51

REGARDLESS OF WHATEVER HE’D SAID TO HIS SISTER in the heat of his outrage, William was finding it hard to husband his dough. If he took twenty, or thirty, or forty bucks out of the bank, he’d burn through it in a single day. On the other hand, some recent lost weekends in the war zones of the outer boroughs had him too spooked to carry more. Several times on lonely streets late at night, he’d had the sensation of being followed. This had started when he’d still been living with Mercer, actually; you’d sense yourself being watched and then turn around and there’d be no one there. And then once, in a flyblown Bed-Stuy shooting gallery, too zonked to move, he’d felt a friend of a friend of a friend lift his graven head, heard him whisper to someone else, Shit, man, do you know who this cat is? as if there might be enough cash in the wallet of Billy Three-Sticks to take them all on the Permanent Nod. Which just went to show you had to be careful of other people.

The rule applied to domestic life, too. The first few weeks after moving out, he’d been crashing in Bruno’s guestroom in Chelsea. He’d assumed his old benefactor would be pleased to see him free again, but some inkling of the circumstances seemed to lurk behind Bruno’s Austrian restraint. Failure to ask what had happened read not as tact, but as evaluation, as disappointment, and perhaps even as a subtle pressure to get clean.

So William had said sayonara and moved the few things he had to his studio in the Bronx. Sure, he was the only white guy for blocks, but he felt sometimes that being raised by Doonie made him an honorary brother. Anyway, color wasn’t the source of his agita up here. It was the half-finished canvases gaping from the wall. Evidence, his magnum opus was called. The title had come before almost anything else. He’d planned to finish before telling Mercer much beyond that. Perhaps at first he envied Mercer’s sanity about his own work, his refusal to boast about his productivity, which must have been considerable, for all the hours he put in. Later, though, after he realized he himself was procrastinating, William had kept quiet out of shame. And now not having spoken about Evidence made it seem even less real. He still forced himself at least once a week, out of a kind of spite, to mix up his pigments. But the daily discipline of brush and canvas had long since deserted him.

Indeed, by April, his main discipline was forestalling until early evening, or at least late afternoon, an experience infinitely more beautiful: the leisurely walk over the Grand Concourse or the long plunge down to the Deuce to cop. As a surfer reads waves, he’d learned how to predict the intervals when the government tightened the supply, and how to ride out dry spells. (If they weren’t only temporary, cops would have been out of jobs.) And he’d learned to appreciate rush hour, the scoring time, when he flowed out to be with the world for a few minutes before diving back into himself—it had the form of anxiety, only drained of the content—and to relish the pellucid air of five o’clock, the colors of the medium he was moving through.

One day, when the supply was good, he was back in Times Square. Daylight Wastings had just ended, but even this early, the neon flashed come-ons above his head, Peepland in red, Peep-o-Rama in blue and red, to match the come-ons catcalling from all around. “Reds.” “Blues, blues.” “Ten dollars, the hand; twenty, the mouth; fifty, full service!” It was a glimpse of the alternate future: not a nuclear holocaust, or a communist utopia, but a life organized completely on market principles. He wanted to stop and admire all these people living like it was the day after tomorrow. Instead he angled head-down into the crowd, trying not to be recognized. In the pocket of his old Ex Post Facto jacket, in the little hole he’d cut into the lining, was a paper envelope of heroin, like the sleeves they put stamps in at the post office.

Hard to say, then, what drew his eye up toward the marquee of a porno palace as he approached the corner of Broadway. He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted. Anyway, in a single glance, he comprehended a body bigger than the bodies around it and somehow distinct from them. It was a white guy, a real hulk, damn familiar-looking, with whiskers and flyaway hair and a slightly fantastic or spectral gaze that raked the crowds from the shadow of a hat brim. William had seen this getup once before—from the window of the loft, he thought—and suddenly his anxiety was just anxiety again; he had been followed. This was the follower. Some kind of narc, it seemed, with that silly hat, the unconvincing length of that hair. He was waiting to bust William. But he hadn’t spotted him yet.

William’s instinct, oddly, was to do exactly nothing he hadn’t already been doing. Or not so oddly. Wasn’t this what you were supposed to do in the presence of a wild animal? Move calmly away. Running will only enrage it. William didn’t look again but resumed his businesslike pace across Broadway. His hands sweated in his pockets; he could dump the drugs, but loved them too much. Fortunately, the block between here and Sixth Avenue teemed with New Yorkers as degenerate as himself, and when he felt dissolved among them, protected by them, he looked back and saw no such person waiting on the traffic island.

Later, locked safely inside his studio, he would wonder if he was imagining things. In any case, he was going to reward himself for keeping cool with a dose large enough to make him puke. Somewhere nearby a building demolition had been in process all day, but it registered at present only as intervals of rumble in the floorboards and a felt compassion for the rats of this city, surrounded on all sides by predators, made homeless by the rubble. Of course, it was not the rats he kept seeing as he hunkered over the blackened spoon. Or as the knot inside him untied and dropped him on the dusty floor to lie in his jockey shorts and drift in and out of the portal the shifting sun drew across the wall. It was the shadowy face of that presumptive stranger. No stranger, really, than the one he’d see if he got up right now to examine the mirror. For William, too, was haunted. Hunted, maybe, for something more than his drugs. Or Billy. He’d been jumped a few months ago, and had not wished to repeat it. But he had lost the will to move, or possibly the ability. And so what, he thought now. Fuck it. Let them come.