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“I didn’t even know,” I say. “I never read the magazine. That’s okay.”

“Oh,” she says after a pause. “Oh, so it’s okay. That’s fine. Listen, I have to go out on a beat right away so if we could — ”

“Do you want to go out with me?”

“What’s that?”

“What’s so complicated? Do you want to go out with me? On a date? We can go to the theater or to dinner or both or neither or something and come back to my place or to yours. How about it?”

“I’m afraid not,” she says. “I’m engaged. I’m getting married in three weeks.”

“Oh,” I say. “I’m sure I wish you all happiness. We could still go out, though.”

“I see the man all the time. We have to make, like, arrangements. It’s going to be a pretty big wedding it turns out.”

“Well for God’s sake,” I say, “what am I supposed to do? I’ve got to go out! Don’t you have any consideration for me? Please, say you’ll go out.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I really am, but I think you’ve got the wrong idea entirely.”

I begin to rant into the phone. I tell her about my loneliness, my fear, my pain, my necessity, my desperate need to connect with a woman, my fear that all my contacts have disappeared and that I am losing control of myself. I talk floridly, passionately, and mix in one or two threats. After some time I understand that I am talking into an empty wire and she has hung up on me. That is probably all right because I am more than a little ashamed of myself and do not want to feel that anyone knows the extent of my vulnerability.

In the morning, when I report to the office, it is locked up. Shuttered. My key fails to work in the door and I am unable to smash the glass. Tacked to the door is a legal form which after a while I notice. It has something to do with the granting of a temporary injunction. In line with this temporary injunction, the premises are closed, etc. I notice a sheet of paper sticking under the door and find that it is an eviction notice from the landlord, dated two weeks earlier, an old trick. Further hangings and smashings on the glass fail to yield any results.

I walk downstairs and phone the landlord from a booth in a luncheonette. He says something about five million smackers and lawyers and complications with which he does not want to deal. The word
impounded
seems to come through along with something that sounds like
certiorari.
He includes his regrets but says that he is now attempting to sell the building to a large landscape redeveloping corporation which will convert it into a luxury-class apartment dwelling and he simply cannot afford to take any risks, such as attachments. He can only cooperate with things as they develop.

I hang up on him — it is a pleasure to break the pattern and hang up on somebody — and go home. There is very little, after all, to do. At home I find that I am very tired and I sleep all day. When I get up at eight in the evening everything seems pretty much the same. The fact that I have not been in the office appears to have made little difference to anyone. I discuss this with Lindy, along with certain ideas I have begun to develop of the Law of Universal Balance, and then I go back to sleep. Sleep is comfortable. I have been functioning without it for so long that it is stunning to understand how totally absorbing it can be, how necessitous, how nourishing to all the corridors of the body. Sometime during the night Lindy must stick to me, for I wake up to find her smashed in the bed beside me, thin strips of rubber sticking to my flesh a smile against my abdomen, a smell like glue pervading the room and nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing to hold on to. But there is no weeping. I went beyond that a long time ago and there is no going back, not in that direction, not ever.

I never thought it would happen this fast. I thought I had time, I thought that there was time enough to do many things. The culture accelerates madly; everything reaches beyond itself, the stunning accumulation of data and possibility makes calculation impossible. There was no time. There was never any time at all.

The next week I take a walk through midtown. It is a gray day, wind in the air, much business being transacted in the Forty-second Street shops and in the theaters. I hunch against the cold, passing newsstand after newsstand. Whores and fags stand in the doorways of the arcades, wondering if the whole thing is worth it. Still trying to make that decision, I cannot help them.

Every newsstand I pass carries an issue of our newspaper. It is not the issue I last worked on, it is a new issue, one which I have never seen before. I buy four copies and they are all the same. The masthead contains my name and picture, below it are articles which I have never read although they are very similar, of course, to all the other articles.

The newspaper goes on. It goes on independent of me; kinetic energy of its own carrying it. This is a mystery. Nevertheless, it has happened. The paper exists. I was totally extraneous. Separate from me, it continues. What am I to make of this? What am I to make of any of it?

I fold the copies of the newspaper under my arm and go home. I will spend the afternoon with them. Perhaps there will be an answer. Perhaps even — and I feel a surge of anticipation at this — perhaps there will even be something worthwhile in the classified section that I can pursue.