New York, 1993. I knew it would happen eventually. It was inevitable. There are only so many people in the world.

I am in the Jazz section of the Sixty-Sixth Street Tower Records when I first catch sight of her standing at one of the listening stations across the store.

The ambient sounds of riffing and scatting muffled through abandoned headphones, of shopping bags rustling, and the tail ends of passing conversations all erupt, blossom, and wither like some great acoustic time-lapse photograph. In the microsecond it takes me to recognize her.

She looks different than I imagined. I guess I thought my leaving would have done more damage—something that I could see just by looking. Tattoos, a nose ring, some ugly form of rebellion. But she doesn’t really look any different. Older, but not different. Her hair is still long, shiny, and blonde, like the little girl who hugs her mother in the hair color commercial.

My first impulse is to run and hide. I’m not sure why. Maybe fear. Fear of what I want.

She smiles as she talks to the sales guy. He has a tattoo—it looks like barbed wire circling his bicep—and an artificial body, constructed by machine at a gym. She tosses her hair. Is she flirting? Jesus, he must be ten years older than she is.

“Can I help you?” A pale boy with unnaturally blue-black hair and lipstick to match has come up behind me.

“No, I’m just …”

The boy walks away.

I look down. My feet are moving—following her. I walk up one aisle and down another, pretending to browse. She joins some friends. They all stand with one hip cocked, wearing more or less the same thing—low-cut jeans and too-small hooded sweatshirt jackets. They all wear flip-flops on their feet, presumably to show off the hideously colored polish they wear on their toes. One girl is too chubby to pull off this uniform. Baby fat hangs out over the top of her jeans, which cling too tightly to her thighs. But she seems oblivious. They are giggling. My daughter and her friends shuffle down the aisles—talking, laughing, shopping, laughing; stepping on the backs of their too-long jeans, which are frayed and dirty on the bottom. Why are girls that age always laughing?

If I were still her father, I could ask. I would know her friends’ names. I would take them out for pizza. Do sixteen-year-old girls eat pizza or just salads?

I look up. I am standing in Rap/Hip-Hop. A middle-aged white man with thinning hair, wearing Timberlands, browsing in the Rap section. Not the least bit conspicuous.

One of the girls looks over and catches me staring. I panic, look away, study the fine print on the parental advisory sticker on the CD I am holding. She whispers to the others and they all look over. I can feel them. I know I shouldn’t look up, but I can’t help it. I need to see if there is anything at all in Willa’s face. Anything. I am older, I have grown a beard, but she would have to know me. I look up for an instant, lock eyes with her, and see nothing. She laughs and puts her hand over her mouth the way young girls do and turns away. She whispers to her friends and they turn to face me.

“Pervert!” The chubby one yells at me, and they all laugh and run down the aisle. My face burns. My stomach lurches. I walk quickly and calmly to the back of the store, hoping to find an employee restroom. Nothing. And no one around to direct me. I panic and run to the stack of boxes I’d seen one of the sales kids unpacking earlier and, bending over it, I vomit onto Garth Brooks’s latest release.

Willa and her friends are still there when I collect myself and return to the front of the store. I feel somehow stronger now, purified, ready to face her head-on. I stride over to the Employee Picks station where they are sharing earphones. At the final moment, though, I freeze, and instead of closing the last few feet between us, I stop at the end of the rack and pick up a CD.

“Look, guys,” says Chubby, “the Perv’s back.”

I look up at her. Cunt. Bitch. Cow. I know exactly what she is going to be in twenty years.

“Now listen here, young lady,” I say in an entirely unconvincing parental tone of rebuke that none of us believes. “I don’t know where you learned your manners, but—”

“Why are you following us? Why are you, like, staring at her?” one of them asks, pointing to Willa.

“I’m not … I … I … I’m … because I’m her …”

Willa looks at me, her eyes searching. “My what?”

“Your father.”

There is no sound. At least I don’t hear any. Willa looks confused. Her friends are stunned; their mouths hang open.

“My father,” she says. It isn’t a question.

I nod. “I know this must be … I mean, after such a long time, this isn’t … Do you think we could go talk somewhere?”

“Um … I don’t think …,” she begins.

“You are fuckin’ nuts, mister,” says Chubby. “You better get the hell away from her.”

“Pardon me, but what goddamn business is it of yours?”

“I’m her SISTER! And you’re not our fuckin’ father. So fuck off.”

So. Fuck off. Not our father. Fuck. Off. My Sister. Not. Her Father.

It’s like they are all very far away. Like I am looking through the wrong end of a telescope. And silence. Someone has pressed the universal mute button. I don’t know for how long.

I am looking at Willa—staring, squinting. Until my eyes sting.

“Willa?” I ask desperately.

She looks at me and sadly, slowly shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says, and means it.

“But I …”

“I’m from Wisconsin. My dad’s a dentist.”

Chubby grabs her arm and pulls her away. The other girls follow, giggling nervously.

Willa looks over her shoulder at me as she is being led away. “I’m really sorry.”

Something is wrong. I stand there, going over the calculations: height, weight, age, eye color. I had been so sure this time. I had made a mistake in Chelsea. And in Tampa. And Stockholm. And Berlin. I am willing to admit that. But this time I had been sure. Absolutely.

Maybe she was just afraid. That would be understandable. I am sure there was something in the way she looked at me, spoke to me. I look around the store. She and the others are at the register paying.

“Can I help you?” A skinny kid with odd facial hair and a small silver hoop through one eyebrow steps in front of me.

“No, I can’t see my—” I try to get around him.

“What? I don’t understand. Can I help you find something?”

“I don’t want any—just get out of my—”

“Okay man, just chill.”

I push him out of my way. I can just see Willa and her friends going through the revolving door out onto Broadway, where another group of kids and three adults stand. One of the kids wears a brand-new T-shirt from a current Broadway musical. The adults—two women and a man—study a Manhattan Streetwise map. They look like sensitive progressive schoolteachers who go by their first names and sit cross-legged on the floor talking honestly with kids about sex. The whole group starts down the stairs into the subway.

I push through the revolving door to run after Willa.

I don’t realize I am holding the CD until the alarm goes off and I am standing on the sidewalk. I feel the security guard’s hand on my shoulder. Tight. I look at the CD. Notorious B.I.G. The kid with the facial hair jogs up behind me. “Hey, Mister,” he says. “You can’t just walk out without paying.”

The security guard and the kid argue for a good ten minutes over whether or not to call the cops. The guard locks me in the tiny employee break room where I sit in a plastic chair decorated with anti-Reagan graffiti, staring at a wall covered in posters of popular female vocalists caught—of course, completely unexpectedly—in obvious states of dampness and chill.

The longer I sit there, the more scared and confused I get. I begin to wonder if someone or maybe some organization is planting girls who look like Willa in cities all over the world. That somehow they know where I will be when. That they are trying to drive me crazy or get me to do something. I start to panic. I tell myself I need to calm down. Because the guard and the kid could be involved. I clear my throat.

“Excuse me, could I please use your phone to make a local call?” I ask, and then wonder if they notice how much I sound like a robot.

They look at each other. The kid shrugs.

“Sure. But make it short.”

“Cool,” I say, trying to compensate for the robot thing. My hand trembles as I dial Walt’s number. I am in the principal’s office because I was in a fight. I am in the Beverly Hills Police Department because I TP’d a neighbor’s house. I am in the Tower Record’s break room mistakenly accused of shoplifting. I am in trouble. I don’t know if Walt will come. Why should he? We hardly know each other. They look over at me—the guard, the kid—and I lower my head. In shame. There are specks of vomit on my shoe. Walt answers and I struggle to tell him everything at once. That I have been falsely accused at Tower Records, that I threw up and passed out and don’t want to impose but …

“It’s gonna be okay, son,” he says. “I’m on my way.”

And Walt comes and gets me. On the way home, we stop for pastrami sandwiches and cream soda. I never tell him about the girl. Willa.

It is long past dark when we get back to the apartment. Walt follows me up to my place, sits down on the sofa, and kicks off his shoes.

“Let’s see if there’s a decent movie on,” he says, without turning around to look at me or asking if I want him to stay. I don’t understand. It’s late. I know he must be tired.

And then it dawns on me. I am being taken care of. Someone is taking care of me.

I sit down on the other end of the couch. “Thank you.”

He nods, barely, and aims the remote at the TV. “African Queen, it’s our lucky day.”

New York, 1994. I am walking home from the Pick, one of three places I go when I leave the house these days—the other two being the liquor store and the video store—when I see a small crowd gathered outside my building. As I get closer, I see what looks like an ambulance but it isn’t pulled up onto the curb. “Medical” something is written on the side. I can’t see the rest. There are too many people standing around blocking my view. And still, for no good reason, I begin to walk faster. And to feel slightly ill. I push my way to the front door and get there in time to see two men in white uniforms trying to fit a stretcher through the narrow entryway, tilting it this way and that—a body, zipped into a black plastic bag, rolling precariously with each attempt.

I can tell, without even unzipping it, who is in the bag. Time slows to a crawl. My breath is gone. I blink, but the scene around me does not change. Something is off. I blink again. And still, crowd watching, men in white clumsily, almost comically, failing at their macabre task. Employing the same failed strategy over and over. Not understanding the square peg will never fit through the round hole.

There are movies where this would be funny—Chaplin, the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers. I have laughed at those movies—the absurdity, the gallows humor. But I am not laughing now. Now I am wondering what the Marx Brothers are doing in my tragedy. I drop my leather messenger bag and rush toward them screaming.

“Stop! Just stop it. Put him down!”

“ ’Scuse me, sir,” the older bulky one says, “but who are you?”

“I’m … I’m … his … son.” Some of the neighbors exchange looks.

“Oh, well, very sorry for your loss, sir.”

“Why don’t you take a moment?” the younger skinny one offers.

They put the stretcher down inside the entryway. On the floor, underneath the mailboxes where Walt and I first met almost two years ago. I unzip the bag so that I can see his face. He is and is not still Walt.

I sit down cross-legged on the cement floor and lift him into my lap, cradling him in my arms. Was it his heart? A stroke? An aneurysm? And if I had been home could I have saved him? What if I could have saved him? I could have saved him if I’d been home. I pull Walt closer and hold his head to my chest. He smells faintly of aftershave and pot. My tears fall onto his cheeks. Now we are both crying. Maybe, I think, it means he will miss me too.

“Sir, we need to take him now,” the big one says to me.

“No, please,” I am begging. “I … I don’t have … anyone else.” I’m sobbing in front of my neighbors. I am ashamed but I can’t stop. “He … He … took care of me.”

The big man kneels down and puts his arm around me. “It’s tough. Losing your dad, even at our age. But think of it this way, you’re lucky you had as long with him as you did. That you and your old man were so tight. Not everyone’s so lucky.”

I look up at him and nod. And then he zips the bag closed, takes him from my arms with the help of the skinny one, and carries him out the narrow entry of our building and over to the truck. “Medical Examiner” is what’s written on its side. The two men take Walt and lay him on a gurney in the truck and hand me some papers to sign. Which I do with some indistinct mark. And then they drive away.

I do not think I have ever been more alone.

Somehow the fact that I feel more pain over the loss of a man I’ve known for a couple of years than I did for my own father strikes me as not the least bit strange. In fact, I have to concentrate to remember Ray’s death. What year was it? Does it matter if I remember? It hardly mattered then.

Los Angeles, 1983. “He has a large abscess in his left lung. And pneumonia. Normally we’d do a surgical procedure, but there’s no chance he’d survive that. We’re treating with an antibiotic and we’ll know more in twenty-four hours or so.”

The doctor gave my shoulder a squeeze.

He had a mustache and wore a bow tie. No white coat, no stethoscope. He looked more like a guy who made ice cream sodas at the Woolworth’s counter than a guy who specialized in death by cancer.

“Okay, well. Thank you, doctor.” I shook his hand, but instead of letting go he brought his other hand down on mine, turning my exit attempt into a sympathy sandwich.

“I believe in being honest with my patients. And their families.”

“I appreciate that, Dr.…”

“Neiberg.”

“Right, Dr. Neiberg. I certainly appreciate that.”

He continued talking as he held my hand between both of his, cupping it gently as if holding a small, wounded rodent.

“Even if he survives the infection, the MRI we took yesterday shows the cancer is working its way up his central nervous system.”

I pulled my hand away. “Jesus Christ. He was only diagnosed five weeks ago. How—”

Neiberg took a deep breath and sighed. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn he was about to tell me he was out of fudge ripple.

“Your father has stage-four lung cancer with metastases to the lymph nodes, spine, liver, bladder, and more than likely, by next week, the brain.”

I stood there looking past Neiberg, nodding. I stared at the nurses and orderlies and physician’s associates. “How do they decide who gets the ugly salmon-colored scrubs, who gets the purple ones, and which poor sons of bitches get stuck wearing the pastel-colored cartoon teddy bears to work?” I asked Neiberg.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I mean, is there some kind of pecking order or does it go by department? Is it just random? Luck of the draw? Matter of choice?”

Neiberg stood there for a moment blinking at me. Silent. “I … I’m afraid I can’t … I don’t really …” He cleared his throat. “Mr. Todd, even with all the pain medication, your father is fairly coherent. These next few days are going to be the last lucid ones he has. If there are things you want to say, things you want him to hear, now would be the time.”

Neiberg handed me his card and gave me one last arm squeeze.

“Call me if you have any questions. About your father.”

I walked down the carpeted hallway looking for room 401 North. This was the most expensive ward in the most expensive hospital in Los Angeles. Insurance didn’t begin to cover it. I couldn’t give two shits if Pop kicked at County, but that wouldn’t look right. Sons like me paid for their fathers to die well. So, Pop, here you are in the VIP wing at Cedars, next door to where Charlton Heston is convalescing.

401 North. I stood there for a minute deciding whether to knock or run. I pulled open the door and stepped inside. The room was bright and sunny and clean and filled with French reproduction antiques—good ones. Apart from all the medical crap, it looked like a standard double at the Four Seasons.

My father dozed in his hospital bed under Ralph Lauren sheets while monitors flashed like video games and an IV pumped him full of some milky white cocktail. His face was yellow, his stomach was distended, and his arms were just wrinkled flesh that hung from the bones. I stood there repulsed and tried to summon up some sympathy. I had resented, despised and been disappointed by my father for over thirty years.

During the years since my mother had died, my contact with Pop had gradually diminished. Now I had one, maybe two brief phone conversations with him a month—mostly at Ellen’s insistence—and saw him rarely if ever. But I paid his rent and sent a check every month. Partly for my mother’s sake and to play the good son, but mostly to remind him that I could. That I had succeeded where he had failed. He was never anything but grateful. Grateful and proud. As if he’d forgotten the first two decades of my life.

I stood around while he slept. I didn’t want to wake him, but I wanted him to know I’d been there. Otherwise what was the point? So finally I just “bumped” into the bed. Gently.

His eyes fluttered open. He looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back. The good son. “Hey, Pop, how you doing?”

“I’m good, I’m good,” he said in a low, dry voice. He beamed at me and the guilt kicked in. “You didn’t have to come all the way across town. Traffic’s hell this time of day,” he said.

“C’mon, Pop. Don’t be silly. I wanted to see you. You have everything you need? Are the nurses treating you well, because I could—”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Ray said and took my hand. “Sit down for a minute. Tell me about Ellen and the baby. Do you have a picture? I’d like—”

“She’s not a baby anymore, Pop.”

“Right. Sure. I guess it’s been a while. When I get outta here we should—”

Shit. They haven’t told him. Fucking Neiberg. He wasn’t putting this on me.

“Listen, Pop, I didn’t want to wake you before, and now …”

“Have you talked to the doctors, Grey? Because I can’t get a straight answer from any of ’em. This one says he’s gotta confer with that one and that one’s gotta confer with this one.”

Dammit.

“Sure, Pop. I’ll get it all straightened out,” I said, heading for the door. “I wish I could stay longer but I’ve got a meeting at three so I should probably—”

“Oh sure. Yeah. You get your ass back to the office. You got things to do.” He laughed, but it stuck in his chest. He started coughing and couldn’t stop.

I stood there and waited, but it just went on and on. Finally, I called for the nurse. She shoved past me, pushed the button to raise the back of the bed, and held a mask to his mouth. The coughing began to subside. Pop pushed the mask away and waved me out.

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me,” he said, smiling and coughing.

“Okay, Pop. Well, I’ll call you tonight then.” I walked out of the room backward, smiling cheerfully until I was sure he couldn’t see me.

A few days later, he died. The tagline of our relationship: He was an asshole. And then he was dying and I was an asshole.

New York, 1994. For days after Walt’s death, I wait to hear when and where the funeral will be. I don’t go to the Pick or the video store. I don’t leave my apartment except to check the mail and the bulletin board in the lobby for some announcement about the funeral. I think maybe the super will know. But there’s nothing. And when I ask the super, all he says is, “The family is very private.”

And so, after ten days, I finally have to admit to myself that they’ve had it without me. I tear up the eulogy I spent days writing and throw it in the incinerator. I consider following behind it. A sort of cremation/self-immolation form of protest. But I can’t. Because whether by accident or design, the chute is far too small to accommodate a human body.

Ten days later, I’m collecting my mail when I see a large black Mercedes—anomalous for our little strip of Hell’s Kitchen—parked outside the building. Illegally. Ricardo the super is sitting on the stoop reading the Post. I jut my chin out toward the car.

“The family come to clean out Walt’s place. The son paying me to watch his car.”

While I know in theory they are within their rights, I also feel quite strongly that Walt is being violated, that only I know what was truly important to him, and that it is my duty to protect Walt from his asshole Republican, Westport, Connecticut son whom, while he didn’t come right out and say it, I know Walt hated.

And so I bolt up the three flights of stairs and let myself into the apartment with the set of keys Walt gave me.

A tiny blonde woman wearing a headband and an Hermes scarf around her neck is tossing things into garbage bags. “Oh my God!” she yells.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I yell back.

“Richard!” she screams.

“He better not have thrown away the little glass bottles,” I threaten.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks, suddenly more outraged than frightened.

Richard, tall and skinny like Walt but with none of the Jimmy Stewart charm, rushes into the room. “You must be that guy,” he says.

“What guy?”

“I think he’s that guy, honey,” Richard says to Blondie. “I told you there’d be a problem with him some way or another.”

“Which guy do you think I am, asshole? And did it ever occur to you that Walt might have friends, neighbors who would have wanted to go to his fucking funeral?”

“See?” he says, smiling smugly at his wife. “Problem.”

“The problem is you’re an inconsiderate dick, Dick, and you’re gutting Walt’s place. You have no idea what some of these things meant to him.”

“You know,” Richard says, “I could have had you arrested for signing those papers. For claiming to be me the day my father died.”

“I never claimed to be you,” I say with as much disdain as I can manage.

“You claimed to be his son.”

“His son, but not you. Not the same thing.”

“Is it money? Is that what he wants?” Blondie interjects.

When I realize how pointless this is, when I realize for the four hundred millionth time that Walt is gone and with him the unfamiliar feeling of safety and friendship I was just beginning not to doubt, a wave of exhaustion and grief washes over me and I stumble backward onto Walt’s couch. I let my head fall back and I close my eyes.

“Look, I understand what you’re going through.” I force my eyes open and look at him. “I didn’t give a shit about my own father either. But Dick, I gave a shit about yours.”

“Where the fuck do you get off telling me how I felt about my own father?”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t. I was extrapolating from what Walt said about you.”

Richard points toward the front door. “Get. The. Fuck. Out. Before I tell you what he said about you.”

I know he’s bluffing. He has to be. This is just sibling rivalry shit. Because I know Walt loved me more. On my way out, I walk past the kitchen. Blondie is pulling all the macaroni collages and cotton-ball snowmen off the refrigerator and stuffing them into the garbage bag. The bag is getting full. To make more room, she sticks one foot inside and steps down hard and I hear the cracking of uncooked pasta, lentils, and hardened glue.

Now I am done.

I go for days without speaking to another human being. Maybe weeks. The conversation in my head seems to suffice.

Today I woke up to discover I have become a ghost. I have disappeared. I come and go in public, in broad daylight—crossing streets against traffic, slipping in and out of nearly closed subway doors—never once getting handed a supermarket circular, discount offer, or trial membership to a gym. I have fallen off the radar. No one makes eye contact. Not with me. I am invisible. I walk among the living but exist on a different plane. Distanced, as if I am at a remove. Or rather, as if I am as if. Imaginary.

The sensation is strange. Not to feel nothing, but to feel like nothing. I am light and cold. I can feel the wind blow through my empty veins. I do not exert enough gravity to keep my feet on the ground. So I hover, suspended. I am somewhere between now and when, between here and just beyond where. I am halfway there. I have had enough. More than enough. But I have tried and failed to go the last mile. I have stood at the edge of the subway platform leaning into the oncoming light. And stepped back. Because I am a coward. I need help. With my exit.

So I decide to consult the experts. I flip through the yellowing yellow pages, write the address on my hand in ballpoint pen, and leave the apartment. It is cold. I don’t know what day it is. Or what season. I am not wearing a coat. I notice only because other people are. I can see them but I am certain they cannot see me. There’s nothing here to see. It has come on gradually, this apartness I feel. Little by little, thread by thread, I have been coming untethered. From things. From people. From voices and meaning.

For a long time—for as long as I could stand it—I tried to make the effort. I tried to wear the face of a functioning member of society. But when I woke up this morning, it had happened. It was done. And now, while I am not yet dead—already almost, but not quite dead—my ability to pass as living, to function among the living, is gone.

This morning I woke up a ghost. Frosty air follows me into rooms overheated by prewar radiators. And my hands—large, grey, and cold—are going numb. I must remind myself to blink. To look human. Blink, I think. But they know. Everybody knows. Now it is just a matter of time. And of how and where and when. Now it is a matter of getting it right. I want to get this right. So I will consult the experts.

It turns out I don’t have a lot of options when it comes to suicide advice. Prevention, sure. How-to, virtually none. But there is the New York chapter of the Hemlock Society. So, with much effort, I take myself to its small, windowless office located on the fifth floor of an ugly white limestone building on First Avenue and Thirty-Eighth Street. I’m not sure what I expected, but this cramped, dingy, fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored hole-in-the-wall isn’t it. Frankly, it’s depressing. Then again, I suppose they don’t really care much about first impressions given their lack of repeat business.

I don’t see anyone sitting behind what appears to be the bulletproof glass that surrounds the tiny reception desk, so I ring the little bell on the white linoleum counter. The plastic at the corner has peeled back and someone—one of the Hemlock staff—has restored it with silver duct tape. I read the entire Hemlock Society brochure, find out they’re opposed to euthanasia but in favor of assisted suicide, and decide that the subtlety is lost on me but I don’t really care. What is beginning to annoy me is the fact that it’s taking so long to get any kind of assistance at all. So I knock on the bulletproof glass.

“Hello? Hello? Excuse me, anybody back there?”

“Coming,” a shaky voice calls back. “Be right there.”

The woman who comes out is neither young nor old. She has on one of those long flowered jumpers that leave everything to the imagination. Her long reddish-blonde hair is done in a complicated braid and she is using the kind of metal crutches you have to put your arms through—the serious kind. From where I’m standing, I can’t see below her knees but I can tell it’s been a long time since there was a bounce in her step. When she finally reaches the counter, she rests against it and takes a deep breath. Then she looks at me and smiles. “We don’t get a lot of walk-ins.” Her lipstick is seashell pink.

“Oh,” I say, “do I need to make an appointment?”

She laughs and has to grab the counter through her crutch to keep from falling. “Gosh, no. Most people just call in. Never mind. How can I help you?”

It occurs to me that despite her disability she has a demeanor far more suited to offering advice on seasonal planting in a flower shop or on vitamin supplementation in a health food store.

“I want to die,” I inform her.

Her pink mouth stops smiling.

“What do you mean?”

“Which part didn’t you understand?”

“Well, are you sick?”

I think about that for a long moment. I certainly feel terrible. Close to death. In pain. Unbearable pain. And nothing, nothing makes it better. It is only getting worse. Helping me to die would be an act of mercy.

“Yes,” I say.

She looks skeptical. “I don’t mean to pry, but … you don’t look … Have you gotten a second opinion? Whatever you have may not be as advanced as you’ve been told.”

“Trust me,” I say. “This is the end. I can’t live like this anymore. Just tell me what to do. I don’t want to screw it up.”

“Uh-huh. Again, forgive me for … What exactly is it that you’re suffering from?”

“Depression. I’m depressed.”

And when she laughs, her pink lips open so wide her face disappears and I can see her uvula dancing in the back of her throat.

“I’m glad I could make one of us laugh,” I say.

She stops laughing. Stops smiling. She leans across the counter and pokes her crutch at me menacingly.

“You think this is a joke, mister? You know how hard it is for us to keep this place open? For people with real illnesses? Real pain?”

“But I am in—”

“Oh screw you, mister. I’m going to be dead in two years. And not because I want to be. If you want to die now, why don’t you go jump off a building or slit your wrists or jump in front of a subway?”

“Because,” I say, “those things don’t always work. Things can go wrong.”

As she drags herself back to the office, she stops and looks over her shoulder. “Well, you know what they say, if at first you don’t succeed …”

I stare at her, shocked, shamed. Unassisted.

I don’t know how I get to Penn Station. I am just there, staring up, unblinking, captivated by the clacking, perpetually shape-shifting Amtrak departure board.

I have the fantasy that I am going to ride the rails. See the good old U.S. of A the old-fashioned way. I am filled with romantic anticipation of train travel fueled by dueling images of Old World opulence from Murder on the Orient Express, American ingenuity from Ford’s Iron Horse, and danger from North by Northwest.

I pull out of Penn Station aboard the Amtrak Crescent bound for New Orleans, immediately enter a long, dark tunnel, and emerge into fields of wildflowers. There is a beautiful blonde woman in a sundress running toward me. I open the window and breathe in, not caring that flowers will no doubt aggravate my allergies. The smell of long, uncut grass is intoxicating. I reach out the window to grab a handful of yellow flowers.

Suddenly, though, it is dark. The flowers are gone. And when they come back, when the lights come back, my flowers have been replaced. By fake, two-dimensional paper ones. And a two-dimensional paper girl who smiles because she can breathe freely again due to the contents of the bottle she displays.

My perfect world is gone. Just like that. I turn around, look over both shoulders. I am on a subway. Attracting attention. I search my pockets for my ticket. To New Orleans. Because I’m sure I bought one. That I got on that train. I’m so sure, so sure. I would swear to it. But my truth, like my time, seems to be fungible, capricious. The ground under my feet is eroding. Soon there will be nothing solid left to stand on. Soon there will only be shadows. Shadows and whispers. And I will mistake one for the other.

I spin around, hoping to take him by surprise. “TAKE ONE MORE FUCKING STEP AND I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!” I scream.

There is no one there. Just the crowd of anonymous commuters who expertly and efficiently divide themselves in two in order to give me wide berth. Moments ago I felt someone sidle up behind me. Saw his shadow rising up over my left shoulder. Heard him exhale in my ear.

The light changes and, aside from two or three impatient pedestrians who have risked death crossing four lanes of oncoming traffic, I am left alone on the corner. My heart is still pounding from my encounter with the phantom assailant. Only a bottle of Hurricane shattering at my feet, spraying the bottoms of my pants with drops of malt liquor and shards of glass, reminds me that I have been standing in this spot for a suspiciously long time.

I scan the collection of teenagers on the street corner but cannot identify my sniper—the one who launched the bottle at me. The light changes again and suddenly I am in the way. The looks I’m getting from passersby are not friendly and I feel shoulders and sharp elbows pushing, prodding, and buffeting me around.

I don’t know how I got here. I remember a bus. And lights and tunnels. Crowded staircases that smelled like sweat and piss and doors opening and closing like mouths, spitting out miserable, angry people. I followed one. To see where she was going. To see if it would be better for her when she got there. She had been trying to tell me something. The whole subway ride, I could feel the effort she was making. I could see the message she was trying to send me spark in the backs of her eyes and struggle to catch and take hold. She was like Lassie, barking at Timmy’s father so he’d follow her to where Timmy had fallen off a cliff or into a well.

So when she got off the train, I got off too. And when three blocks up and one block over she boarded a bus, I got on behind her and dumped a pocketful of change into the machine and stood there listening to it chew up my money until the driver told me to move to the back. And when I stood next to the seat where she was sitting and she looked up surprised, I knew she was happy to see me. So I smiled and got off at her stop. And when she went into a little bodega to buy milk and cat food and batteries and tampons, I waited outside and watched her shop and pay. And when she came out, she started walking faster and crossed the street and I had to run after her to keep up. And she started running and yelling for help.

“What is it, girl? What’s wrong?” I shouted.

But she wouldn’t tell me. She just kept running and looking over her shoulder. I tried to stay with her. But we got separated. And now I am lost.

There are numbers on the streets and names on the avenues. I should know where I am. This should feel more or less like a place feels when it’s where you live. But the coordinates are off. The city is not where I left it this morning. I look over and see the entrance to the 125th Street station and the stairs leading to the raised platform. I’m guessing that is where I came from. This shouldn’t be so hard for me. I know that. But the last few days, no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to come up with a better version of myself.

The noise in my head is like a radio. Constant. It skips quickly from station to station. And then back again. Trying to find a frequency. Meantime, it’s all-in, all the time, all at once. Whatever’s out there’s in here. Skidding, shouting, banging, laughing, Don’t-be-that-way-baby, Don’t-fuck-with-me-asshole, Don’t-know-why-I-bother, Don’t Walk, Don’t Walk, Don’t. Walk. Walk. Walk on by. Bye-bye baby bye-bye. Wet. Wet. What? Drip. Wet? Fuck. Wet. Drip. Drip. Fuck. How many drops are dripping from this goddamned scaffolding? 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9—drops or seconds? I’ve lost count. Start again. No, stop. Stop! StupidBoringCrazyLazy. Get outside your fuckin’ head. Look outside. Look. Liquor store, laundromat, chicken shack, Dunkin’ Donuts, hair weave palace. Wish they’d stay still. They switch places when I blink. Just to fuck with me. Donuts blink chicken. Chicken blink laundry. Laundromat; hair palace; liquor store. Liquormat Laundropalace. Shell game. Musical fucking chairs. Just to fuck with me. I walk away. Walk this way. Walk away, Renee. And my feet take over. The sound. The rhythmic clip-clop on the blacktop. The boom-clop, click-bop. Stop. Can’t stop. Clop-boom-skip-stop chick-a-boom bop. Miles Fuckin’ Davis. John Fuckin’ Coltrane, jazz man. I’m the man. I’m the anchorman. News and weather on the eights. All the eights. That’s a lot of eights. It is tedious, monotonous, onerous listening to my own news and weather all day, all night long. On the eights. And underneath the sound of my own voice in my own head is the rhythm of my own feet on the ground. The containable soft-shoe that escalates into the full-blown percussive jazz rat scat that will not be tamed—the unlikely soundtrack to my interminable A.M. radio anchorman monologue. I am fascinated by my ability to syncopate, enumerate, ruminate, calculate, self-flagellate. It occupies every millimeter of available space in my head. I want to take a broom and sweep it out my ears like dust out an attic window but there will be more. On the eights. Every eight. All day, all night. No matter how much or how often I sweep it away, the noise will always come back.

I know enough, am aware enough, to know that what I’m hearing—or thinking—which is it? Don’t know—does it matter? Doesn’t matter—is crazy shit. Or rather, it is the shit that fills the heads of crazy people. But I should get points for self-awareness. Because if I know it then I’m not. If I were really crazy, I would think I was God or Jesus or Mick Jagger. That’s what crazy people think. But I don’t. I know who I am. Which is a relief. Because I was getting worried. Not really. But a little. Because of the noise.

I’ve spent too much time alone lately. Too much time in my own head. Thus the noise problem. I’m out of practice with words. Need to use them out loud again. I decide it would be a good idea to have a conversation with someone. Nothing too hard or too big. No politics or religion. Not even the weather. Just a verbal exchange. A verbal transaction. Maybe an actual transaction. I look up: chicken, donuts, laundry, liquor, hair weave. Not a tough choice. As long as they stay still.

As I walk past the bums huddled under their filthy blankets, shopping carts tethered to their ankles, the dirty bastards tell me to stop kidding myself, that there’s a puddle of piss waiting there with my name on it. Lie down. Make yourself comfortable.

I spit on the ground in front of one of them and get in his face. “Someday, the skies will open, and a flood will come and wash all the scum like you off the streets.”

“Huh?” He looks at me, confused, scared. Like I’m the crazy one. Like I’m the one with the problem.

“Don’t fuck with me, asshole!” I scream at him.

He looks up. “Okay, man, okay, whatever you say.”

Then I head across the street toward the friendly pink neon sign happily buzzing the word “Liquor.” It’s right where I left it.

I feel better already.

I point to the largest bottle of scotch I see behind the cashier and pull out a wad of balled-up cash. I am sure the cashier is watching me, looking at me. I leave the store and, having no idea where I am, chart a random course. Sounds and colors are bright, blurred, inseparable. I cannot tell “Walk” from “Don’t.” And so I keep walking until the scotch runs out. I know it is time to go home, but I would have to know where that was in order to go there. Walt, I think.

Walt. I cross half an avenue and sit down on the bench in the middle. Home. Willa.

By the time I see the shadow behind me, it is too late. And I’m not sure that I care anyway. Maybe he is doing me a favor. What I haven’t been able to do myself. But I want to see him. And so I turn around just as the towering bearded man in the filthy clothes raises my empty scotch bottle over his head and brings it down on mine. Once, twice, hit the bench on the way down, sharp, hard kick in the ribs, head pulled up and back and dropped hard onto the bricks, final kick in the jaw. The pain, I think, the pain is truth.

It is dawn when I wake up shivering, throbbing, still bleeding. Coat and shoes gone. Pockets empty. But cold is the central issue now. I raise my head and see steam coming from a grate across the avenue and a third of the way down the block. It may as well be a hundred miles. But when the light changes, I begin to crawl, and when I get there, collapsing on that heating grate is one of the highlights of my life.

I fall asleep immediately and wake up far too soon to the inconsiderately thunderous footsteps of weekday commuters. By now the pain of last night’s shenanigans has spread throughout my body like a virus. I look up at the passersby from my position on the grate and could swear that every one out of ten is a wolf in a suit, furry and fanged. I blink only to see the flesh slowly melting off the face of a man dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit. I wonder if the blood I’m covered in—my blood—is real. No one stops. No one even seems to see me lying here, so maybe it isn’t real. I am invisible. So maybe I’m not real. Maybe the only thing that’s real is the pain.

I don’t know if I wake up because I want to scratch the uncomfortable itch below my left eye or if scratching the itch is the first thing I want to do when I wake up. I don’t have time to fixate on the question: both my arms are tied tightly to a wheelchair. There will be no scratching whatsoever. My eyelids fall shut, but I will them halfway open, manage to drag my chin off my chest, and force my eyes to move back and forth for a few seconds, looking for information. The effort is overwhelming, but before my head drops and my eyes fall shut again, I am able to ascertain that I am, it seems, sitting in the wheelchair to which I am tied and that the wheelchair is facing a sign that reads: NYPD: NO LOADED FIREARMS PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT.

The itch becomes secondary.

The words roll around in my head and eventually a red flag goes up. My vision is a little blurry, particularly around the edges, but this time my eyes stay open. I have an excellent view of the floor from this position, and this time I notice that my ankle is handcuffed to the crossbar of the wheelchair. Or foot-cuffed, as the case may be. I wonder if the police have special ankle cuffs or if standard-issue handcuffs are designed to expand to accommodate lower extremities. I kick at the restraint and the metal bites into my bare skin. When did I lose my socks? I kick again and try to get some forward momentum going on the wheelchair. It occurs to me this whole thing is overkill on someone’s part. Whatever I did, I have less neck strength than a newborn, so I’m probably not much of a flight risk.

Slowly, as the blood rushes forward, I become aware of a dull ache on the left side of my mouth. It throbs rhythmically as if it has its own pulse. My tongue is thick, dry, and it would help if I could use a finger or two to peel it off the roof of my mouth. But I concentrate on sucking and swallowing and eventually produce enough saliva to wrench it free. And to notice the distinctly unpleasant coppery tang of recently shed blood.

A wave of nausea sweeps over me. I reluctantly allow the oral exploration to continue and almost immediately regret it when the tip of my tongue encounters a large gap occupied by teeth last time I checked. Now it is just a big empty parking lot haunted by soft, sore gums. The handcuffs, the wheelchair, the sign, the missing teeth—as the fog begins to lift, I am starting to get the feeling something bad has happened.

A second wave of nausea hits and this time there is no turning back the tide. There is also nowhere to go except maybe six inches front and center, give or take. I pitch forward and projectile vomit the nearly day-old contents of my stomach—mostly alcohol, stomach acid, and the remains of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, which, if not upchucked, might have remained in my colon undigested for years. I lurch forward with such force that I actually achieve the forward momentum I was seeking just a moment ago. The chair falls forward and I fall face-first onto the black-and-white-checkered linoleum floor and into the pool of warm vomit I’ve just deposited there.

New York, 1994. Viagra guy is already waiting in line for dinner. Even though there is no line and there is no dinner. But when it gets there, he will be first in line. It’s like this at every meal. We call him “Viagra guy” because that’s what his shirt says. It is bright yellow with blue lettering. On the back there is some information about Viagra in red letters. Viagra guy wears his T-shirt every single day tucked into his hospital-issue paper pants.

I’ve never heard him speak. Just the occasional grunt. Bald on top but with more hair on his arms, hands, and knuckles than I’ve ever seen on a human being. I believe Viagra guy may be the closest thing science will ever get to a living, breathing specimen of the missing link. When Glenda and I walk by the dining area, Viagra guy has one hairy arm crossed over his belly. That arm supports the other so that he can pick his nose for extended periods of time without fatiguing the picking arm. Viagra guy doesn’t read, watch TV, or participate in group activities unless forced to. His chosen form of recreation is nose-picking.

“You are revolting,” Glenda says as we walk by him.

“FUCK YOU!” he yells.

“So you do speak,” I say. “Way to go.”

The dinner cart is wheeled in and Viagra guy grabs a tray. “Don’t you think you should wash your hands?” Glenda says, curling her lip at him in disgust.

“It’s none of your damn business,” he says, flicking what I can only imagine is a tiny rolled-up ball of snot in her direction.

“It is my business, you filthy illiterate cretin.”

“FUCK YOU!” he yells at her.

“LIMP DICK!” she yells back and takes her place at the back of the line.