“So then I had to take a shit.”

Oliver had the beer bottle tipped to his lips. It just stopped there, hovering. He stared across it at his kid brother. “What?”

“I had to take a dump. I had diarrhea.”

“Zachie. You had every cop in the city after you. You were dressed like a girl, for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, that was the thing. And, you know, they’re getting ready for the parade out there so there are all these policemen around the square and around Sixth Avenue. They’re everywhere.”

Oliver could only marvel at him. Sitting all gangly on the mattress, his knees up around his ears. His eyes wide and dark and goofy. His smile like a goofy child’s. He was not wearing Tiffany’s clothes anymore. He was in faded jeans, torn at the knees, and some sort of bulky, patchwork shirt. Each square a different color and design; looked like it had been made at a quilting bee for psychopaths.

“So you know, I went into that place—Mom’s or Mama’s—it’s that ice cream parlor …”

Oliver, sitting on the desk chair, still holding the beer bottle up around his mouth, shook his head in wonder. “Papa’s something …”

“Right. And I ask the cashier, you know, can I use the bathroom. And he can see I’m dying, I’m all doubled over. And he says sure. So I run to the back and I slam myself into this little room and I’m wrestling—you know, you have to sort of get your skirt all bunched up around your waist with one hand and then pull down your underwear with the other and I feel like some sort of contortionist or something and then all of a sudden there’s this pounding on the door—bang, bang, bang, you know—and I’m desperate and I shout: ‘What?’ And it’s the cashier. He’s yelling, ‘Miss! Miss! You’ve got the wrong room! You’re in the men’s room! Miss!’ ”

Oliver laughed. He lowered his beer to his lap. He nodded.

“And I had to shout back in this high-pitched, this falsetto voice, you know, ‘Oh, thank you, sir, it’s all right, thank you very much.’ But he just kept on pounding. What could I do? I’d finally gotten my skirt over my head so I could hold it up, but I couldn’t see. And my jockey shorts are down around my ankles—and I mean, my gut is exploding, there’s no turning back. And he keeps calling me: ‘Miss! Miss!’ I was in there for, like, forty-five minutes. He kept coming back and shouting at me the whole time.”

Oliver looked at Zachie, at his bright, black eyes. Saw him nod his goofy head, smile his goofy smile. And he laughed some more.

If the feds get to him first, your brother is going to be dead.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and laughed harder. “You idiot. Christ!” His black hair trembled on his forehead as he laughed.

Zach shrugged. “What was I gonna do?”

“Stop. Jesus,” Oliver said. He couldn’t stop laughing.

Zachary watched him from the bed. Big smile. Nodding his head up and down. Sipping from a glass of water. In an unspoken agreement, they had turned the apartment lights out. The light of afternoon was fading from the room as well. The mounds and rows of books all around them were melting into a comfortable brown dusk.

“Oh! You asshole.” Oliver took a gulp of breath. Wiped the tears of laughter from his face with his open hand. Shook his head into his beer again. Took a sip of it. Then he just sat for a moment, staring at his little brother.

They are going to kill him, Perkins. I know this for a fact.

“So?” he said, as solemnly as he could. “Were you there?”

Zach, still grinning, puffed his cheeks. “Whew! The mews, you mean? Yeah.”

Both men nodded somberly. A long moment passed in reflection.

“So did you puke?” Oliver finally asked. “I puked. Did you puke?”

“I don’t think so. I was pretty upset though.”

“I just puked. Christ, when I saw her head right there in the toilet like that, Jesus …”

“Oh, so that’s where it was.”

Oliver just exploded with laughter, beer spraying from his mouth. He had to put the bottle down. Bow his head into both hands. Oh, so that’s where it was! He couldn’t stand it! He closed his eyes. He could see the woman’s face staring up at him from the toilet, but he didn’t care. He laughed until his voice became a thin squeak: eee eee eee. Zach laughed too, just watching him.

“Oh, man!” said Oliver finally. “That’s where it was, all right. Jesus. Right there in the toilet. I went in to throw up …”

“Oh no! You didn’t …!”

“No, but I just missed, man.”

“Oh no.”

“Jesus. Oh God.” He kept on laughing. “Wait’ll Nana finds out about this. She’s gonna flatline.”

Zach gripped his chest and stuck his tongue out: Nana having a coronary. That set Oliver off again and he actually stood up, he was laughing so hard, stamping his feet against the floor, shaking his head. When he finished, he sagged wearily against the wall. He looked down at Zach, who still sat on the mattress, all knees. Smiling. Nodding his head up and down. The same stupid Zach he’d pulled up the hill on that sled.

We’re not gonna go over the bump, right, Ollie? You’re gonna ride with me, right?

Oliver had to fight the urge to cross the room and just lift him off the mattress in his arms. Just kiss him smack on the forehead. The two of them didn’t do things like that.

“Oh God!” he said instead. He tilted his head so far back he was staring up at the ceiling. “Oh God, what is happening here? I can not believe this is happening.”

“I know. It’s insane.”

“Well, what went on with you, Zach-man. All this bloodstained clothes shit and Detective Mulligan and everything? Christ!” Oliver kicked the floor with his heel. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. I mean, the FB-fucking-I … What’s happening, man?”

“Nothing!” Zach exclaimed. He put his skinny arms out, showed his empty hands. He was wide-eyed. “I had a fight with Tiffany. That’s all. That’s how it all got started. I don’t know: something’s the matter with her. She’s been acting weird for weeks. I don’t know. We had this quarrel and she got all pissed off and … she told me to leave. ‘Go back to your stupid mews and live there,’ that’s what she said. What was I gonna do? It was, like, four in the morning or something, I don’t know. And I came in—to the mews, I mean—I went to the mews and the place was all messed up and everything. So I figured it was robbed, right? And I went upstairs to check things out and … that’s when I saw the body. You know? And I got all messed up. This is the stupid part. Cause I … don’t know what I did. I ran over to it. You know, I didn’t even notice about the head. Well, I mean I noticed it, but I just … I wasn’t thinking or something, you know, because I ran over to it—the body—and I took hold of it, you know? To see if I could help or something … I took hold of it by the shoulders. I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. So I got all covered in blood. And then I saw, you know, what happened to the head. And I thought, Oh shit. Oh shit, now I’m all covered with blood, you know, they’re going to think it was me. And I just … I … ran out. I ran home, back to Tiffany. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He sighed; sagged. “Then, when I got home, you know, I told Tiffany everything that had happened, right? And she just went all—pale, like, just the red going out of her cheeks, just all gray, and I said, ‘Tiff, what’s wrong,’ but she wouldn’t tell me. And then she said, she said, ‘Just wait. Just wait here, okay?’ She said she had to go out for a little while and then … then she said she’d come back and explain everything.” He gave a slow baffled shrug. “Only she never did. She never came back at all. I haven’t seen her since.” And he just sat there, gazing at the floor. That was the end of it.

The smile was gone entirely from Oliver’s face now. He grimaced, snatched his beer bottle up by the neck. Carried it over to the window, stepping around the books. Dread—his old friend Uncle Dread—was back. In spades. Mr. Relief had moved away and good old Uncle Dread had set up camp in his stomach. Building quite a little bonfire in there too by the feel of it.

He was on the drugs, Ollie thought. He swigged the beer. Looked out the window, through the grillwork of the fire escape. Down on the little Village bystreet going shadowy in the afternoon. Two children in store-bought masks danced through the shadows behind their mother—impossible to tell which TV characters they were supposed to be. And a gay couple in studded leather and motorcycle caps followed after them, hand in hand. Oliver, watching them all, felt so alone, felt such a lonesome hankering for childhood days, that he almost spoke aloud in his bitterness: You went back on the drugs, you stupid shit. No wonder you couldn’t think straight.

He glanced over his shoulder. There was Zach, knees around his ears. Gazing off stupidly. Sort of waggling his head.

We’re not gonna go over the bump, right, Ollie?

Oliver didn’t say anything. He turned to the window again. He sighed. Thank God the window was open, he thought. Zach had come up the fire escape and climbed in and thank God the window was open for him. If Mulligan got his hands on the Zach-man now, if Zach told his story—trying to revive a headless body, hugging it, getting covered with blood …

I give you my word that I will personally beat the living shit out of him until he tells me everything he knows.

Zach had been on drugs. That was the only explanation. The way he acted, the things he did. The way his stomach was all messed up. He was on drugs and Tiffany knew it and threw him out. Go back to your stupid mews and take your drugs there. That’s what she must have said. Go back to the mews like you used to.

He sent a long breath echoing into the neck of the beer bottle. Go back to your stupid mews … he thought.

Or had she known? Had she known he’d go there and find the body? Had she sent him there to find it, to set him up, just like she sent Oliver himself there later in the day—sent him there and then called the cops to report a woman screaming?

She said she’d come back and explain everything. She’s been acting weird for weeks.

She was the key to it, all right. Oliver was sure of that. She had the answers. But how were they going to convince Mulligan? Especially now with his brother on drugs again. On drugs and all bloody, his fingerprints probably all over. His idiot brother. How could they convince Mulligan to talk to Tiffany before he kicked Zach half to death?

Oliver gazed down at the crowns of the gingkos, which were slipping into the street’s shadows too. He pulled at his beer angrily. Thought of the first time Zachie had broken down. Up at SUNY. In New Paltz. Brilliant guy like Zachie killing time in a bogus little state school like that. Goofball U, Oliver used to call it to himself. People majored in tans there; rock-scrambling through the Shawangunks. Ollie himself had just finished up at Bennington. He was bartending his way down the White River. Writing bad poems and some good poems too. When Nana called him, he was living in a tent, in a campground near Gaysville. Laura, the waitress at Hemingway’s, had come to fetch him. “It’s your grandmother. She says there’s a catastrophe.”

Oh, and it was a catastrophe, all right. Zach had been curled up in a corner of his dorm room for four days. Arms around his knees. Wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t talk to anyone. Even when Ollie got there, he would only lift his solemn little face and pronounce grimly, “This is not what God wants me to do, Oliver.”

Not what God wants me to do. Oliver sneered down at the gingkos. Hissed through his teeth. An old man stood under one of the trees, belly in his T-shirt like a medicine ball. Gabbing forcefully across a shopping cart with an old lady in a housedress.

Or maybe they’re cops, Oliver thought. Maybe they’re FBI and they’re watching the place and any minute they’ll come bursting in here, guns blazing.

If the feds get to him first, your brother is going to be dead.

Oh boy. Oh yes. Uncle Dread was cooking up a storm in the old breadbasket now. Oliver brought the bottle to his mouth again. Tasted the bottom suds. Wished the alcohol would take hold a little. Calm him down. Blunt the edge of this depression. This fear.

After SUNY, Zach had come home to the mews again. Nana had gotten him a psychiatrist that time too, paid all his expenses, everything. And Zach had lain in there, in the mews, in the dark. Reading Augustine and C. S. Lewis and Hans Kung, days on end. Thomas à Kempis, for Christ’s sweet sake, days on end. And finally, one day, he just took off. Joined some sort of Christian religious retreat somewhere in Pennsylvania. And wrote joyful, pious letters home for a year and a half until he broke down again and Ollie had to go fetch him …

Oliver tilted the bottle back. Drained the beer. To no avail, like the man said. His heart was still lead. His mind wouldn’t stop working. Mulligan:

I will personally beat the living shit out of him until he tells me everything he knows.

That prick. The pug-nosed detective without a trace of emotion in his voice or his face. Blinking down at him from behind the round wire rims. Laying his photographs down like playing cards, blank-eyed, poker-mugged. And those photographs. That picture of the girl with the leather mask over her head and the politician up her ass. Damn it, Ollie thought. Goddamned Tiffany. What the hell was she up to here?

She said she’d come back and explain everything.

“Ach!” He waved it all away. Turned around.

There was Zach, perched on the mattress. Arms flung over his raised knees, hands dangling. Looking up at Oliver with his big eyes and waiting for him to speak. What’re we gonna do now, Ollie? Just like after Mom died. What’re we gonna do now?

“Oh hell, Zachie. You gotta turn yourself in,” Oliver said. “You got to. There’s no other way. We’ll get you a lawyer first. Nana must know somebody. Mulligan won’t be able to touch you if you’ve got a lawyer …”

“Oh Jeeze, Ollie, I don’t know …”

“Look, man, they knew this girl, this dead girl. The cops, I mean. They knew her and they’re pissed off. If they catch you, if you run and they catch you, they’re gonna teach you new meanings of the word ‘excruciating.’ You gotta do it. You gotta turn yourself in.”

The two brothers were quiet then in the dusky room. Oliver, ashamed, shuffled at the window. Gripped his empty beer bottle, studied the floor. On the mattress, Zach considered things, his eyes moving. Glancing from one skewed stack of books to another. Lingering on the cover of The Wasteland.

Goddamned Tiffany, Oliver thought. Where the hell was she?

“Okay, Ollie,” Zach said then. “Okay.” He lifted his shoulders. “Jeeze. And I was gonna be King Death in the parade tonight and everything.”

“Yeah. Well. Next year,” Oliver said. He couldn’t meet Zachie’s eyes.

Zach tilted his chin up a little. “There’s just one thing, Ollie …”

“What’s that?”

“Well … Tiffany.”

Oliver looked at him. “Yeah? What about her?”

“Well, I mean, I think I know where she is now.”

“What?”

“I mean, she’s supposed to work at the bookstore today. I mean, there’s no place else she could go except to Trish and Joyce at the bookstore. Or maybe home to Scarsdale. But I think she’s at the bookstore. I’m almost sure of it. I’d have gone there myself except … the cops, you know, and I was so sick and all.”

Oliver said nothing. He looked away, trying to think. Running his hand up through his hair. Zach had to turn himself in. He had to. But what if … what if Oliver could find Tiffany? What if she did have some of the answers? Enough to convince Mulligan Zach was innocent, enough, at least, to keep him at bay?

“Shit,” he said aloud. He was a poet, not a cop. It was impossible to work this out.

“Maybe we could call her,” Zach said.

“No,” said Oliver at once. If they gave her warning, she might run off. “The bookstore’s right around the corner. Maybe I could go over there.”

“I sure would like to talk to her,” said Zach. His head swung back and forth slowly. He studied the empty air. “I mean, I’m really worried about her, Ollie.”

Oliver drew a long breath. He nodded, let it out. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “So the fuck am I.”

Beverly Tilden was on her way to the NYU Medical Center to visit her father, who had recently had his gallbladder removed. Mrs. Tilden had asked the taxi driver to leave her off on Second Avenue because there was a good Korean grocery there, on the corner of Thirtieth, across from the shopping center. Mrs. Tilden had popped in to the grocery and bought her dad some pink carnations and some strawberry Crumblies. He would sneer at the flowers, she knew, because he was an old-school tough guy. But he’d like them secretly. And though he probably couldn’t stomach the cookies yet, he would be able to offer them to visitors. That would make him feel more like a host, more in control.

Mrs. Tilden, tall and trim, strode down Thirtieth then in her fashionable, ankle-length black coat. The flowers, wrapped in foil, were in one gloved hand. The cookies were in a white plastic bag over her forearm. Her purse was strapped over her shoulder. She glanced at her watch as she walked and made a face. It was three-thirty already. She had to make this visit and get home by five at the latest. The Halloween party was at six, and every girl in Melissa’s class had accepted her invitation. That meant eleven six-year-olds in a two-bedroom apartment. Bobbing for apples, OD’ing on sugar. Giggling, shrieking … Even with the caterer and the hired magician, there was going to be plenty of hysteria left over for her.

She walked a little faster. She was about halfway between Second and First. A police car came speeding up behind her, sped past her, its siren howling. Mrs. Tilden wrinkled her nose a little at the noise. After the police car turned onto First, there was no other traffic on the street. There were no other pedestrians either. Mrs. Tilden was alone on Thirtieth. But she did not notice that.

Not until the dark figure stepped out into her path.

Mrs. Tilden was on the south sidewalk, passing a row of brownstones. Thin sycamores with yellowing leaves spread sun-flecked shade. A breeze from the river made the elms sway. The light and shadow played and danced. Mrs. Tilden slowed. Her eyes flashed over the strange figure before her, dark and dappled beneath the trees. Mrs. Tilden didn’t like what she saw. Not a bit.

It was a woman. She had appeared suddenly. Slipping out from behind a brownstone stoop as if she had been hiding there. She was a bedraggled creature. Brown hair in tangles to her shoulder. Mascara on her wide, pale cheeks. Lipstick smudging her chin. Her cream-colored blouse was splashed with grime, torn at the shoulder, revealing a bra strap. Her dark skirt was streaked with dust. Her feet, in flats, showed filthy, nearly black. But it wasn’t this that scared Mrs. Tilden. Homeless people were all over the city; they rarely hurt anyone. No, there was something else about this woman. Her slumped, sullen, determined look. Her eyes—they were foggy—were veiled like the eyes of a snake Mrs. Tilden had once seen on a PBS nature special. Well, whatever it was, it set the alarms off, all right.

On the other hand, the alarms were always going off in this city, and Mrs. Tilden was in a hurry. She kept walking right toward the strange woman. After all, it was broad daylight. The busy corner of First Avenue was just a few steps off. There was even another police car passing by down there, its siren wild. And there had to be other people …

Mrs. Tilden glanced around nervously. No. There were no other people. The block was empty. She was alone.

And at that moment, the woman stepped toward her. Mrs. Tilden, suddenly terrified, swerved to get past. Swerved the wrong way, toward the buildings. Oh, damn it! she thought. The woman cut her off, backed her up under the stoop’s balustrade.

Good God, thought Beverly Tilden, this is it, this is the real thing, it’s really happening!

The woman stared up at her dully with those glazed eyes.

“I just escaped from Bellevue,” she said in a harsh whisper. “I have a knife. Give me bus fare.”

Mrs. Tilden was surprised to find she could still think clearly, almost calmly, though she was now icy with fear. She would just give the woman her money, that’s all. Just cooperate, that was what everyone told you.

“All right,” she said. “Just a minute.”

She fumbled for her purse, trying to open it with the flowers still in her hand. As always when she felt threatened, a New York tabloid headline screamed in her mind. MURRAY HILL MOM STABBED FOR BUS FARE! She fought the thought off. It would be all right if she just cooperated. With a quick curse, she dropped the carnations to the sidewalk. Let the bag of cookies slide off her arm as well. She snapped her purse open.

“I’ll give you whatever I have.”

“I just want bus fare,” the woman hissed. “Bus fare. I have a knife.” She held a brass letter opener up before Mrs. Tilden’s eyes. Mrs. Tilden would not have thought that would be a very scary thing to see, but it was. She fumbled her wallet open. Picked through it frantically with her gloved fingers.

“I have a token,” she said. “Is a token all right?”

“Fine. Yes. Hurry!”

“I’m trying to get it out.”

“Hurry! They’re all after me.”

Mrs. Tilden bit her lip as she hunted the token out of the wallet’s cloth folds. They’re all after me? she thought. The woman must be some sort of paranoid.

BLUESTOCKING HOUSEWIFE SLASHED BY MADWOMAN!

But she was aware of the sirens now too. All those sirens, lots of them, baying like hounds, like a pack of hounds gathering down on First. Oh God, this really was the real thing. This was really serious.

SICK DAD’S DAUGHTER EVISCERATED IN KILL SPREE!

“Here it is!”

She held the token up, pinched in her fingers. The woman snatched it.

“Thank you.”

She kept standing there. Glaring up at her. Mrs. Tilden hardly dared to look her in the face, but she sensed her youth. Her young, hot misery and desperation.

“I really appreciate it,” the woman said.

“All right.”

“I’m really a very nice person.”

“I—I’m sure you are.”

“Maybe I better take a five too.”

“For God’s sake, take everything.”

“I haven’t eaten.”

“Here!” She snatched a fistful of bills out of her wallet. Held it out to her.

“Just a five,” said the snake woman. “I’m nice. I mean it.”

“Please,” said Mrs. Tilden. “Don’t hurt me. I have children. Just take whatever you want.”

The woman pulled a bill out of Mrs. Tilden’s clenched fist. She was still holding up the letter opener. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it. Really. I’m nice.”

Mrs. Tilden nodded, trying not to steal glances at the blade, trying to look nowhere.

At long last, the woman lowered the opener. She began backing away. Staring at Mrs. Tilden, but backing away. Mrs. Tilden cringed by the balustrade. Didn’t move a muscle. She was excruciatingly aware of how quickly the woman could change her mind. Change her direction and leap at her, hurt her. On First, the sirens kept gathering, siren upon howling siren, growing louder, more numerous. But not one car came this way. Not one other person appeared on the sun-dappled block.

Mrs. Tilden huddled into herself as the woman sidled off. And the woman still eyed her. Still studied her crazily with those creepy, baleful, Nature Special eyes. And then, she stopped.

Oh please, Mrs. Tilden thought. For God’s sake, please.

The snake woman leaned toward her. Whispered to her in a voice like a sizzling fry pan. “I wish I were you, lady. Watching me go.” Mrs. Tilden stared. The snake woman’s eyes filled with tears. She turned away, her shoulders hunched. “But I’m myself,” she muttered dismally, “whoever I am.”

And with that, she shuffled off toward Second.

Avis was thinking about going outside when Perkins came through the window. She hadn’t really been outside all day. She had been stuck in this stupid apartment all day, ever since she got back from Perkins’s. She had been reading—a 750-page manuscript called A World of Women. Which “might be something for Julia Roberts,” according to the cover letter from Victory Pictures. The cover letter also said she had to finish the book and get her report in by tomorrow. Because Julia was waiting with baited breath to find out what Avis thought, har har har.

Anyway, the novel was garbage; she could hardly follow it closely enough to write the synopsis. And, of course, the baby had to be nursed and changed and played with and kept out of trouble. So by three-thirty, when Perkins came up the fire escape, Avis was only on page 400. The brilliant blue of the autumn sky was starting to fade to violet. She could see this happening above the brownstone cornices and it filled her with a growing sense of claustrophobic despair. She would never get out, she thought. The novel’s prose had turned her mind to tar—it would take forever to finish it. And the baby was sitting under the folding card table, making a funny noise by putting his hand in his mouth, so she had to stop and smile at him every two minutes to let him know what a wonderful thing he was doing. And the sky was growing darker by the minute and soon the crowds would gather for the parade and there would be no point to going out anyway and she’d be stuck here for the rest of the night and she hated her life and she glanced up from manuscript to baby to window for maybe the seventieth time—and there was Perkins. Arms spread, face pressed to the pane. Well, her little heart just went pittypat.

She waved him in. Perkins ducked down under the sill and jumped to the floor.

“Pa!” said the baby. And he stuck his arm into his mouth up to about the elbow and added, “Arrragherageraggah …”

“Whoa, nice going,” said Perkins, smiling at him. And then his smile vanished. “I need you, Ave.”

“Jesus.” She stood up. Her head was so heavy with A World of Women it felt like a cinderblock. She stared at the poet through her huge, square glasses. “You’re all pale, Ollie. Have you eaten?”

“No, I don’t need to eat.”

“I have cold chicken in the refrigerator.”

“Avis! My baby brother is wanted for a murder he didn’t commit.”

“What? Holy shit! Let me get the chicken.”

“Avis …”

But she hurried into the kitchenette: getting him fed would help her to think. She bent into the refrigerator while he, trying to follow her, was waylaid by the baby. The baby had crawled out to him from under the card table. Perkins gave a quick flinch of annoyance, but the kid loved him; he couldn’t just walk away. When Avis brought her aluminum foil-wrapped plate to the counter, Perkins was there with the baby on his hip. The baby pulled at his hair, crying “Pa! Pa! Pa!” and farting happily.

“He’s hiding in my apartment,” Perkins said. “The cops’ll kill him if they hunt him down.”

“Oh my God,” Avis said. “Dark meat or white?”

“I gotta go out. I gotta see if I can find his girlfriend.”

“Give me the baby. Here, take this.”

She traded a drumstick for the baby. The baby complained as Perkins handed him over.

“Zach’s not feeling well. He’s gonna catch some z’s,” Perkins said. He wagged the drumstick at her. “Just do me a favor, okay? If the cops come, call down there. Two rings then hang up, then call back, that’s our signal. And watch what you say on the phone.”

“Okay, okay,” she said quickly. She blinked across the counter at the poet’s haggard, angular face. She felt worried and excited and warm for him all at once. Already, racing through her mind, were half-acknowledged, jumbled scenarios. Handsome Zachary. Persecuted. Brave. Or frightened. Loved her, his head buried in her breast, and she was prettier. She was Jessica Lange in Country. Or Oliver loved her for helping Zach … Avis was eager to be more involved in this. “I’ll go down when he wakes up,” she said. “I’ll check on him.”

“I should be back by then,” said Perkins. He tore into the drumstick as he headed back toward the window. “Thanks, Avis.”

“The baby goes down for an hour at six,” Avis called after him, working it out. “I’ll come down then and bring you guys some food.”

“Yeah, forget the food.” Perkins had one leg out the window. “He’s got the quickstep.”

“Ooh, poor guy,” said Avis. (Zach was lying in bed, gazing up at her weakly. She was hovering over him wearing a nurse’s cap.) “I’ll bring chicken soup with rice then. That’s good for that.”

“Avis …” said Perkins. But then he only shook his head. He blew her a kiss and was gone, the fire escape rattling behind him.

Avis stood alone, watching after him, her baby wriggling in her arms.

The bus pulled away from the curb. The police sirens whooped and bayed. The sound seemed to spread out over the low-flung avenues. Dart up over the sidestreets. Echo down off the blue sky. The hounds seemed to be everywhere.

Then the bus gave a roar of its own. It rumbled downtown, smaller cars clinging to its wheels. Nancy looked out the rear window at the traffic scuttling along behind. She saw the shopping center falling away. And not a police car in sight. The sirens grew fainter under the bus’s grumble. They grew fainter still as the bus gunned and picked up speed. Nancy faced front in her seat, the corner seat against the rear wall. She leaned her head back, her crown to the window. She gazed up dully at the emergency exit in the bus’s ceiling. “Push up to open for ventilation.”

I’m the one who’s going to kill him, she thought blankly. She closed her eyes. I’m going to kill someone. I’m a Murderer! Murderer! And you said you were nice!

But her inner voices were growing dim too, as if the bus were also leaving them behind. After a few moments, she became aware that her mouth was open. She ought to close it, she thought. But she just sat there, head back, eyes shut. Not even hearing the engine anymore. Not knowing what to think about or daydream. She felt herself floating in a strange, pulpy element: the blackness of not knowing who she was—or really, not knowing what she was like. Because she was still sure she was Nancy Kincaid. She just didn’t know what that meant anymore. She didn’t know what Nancy Kincaid was going to do from one moment to the next. What decisions she would make. What cruelties she was capable of, what kindnesses. How were you supposed to know that? How were you supposed to find it out?

I’m twenty-two years old. I work for Fernando Woodlawn. I live on Gramercy Park with my mom and dad …

The words dropped away, down into this pliant interior mass. Down and down and down, as if into a well, and she waited for the splash and it didn’t come. And she slumped now in the corner, her mouth hanging open. The bus jostled her gently. So sorry, she thought. She felt the soft mother breasts against her. White sheets. Soft mother lips against her cheek and the smell of dishwater. I was a teenager and I was angry and crazy and I’m so sorry. The reassuring weight of her mother sitting on the end of her bed as she lay with the covers pulled up to her chin. The reassuring rhythm of her mother’s voice, like lapping water. Storybook in her frail, red hands. White cover, black letters. The Animal Hour. And Other Poems.

What if we went off together into the hills
and on into the hills beyond the hills where the

leaves are changing?

Where the first remark of gray among the branches
is insinuated in me now like something one

learned before youth

and has, in consciousness, forgotten.

Her mother’s voice like water. Water bearing Nancy away. Carrying her away in waves from the night bedroom. From the shadowed, half-visible hall threatening beyond the door. From the half-open closet and the monster’s eye pressed to the crack. From the mutterings in the street and all the chill emptiness around her since her father fell in … fell in … Wait—there he was. Oh, I was so angry about it. She could see him falling. Down into the dark well where the words had gone. Daddy … Daddy fell in … Tumbling backward, his arms pinwheeling, his mouth agape …

Daddy!

Nancy started in her seat, her eyes coming open. She lifted her head and looked around her. Licked her dry lips. Tasted her dry mouth. A woman in a nearby seat cocked an apathetic eye at her. The other passengers—there weren’t many—huddled over themselves, backs to her. Without thinking, she glanced at her wrist. No watch. Right. She remembered. They had taken her watch.

What you’re experiencing is an episode of schizophrenia.

She glanced out the window. A suggestion of dark coming on over a low, drab, brick landscape. It got dark early this time of year, but still … She did not know how much time she had left.

Eight o’clock. Eight o’clock.

The bus pulled to the curb. The doors gave a whoosh and opened. Nancy got up quickly. Grabbed seat backs, went hand over hand up the aisle to the rear door. She pushed out, tumbled down the steps to the sidewalk. With a blast of exhaust behind her, the bus pulled away, left her alone.

She was standing on the shore of a desolate territory. Low buildings. Curtained windows. The first slate-blue of evening in the air. A few cars moving back and forth but no other pedestrians. Just a cluster of unshaven men at a tavern a few doors down. Black and white men, five of them, all smashed beyond comprehension. Gesturing at one another with great conviction. “Anudder ting: fauben at bish in sunight. Ha!” one of them said.

They turned when Nancy got off the bus: She was something to look at anyway.

“Hey, mama,” one muttered.

She walked by them quickly, her back primly erect. When she figured she was safely past, she stole a quick look at them. They had gone back to their conversation, but a ghostly figure was watching her now from inside the tavern. A disheveled specter under the neon sign for Coors. A woman. Just as seedy as the men. Clothes torn, hair in tangles. Nancy met her eyes a moment. And then her guts plummeted as she realized it was …

Murderer!

Herself. Reflected in the dark tavern window.

Oh boy. Terrific.

It brought the whole muddle crashing back on top of her. It’s me! I’m the one. Look at me. I’m the one who’s going to kill him! Jesus, just look! She was past the tavern now. Facing forward again. Walking on. But that spectral stare, that glassy, baleful stare from the window … It walked with her, beside her. I’m you. I’m who you are. She was beginning to take a sort of grim satisfaction in torturing herself with it. Remembering the sweet doctor staring at her as the pain flooded up from his crushed testicles. The terror in Nurse Anderson’s eyes as she yanked her head back. And then that poor rich lady—whom she had mugged, for Christ’s sake. Mugged! That’s what you’re like, Nancy, she told herself, hurting herself, glad to hurt herself. That’s the sort of thing you do. You’re bad, you’re not nice, you’re bad. Bad Nancy.

The next thing she knew, she was heading downstairs. Moving down through the dank concrete of a subway entrance. She hadn’t even been thinking about it. It had just taken care of itself. Now, she was slipping her stolen bill out of the waistband of her skirt. Out from under her famous letter opener. She was buying a token, pushing through the turnstile. And, she realized, she knew exactly where she was headed. She had known all along, in fact: that was part of the hurt, part of the misery of it. She knew where she was going and she hated it but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t make it stop.

I wanted to be a dancer! she thought, waiting for the train. But she had taken the job with Fernando. She had stopped looking for an apartment, even though she had wanted a place of her own. Her own actions had seemed to just happen to her. She had not seemed to do them herself. She made fatalistic little wisecracks and she complained to her friends—and then she went ahead and did exactly what she didn’t want to do. She was not in control of things.

I wanted to be a dancer.

But somehow—she could not even remember how—she had turned into this instead.

Now, she was on the subway. Sitting in her corner seat, pressed into the corner, almost cowering there. There were nine or ten other passengers in the car, and they were all sort of ignoring her and keeping tabs on her at the same time. Just another bum on the train. Nothing dangerous, but peep over there now and then to make sure. She peeped back at them sullenly. The subway was getting closer to her destination. With every stop, she felt heavier inside. Sicker with herself. And the others just sat there. Reading newspapers. Stroking their children’s hair. Why didn’t they stop her? Why didn’t anyone stop her?

City Hall. Her heart was beating harder now. Her tongue kept going to her lips to keep them wet. She couldn’t be doing this again. It was crazy. She couldn’t. But when the doors slid open—sure enough, she got out of her seat. She joined the small crowd exiting. She stepped out onto the platform. She couldn’t make it stop.

A thin line of passengers were on the platform, waiting for the train, pressing in on it as the doors opened. She slipped through the line to the center of the station. She scouted out the long cavern. Scoped its pillars, behind its stairways. Two black men lounged on a bench. A woman hugged her briefcase to her chest, gazing off dreamily. No cops. Not a cop in sight. She started moving. Casually as she could. Sidling away from the exiting crowd toward the far end of the platform.

Nobody watched her go. She swallowed hard, turned and walked faster. She saw the station wall ahead. The white sign with its red lettering. “All persons forbidden to enter or cross tracks.” And there the concrete ended and the blackness began. Blackness like the sludge inside her, and she thought: Not again. I can’t. Really.

And then she had reached the end of the platform, the metal ladder there. She looked back once. Saw a beatnik-type near the stairs, watching her with wan interest. She ignored him. Took hold of the ladder. And lowered herself down onto the tracks.

She did not look back again. She walked quickly into the tunnel, hanging between the track and the wall. She tried to keep her eyes straight ahead, her mind straight ahead, like a laser, narrowed to a beam. But boy oh boy was her heart going now. Her pulse at her temple was like one of those small steel hammers: In case of emergency, take hammer and break glass. Her senses were heightened. Every aspect of the tunnel grew sharper as she went in deeper. The underground pillars loomed out of the murk. Bare bulbs burned like eyes amid pipes and wiring. The click of switches in the distance sounded like rifle shots. And every time she thought she had the mind-laser going, something scuttled suddenly: a rat? Something worse? Her eyes flicked swiftly over the four tracks as they fanned off into nothingness. Her breath trembled. But she kept walking. Fast. Straight ahead.

And there it was. A few yards away. That spot where the tunnel narrowed. Oh, she thought. Oh no. But she kept walking. And then the walls were rising up around her. The high corridor of snaking graffiti. Coiling letters. Tendrils of sprayed paint. She could hardly breathe at all now with her heart in her throat this way. She was in the ghost station again. The platform took shape, and the shapes of the abandoned bags and wiring on it. The smoky shapes of the graffiti on the wall above. And the shape, the silhouette, under the platform’s ledge, of the little arched alcoves. The place where she had hidden her purse. Her gun.

I’m the one. I’m the one who is going to kill him.

She stopped. She felt her throat tighten as the smell wafted up to her. It stung her nostrils: that damp, living tang of decay. She glanced up: She’d heard a snap. Another switch on the tracks going over. She felt the first faint breeze. Saw the first creeping glow in the far tunnel. A train was coming. She had to get to work.

She ducked under the edge of the platform. Knelt down at the entrance to the alcove. Already, she could feel the ground shivering as the train came on. And that stench grew denser. It was a cloud around her. She swallowed thickly. Her stomach began to churn.

She felt the air stir on her neck. Glanced back over her shoulder. Saw the glow of the train’s headlights spreading up over the tunnel walls. She held her breath and ducked her head into the alcove. She could see it as the tunnel grew brighter: the humped gray thing in there. The soft rotting thing.

She had to breathe. She turned her head and gasped and the stench swarmed into her mouth, into her lungs. She groaned and her stomach went all the way over. She held her breath again. Narrowed her eyes to slits. Reached out and shoved her hand into the mound at the back of the alcove.

The juicy mass closed around her hand, squeezed between her fingers. She gagged, her tongue coming out between her teeth. The ground was really bouncing under her knees now. The tunnel was beginning to fill with the rattle of the train, with the light. She worked her hand deeper into the muck and when she had to breathe this time it was like swallowing vomit. She dug around in the mound as the racket of the train grew louder, as the wind of it pushed at her and the glow spread.

And it wasn’t there. The gun: It was gone. The cops must have gotten it. They must’ve searched the place and found it.

“Ah …” She gave an inarticulate cry. Pulled her hand free of the mound’s suction. She worked her way to her feet. Staggered back from the platform until her heels touched the track rail. She gasped for breath. Her hair blew across her eyes. The train’s rumble seemed to shake her from the inside.

She looked up to the platform. She was going to climb up there to get out of the train’s way. She looked up and saw the spreading outglow play over the walls. As before, the graffiti seemed to come to life in the spreading light. The letters seemed to move. Great brown boas of paint seemed to squirm and wriggle. Slashes of green coiled and turned. Maroon swaths twisted.

And then one large black shape writhed violently amidst the others. It curled away from the rest and began to come toward her.

Nancy’s lips parted. Even as the train’s lights broke out of the tunnel, two circles of glaring light growing larger by the second, she could only stand, she could only stare. The shape that had broken from the wall was shambling toward her. It was hunched and enormous. It was leering at her, glaring at her from two marble eyes that caught the oncoming subway’s light.

A man. It was a man. Jesus Christ. He lumbered toward her. Lumbered to the edge of the platform. Rose above her like a behemoth. Rose to the dark heights from which his eyes burned down at her. From which his gray grin gleamed.

His shoulders shook as if he were laughing, but she could not hear him above the roar of the train. He opened his mouth and lifted his arm as if he were laughing, and his mouth gaped wider.

And then he pointed something down at her face. And she saw it was the barrel of her gun.

The light of the late October afternoon was dying over Sheridan Square. The sun was touching the flat roofs of the cafés, and the last rays of it were going golden on the fenced-in flora of the Viewing Garden. Long shadows spilled onto Seventh Avenue. They fanned the flames of Perkins’s dread: Time, he thought, was a-wasting.

He came into the square from West Fourth Street. Passed through to the corner and stood at the red light, absently wiping chicken grease off his fingers onto his jeans. He could feel the time passing, minute by minute. And it was only a matter of time before Mulligan tracked down his brother. When the traffic light changed, he charged across Seventh. His arms swinging, his shoulders hunched. He was thinking about Tiffany now. About how she would resist him. I don’t want to talk to you, Oliver. You know how you are. I’m not talking to you at all. Then she would smile at him, that superior, ethereal smile of hers. His mouth worked as he thought of how he’d tell her off. He was itching to shove her back against a wall and shout the truth out of her.

The bookstore where she worked was called The Womyn’s Room. It was on the ground floor of a yellowing brick building on Bleecker Street. Perkins barreled down Grove, just off the open square, deeper into shadow. Bleecker, at the next corner, was more shadowy still. Perkins was bent forward urgently, pushing forward with long, urgent strides as he reached the intersection.

And there he stopped. Pulled up like a reined-in horse. The bookstore was just across the street, a little to his right. A new red brick facade under the yellow brick. There were two large display windows full of books, framed by black metal. The front door was set in between them, forming an entrance alcove. The door within the alcove was swinging out.

And out, under the alcove, to the sidewalk’s edge, stepped Detective Mulligan.

“Fuck me,” was Perkins’s comment.

He pulled back around the corner. Clung to the wall of the apartment building at the end of Grove. Peeked around the edge of it, feeling like Peter Lorre in some old spy film. Curly-haired, baby-faced Mulligan just stood there. Hands in his trench coat pockets. Eyelids batting behind the round wire rims. Perkins had to yank his head back as the lenses turned his way in a slow scan.

“I can’t believe this,” he said to the cold bricks against his cheek. He waited a full minute before he dared to peek his head out again.

Mulligan was moving by then. Walking to the black Dodge parked alone—illegally—at the curb. He slid in on the passenger side. Perkins could not see the driver, but he heard the engine fire up at once. The car pulled out. Perkins had to draw in again, like a turtle, as the Dodge sped past the corner.

The second the car was out of sight, Perkins resumed his charge. Strode across the street to the bookstore. In past the windows with their prim displays: clusters of an author’s books, huddled together as if for warmth. Those photographs, the severe women, their grim intellects in their eyes.

He pulled the glass door back. Stepped into a small shop. The door hissed shut behind him. The warm amber of the wall-to-wall shelves embraced him; the smell of books, the stillness of them.

Trisha—or Leatherhead, as Perkins called her—was behind the counter, an octagon of low shelves in the middle of the room. Perkins stomped over to her impressively. Trish did not so much as look up. She was a woman in her twenties, pole thin. Even her head was a thin cylinder, topped with spiked white hair. Only the broad shoulders of her studded leather jacket gave her any bulk at all. She was leaning over an inventory list. She was chewing gum.

Perkins leaned in toward her, his fists pressed into two stacks of lesbian poetry.

“What’d you tell him, Trish?”

“Fuck off, Ollie.”

“What’d you tell Mulligan?”

“Eat me.”

“Where’s Tiffany?”

She flipped him the finger. She chewed her gum.

“Look, Trish,” Perkins said. “I know how you feel about me, okay? But try to understand. There are your feminist theories and feelings and opinions. And then there’s reality. See? Reality’s important. Your theories and feelings are meaningless. Now we’re dealing with reality. Have you got that?”

She glanced up long enough to sneer around her spearmint. Perkins saw the five gold rings through her right nostril. He sniffed—they always made him want to sneeze. “It amazes me that you would just come in here and be so phallic,” she drawled.

“Oh Christ.”

“Do you really think I’m just going to accord you your masculine privileges?”

Oliver hung his head.

“We shouldn’t even let you in here,” said Trish, “the way you objectify women.”

“Hey. Hey. I haven’t objectified a woman in over a week. Can’t a man change?”

“Lethal misogynist.”

“Not lethal enough for you, baby.”

“Your poems should be hung in effigy.”

Perkins’s face went red. His arms, braced against the books, trembled. “You can’t make an effigy of a poem, Trish. It doesn’t make sense. Now who do you want Tiffany to deal with, me or the fucking police?”

Something sparked in Trisha’s eyes at that. She made a show of casually reviewing her inventory, mashing her gum with pistoning jaws. Finally, and without looking up, she said sullenly, “The cop said there’d been a murder.” She raised her eyes to him. “That true?”

He nodded. “There’s been a murder, yeah.”

“Great. That’s just great.” Her lips twisted. “You bastards. You and your brother. What did you get her into?”

“Did you tell Mulligan where she is?”

“I don’t know where she is. I didn’t tell him anything. All right? Now why don’t you just get out of here, semen-breath.”

“It’s me or the cops, Trish,” Perkins said again. “She’s gonna have to talk to one of us.”

“Yeah? Which is worse?”

Perkins didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure.

“Shit,” said Trisha. “Why don’t you just fuck off, you macho shit. Damn you. You and your brother. Damn the two of you.”

He was surprised by the red flood of rage in him. He wanted to drag her over the counter by her leather jacket front, mash that sneering face a little. He backed away from her instead.

“I told her there was nothing in men,” Trish muttered.

“Yeah,” Perkins snapped. “I’ll just bet you did, you jealous bitch.”

Now it was Trisha’s turn: She flushed scarlet. Her eyes grew damp. “Go suck some little boys, creep-o,” she nearly shouted at him. “You do anyway.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said.

And that’s intellectual discourse in the Village, he thought, as he turned his back on her, waved her off.

He stomped to the door. He had his flattened palm braced against the metal frame.

“Hey!” Her bark stopped him but he didn’t turn. “Hey,” she said again. “Testicle-head. Hold on.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. “What?”

There was a pause. A breath, a long breath; forlorn. “Are you actually telling me they’re gonna arrest her?” Trish said.

“That’s my guess, yeah.”

“And what’re you gonna do to her? Fuck her over somehow, I’ll bet.”

Perkins didn’t say anything. He sensed he had her and he didn’t want to muck it up. He came around slowly until he was facing her and, sure enough, she was wrestling with it, her mouth working, her chin lowered. He waited in silence; let her come to it on her own.

“Fucking pig cop,” she said finally. “He’ll go there eventually anyway.” Still, Perkins kept quiet. She glanced up at him angrily. “All right,” she said. “All right, you shithead, but you better not fuck with this. You better not fuck her up anymore.”

“At least I’ll give her a chance to explain,” Oliver said. That was true enough, at least.

Trisha made a short, nasty gesture. She had pulled something from a pocket. A small rectangle of paper. She tossed it onto the countertop. She looked away.

Perkins decided she had gone as far as she would. He walked back to her, his tread heavy. The paper on the counter was white with blue markings. It was a schedule for the Metro-north trains out of Grand Central. He picked it up. It was the schedule for the trains to Scarsdale.

“I found it in her desk,” the woman said. “This morning, when she didn’t show up for work. I called her there. A couple of times. But there’s no answer.”

The schedule was marked. Perkins could see two small scratches that seemed to have been made by a pen that had run out of ink. One scratch was near the 12:03 out of New York; the other was by the 4:35 return, which arrived in the city just a few minutes after five.

“I don’t even know if it’s for today,” Trisha said. “It’s just she hasn’t gone home like that in ages and I …” She hardened at once. “If you give it to the cops, Oliver, so help me God, I’ll kill you dead.”

He nodded at her. “Thanks, Trish.”

“I swear it, Ollie.”

But he had already turned away again. He was already heading back toward the door.

“Bang!”

The man waved the gun barrel in Nancy’s face. She heard him shout the word above the wind and rattle of the onrushing train.

“Bang! Bang!”

The train’s lights beat down on her from the right. Her peripheral vision was wiped out by the glare. The deep, black bore of the gun swallowed the rest of her sight, and all her thoughts, every thought but of the instant death in there, the coming flash of fire. She breathed hoarsely. Stood frozen in that black thought. The man on the platform kept waving the gun. Nancy’s mouth opened. She put her hands up.

“Put your hands up!” the man screamed.

She put her hands up higher. She felt the ground bouncing under her feet. The rail hot with vibrations against her heel. Her body had turned to liquid, her will was empty air. She couldn’t move. She stared, her whole heart pleading.

“Bang!” The man waved the gun in her eyes. He leaned down at her so that his face caught the glare of the train. It was an intelligent, cultivated face. Sandy-haired, sad-eyed, full-lipped. Etched with a grin of inner agony. “I know who you are!” he shouted—and he really had to shout now. The roar of the train seemed to be expanding, filling the place. The light was blinding. The wind blew Nancy’s hair across her wide eyes, her open mouth. “FBI!” the man screamed. “Extraterrestrial FBI! Trying to get into my brain, aren’t you? Trying to take over my brain! EXTRATERRESTRIAL MOTHERFUCKERS EVERYWHERE! You can’t fool me, you federal space fucker!”

Nancy stared.

He’s experiencing an episode of schizophrenia …

The madman took another step toward her. She whimpered and leaned away from that deep black bore. He jabbed it toward her nose, about a foot above her nose. She could see all the way into it, into the dark of it, and everything else was white and roaring. The train shrieked—its horn stabbed her ear—a wild animal shriek of warning.

“Please!” she screamed.

“I know who you are, you federal fucker!” She felt the barrel pressing down at her. She felt the heat of it. It was ready to explode.

“Die!” he shouted and the train’s horn shrieked again.

Nancy’s hand shot out—her right hand—slapping the man’s gun arm away to the side. He pulled the trigger. Nancy screamed once more as the pistol snapped into the shivering thunder. Flame and smoke blew from the barrel into the white glare. But she had already dodged away from it. She did not know—could not think—what she was doing, but she had dodged to the right and toward the platform. She had seized the madman’s wrist in her left hand. She was spinning in the small space with her right hand balled into a fist. The train was an avalanche of noise and light, filling everything, moments away.

She yanked hard at the madman’s arm. Yanked him down with her left hand and slugged him in the jaw with her right. Too crazed for pain, she still felt the shock in her elbow and shoulder. Felt her knuckles popping against his gristly chin. The pull and the blow brought the madman over the platform’s edge. Screaming, he fell, arms pinwheeling …

Daddy?

Down into the white light. Down onto the track. She gaped at him, horrified, as the massive silver front of the engine ramrodded toward them both. The crazy man lay pinned to the track in the icy white light. There was no time even for him to look afraid. He just stared up into the light in dull amazement. And Nancy had no time to help him. She had to get up on the platform, or under it. She had to get out of the way or she’d be crushed between steel and concrete.

The crazy man lifted his arm before his face as the train rushed at him.

Murderer! Murderer! Nancy thought.

And she leapt onto the track. She straddled the madman. Grabbed his shirtfront and hauled up on him. He was too big, too heavy for her. He wouldn’t budge. The train ploughed at them. She felt it at her back. She felt her ears would burst from the thunder, the insane harpie shrieking of the horn. The crazy man stared stupidly past her at the train. He still had his arm up for protection.

Nancy shouted. She hauled him up. She dragged him to one side, over the rail, off the tracks. She tossed him under the platform as if he were a doll. Threw herself after him, on top of him. Clung to him as the lights flashed past her, as the knife-sharp wheels of the train churned past her over the tracks at a distance of inches. She clung to the madman and sucked in his sour smell, the smell of his urine and filth, and the electric smoke of the train. The engine flashed by and then a car and then another and another, flash, flash, flash. The train howled once more, as if in triumph. And then it was rattling away, the thunder fading, the dark returning. It was past them. It was gone. The clatter retreated. Faded away.

In the sudden quiet, Nancy groaned. She leaned over the side of her crazy pal and vomited. A thin green gruel burned out over her teeth.

“Eagh,” the crazy man muttered. “How humiliating.” “Shut up,” said Nancy. She rolled off him onto the ground. Rolled over onto her back, her arm flung out over the ties. Her fingers brushed the handle of the gun, which lay discarded now at the center of the tracks. She stared up stupidly into the darkness above her. “Just shut the fuck up,” she whispered hoarsely.

Twenty to five.

Perkins stood at the marble balustrade overlooking the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. He felt harassed by the time.

He was at the café on the balcony. Hemmed in by suits at either shoulder, men and women drinking at the tables around him and the bar behind him. He leaned over the balustrade, gripping a mug of Sam Adams beer.

Below, on the floor of the huge concourse, streams of commuters flowed in all directions. They flowed into the concourse from the long hallways on every side, and out through the marble archways that led to the tracks. Under the vast cerulean vault above, where the zodiac was painted on assbackward with weak light bulbs twinkling here and there for stars, the people swirled and intertwisted. They eddied and turned around the information kiosk at the center of the place.

The kiosk was a brass gazebo with an archaic clock atop it. The hands on the clock read twenty to five. Perkins sipped the foam off his beer.

He should’ve gone home, he thought. He should’ve gone back to check on Zach. The dread was climbing into his throat, almost nausea now. It was getting harder and harder to think. He should’ve just headed the fuck on home.

But what then? What could he do then besides stand by and watch while Zach turned himself in? While Mulligan and the feds tore him limb from limb?

The lacy black hands on the clock atop the gazebo swept around slowly. Four forty-five. A whirr of wordless voices rose up steadily toward the backward stars. He thought about Tiffany. He thought about finding her, questioning her about the body in the mews, about the photograph of her with Fernando Woodlawn. He had phoned her mother’s house in Scarsdale, but there was no answer. He had decided to come here to wait for the 5:02, the train she had marked on the schedule. He had come reluctantly. He kept telling himself that he ought to go home.

The man in the information kiosk had told him that the train would come in on track 28. Perkins could see the number painted over one of the marble archways below. He watched the arch and sipped his beer. He hoped the beer would cut through the gel of dread that clogged him now from belly to brain. But no, it was going to take a lot more beers than one to do that. He drank more deeply. He thought about Tiffany. He shuddered. Grimaced on the streaming rush below.

He remembered the first time he had seen her. She was already living with Zach by then. Oliver had never even heard of her and then one day he went to visit Zach at home and she was just there, just living with him. They had met at the Pennsylvania retreat apparently. The Christian place Ollie had yanked Zach out of after his second crack-up. She had stayed on there alone for a while after Zach left. But apparently she missed her snookum’s mystic brilliance. She had to be with him.

“He was operating about three astro-levels above everyone else there,” she explained to Ollie, when he met her. “That’s why his aura got so clouded over. It was the effort of trying to shine through their misunderstandings.”

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “Yeah, that must’ve been it.”

Zach and Tiff had looped their arms over each other and beamed at him. Two cosmic goofballs in love.

Perkins shook his head as he remembered. Even the thought of her made his tongue go sour. The thought of her treacherous, deep, doe eyes. He glanced up a moment at the stars painted on the ceiling. The April constellations rolling eastward into winter. She believed in astrology. She believed that dreams were messages from God. She believed that Jesus had a white aura because Mary had conceived from the divine energy radiated by the star of Bethlehem. “You know,” she told him once, “it’s just so hard for me to get it into my head that you’re actually Zach’s brother.” She had that Venus face, that voice like music. She tilted her head at him when she spoke. “I mean, his astro-level is so high, you know, his aura is so pure and he understands so much and, I mean, you …”

Perkins snorted. He tilted back his mug and let the beer ripple into him. The suit standing on his right had moved off toward the bar. Now, when he set his mug down on the balustrade, he saw a woman in a green dress seated at one of the café tables nearby. She had one leg crossed over her knee, the black shoe swinging out and back, out and back. She was sipping a soda water and lime. She looked up at Perkins and he looked away. He scanned the concourse grimly. Leaned against the flat cold stone and gazed down at the steadily rising flood of rushing people under the man-made heavens. The hands on the kiosk clock had moved closer to five.

You don’t understand anything, Oliver, not anything. That’s what Tiffany had said to him. That night. That night a year ago. It made his guts curdle to remember it, and he detested her and he detested himself and he was sick of it. Full of dread and sick of it. You don’t understand anything.

This time, when he glanced down, the woman in the green dress held his gaze. She considered him; she let her lips soften. Perkins had the almost overwhelming urge to hurl himself onto his knees before her. Wrap his arms around her, bury his nose in her groin. Nuzzle her like a puppy dog, sniffing for sex and comfort and a little respite from his loneliness.

Probably unwise, he thought, all in all. He offered her a sad smile, then turned back to the balustrade, back to the view below.

The hands on the kiosk clock touched five.

That night, he thought. That night when he had found Zachie drugged out of his mind. Lying on the floor of the mews bedroom, mumbling about the goddamned teacup and brotherly love. Where was Tiffany then with her fucking astro-levels? She should have taken care of him a little bit. She should have opened her eyes and seen what was happening to him. No. She showed herself that night. She showed herself in her true colors …

He grimaced again, an expression of pain. His stomach was sour and his heart was lead. He thought of this afternoon: finding Zach at his apartment; Zach and him together. When they’d been kidding around, laughing like that—it was the first time since he could remember that his loneliness had lifted a little. That pall of loneliness.

Jesus Christ, he thought. Jesus Christ, what have we done?

Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught the movement at track 28. He turned and saw the staggered flow of commuters break through the marble archway, spread out across the grand concourse. He straightened. His eyes picked over each person who stepped under the arch, followed each figure as it entered the surrounding currents. The flow through the archway stalled a second, then began again in a fresh gout.

And Perkins reared up at the balustrade, stunned for a second by what he saw.

Out through the arch, there had come a small, slim figure. Its head was bowed, its face obscured by the brim of an oversized baseball cap. But he recognized the outfit right away. That crazy quilt shirt, the coat of many colors: How could he miss it? The jeans, torn at the knees. The red canvas bag the figure was carrying …

“What the hell?” he said. “Zachie?”

The figure moved across the concourse toward a corridor of lighted food concessions. There was a subway entrance there, just across from a magazine stand. As the figure moved to the center of the concourse, it turned. Looked up at the information kiosk, at the antique clock that now read 5:09.

Perkins saw the profile in that moment, and said nothing. His lips parted and the air came out of him silently.

The figure hurried on across the concourse toward the subways. And it was not Zach. It was Tiffany.

The gray-haired man with the folded Times would go home tonight and tell his wife that he had seen a monster. He was a stocky, staunch old Wall Street crusader. Florid skin, pulpy nose. Planted on the subway platform like an oak, waiting for the next train. He would chuckle as he said it: “So I’m just standing there waiting for my train when this … this creature came crawling up onto the platform. The way it looked, it must’ve been living in the tunnels for years! I’ve read about that sort of thing …”

That’s how Nancy imagined it anyway as she climbed up the ladder off the tracks. The way the old guy was staring at her made her want to shrivel up to nothing. She was painfully aware of what a mess she was. Her blouse in shreds, her bra sticking out of it. Her face and arms streaked with dirt and blood. And then, when she got a whiff of herself … Climbing onto the platform on her hands and knees, her head hung down. She smelled her urine and her vomit. Her rank sweat. The traces of that juicy garbage in the alcove. This guy, this Wall Street guy, made a face at the very sight of her; and who could blame him?

She pushed herself to her feet. Felt the weight shifting at her groin and smoothed her skirt down nervously. She had the gun hidden in the front of her panties now. She’d lost the letter opener in her fight with the madman, and she couldn’t find her purse, but she had hung on to the gun. She could feel it, heavy against her pubic hair, warm and somehow vital against her flesh. She looked around to see if anyone noticed it bulging through her skirt. But only the stalwart businessman was looking at her at all, and he was staring at her grimy cleavage. The rest of the crowd was gazing off to the left, watching the oncoming lights of the next train.

She turned her profile to the businessman, ignored him. She shuffled to the edge of the platform. She was on the uptown side now. She had crossed over in the tunnel. As she was limping back toward the light, she had seen the train—the one that had nearly crushed her. It had been stopped before the downtown platform. She had seen the transit police pouring into the station there. Blue uniforms weaving between the gray suits and the tweed skirts and jackets. They were searching for her. They had seen her and the madman on the tracks. She had scurried away from them, across the tunnel, between the columns, to the other side. She was going uptown anyway. She was going to Gramercy Park.

She had decided to head for home. To see her mother. She didn’t know where else to go. Her address was the only clue to her life that she had. And if her mother didn’t know her, if her mother didn’t know who she was, what she was … Well, then she was lost for sure, forever.

The uptown train sliced smoothly into the station. Clean silver cars flashing by, slowing to a stop. The doors slid open and Nancy limped wearily into the car. Several of the passengers glanced up at her. When she sat down, the woman in the seat next to her got up, moved away.

The train took off. Nancy stared straight ahead. Clasped her hands between her knees, hunched her shoulders. Clutched her misery to herself. She felt like crying. Her mind kept showing her a movie of the subway tunnel. The glare of the train lights. The glare in the wild, agonized eyes above her. The bore of that gun, the sudden death ready to explode out of that gun …

That man, she thought, shuddering. That madman. She began to tremble as she remembered his dull face caught in the subway lights, pinned on the tracks. His arm raised uselessly before the onrushing train.

You are experiencing an episode of schizophrenia …

She had to hug herself to get the trembling to stop. That’s what he was, she thought. That man. He was a schizophrenic. Just like me.

At the end, in the darkest place of all … She remembered the merry gaze, the quiet, merry voice of Billy Joe Campbell, the crazy man who had accosted her at Bellevue. In the darkest place of all, there is a fearsome creature, he had said. The Other; the self whom, above everything, you wish not to be.

Well, that was him, all right, she thought. That nut case with the gun. That was definitely a self she would prefer to avoid. Living in the dark like that. Drooling in the dark. Screaming out fantasies about federal agents from Mars; extraterrestrial brain snatchers; murder at eight o’clock; at the Animal Hour … Oh yes, she too could have a career as a Crazy Subway Guy.

Only if you have the courage to embrace that self can you learn the magic word …

“Ugh.” She let out a little moan, shivering. And then caught herself. Huddled into her stink. Muttering. Shuddering. She stole a glance around the crowded subway car. All those faces against the wall. The people standing at their silver poles. Why, to them, she already was the Horrid Thing. The Creature from the Subway Tunnel. They were probably all staring at her really, secretly. Peeking secretly at the bulge of the gun in her panties. They were probably all just waiting for the next stop to start shouting for the police …

Suspicious, her eyes traveled over the crowd. The Black Secretary. The Warehouseman in the plaid shirt. The two Businesswomen. And then, also, here and there, mingled with the others, strange beasts. The white-skinned Vampire between the secretary and a clerk. A furry Wolfman behind the businesswomen. A ghoulish Monk at the warehouseman’s shoulder. Hey, wait a minute, she thought. What was going on here, anyway? Everyone was secretly watching her but did anyone else even see these monstrosities?

She had forgotten it was Halloween.

Twenty-third Street. She saw it with a start, as if coming awake. This was her station. She stood up quickly and joined the small gush through the doors to the platform. She kept her eyes turned down as she shuffled behind the crowd. A policeman stood at the stairs, scanning faces. She looked away as she shuffled past him.

She came up onto Park Avenue South. She was surprised to see how dark it was. It must be after five already. At least. The clear autumn blue of the sky was gone. A violet dusk hung over the broad double avenue. The string of traffic lights at each corner to the north burned green in the darkling air, all the way up to the bright facade of Grand Central. Then the lights changed and burned bright yellow; then bright red. The thick rush hour traffic halted. Great buses grumbled, and white headlights glowed in the deep blue air.

Three hours left, she thought. She stood on the corner, looking around, looking for a clock. But something else caught her eye. She turned and found herself peering into the broad display window of an electronics store. A Newmark and Lewis right there on the corner. “Halloween Deals!” declared orange cardboard letters pasted to the glass.

Oh, she thought dully. That explained the monsters in the subway car. There were monsters here too. A nearly life-sized cardboard Frankenstein, his arms outstretched. A witch stirring her brew. A cardboard skeleton on the glass door with yellow eyes and an evil grin and worms and rats squirming in his rib cage.

But that’s not what had caught her attention. What had made her turn was something in the display itself. Nine television sets glowing in the center of the window. Twenty-inch Sonys, stacked together on shelves, three on top of three on top of three. Each had the same picture. A pretty coffee-skinned newswoman peering out earnestly. Must be the five o’clock news, Nancy thought.

She gazed at the TVs absently. Hadn’t there been something else? Something on the screen just a moment ago? She had caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye, hadn’t she? Something familiar, something that had stirred her memory …

For another moment, she gazed through the window at the nine newswomen. All the same, all surrounded by cardboard bats and ghoulies, draped with Halloween crepe. Then she shook her head. No. It had just been a sensation. A glitch. Like déjà vu. She began to turn away.

And the picture changed. She hesitated. She stood there on the sidewalk, this ragamuffin in her tattered blouse. She forgot, for a moment, her filth-streaked skin. The weight in her underpants. The rank smells coming off her. And she gazed through the store window at the nine television sets, the nine pictures. They were pictures now of a young woman’s face.

Do I know her?

She was a pretty girl, wearing one of those graduation hats with the tassel. High rosy cheeks and a shy smile. Glistening brown hair to her shoulders. Blue eyes.

I know her …

The sight of her made Nancy’s stomach contract with fear.

The Other; the self whom, above all, you wish not to be.

And now the picture—all nine pictures—had changed again. There was a video shot of a house now. A small house. White brick fringed with red ivy. Shaded by a maple tree on a small tree-lined lane. And it made the fear worsen: It was like a memory, a threatening memory, just out of reach. The ragged, smelly young woman stood there, gazing at it, licking her lips. What. What is it?

And again, the picture changed. A quick cut, almost simultaneous on all nine sets. On all nine sets, men carried a stretcher out of the house. A stretcher with a black shape on it. A black body bag.

I know this. I know this. Damn it. Her stomach was sloshing around now like a washing machine. Her breath was quickening, her pulse was like a drum. And yet she felt at the same time as if she were floating away. Drifting off above her own body, this physical cauldron, its weird, unthinking fear.

She watched the TVs as if hypnotized. Another cut. More people in the narrow lane outside the little house. Policemen striding purposefully past the cameras. The camera shakily panning down to a plastic bucket in one cop’s hand. The camera zoomed in. The bucket—nine times the bucket—filled the screen—one bucket on every screen. And Nancy’s hand rose slowly, her dirty hand. She pressed it to her throat. She felt like she was strangling. She was so frightened …

“Oh!”

She gasped. Her hand flew from her throat to her mouth. A man was walking toward her, nine times, on nine screens. A man in jeans. Black hair, almost to his shoulders. Weary eyes. She knew him, yes. Those weary, lonesome, lovelorn eyes.

But I … I made him up!

She couldn’t mistake him. The sharp planes of his face, the lived-in lines. It was her poet! The poet she had dreamed about. The suffering artist who had put his naked arms around her. She had fantasized him! She had wished for those sad eyes to turn to her. To look up from the pages on his desk to where she lay naked beneath the sheet in his garret … And there he was! Walking down the alley, his shoulders hunched. Holding up his hand to ward off the reporters’ microphones. The microphones converging on him. Policemen flanking him, escorting him to their car. Nancy’s fear had spread all through her, and yet she wondered at it too: She had fantasized him and there he was, right there, he was …

The pedestrians heard her cry out. There were a lot of pedestrians on the sidewalk around her—it was rush hour now. The pavement was rhythmic with their homeward foot-steps. The darkening air was alive with their vital eyes. She cried out and they heard her and glanced her way. Glanced at this pitiful, slack-jawed, staring thing, this filthy, muttering rag of a girl. They veered to go around her safely as she stood there, oblivious to them, gaping at the nine televisions in the Newmark and Lewis window. Gaping at the nine faces on the nine sets, all the same.

And no one—none of the pedestrians—noticed that the face she was staring at—the nine faces on the nine TVs—was her own.

But it was. Nancy shook her head for a moment, unable to take it in. There she was, nine times, three on three on three, staring back out at herself. Another second and the truth of it got through to her. She broke from her trance. She bolted forward. She ran forward to the glass door with the worm-eaten skeleton. Pushed through into the store.

And now, she was surrounded by herself. Everywhere—on both long side walls of the store—in the center shelves that ran from front to back—everywhere, her own face stared from screens of various sizes. It was a still photo, a color picture faintly out of focus. But she saw the broad cheeks, the strong jaw softened by the fall of curling hair. The direct, strong, honest eyes.

There I am! she thought, turning from set to set, drinking in her old self. There I am! I found me! There …

From somewhere, some speaker somewhere, a newsman’s voice was telling his story in short hammer strokes. She tried to concentrate, tried to listen, but then …

“Miss?”

At first she did not know where the voice was coming from. Soon enough, though, she saw. A store clerk. A tubby Indian in a sweat-stained white shirt, his red tie loosened at his throat. He was hurrying toward her down the aisle. Waddling between all her faces as they rose up the wall, as they ran along the shelves.

“Miss …”He was shaking his finger at her angrily. “You cannot come here. Dressed like that. You must go.”

“… as outraged law officers promise to work relentlessly,” the newsman was saying.

The store clerk waddled toward her, belly first. “Excuse me. Excuse me, Miss.”

“… sifting clues around the clock …”

I have to listen to this, she thought.

“You are not buying something,” said the store clerk like an angry hen.

“… trying to solve the savage murder …”

“Out, out, out, out.”

“… of Nancy Kincaid …”

“What?” said Nancy.

But the store clerk was upon her. His round belly pushing her toward the door. His finger waggling in her face. “You are not buying something dressed in this way. You must go.”

She staggered back from him. Staring, open-mouthed, as her face—as all her faces—flicked away to nothing on the walls and the shelves. The coffee-skinned anchorwoman returned.

“Elsewhere in the city tonight,” she said, “firefighters in Brooklyn are working to contain a blaze that …”

“Brooklyn?” said Nancy. “But what …?”

The savage murder of Nancy Kincaid?

“You must go!” the store clerk screeched in his high-pitched Indian accent.

You mean I’m not the murderer? I’m the goddamned victim?

“What’s happening?” Nancy cried out.

“I will call the police!” said the store clerk.

He came on hard, driving her back, sending her staggering back until she was at the door. She wanted to throw her hands up at him. She wanted to scream: For God’s sake! Leave me alone! Can’t you see I’m dead!

But the store clerk reached out past her head. Shoved the door open behind her.

“Out, out, out,” he said, bellying her backward.

The pedestrians passing on the sidewalk glanced up briefly as Nancy was forced out among them. She stood still in their scurrying midst, staring at the store door as it swung shut with a pneumatic hiss.

But what the hell …? she thought. What the hell is happening?

She stared at the glass door; at the new evening reflected there; the televisions glowing and flickering within; the skeleton hanging before her. That skeleton, worm-infested, crawling with rats: It was staring out at her. Grinning and staring with his yellow eyes, out from behind the reflection of her own terrified face.

Perkins bolted from the balustrade. Shouldered his way through the bar crowd, then short-stepped down the sweep of marble stairs to the concourse. His first thought was to run straight across the floor. To grab her arm. Spin her toward him, shouting in her face. Tiffany, what the fuck is going on?

But he hung back. He watched as she ran ahead of him. Weaving her way through the streams of commuters. Across the vaulted canyon, by the marble arches along the walls. She clutched her red bag tightly. Kept her head ducked down, her face hidden by the baseball cap, her hair tucked up under it. She ploughed grimly through the gaps in the crowd. Moving urgently, by all the looks of it. Heading toward some definite destination.

Why did she come back? Perkins thought. He slipped through the lines and crowds behind her. Moved after her steadily, keeping her in view. His whole body seemed to be pulsing and tightening, anxiety and excitement making him jittery, breathless. His thoughts pulsed too, little electric bursts of them: Where did she go? What was she doing? Why did she come back? Damn her, why did she have to come back? “Excuse me,” he said softly, as he worked his way around the shoulders of a rushing businessman. He was not even trying to get close to Tiffany anymore. He was following her, plain and simple.

He slid around an elderly woman, pushed between a pair of backpacking kids. He watched her over the heads of the crowd, through the spaces between their bodies. He kept moving after her. Tiffany had now reached a subway entrance. She stopped there. Perkins pulled up short, about fifteen yards behind. He let the crowd converge in front of him. Ducked down, hoping to hide behind them, but catching glimpses of her still. He saw her turn, slowly; turn her head to scan the vast terminal with big, hunted eyes. Did she know she was being followed? Could she pick him out? He couldn’t tell. He saw her ashen cheeks, the thin line of her white lips.

You don’t understand anything, Oliver.

And then he saw her take a breath—and she darted into the entranceway.

He moved forward quickly, afraid of losing her in the crowd. But when he came into the entrance, he spotted her at once. That colorful quilt shirt was easy to see. He tailed it down the stairs into the station. Through the turnstiles. Across the low-ceilinged underground plain of columns and signs and stairwells. She moved with the other travelers, with their quick, synchronized steps. He kept her in view: the movement of her hips, the way her arm went out at the elbow as she hurried down another flight of stairs to the train platform …

She had worn black that night, he remembered. The night he had found Zach drugged and loony at the mews. He had taken his brother to St. Vincent’s Hospital and called Tiffany from there and she had shown up wearing black. Black jeans, a black turtleneck. Her black hair pulled tight behind her with the silver streak woven into the ponytail. Her face had been drawn and very pinched and white. She had looked tired to Perkins, cross and unattractive.

She got on a number 7 train now, crosstown, and he got on, one car behind her. He worked his way to the storm door, where he could see through the glass panels from his car into hers. He leaned his shoulder against the door and watched her. Sitting there with the red bag on her lap. Staring into space, miserable and pale. Perkins wiped his mouth nervously.

The doctors had kept Zach at the hospital overnight. Perkins had taken Tiffany back to her apartment: the railroad flat in the East Village, hers and Zach’s. She had sat on her bed with her hands hanging down between her knees. Looking straight ahead of her. He had seen her in the dresser mirror as he turned to go. He had wanted to scream at her. He had wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. All her mystical horseshit. Why hadn’t she taken better care of his brother?

The train pulled to a stop at Forty-second Street. She got off there, and so did he. Once again, he followed her through the wide, low underground caverns. She was going faster now. Casting little glances side to side at the men and women walking around her. Did she sense him there? Did she know somehow he was behind her? His nerves throbbed in him to the rhythm of his footsteps. His footsteps echoed in the broad underground passage, the echo lost in the echoing footsteps of the crowd.

“Well …” he had said, and moved toward the door.

“Don’t go.” Tiffany had not even looked up at him. She had sat on the bed, stared straight ahead, and her pale face had begun to tremble. And then she buckled forward, covering her face with her hand. He had gone to her, sat next to her on the bed. Put his arm around her, thinking, Well, why didn’t you watch out for him, damn it? But he hated to see a woman cry. She had pressed her cheek against his shoulder. He had felt her tears dampening his shirt and stroked her hair. She had looked up at him desperately. “Oh God, Oliver, oh God,” she’d said. And then he had kissed her.

He swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth as he watched her moving ahead of him. Why the hell had he had to kiss her? Why the hell did it have to happen at all? He watched her vanish and reappear in the hurrying crowd. Caught glimpses of her hips switching and remembered Mulligan’s photograph and her white, naked ass. The nape of her neck looked bare and delicate with her hair all piled up under the baseball cap … Christ. Christ, he had known Zach loved her. Even when it was happening, he had known she was the only woman Zach had ever loved. He had told himself that it was nothing; just this one urgent moment with her. He had told himself that they both just needed comfort on a rotten, lonesome night when things had gone wrong. And then, oh Jesus, how he had ploughed into her. How he had pistoned into her, crying out as she cried out, as she tore at his shoulders with her frantic fingers. Her body had felt soft under the cotton turtleneck, but when she stripped the shirt away she was sinewy and hard. Her skin was dark, her breasts were small and sharp, her thighs clamped him and he could not stop touching her, nipping at her, driving into her soft mouth with his tongue. He had come with his powerful arms wrapped around her, holding her tightly to him and moaning her name in a way he did not like to remember.

Tiffany boarded the West Side train. Perkins pulled up a second, still trying to swallow that taste that would not go down. Then he went in, one car behind her. Dashed through the doors as they were sliding closed. Snaked swiftly through the jam of workers, secretaries, execs. Pushed to the storm door, so as not to lose her as the train pulled out, as it picked up speed.

He pressed against the door and peered through its glass panel into Tiffany’s car. He saw her, sitting against the right wall around the center. And then the undulating movement in the car caught his eye and he saw the rest of it. He saw the celebration.

It was a party of freaks. All through the car. Human hybrids, mutant beasts. Dancing in the aisle, arms raised, hips swaying. Standing on the seats, their heads thrown back, their chests forward: howling at the ceiling till they lost their balance and tumbled into the arms of the creatures below. Cowled, chalk-faced ghouls; zombies in pinstripe suits; cadavers in lacy slips dry-humping top-hatted Mr. Hydes. And every centaurlike combination of the sexes—women with padded jockstraps, bearded men with padded bras, indefinable assemblages of curves and bulges and body hair—fandangoing with one another, bottom to bottom, crotch to crotch, in the swaying, jam-packed car.

Perkins peered through the glass. Turned and glanced at his own car: the sedate gathering of workers crushed against one another, wriggling to find space to read their evening tabloids. He turned back to the glass panel and peered through at the bizarre celebration. And then he noticed Tiffany again, and caught his breath. She was gazing right at him.

She was gazing desperately up at the glass panel from her seat. Smiling an unhappy, mendicant, despairing little smile. Gazing right at him. Or was she? A second later, she had turned away again and was staring blankly into the wild scene before her. He wasn’t sure if she had seen him or not.

The train pulled into the West Fourth Street station. The creatures in the next car howled in unison: “Halloweeeeen!” They poured out the doors. Perkins pressed his face to the glass, his view obscured by the mob of them.

Then the car was clear. He could see again. Tiffany was gone. And the subway doors were closing.

He leapt to them. Caught them as they shut. Grunted as he forced them ajar. They retracted a moment and he slipped through. He stood on the platform, looking this way and that until he caught sight of her quilted shirt again. She was in the midst of a huddle of monstrosities, moving toward the stairs. He followed, rising up after them into the blue evening.

As he stepped out into the chill air, he checked his watch. It was nearly six. The parade wouldn’t start for an hour, but Sixth Avenue was already lined with spectators. Some were in costumes, some in street clothes. Some had taken up their viewing posts by the police barricades along the sidewalks. Others, most, strolled in a heavy flow past the broad display windows of the low malls. Vendors were setting up their tables before the windows. They were hawking noisemakers to the passersby, and domino masks bordered with flashing colored lights.

The avenue itself was cleared of traffic. Policemen patrolled freely on it, pacing up and down. Perkins clutched a little at the sight of so many of them, so close to home, so close to Zach. But he couldn’t do anything about it now. Tiffany was getting away from him. Heading uptown, quicksilver, slipping through the dense crowd, zig and zag. Perkins had to lift up on tiptoe to watch her Mets cap weaving ahead of him.

He followed her—and he wanted to stop following her. He felt she was leading him on now, taking him somewhere he did not want to go. He wanted to let her disappear, let the whole thing disappear …“Excuse me, excuse me,” he murmured as he worked his way around the strolling people. He could not stop himself. He felt powerless, as in a dream. As in a dream, he had a horrible sense of premonition. And it was building …

He looked up. Ahead of him, darkening against the dusk, the spires and turrets, the brick and tracery of the Jefferson Market Library rose up out of its surrounding cluster of trees.

“Oh hell, sister, that was wrong.” That’s what he’d said to her when they were finished. He had sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. Wishing he could wriggle out of his own skin. Get away from his own remorse.

“Oliver. Don’t say that.” She had sat up, the sheet falling from her breasts. She had put her hand on his shoulder. He turned away from her. “I needed you,” she said softly. “I needed you. Really.” He wanted to tell her to shut up. He wanted to get the hell away from her. She leaned her head against his back, her soft cheek against his skin. “This has been getting me all so confused,” she said. “The way he’s been. What he’s been talking about.” He heard her sniff. He felt one of her tears roll down his spine. “I mean, he’s so wise, he sees so much, I don’t understand what … I mean, the things he makes me do now …” His skin crawled. Damn her. He felt like such a shit for doing this; goddamn her. He sat where he was, hunched and silent. And she said: “I just sometimes feel like I can’t stand it anymore, that’s all. I mean, I try to understand, but he’s, like, on such a whole other plain from me, from everyone … it’s just these things …”

“Stop it,” he said. It came out a growl, harsher than he’d wanted. “What’re you talking about? Just stop it. Don’t put it all on him.”

She pulled away. He glanced over his shoulder and saw her looking at him, baffled, teary eyed. “I didn’t … I didn’t mean … Well, you saw what he was …”

“Stop.” Goddamn it. He ripped himself free of the sheets, stood naked off the bed. “The man’s on drugs, that’s all, that’s what I saw. He needs some help, for Christ’s sake. That’s all. A little less of your airy-fairy bulbhit.”

“Oliver, don’t you understand what …?”

“I mean, he wasn’t taking that garbage before he met you, Tiffany.” He only muttered it, but her face went slack, as if he’d stunned her with a blow. He felt bad; it made him angrier still. “All that—cosmic crap. All that expand your mind, purify your aura, raise your astro-level. What’d you expect?”

“But I’m not the one …”

“I mean, isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t this what you wanted him to be like?”

She stared at him. Slowly, she shook her head. Her chin began to quiver. “God, Oliver! God, why are you being so mean to me?” Then her face buckled and she began to cry in earnest. “Oh God!” She flung herself back on the bed. Buried her face in her arms, sobbing. “You don’t understand! You don’t understand anything, Oliver, not anything. Just get out, damn it. Just get out of here. Please.”

Then he lost her. Right in the shadow of the library. He had looked up for only a second at the blackened patterns on its stained glass windows. He had thought, only for a second, about how he had planned to go up there tonight. Up to his workspace. To try to write a little, to watch the parade. And he had thought, without meaning to, without expecting to, without understanding why, he had thought suddenly that he could never go back. He could never write a poem again. He must keep silent. Must …

And when he looked down over the thick currents of people going to and fro in the gloaming, the blue baseball cap was gone. Tiffany was gone.

Perkins ran forward. Pushed forward through the crowd. He slid and shouldered his way up to the corner of West Twelfth. That’s where she’d been standing. That’s where he’d seen her last. He looked down the sidestreet. Along the brick facades, beneath the yellowing trees. Traffic had been stopped here too. People walked in the street, and along the sidewalk under street lamps and shadows. But there was no sign of Tiffany. Perkins stood there, looking for her, his heart pounding hard, his thoughts jumbling.

And then, with a little coppery spurt of fear on the back of his tongue, he realized this was Nana’s block. There was Nana’s building right in front of him. She must have gone in there. She must have gone up to see Nana …

He punched his fist into his palm as he charged forward again.

“Bitch!” he whispered. He started running. “The bitch!”

The building rose up over Nancy into the twilight sky. A broad brick facade with alabaster ledges and balconies. Shouldering the ledges, flanking the balconies, gargoyles stared out over Gramercy Park. They were grinning homunculi, squatting, gibbering. Wagging their tongues lasciviously. Rolling wild eyes.

Nancy stood on the sidewalk below them. She shivered, cold in her rags. Her eyes moved over the stone monsters overhead, over to the corner window, her window. It was dark up there. Nobody home. She gazed up at it until her vision blurred. She swayed where she stood. Faintly, behind her, she heard children’s laughter. Two mothers were herding their costumed trick-or-treaters around the iron gates of the little park. Nancy listened to their voices wistfully. Closed her eyes. Feeling woozy again. And tired, so tired. If she could get upstairs, if she could get into her own home, onto her own bed … Oh, she would sleep for a year. The cool sheets around her body, the cool pillow under her head. The weight of her mother sitting at the foot of the mattress. Her mother singing.

She swayed backward. Nearly toppled over before she jacked her eyes open wide and steadied herself. She had to hold it together. She had to hang on if she was ever going to get inside.

The building was on the corner of Twenty-first and Lexington. The entrance was on Twenty-first, facing the park. The heavy wooden doors were open, but the doorman was there. A hard-looking Irishman. Face like a hammer, body like a fireplug. He was sitting on a three-legged stool just within the entrance. He had not moved for fifteen minutes.

Nancy lowered her eyes to him, blinking to stay awake. Maybe she should just walk up to him, she thought dreamily. Maybe she should just say, “Hi, I’m Nancy Kincaid. I was savagely murdered today and I’d really like to change my clothes. Are my folks home?”

Well, maybe not. If he didn’t recognize her—if he called the police … She did not have the heart for that anymore. She did not have the energy to escape again. Most of all, she did not have anyplace else to go.

Anyway, the doorman was going to move soon. She was almost sure of it. He had to work the elevator too. She remembered that—or at least she thought she did. If she could just stay on her feet long enough, someone would ring for him upstairs. He would have to leave his post and go fetch them.

So she waited, swaying. She could almost feel the passing time. The dark falling all around her like rain. Getting late, she thought. Getting to be eight. Can’t wait. Got a date. Got to be there for the Animal Hour, woo, woo. The flood of darkness closed around her. She could feel herself going under. Jesus, was it really only this morning that she had vanished from the face of the earth? All that running through subway tunnels, getting arrested, kneeing shrinks in the balls. Fighting with insane gunmen beneath the sidewalks. And then to realize that she was a murderer—and then to find out that she had been murdered—I mean, what a day, she thought. Her eyes fell shut again. She smiled, swaying comfortably on her feet. Feeling the goose pimples tickle her bare arms as the chill October dusk wove through the tatters of her blouse …

Then her eyes shot open. She had heard the bell inside: the elevator. She saw the doorman sigh and push off his stool to his feet. He shut the doors to the building. Through the doors’ glass panels, through their filigreed glaze, she saw him humping away across the lobby. She waited another moment, breathing heavily. Then she looked around. The children were gone. Only a vampire and his girlfriend were strolling arm in arm by the park, pausing under the old iron street lamps. She moved toward the building.

At the door, through the glass, she could see the elevator across the way. The doorman had shut himself in the old-fashioned cage, and now the door slid shut and he rose out of sight. Quickly, Nancy hiked her skirt up. Reached into her panties and pulled out the .38. She struck the thick glass panel with the gun butt. Struck it again, down at the left-hand corner. A small triangle of glass burst from the pane. She heard it fall and shatter on the lobby floor. With another glance over her shoulder, she reached through the hole and seized the doorknob. In another moment, she was inside.

Imitation gas lamps burned low, threw yellow light on the dark oak paneling around the walls. Nancy’s shadow danced on the marble tiles of the floor as she crept forward swiftly. She heard the elevator stop above somewhere. The arrow over the door pointed to the fourth floor. She heard the cage slide open. She went around the corner into a small mailroom.

Brass mailboxes lined three walls. On the fourth there was a solid metal door. Nancy pointed the gun at the doorknob. Her finger tightened on the trigger. On second thought, she reached out and tried the knob with her hand. The door opened easily. Inside there was a wooden pegboard with keys hanging from hook bolts. She lifted the key to 3K. Shut the door. Hurried back into the lobby.

She had not heard the elevator cage slide shut, but she could hear the car in motion now, descending. The arrow pointed to three, then two. Then light showed around the edges of the box. But Nancy had already crossed the lobby to the stairwell door. She pulled it open and slipped inside. As it shut behind her, she heard the elevator cage rattling open.

The adrenaline pumped through her and she climbed quickly. The rags of her blouse trailed behind her like white streamers. She gripped the key in her left hand, the gun in her right. On the third floor, she pushed the door open gingerly. She peeked out to make sure the hall was clear. Then she stepped into the hall, went with long strides toward the door at the end.

The hall lights were dim and she moved from shadow to shadow. The plush paisley carpet muffled her footsteps. She prayed that no one would open his door and spot her there. A beggar with a gun. This stench around her like a cloud.

When she reached 3K, she rang the doorbell. But she didn’t wait for an answer. She unlocked the door with her key and went in. Shut the door behind her. She leaned back heavily against the wood. Her mouth hung open with weariness. She peered into the darkened foyer, seeing nothing but a blur. She brought her hand up quickly to brush tears from the corners of her eyes. Hi, Mom, she thought. I’m home.

It was several minutes before she could move away from the door. When she did, her heart was beating rapidly. She was eager—she had not known how eager she was—to see a familiar thing. Some room she had been in. Something she had touched. A face; her mother’s face. Anything she remembered. The newsman’s sonorous drone played in her head as she came through the small foyer. It taunted her: The savage murder of Nancy Kincaid … It was ridiculous. Obviously. She was not dead. It was crazy. And yet she was, in fact, beginning to feel like a ghost. Unseen. Unknown by anyone. She ached to exist again.

She moved into the living room, the gun held down at her side. She peered steadfastly into the shadows. She could make out an aging, respectable place. A thinning rug on a wooden floor. A stolid sofa. Stalwart club chairs that looked as if they would smell of pipe smoke. Nancy’s eyes darted anxiously from one thing to another as she passed through. Butit allseemed two-dimensional in the dark. It did not seem real. She did not seem real moving through it. Her heart began to beat harder. With every step she took, she felt she was growing more ghostly, more transparent. The savage murder … The savage murder of Nancy Kincaid … Her head felt light. Christ, she was fading away, wasn’t she? None of this was familiar. She could not remember it at all.

She crossed the room and came into a hallway. Doors opened on either side and there was one door at the far end. She moved down the corridor, peeking in the rooms. Looking at the pictures and photographs on the wall. Recognizing none of it.

The savage murder of Nancy Kincaid …

“Who am I then?” she whispered into the shadows. “Who the fuck am I?”

She felt like no one as she reached the end of the hall. She felt she was fading away.

Then she looked in through that last doorway. “Oh!” she whispered. She turned on the light.

It was her room. She had found her room. The lace curtains stirring over the partly opened windows. The Degas posters on the flowery walls. The ballerina jewel box on the white dresser, reflected in the mirror there. And snapshots wedged in the mirror’s frame. The bed was a sweet four-poster with a frilled canopy over a thick white quilt. A huge stuffed panda was propped against the headboard. She moved among all this with her lips parted, her eyes swimming. Did she remember it? Was it hers? Well, wasn’t it? Of course it was. She knew it was. A young woman’s room that looked like a teenager’s. That looked like a little girl’s, in fact. Yes. That was just her. Because she hadn’t wanted to grow up. Because she hadn’t wanted to move away. She should have found her own apartment, her own job, a job she wanted, her own life … But she didn’t care about that now. She tossed her gun down on the quilt. She took hold of one of the bedposts in her hands. She pressed against it. Rubbed her cheek against the warm curve of the wood. That was it for the outside world as far as she was concerned. She was going to live in this room for the rest of her life. Forever. She never wanted to leave. She closed her eyes and the tears overflowed them. Olly olly oxen free, she thought. Home.

It was a long while before she opened her eyes again. She gave a little laugh and sniffled. Looked around her. She let go of the bedpost and moved over to the dresser, to the mirror. She ran her eyes over the photos there. They were photos of girls mostly. Teenaged girls standing together, laughing. Arms thrown around each other’s shoulders. Girls in evening gowns with boys in tuxedos beside them. Girls making faces, clowning in costumes and thrown-together outfits: the rich dame, the motorcycle bandit, the New Orleans whore. Her eyes moved from face to smiling face and she ached, she was so hungry, to remember any of them, one of them.

But there were only phrases. Words rising to the surface of her mind like bubbles in a pond. Would you stop worrying? You look fantastic … Well, you ask him out. Guys love that … Lets just hit Columbus Avenue and shop until we die … Phrases, words, but no voices. She just could not hear the voices. She could not remember them.

Her eyes began to fill again. She glanced up at her own reflection. Whoa. She snorted. What a sight she was. Jesus. Her skin looked like the side of a submarine. Her hair … Well, I just had it dipped in shit and I can’t do a thing with it. There were scratches and streaks of black filth on her cheeks that made her lips look ashen like the lips of … well, of a corpse. She studied herself. She was almost fascinated by the disaster. And then, slowly, she smiled a little.

Ooh, she thought. Do you know what I’m going to do?

Moments later, she was stripped naked in the bathroom down the hall. She was in the shower. Catching the hot spray on her chest, letting the water run down between her breasts, over her belly. Her sense of rushing time was gone. Her sense was gone of everything except that water. On her back. In her hair. The shampoo in her hair. The foaming soap on her face, on her breasts, in the crack of her ass. The satisfaction of the black water running off her, running down the drain.

She dressed again in the bedroom, gleefully stuffing her old clothes in a little pink waste can by the window. She found fresh panties in the dresser. Wonderfully dry panties—soft where her thighs had been chafed by the others. She found a full-length mirror on the inside of the closet door, and she watched herself as she fastened her bra. She was half in love with the sheen of her own skin, pink from the heat of the water.

She pulled on some loose-fitting black jeans and a bulky gray turtleneck. She slipped her pistol into the jeans’ waist, covered the handle with the sweater. She turned this way and that, studying herself in the mirror. Dressed for travel, armed for hunting, she thought. And the reflection of herself in her clean clothes made her feel more awake, more clearheaded, than she had all day.

She pulled on a pair of sneakers and she was finished. She stood in the center of the room. She felt satisfied with herself, but she was a little at a loss as to what to do next. She had to fight back that sense of urgency that was creeping back on her now. She glanced over at the dresser. Noticed a lipstick beside the ballerina box. Ooh, she thought. She went to it. Uncapped it. A pink gloss, good for her pale skin. She leaned in close to the mirror and spread it on.

Oh, it was a luxury. She would never take makeup for granted again. Wonderful makeup. She would build a shrine to it. Lipstickhenge. She would sacrifice a lamb. Just to feel it on her lips now, to see the color come, as if she were drawing it out of herself, drawing herself out of the ashes, becoming more distinct, more real …

Her hand stopped moving. Absently, she pressed her lips together to even out the color. But her eyes had moved away from her reflection now. She had noticed something—another reflection in the glass.

It was a clock. On a table on the far side of the canopy bed. Right under the shade of a bedside lamp. She had not noticed it before. It was a small digital clock with red-light numbers. 6:27. She stood there, with the lipstick in her hand, staring at the numbers reversed in the mirror. An hour and a half, she thought. And she thought of voices down a hallway. Eight o’clock. She narrowed her eyes. Trying to remember. That long hall …

But now she noticed something else, something in front of the clock. And she thought:

We’ll have to draw him there. Bring him there at just the right time. Voices down a hallway. The hard carpet under her hands, against her cheek. The low voice at the hallway’s end. You won’t forget now. You have to be there. Eight o’clock.

She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until the air came shuddering out of her. She put the lipstick down on the dresser. She turned around, away from the mirror. What is it? she thought.

She could see it more clearly now. Lying right in front of the clock, a faint glow of red on the shiny white cover.

Oliver Perkins.

Ollie. The name murmured at the end of the hall. The name on the shiny white cover.

She moved quickly away from the dresser. Moved around the bed to the side table. The book was lying face up, the title clear in black letters. The Animal Hour and Other Poems by Oliver Perkins.

That’s him, she thought. Good God, that’s him. She picked the book up. Her hand was shaking. She began to turn the book over and she knew what she would see. The voice from down the hall was murmuring, murmuring to her. Whispering in her ear. He’s got to die at just that point, so don’t forget. Eight o’clock. The hall seemed to telescope, grow shorter and longer. The voice was in her ear, then far away, down the hall. And she turned the book …

She saw the face she knew she would. His face. Angular and sardonic. Wanting her from deep in the eyes: lonesome without knowing how lonesome, needing her love, her comfort. It was her poet: the one she had imagined. A face to turn to her in the dark, to press against her skin in the dark, against her breast …

And he’s the one, she thought. She shook her head at the photograph, thinking: He’s the one who’s going to be murdered tonight. The low voice whispering down the hall, whispering in her ear. Oliver Perkins. He’s going to be killed. He’s going to be killed at eight o’clock.

You have to be there.

She gazed down into the lovelorn face a long moment. Then she jerked back suddenly, the book falling from her hand, fluttering to the floor. She gasped, covered her mouth to keep herself from crying out.

There had been a loud, jolting noise from down the hall. The front door was opening.

Someone was coming into the apartment.

Avis was sitting in the blue dark. The rocker was gently moving. The baby was taking a few last sleepy tugs at her breast. The balloon-pattern curtains were drawn against the evening light. But around her, in the pearly outglow of a street lamp, the shapes of mobiles were visible as they swung and dangled. The shapes of stuffed animals, of cardboard mice and birds and frogs, sank into the gathering gloaming. All the colors of the room sank slowly into blue. Avis held the warm weight of her baby against herself and stared into space.

In her daydreams, she was sitting at Zachary’s bedside. He was lying there ill, gazing up at her weakly. She was running her cool fingers over his hot, damp brow. She imagined his grateful face.

She knew what he looked like. She had seen his picture. Oliver had once shown her an old Polaroid of the two brothers together. Arms around each other’s shoulders. Zach’s smaller, slender body pulled to Ollie’s. His broad, shy, silly smile. She knew he had taken drugs for a while and that he had had breakdowns. And she knew he had a girlfriend whom Oliver didn’t like. In her daydreams, Zach’s girlfriend was in prison for the murder that Zachary didn’t commit. When he was acquitted at the dramatic trial (at which Avis had been the key witness) he collapsed into Avis’s arms …

Avis took a deep breath and then let it come streaming out of her. She rocked gently back and forth. The baby was slack in her arms, asleep. It was after six, maybe close to six-thirty.

The baby would sleep for at least half an hour now. She could run downstairs, Avis thought, and check on the Perkins brothers. If the baby woke up and cried, she would hear him through the window. She did not want to take the baby downstairs.

She thought about that now. Oliver would be there, she figured. He would introduce her to Zach. She had made some chicken soup with rice for Zach’s bad stomach. She would heat it up for them. “It’s no trouble,” she would say. After Oliver told her what was going on, she would say she had been too agitated to finish the horrible book she was reading. So she had made the soup instead. The soup was in a plastic container now on the counter in the kitchenette.

She stood up out of the rocking chair, cradling the baby. She stepped forward in the dark, ducking through the mobiles. She moved to the rail of the crib. Lay the baby down among his stuffed animals. She tiptoed out of the room, closing the door behind her.

She stood for a moment in the living room. The empty room with its canvas chair and its folding card table. Its un-decorated white walls and the bare white bulb in the ceiling above. Voices came in through the window. The crowd murmur from the street, and the sound of footsteps on the lane: people hurrying to see the parade. She stood for a moment, thinking. And then she decided: yes. She would go downstairs. Definitely.

And she moved to the kitchenette to get the chicken soup.