally unclear to me what the problem could be.

This was one way, only days into my program of abstention, I was beginning to miss my longitudinal studies, that sense of accretion they could be counted on to produce. I had, in fact, discontinued the last of them, the Claires, not just because Whent wasn’t interested in more pictures but because, as he’d indicated in his halting way, that particular world had probably completed itself, and everything I produced from now on in that mold would represent not plenitude but surfeit. It would find no place within the volumes of that universe, but instead dribble away without effect.

 

Whent’s check arrived the next week and it was handsome. Not handsome enough to put an end to my worries, but if I spent it sensibly it would reprieve me. I could finally pay off the back-rent in full, not to mention Blue Cross. It meant I could also forestall certain compromises I’d been contemplating with some dread, the first of which was asking for money from my family in San Francisco—from my mother in particular, I would probably have had to start with her, as I had in all my previous petitions. My father, forward in so many ways—he was a litigator, after all—lurked in the background of these discussions, which was especially odd given that he’d generated almost all of this money. Perhaps it was out of love for my mother that he entrusted this particular financial matter to her; or else he was using her as a shield, not wanting to enter into dialectic with the son he’d trained in its ways. Or maybe he just thought she was the best person for the job at hand. She was, it’s true, very much practiced in the allocation of funds to artists, through museum administration work. But her expertise wasn’t necessarily a boon for me. She was too wise about wastage and hot air, having seen it all about her for so many years.

Still, there was certainly money there to be discussed. I’d first called on it during school, to defray my various trips to Europe and Asia. Granted, they were artistically grounded journeys; but I would have undertaken them regardless. Since I didn’t seek fellowships or a place in graduate school, my second appeal came when college had finished and I’d moved to New York. Now, my parents were closing in on retirement, and without their explicitly saying so, the notion had been made plain to me that there would be no way of making allowances much longer. Anyway they were both coming to think of it as a bit of an embarrassment to go around handing out money indefinitely to their oldest child, while the younger two pulled their own weight—or, in my sister Helena’s case, had found someone to pull it for her. Where would all this lead? To my head lying on the platform, perilously close to the tracks like the other Helena in my life, sniffing someone’s shoe for potential sustenance?

My brother and sister could be considered, at this stage, two independent sources of benefaction, though these reserves were unproven. The youngest, my sister, had married well only six months ago, just after her twenty-first birthday, and was now living a thoroughly Californian life in San Diego. I felt as though she might be able to do something for me if need be; her husband would have been regarded as landed gentry a couple of hundred years ago, and he seemed concerned to prove his worth to my family, which was richer in books than in cash. Our brother, Ty, just a year younger than I was, had trained as an engineer and became, briefly, a designer at Tesla specializing in aerodynamics. But now he was starting to see significant money as a management consultant in the Bay Area—how significant I didn’t quite know—flying all over the country for three months at a time and disciplining all varieties of corporate economy, including, to his delight as a man of sports, that of the NFL’s Houston Texans.

I had a hunch, and it was no more than that, really, that my siblings would be helpful in a pinch, particularly as it would entail an admission on my part that high-mindedness couldn’t entirely be separated from folly. But they would help also because, as I say, our household tilted toward values most fully embodied in the life I led, not them. Which is to say, they believed in the life of the mind, even when they didn’t live it. You couldn’t have grown up in my house and believed otherwise. My mother, after all, had curated modern art at the Getty and the Hammer for years. And my father was an attorney of the most bookish variety, who, after a stint in corporate law paying off student loans, settled into a group practice in Los Angeles renowned for taking on cases of an esoteric, almost philosophical sort, where the jurisprudential stakes were highest, if not the financial rewards.

Before yielding to the indignities of alms-seeking, lately I’d been considering the prospect of being less discriminate with my commercial projects, of taking whatever Cosquer put on the table, really, even while this seemed to me a recipe for a quick and fatal disenchantment with things far larger than art. Perhaps now, though, with the check from Whent and the possibility of many more to come from his friend Garrett, I wouldn’t need the work Karen said she’d wanted to discuss with me. Of course, the money wouldn’t get me to cancel my meeting with her. It only made the prospect more pleasant, to meet her simply on the grounds of longstanding friendship—and perhaps for one other reason: she was a dear friend of Claire’s; in fact, I’d met Karen through Claire. There might be information to be gleaned.

Ahead of the meeting, I was trying, these last days, to work out the kinks in the ‘Gold Bug’ illustrations, a project I really did care for, and which seemed to me a link to some future form of art I might try my hand at. These were executed in colored pencil, and all the blending was of the optical sort, in which strokes of red and white, say, packed closely enough together, produced a shimmering pink impression. It was an underused medium, colored pencil. It had neither the gravity of graphite nor the mineral vibrancy of chalk or pastel. Yet it was capable of enormous subtlety, a softness that was nevertheless tactile. Marco Mazzoni’s pencil works; Martha Alf’s just as much; Ernst Haeckel’s perhaps most of all.

I also had some Yupo-based theater posters going, narrow ones, shiny and slick, hand-lettered in chalk and ink, with reverse lettering. These I’d mounted on white board, so you saw straight through the plastic support. It looked like a sort of frosted image, and it was perfectly suited, being waterproof, for the all-weather, outdoor deployment that Karen had reminded me about, for the Wooster Group. We were going to deck much of downtown with it, all around their space.

As a collective, we were working on banners for the Metrograph cinema. There was something fascinating about having a bearing on the way these institutions met the world, the forging of identities through something as simple and decisive as a choice of typeface or a background tone, or through subtle differences of medium: India versus sumi ink, say, as had been the choice confronting us with the Wooster posters; India won. Granted, there was probably less inspiration to this work than designers themselves would have you believe or would try to convince themselves of, and it was hard to begrudge them this vanity, these thwarted artists who’d lost their nerve to economic realities. But there were certainly profundities in play in what they did, never mind exactly why they did it.

The materials of all three projects surrounded me. I kept everything up here on the second floor, even though I had an entire floor beneath me to occupy. I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to enter the space, to clear it for my own use or even to sublet it. I’d look into the windows occasionally when I came in through the side entrance leading directly to my floor, but you couldn’t see very deeply into the place, the windows were so dirty. Perhaps I needed them that way.

 

I had sticks of chalk in each hand, for two different pieces, when the call from Garrett finally came. We didn’t talk long. He didn’t seem to want to, only enough to gauge my interest, which I made an effort to suppress. I didn’t want to put my budding desperation on display.

What I took from our conversation, besides that I was to meet him tomorrow at his offices on Roosevelt Island, was the peculiar unresolvedness of his voice, especially for a man of business. It wasn’t diffidence that he evinced, by any means, but there was a patent lack of finality attending his sentences, so much so that I could never be sure when it was my turn to speak, even after he’d been silent for some time. At the moment he hung up, even, I was convinced he was only pausing for breath. He had in fact said goodbye, yet there was nothing of parting in his tone—something that would be brought home to me in other ways later on.

The next morning was cooler than it had been for a while, a glimmer of the new season, and for the first time in my life, after nearly five years in the city, I found myself on the tram to Roosevelt Island. I’d never had a reason to go to before. Few people did, from my world. And even though the F train stops there, the natural choice was this form of sky travel I’d witnessed so many times while coming into the city from JFK, crossing the Queensboro Bridge in a hired car.

Predictably, many of the other passengers were tourists, and nearly all of them were focused on the island we’d just left, not the one we were headed to. Phone cameras clicked wildly, a few even with that sonic simulation of a closing shutter that the older generations often left activated, mostly because they didn’t know how to change the default settings of their devices. They were creating ersatz replicas of the images of Manhattan they’d seen all their lives, on postcards, televisions, billboards, cinema screens, before they ever came to the city or even entertained the notion: helicopter imagery, a perspective that thrust the earthbound viewer somewhat dizzyingly into the sky, amidst all the iconic steel and glass spires of midtown, the topographical flattening that occurred further south, and then, just as the island disappeared into the water, that jagged spike of finance.

Many of these tourists wouldn’t get off at Roosevelt but simply take the tram straight back for a second photo shoot. Their aim was only to gaze upon the island of which they’d already seen too much, the one that no-one would ever need more images of; whereas Roosevelt and its dangling airborne transport was merely a point of view, not a state of mind. Having seen all I’d wanted of Manhattan, I was one of the few turned toward the more obscure island. In fairness to the others onboard, there wasn’t much to attract the eye, except, perhaps, the new university technology campus built of twisting glass panes, which repelled sunlight like water and seemed on the brink of shattering from torsion. At the southern end of the island I could see a colossal ruin, which I knew to be a state-of-the-art nineteenth-century hospital long ago abandoned to the elements. This might have been all I understood of the island—a place of stark growth and decay.

I was headed north, though. I took the shuttle from the tram stop and watched the East River come into view. A few moments passed before I realized what I was seeing, a building that had only just become familiar to me, though from this distance the vaulted door in black glass seemed reduced to nothing. Only the strong verticality of the structure and the pale yellow of its façade were clear; there was a slight taper toward the top, though that could just have been the effect of cascading light. This was the home of so many of my works: Whent’s home. That sealed patch of grass, how electric it would be right now, if anyone bothered to look at it in the gargantuan lobby.

The shuttle stopped at a bright white hospital decidedly not in ruins, though certainly it didn’t look as if it were operating at its zenith. Rather it was one of those elemental structures that hadn’t yet come into its own, and so it reveled in its own potential, which the passerby or guest invariably realized in his mind’s eye. Garrett had said I should just walk north from there, along the water, to find Antral’s headquarters. So far Roosevelt seemed to me constructed almost wholly out of hospitals and business parks. Greenery interrupted by office buildings lay in all directions. Yet I kept to the water’s edge as I traveled north, hoping this would steer me true, until I reached a complex of orange-toned, flat-roofed buildings, just three stories each and arranged in the shape of a closed parenthesis. Each building was connected to the others by sheltered walkways, and further paths led from each one to a central glass atrium fronting them—essentially a giant bubble. The back of the parenthesis pushed in on a wooded park, the trees of which, tall and crooked and mossy, appeared to be digesting the buildings, though in a happy sort of way that gave the offices the look of a visitor’s center at a nature reserve, or a scientific facility designed for the study of endemic island wildlife.

Garrett had mentioned the buildings’ soft orange tone. It was the only feature he’d noted, as in fact the color was so unusual that it often served as a marker (“that orange thing”) in giving directions. This is how I would know I’d arrived, he said, as you could find the hue nowhere else on the island and possibly the world.

After taking the long concrete path through the center of Antral’s shrubby yard, which resembled dense forest undergrowth, I entered the glass globe, whose true size, IMAX-scaled, couldn’t be appreciated until it consumed you. I wasn’t asked to wait by reception, which I would have liked to, actually, simply to see what I could through the dome besides the taller trees of the park leaning over the buildings directly north. If I turned to the west, would I find Whent’s apartment? Certainly there’d be the dangling tram, and the Queensboro Bridge. Would they seem changed through glass, as paintings in a museum did? I decided not to check.

My escort had arrived. She was clothed in the summer holdovers of a T-shirt and billowy cotton skirt and owned the softly anxious air of everyone I’d ever known in the basic sciences. Together we took the easternmost walkway leading out of the atrium and made our way to Garrett’s office, which lay on the edge of that curve of buildings in the direction of Queens. The architectural lines of the atrium, the walkways, and the low-lying buildings felt straightforward enough, yet not so simple as to suggest functionalism. Here and there formal squiggles undermined the regular angles that held sway within these co-articulated spaces, whether in the strictly unnecessary depth of the atrium’s threshold—deep enough that it amounted to something more than a vestibule, almost a lobby within a lobby—or out in the walkways, which mildly undulated in width and height as you passed through them, for no obvious reason other than to express the varying properties of the sloping glass, which distended the trees and the clouds as we passed.

Subtle deviancy also attended the most curious feature of the complex, which remained the orange tint of the stone. At a distance it had an even, pastel quality that appeared to be the result of paint, but from closer up it was obviously natural and less even in intensity, with an irregular grain traveling outward in fractal whorls. It must be some rare form of marble, I thought, except that it seemed too matte for that.

Where this stone came from, I couldn’t say; nor could I be certain I’d seen its kind before. But it had a mesmerizing translucence that only gradually made itself known to the eye. Again I had the impulse to stop and examine it, but each time I glanced hopefully at my chaperone, she tipped her head away from me with a pre-occupied smile, acknowledging the reasonableness of my wish and denying it by the same gesture and thus saving time, which I gathered she held more precious than all else. So I kept moving, doing my best to take in the stone surrounding us in ribbons intercut with glass. Its color seemed not to exist on its surface, emanating instead from some deeper place, even somewhere behind it. The stone—or could it be some sort of synthetic material?—was merely the transmitting medium, one that ran totally uninterrupted everywhere, as not a single mural, sculpture, or painting could be seen anywhere, the very things I presumed to find in force at the headquarters of an entrepreneur with an appetite for art.

We entered the eastern wing and the proportion of stone increased, along with the amount of metal and artificial light. We kept to the right side, speeding through several broad corridors and up two floors, and then finally crossing a shimmering showpiece walkway. Other than this architectural feature, the building’s interior was analytical in design; even when you didn’t see dials or instruments, you felt them lurking in this house of science. The office we arrived at seemed inappropriately modest for the chairman of Antral, a firm that would have been familiar to anyone who stayed abreast of the manufacturing industry, even if you didn’t necessarily know just what they did. For some reason the office’s ceiling was much lower than that of the airy hallway outside, and the varnished tan desk carrying neither paper nor electronics of any kind was of terrific dimensions, not at all in keeping with the modest proportions of the space. What’s more, it’d been unnaturally centered in the room, leaving only a small band of space around the perimeter to move about in, which was made even narrower on one edge by an empty built-in bookcase and, alongside it, stacks of moving boxes and storage bins. A cheap metal chair with hardly any padding occupied a gap in front of the window, and the one item here of quality—a fine green leather desk chair, high-backed with a regal air—looked silly rather than grand in these conditions.

The crampedness was relieved only by an untrammeled view offered by the floor-to-ceiling window the desk faced, which overlooked the park and the East River beyond. Drawn straight to this transparency, in some manner seeking the illusion of open space, as one does from a subway car, I squeezed in front of the desk, leaving the woman behind in the hallway. She didn’t stay long anyway, judging by the footfall. There were things to do.

I searched the forested land, as I did my own little Bronx park sometimes, for people and their traces, when the sound of boot heels came on. I whipped around to find a man—dark blonde, long-limbed, hazel-eyed, and probably in his early forties, going by the pliability you could see still inhabiting his rosy skin, which bore the finest creases. Besides dark boots he wore sky-blue shirtsleeves and black chinos. He arrived with a distracted air that dissipated almost as soon as we’d exchanged names—it was, indeed, James Garrett—after which we took seats on either side of his desk, though it was necessary for me to angle my little chair to one side to sit comfortably.

“Sorry it’s so tight in here,” he said. “My office isn’t my office right now. There’s a demo set up in there that’s... well, anyway, didn’t you bring anything with you?” He squinted at me and caught himself before I could answer. “I didn’t ask you to, though, did I?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Ah, but see, I don’t think it matters. The studio you work with—I hope you don’t mind—I told them I was curious about your work. They pointed me to some of the commissions you’ve done for them. Things with people, specifically. That illustration for the CRISPR op-ed, for one.”

“Karen?”

“Right. And then this glorious cover, for a new novel?”

“The book is pretty bad, it turns out.”

“But your design!” I felt as if he were about to stand. My directness buoyed him, made him more decisive than at any time on the phone.

“The sea of bodies.”

“And how the title, the font, is just so delicate. It almost reaches you later. That’s how I put it to Paul, my right hand. You’ll meet him.”

“Or it doesn’t reach you at all. I don’t know what they thought of that. That was for Penguin. Karen can sell these people on almost anything these days.”

“Well, the magazine is terrific. It’s well-earned. She sent me a few copies of the thing overnight. All paper, she wouldn’t do PDFs.”

“The place doesn’t even have a website,” I said, flexing my hands. “Anyway, the imprint that published the novel likes to see itself as forward-looking. So in a certain way, they had to swallow it.”

He narrowed his eyes and shook his head with a silent laugh, just before tugging at the collar of his oxford. His face had grown ruddier. “But could it really have been any more right for that book?”

“You mean because of its ambitions?”

“Right. So the cover, in that case, really shouldn’t be a slave to...”

“To information.”

“To function, is how I would say it. And you haven’t been cute with it, either: scrappy or frilly or know-it-all. That would have ruined it, for me.”

“What I came up with was basically what I thought the book could have been.”

“If the writer had been any good, you mean.”

I smiled a little, no teeth. “Up to his own material, yeah.”

“The execution. Exactly.”

“But the cover is based on the book. I read it, absorbed it.”

“But you didn’t, I don’t know...” He looked past me, out the window. His gaze softened. “You didn’t draw down to the book.”

“That’s true,” I said with a long nod.

He chuckled like a boy at this. “And why exactly should you be expected to draw down, by anyone, least of all by the client?”

“The book had already let itself down. That was my thought.”

“So why should you?” He stood up and walked to the window, briefly positioning himself beside me as he looked out over the wood and water. “Did you know you can see Rog’s place out there? It’s where I first came across your pictures.”

He started pacing slowly in front of the window, head thrown back rather than bowed; the sun was right there in his eyes but he didn’t seem to mind. I could think of nothing to say, nothing that was more interesting to me now than watching him gather his thoughts in the light until, finally, after some time like this, he spoke again. Between long and thoughtful pauses, he began to tell me about himself and Roger Whent—or Rog, as he called him. He’d known Rog for a long time now, apparently, since their days at Cal together. They were chemical engineers as freshman, though Rog switched over in his junior year to his true love, computers. From there he went on to the Media Lab at MIT for a few years before returning to the Bay Area, to work in a fledgling company’s wireless operations, creating ultra-fast radio-wave WANs in which whole cities became efficient hotspots. Only later, Garrett explained, did Rog move east, to New York, to found his own company, Salient Technologies, focused on making action at a distance—that’s the way Rog liked to describe his core interest—the norm. Where every element of life could be put in mutual touch.

Garrett, though: he’d gone straight from Berkeley to New York. The only other place he’d ever lived was the Chicago exurb he’d grown up in, where his mother still resided. His father, Terry, a landowner and semi-industrial farmer, was now dead, but he’d left behind a lot of everything to his wife and his only child, including seed money for Antral.

Garrett’s and Whent’s companies had gone through the usual growing pains in parallel in the city. It really wasn’t worth recounting, he said with a grin that acknowledged anxieties now long since passed. Although they were never in exactly the same industry, when it came to technology they both hoped for crossover down the line between their interests. That was an article of faith among technologists, really. The whole thing—here he tapped the window for emphasis—the whole thing was predicated on just this: the possibility of extension, indefinitely, even when it seemed you would need some sort of magic to bring it off. Magic, after all, could be invented like anything else.

“So just a few weeks ago,” Garrett said, sitting down in front of me on top of the desk, with his boots dangling, “I went over to Rog’s place for a little party in honor of a mutual pal.” Lucas, he was an engineer and programmer, based in Denmark, actually, who spent all of his time on 3D printing. Apparently he’d constructed a prototype that was a quarter of the cost of its closest rivals, yet still somehow twice as versatile in the jobs it could handle. The machine had just made the rounds at campuses and technology forums throughout Europe, in Munich and Oslo and Manchester. Rog was fêting Lucas upon his arrival in the United States, ahead of a show, celebrating this machine’s potential, which couldn’t be totally known yet. Much of the intrigue surrounded just how widely its low price point would allow it to be distributed. What kind of sea change could it induce, if the fabrication process could be brought to heel, cost-wise, in the way their Danish friend claimed to have done?

The drinks were flowing that night, exotic cocktails mixed by the caterers, and the things they drunkenly printed out were getting progressively sillier. “It was all pretty amusing,” said Garrett, “until I noticed the drawings on Rog’s walls, the ones I must have been looking at, hardly thinking about it, the whole time, while I was caught up in the novelties coming out of the printer, and the booze.” For all their differences of technique and material, he suddenly realized the pictures were all about one thing, one woman: my Claire. “So I started making my way around his place, just looking at these things. I went around like that three or four times, upstairs too, picking up another slug of whiskey from Rog’s private cabinet, forget the fancy cocktails, every time I came around past the kitchen.” Here was a universe built from a single person—that’s what Garrett remembered feeling. “It was an epic, sort of.” He’d once had a classics professor, he told me, a brilliant man at Berkeley who’d made everyone read The Iliad aloud in class, day by day. “Best class I took, I’d say.” The engineering courses were just information you took in, but here was an experience. Yet there was a problem, and not a small one, Garrett thought: “It wasn’t my universe, or our universe either.” He paused without elaborating, began tapping once again with his fingernails, brow furrowed, but this time on the desk beneath him. I gathered, from what he would go on to tell me, in fits and starts I patiently waited through without moving from my chair—unlike Whent, he seemed to appreciate my silence—that he thought that Homer’s poem stood in a world that was long ago lost to us, severed from modern life. You could only grasp it limply from a distance now, as a specimen text from another era, a cadaver almost, and always with the help of a professor.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the end of Garrett’s disappointment. His complaints grew more blunt, and as they did, his tone darkened. “Your drawings, too,” he said, “as much as I couldn’t stop looking at them.” He eyed me for the first time in a while. “I felt sealed off from them.” Even though the world I depicted was contemporary, he said, there was just so little of it beyond Claire, and beyond my particular way of seeing her. It was mostly a private world: hers, and mine just as much.

What this meant to Garrett, what I surmised he meant anyway, was that the meanings, the stories that circulated through the body of pictures, couldn’t really be inhabited by him. He could make inferences about the significance of what I’d produced, he could study it like an object of science, observing it patiently and interpreting it, but that was actually the very opposite of habitation. “It wouldn’t be at all like coming face to face with yourself in the work,” he said, “or finding a home in it”—not in good faith anyway, without simply foisting your thoughts onto it, bending it to make room for yourself in its lines and washes and colors.

What was worse, he said, getting up to stand at the window again, but now with firmer resolve, was that whatever meaning you did pull out of the piece, there was no reason others wouldn’t extract something entirely different. Which again left you feeling distanced from the thing itself, and from everyone else who’d looked at it, too. Finally he returned to his throne of a chair. “It made me a little sad to see that, how lonely it all was in the end. And maybe Rog and everyone else is fine with that. But that’s what I was thinking about on my way home that night.” He rapped on the desk with his knuckles and perked up, looking almost apologetic. “It gave me a lot of ideas, too, though. That’s why I wanted to see you here.”

I smiled faintly but turned away from him toward the trees outside. All his talk, mostly critical of what I’d achieved, had driven me into my own thoughts. Even if strictly speaking he knew rather little about me, I was impressed by what he’d managed to deduce. Whent was right: Garrett was curious. For one thing, he was correct in saying that I, though quite capable of the outer gesture, the social dance, naturally tended toward inwardness, which I evinced even in the very of having this thought, with him giving me some time to compose myself by kneeling down near the shelves and riffling through the boxes stacked against them.

I say naturally inward, though whether this bent was merely a contingent matter, owing to the present shape of the world, I didn’t know, given that I had experienced no other. The very fact of my discomfort with an entirely private life—why become an artist, after all, if you had no interest in public space?—gave me hope that, indeed, my withdrawal now was hardly fated, even if I wore it well.

It’s always nicer to imagine that if the world had been just a little different, or one had been born in another age, including the future, peace and joy would be in touching distance, rather than have to admit the aptness of our existing relationship, if fit isn’t quite the right word, with the world just as we find it: even when that relationship is rude and fractious. For me, there had been, and continued to be, opportunities to make other choices, to live different sorts of lives, that much was obvious. So what else but a genuine preference for psychic distance could explain why I’d voluntarily moved to the Bronx from a place like Sunnyside? That’s where I’d gone after I’d decamped from the milieu of artists occupying Bushwick and Ridgewood, at the border of Queens, a milieu I’d been told was my own. I’d left because it wasn’t distant enough; I could still hear them breathing. Had they had different natures, though, how could I know whether I would have sought out their company or been even more repulsed, this time for completely different reasons?

In any case, I suppose it made a certain sense that my pictures would feel hermetic, inscrutable. They may have occupied the space of myth, but it was undoubtedly private myth. What I didn’t fully realize, as I turned away from the brightness of the glass and watched Garrett down on his knees, rearranging storage bins, was quite the way that this privacy, the particular sort of mystery it induced, much as it might liberate the viewer from a straitjacket of meanings, did so at the cost of leaving him estranged, without orientation. Some viewers, like Whent, didn’t mind that. Considering his relations with his girlfriend, and with other women, too, he probably even sought it. Indeed, this divorce between creation and perception, poesis and aesthesis, is the signature trend of modern art, particularly in its irrationalist and abstractionist guises. Artworks that brook no recognized links between expressive means and subject matter are like maps without a legend: being more or less indecipherable to the gallery-goer, such imagery can be freely absorbed into any fantasia that appeals to the viewer. Meanings can be projected onto canvases quite heedlessly. These works don’t draw you out of yourself and force you to meet the artist and the culture on common ground, so much as provide material to be used in any way you choose. Discovery, communion—in some sense these just aren’t consistent with the ubiquity of personal interpretation that so many theorists and artists have helped bring about.

Other people, though, people like Garrett, appeared to seek something besides a space for the free play of meanings that had dominated visual art for well over a century. I myself wondered more and more about this: whether Descartes really was wrong and meaning was public in the first instance, so that all else could only be derivative, a retreat or debasement or perversion. And it was the Lebenswelt of the Bronx, of all places, that seemed to raise the question most insistently for me.

Garrett returned to his feet with an armful of books with blank bindings and set them out on the highest shelf, one by one. Satisfied, he came back and stood just in front of me, going over his knees roughly with his hands to knock off the dust. He might have told me what the books were about, or why exactly we were meeting in a room that he hadn’t even moved into properly, but he offered me a brisk nod instead, as if to say he’d finished whatever it was he’d meant to do with the boxes, even though almost all the materials remained unpacked and the bookshelf had only a half-dozen volumes on it. It didn’t matter to him, not now, when there was so much else on his mind. He pressed his palms together lightly, leaned against the desk, and picked up his story. The day after Rog’s party, he said, he couldn’t be quite sure how much he’d had to drink, nor how much his feelings had been provoked by the pictures themselves. So he called Whent and got put onto Cosquer, which he’d never heard of before. He looked over what Karen sent him, some of my projects, and some copies of the magazine itself, and he was heartened to find that what he’d felt that intoxicating night was in fact quite real.

Garrett pointed out the window now, his cheeks plumping and a smile breaking over his lips. “Rog and I, we were neighbors over there for a while, until I moved to the island.” His arms were folded and his eyes nearly closed from the intense sun in our faces. “Partly to be closer to work. But also just because.” He opened his eyes a little. “You know what it is we do here, right? Rog told you?”

“He mentioned materials. Storage.” Toxic waste, I thought, might not be worth mentioning just now.

“Really? That’s all—storage?” He went back around his desk and sunk into the arms of his commodious chair, breathing in deeply and exhaling through his teeth as he leaned all the way back, so that with a downward gaze his eyes narrowed on me. I don’t think he believed I knew so little. He recognized politesse.

“And that you’re branching out,” I added. He waited for more, calling my bluff. Finally I admitted, “Roger was vague.” This was a lie, too. Whent had said enough.

Garrett smiled wearily, stood up, and sighed. “Well, materials is true. Storage, yes, that’s how I got my start. Anything else he mentioned? You really don’t know much about this?”

I shook my head.

“It’s just, none of it is necessarily relevant, from where you’re standing. That’s what I would say. I hope Rog might have made that clear to you, too.” He edged toward the door before looking back at me. Now his wide red face altered: he was excited, the definition of outward-looking. “But why not have a tiny peek, since you’re here?”

I followed him down the narrow corridor. His body seemed barely able to contain the force that ran through him; the time for reverie was past. I almost had to trot in places to keep up with his shrinking form as he wended his way ahead of me. Eventually we reached a room that reminded me most of my doctor’s office at New York-Presbyterian, an internist who’d remained there through my years in the city, though I’d only briefly lived nearby, at a family friend’s when I’d first arrived. But here in Garrett’s compound, among all the mirrors and glass and chrome, in the place on the examination table where a patient might have sat, there was instead a body-sized swatch of material, perhaps cloth or plastic, so startlingly black that it reflected almost no light. It was secured in place as if it might escape otherwise. Silver pincers clamped its edges like a trampoline, and everything was enclosed in a transparent plastic frame. Less than a yard from it, within this chamber, a gunmetal blue nozzle fed by a hose blasted it at regular intervals and varying intensities with a purplish gas. Garrett, his demeanor entirely changed, said it was merely compressed air, so its lilac tones might have only spoken to the peculiarity of the lighting within the chamber, which was overwhelmingly intense, designed, I assumed, to reveal qualities of the cloth or the gas or their combination.

The heaviest shots from the nozzle met the ears like pistons pumping, or industrial doors closing. Garrett slid his fingers onto a control panel just inside the doorway and piercing jets of water replaced the gas; the material ballooned outward now at the point of impact and glimmered as it soaked through. Yet even before the next blast could come, the distended span of black somehow reclaimed its original flatness; it dried at startling speed, too, glitter replaced by bottomless black as water drained out of the base of the chamber in rivulets. The cycle repeated several times: deluge, distension, recovery.

“This is still at the core of Antral, for sure,” Garrett said while we stood back, observing from the hall. “Chemical engineering is what
I know, and I still manage to supervise almost everything around here, through testing and the rest. But we don’t exactly sell this stuff to the public. It’s for industrial applications, construction, storage. Scientific and, well, government purposes, too. I’ve been lucky, it’s been mostly profitable—once we got settled in, anyway, made a few key discoveries. And there just hasn’t been any need for promotion. It’s all so clearly necessary for our clients.” He spoke at a more rapid clip now, his voice carrying the same energy that had crackled through his body down the hall.

I was tempted to enter the room properly and inspect the black specimen more closely; this temptation to search I felt everywhere in this building, radiating through its walls. I wanted to steep myself in the peculiar rhythms of the fabric’s transformation, the graceful manner in which it re-established its shape and shed moisture from the outside edge of the depression inward, in waves, like ripples in a pond running in reverse. But Garrett swept decisively out of the doorway and down the hall, leaving me to trail behind his sturdy black workboots as they clopped like hooves.

“What we could use help with,” he said over his shoulder, in a voice amplified by the great height of the corridor, “are the new branches of the business. Things that don’t have complete economic necessity baked right in. You’ve heard of Arête?”

The distance between us allowed me to pretend I hadn’t made out what he’d said, while in fact I was searching my mind. He slowed down and repeated the question. Finally something came to me.

“It’s like a sharp ridge, right?”

“A mountain ridge.” My uncertainty prompted him to turn around and let me catch up, as if physical proximity might somehow also narrow the gap in understanding, which was still wide, as it wasn’t a mountain ridge he had in mind: “Actually I mean the sports brand—capital-A Arête—although it is named after a ridge. It’s a lot smaller concern than Antral, obviously. But then, the fact that this explanation is necessary”—he gestured at me and back at himself, now side-by-side, as we continued down a ramp to the ground floor, though the narrow passage we took, off the main one, barely allowed for this—“the fact that you haven’t heard of the brand, I mean, tells me Paul and I aren’t getting the job done.”

“I think I know of it.” This wasn’t a lie, exactly, but my grounds for saying so came down to my recent sports television marathoning. How was it possible I hadn’t heard of it, given all the commercials that passed before me?

Garrett chuckled kind-heartedly. “It’s really only getting started, so it’s okay, for now, if you don’t know it. But that’s got to change. With your help, I hope.”

We stepped out onto a landing and here the ethereal orange of the building fell away for space-age white. “We launched Arête because once things started moving with the industrial stuff, we thought, how can we use these techy materials, all the profits from the other side of the business that were just accumulating? I don’t live a gaudy life. So how to reinvest to create more public things, universal things, that can matter not just to labs and governments and industry?”

His was the sort of longing, I thought, by which every culturally invisible behemoth must be gripped: Qualcomm, Oracle, Sun. That’s why they sponsored stadiums and arenas around the world, desperate as they were for any measure of public recognition. I wasn’t sure Garrett was after exactly that variety of glory, though. Just looking at the man, the way he carried himself, he might be up to something a little fresher, even if they all felt they were ahead of the curve.

“So the thing that came immediately to mind, when I was first thinking about expanding Antral, was sports. It’s such a natural crossover for a materials firm, right? Fabrics, like the one we were just looking at. There are others we’ve got around here that can hold body temperature down, or absorb moisture, at phenomenal rates; shoes and braces designed for ideal support and flexibility at the same time, without the trade-offs of rate-activated tethers.”

“Stuff Nike can only dream of.”

“You don’t believe me. But actually, yeah. This is stuff we...” He was on the verge of elaborating, then thought better of it, smiled. “It’s genuinely cutting edge, not stuff that shows up twenty years later in Reeboks.” He winked at me. I don’t believe I ever saw him wink again, not like this. There was something unabashed about it. Did it stand for the thing he’d just suppressed?

We came to a freight elevator oddly bereft of buttons. There was just a gash in the panel, into which Garrett twisted a key, leading us further down beneath the facility. Apparently large parts of the place existed underground, which explained why such a robust business had risen only three stories. How many stories did it sink?

We were underground. “Right now, Arête’s gear—the firm’s only a couple of years old—is used by a few football and basketball teams, and that’s about it. A couple of college programs, too. The costs are coming down a little, but this was always going to be niche stuff. The research hasn’t been cheap, and the fabrication isn’t either.”

We twisted sharply into another space that lacked a door; this seemed to be a feature of Garrett’s headquarters, doorways without doors. Before us stood a trove of clear glass disks, some as large as dinner plates, others as small as pocket change, all of them glinting.

“We’re about to launch an optical division: sunglasses for baseball, visors for football helmets. Oakley’s got their Prizm lenses, right? They’re nothing next to these. Eventually they’ll go on the broader market.”

I left him to walk among the lenses, determined this time to linger.

“Pick it up,” he said, referring to a lens that had caught my fancy, rainbowing in the light from some sort of coating or treatment. Looping my thumb and index around its circumference, I held it up to my eye like a monocle and regarded Garrett, which drew a wry face from him. “Some of the things these lenses can get you to distinguish, they’re going to have uses way off the field or court.”

I continued inspecting him. He’d turned a shade of blue, as though underwater; and remarkably, his structure leapt out. The less-than-ovoid shape of his head, for instance, and the length of his stout jaw, the compactness of which contributed markedly to the breadth of his visage. It was a lens keyed to proportions, I thought, to judging weighted masses and their interrelations. I studied Garrett brazenly, descending from the sturdy trunk to the sinuous hands to the hips and legs that surprised me with their litheness. Invading him with my gaze with such impunity, of course, would have been impossible without the pretext of testing the lens.

“The whole project is going to straddle sports and fashion, too, in some way. Arête technically already was a fashion label, an obscenely niche Swiss one that my wife was a fan of. She’d seen it first at Roland Garros. So I bought it, renamed it, and merged its original design team with one I’d more or less poached from a rival company, a French start-up.”

I let the lens fall into my hand, the way monocles fall in old films when the count is surprised by something. Exploring my vision through the lens had also given me cover for puerilities like this. Who had time for sober reactions when endowed with a new consciousness? I’d meant nothing by dropping the lens, of course. I was only playacting. I don’t know whether he thought I’d meant something by it, though, since I’d done it just after he described gutting another company. Whatever it was, he was beaming at me now. If only he would cap it with the wink he’d given me earlier, I would have known for sure.

Garrett turned and took a set of stairs up past the display of lenses without saying anything, and I followed him a very long way back to the surface, eighty or a hundred steps on a continuous flight. How many floors down had we been? When we reached the top, he was breathing no more quickly than before, though his chest heaved, as if his lungs had doubled in size. My own breaths were shallow and rapid. He swung a small door open and everything before us turned green. Here was a garden, slightly overgrown, outside those enclosed walkways I’d come in through with his lab assistant. People were marching through the tubes like denizens of a space station deposited into a pasture. They stared at us as though we were ghosts, as if they knew for a fact that the place we occupied could not in fact be occupied. Garrett happily trudged through the yard. His boots made more sense here. I could see prints in the dirt that matched the ones he was making.

Through the transparent atrium just in front of us I could see a wobbly Queensboro bridge, twice refracted through both sides of the dome. Once we were back within the bubble, through a transparent door you could barely see the hinges of—it was as if we were being directly absorbed into the innards of the place—the bridge stabilized above us. Through a single pane of the bubble, it was brighter, sharper; the material seemed to gild the light passing through it, lend it a glow. Garrett strode through the atrium, blind to the support staff and researchers milling about now, far more than when I’d first entered. None made an effort to hail him, and I could very well imagine him contractually insisting on their silence. He was exactly the right eccentric for this unfathomable order. I thought he was going to deposit me near the entrance, but instead he accompanied me past a group of men in casual suits within that extended vestibule. I took them for venture capitalists, I don’t know why. They were the first to look directly at Garrett; perhaps they’d not been informed of his preferences, or they only obeyed it with regard to me. He paid them no mind, though, and walked me outside, all the way onto the path along which I’d first arrived that led down to the water from the slight incline Antral’s headquarters sat on.

“Why don’t I just walk you to the shuttle?” he asked, as if this process were not already well underway. “I’ve been inside too long, since last night actually. That jaunt through the green back there was a treat.” The path cut toward the water at an aggressive angle before straightening out in parallel to it. The wakes of small powerboats rippled the surface of the river, but the greatest swells came from an incoming ferry charging toward the shore with such abandon I felt sure it was headed for trouble.

Garrett was again examining Whent’s spire, and soon I was, too, never mind the ferry and its fate upon the rocks. “Can you see that reddish one?” His finger extended on a line that just missed Whent’s building, intersecting instead with one a few blocks north that was indeed a dark crimson. “I liked it there, for a while.”

“Do you live near here?”

“Other side of the island, actually. I want to be close, but not too close.” He chortled at this, his eyes roamed. Yet in a couple of strides he was back to business, as though the laugh had helped him clear away pointless thoughts. “The thing is, we are pretty much always working on new extensions with Arête.”

I nodded without understanding.

“New shoots, they’re always sprouting. Drinks, for instance.”

“Gatorade or something?”

“In a way, maybe. Body Armor, Bolt24, they’re fun, they’re hydrating. But we want real efficacy.” He slowed me by grasping me by the forearm and squeezed. “And maybe not just for sports.” He released me and we carried on along the path, which slightly veered away from the water. “I think what we’re working on could be the next step in that market.”

The ferry neared a dead stop in front of us; it turned out there’d been time after all. I searched and found the shuttle in the distance, at the bright red bus shelter enrobed in tramway posters, all carelessly designed and the evident result of desktop solutions. Much of city design had this problem. There was simply too much to do; the best people could only take on so many projects. Hence much of the work fell to lesser lights, with gaudy consequences. Still, to the credit of the small fish who’d thrown this one together, even from here it was legible, its blocky rendering of the Roosevelt Island tram reaching us at a quarter mile’s distance.

“And if that’s not enough for you, there’s another drink we’re working on, too,” Garrett continued. “It’s not even under Arête. I don’t totally know where it fits with the rest of my business.” He sighed and paused and let me take that in. “It’s its own thing. My dad’s whiskey. Or our neighbors’, the Whites. But he picked it up from them.”

I slowed down, working this swerve over in my mind. He was pleased to have surprised me, I could see. “My father bought this old distillery back home, in Illinois, decades ago. He was a big, big farmer, so his life, our life, didn’t look very farm-like, if you can understand that.” His accent seemed to modulate into something more Midwestern, and more circumspect, too—the voice, perhaps, he’d used around the dinner table, growing up. “But this was still something small and quaint, a distillery. It worked with unusual grains. Way past corn. Designer whiskey, we’d call it now, I guess. Wheat was probably the most normal of them. Maybe that’s why it didn’t do so well. Not then, anyway. He always thought of that buy as a failure, a moment of weakness or plain old nostalgia, something he never wanted to allow himself. But then I think how he specifically left the distillery to me, not to my mother. That must mean something. And I’d like to see what I can do with it. Again, with your help.”

The word rang in my head—help—and as we reached the shuttle stop it metastasized into a cluster of doubts. I realized, even at this stage, that it was not at all clear what sort of help Garrett wanted from me. What had been achieved by this meeting, for either of us? We sat on the low bench, I on one end, Garrett beside me, and, a few places beyond him, a man in a red and white sweatsuit and a black bandana worn more like a headband. He was in his early thirties and quietly gasping, with one leg splayed over the end of the bench. He must have been out jogging, though from his sweat-beaded state, he might have been all-out sprinting. His anguish hurt me.

There was a water fountain about twenty feet from us. Maybe he’d doused himself to cool down before we’d arrived. By his twisted expression and closed eyes, it looked like he needed to. His body corkscrewed, too. He straightened out now and then and hunched over for a bit, and his face would arrive in his hands, his head weighing a little more each time, it seemed, as it fell ever lower. This run he’d taken, it had to have been epic; it was clearly too much for him. But then I noticed that I was beginning to trickle with sweat as well. It’d grown muggy since I’d left home, probably ten degrees warmer than expected this time in September. Certainly his sweatsuit, even with the sleeves pushed back, was out of place, possibly even dangerous. The shuttle idling before us would be his salvation, I considered, taking him back home in air-conditioned comfort. But its doors remained sealed, and the driver, who I could see through the tinted windows fiddling with his phone, wasn’t going to open the doors before departure was close at hand.

“So how does this all sound so far? Just in general. Boring?” Garrett wasn’t especially concerned with the jogger’s distress, though I could still hear the man panting.

“It’s not how it sounds,” I said dubiously, still eyeing our companion. “I just think I’d need to know more about what specifically you—”

“Did you know that people have sent me to hack after hack,” he said with a stridency and impatience that surprised me. He shook his head tensely. “But I saw it, at old Rog’s, the genuine article. And that’s what I need. Because, well, maybe there’s a way for us to do this that we’ll both find interesting.” He broke off and cocked his head slightly without turning. “You need some water, friend?” He pointed at the fountain but I could see the jogger’s eyes were closed tight. “Are you going to be all right?” he said as he turned to him.

The jogger nodded vigorously; I had underestimated his strength. Just then the shuttle opened its doors with an extended hiss. Garrett turned back to me and stood up. “Now, let me ask you something completely different, before you go. You know very much about football?” I must have looked even more perplexed this time. “A tiny bit, even?” Yet before I could answer, and without a word, he turned around and began helping the would-be athlete to his feet.

“As a casual fan, I guess,” I said as I rose. My recent immersion in sports television had equipped me with a greater acquaintance than this, actually, though I couldn’t say just how great, given the profound inattentiveness with which I watched.

“Okay, perfect. And what about the theater?”

“The what?” Had he actually said theater now?

“My last surprise, I promise.” He spun back toward me, having finished assisting the jogger and wiping off his hands on his trousers. “I’m talking about off-Broadway stuff. Off-off Broadway even. And indie films as well. I don’t know a lot about them myself.”

I started sinking back into the confusion from which I’d just felt myself to have emerged. The jogger, meanwhile, was limping toward the open doors of the shuttle.

“A little?”

“A little is great,” Garrett said. “Better than a lot, sometimes.” He took my right hand between both of his, which were free of obvious signs of the jogger’s sweat, though I knew in fact I’d been branded with it. Any lab could tell you that, including Garrett’s. Worse, he held on to me for a while and squeezed. “Let me get a few things together, then. I’ll talk with Karen.”

Now the shaking started: our hands bobbed up and down together, but curiously it wasn’t entirely clear who was responsible for the movement.

“This really is not as crazy as it seems. I mean that.” His words lent our handshake another sense, brought it a purpose that wasn’t purely otherworldly.

I freed myself of his grasp and hopped onto the shuttle. The perspiring man unfolded himself on the seat across from mine and basked in air conditioning that was disappointingly weak. As he and I headed back down the island toward the tram, he kept his eyes closed. For reasons of pleasure or pain? I didn’t know.