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woman.
    How old is she? the friend asks.
    Oh, sixty maybe.
    That’s tough. What makes you think she’ll turn the radio down instead of up?
    She’s sublimating. As soon as she has good sex, she’ll do anything I say.
    What if she gives better sex than she gets? friend number two says. Will you then do anything for her, will you let her turn the volume up even higher?
    At this point their soup comes and their conversation drifts here and there—work, new apartment, baseball—with nothing to hold it together.
    You move into your own mind. No one would deny you’re from Cubop City, even if you were born elsewhere. When you came thirty-eight years ago, you were twelve . There was no anxiety about how to get around, how to act, what to say. You knew these things, you had learned the code in the city of your birth, and you applied it with relative success. There were minor adjustments. In Cubop City you didn’t have to wave at buses for them to stop. You had to look carefully before crossing a street; there was less sky to look at, more anger to avoid. There were crowds at rush hour such as you’d never seen. Minor things. You knew the pulse of the city because it was your pulse. You knew to get out of harm’s way, yell at a driver running a yellow light. Your heart beat fast; your ambition grew in direct relation to the city itself, its thirst and hunger, its drive to charge at nature and swallow it.The city was hard work, propelling itself beyond the day to the next at the speed of neon. In winter, bundles moved about spewing steam like locomotives. The sun was weak willed and timorous.The city went on with its business.
    You finish your lunch and walk outside. It is autumn. Already the saplings on the avenue have lost their leaves. The noise has grown and you feel the need for quiet, the afternoon scurrying away into the factory towns of New Jersey, the body of time stretching as a cat stretches on the floor. We can only remember the past: a slow movie about to end, the smell of ripe guava, the taste of tamarind, a mockingbird swooping to a fence post, marking territory with song. You are walking down the sidewalk, the primal and the actual city intertwined. The organism that took your childhood away is the one that gave you the gift of manhood. You will know no other place like you know this. This city with a scar like a knife wound on its belly, this city like the flames shooting into the sky, rock hewn, crystallizing, into which you disappear.

THE BUTTERFLY
    A fter the knifing, when Angel is so close to death he can taste its breath, a field opens before him and slopes down to the sea. He goes out on that field and sits in the tall grass. The sky is deep blue and the sun is a friendly creature with no inclination to blaze. Hours he spends looking out toward the water, reclining backward with elbows on the ground. Sometimes an orange butterfly alights on his bare knees and its scratchy legs distract him from his reverie. Is the butterfly imagining him, or is he imagining the butterfly? It is very beautiful and seems comfortable there. Even as he thinks comfortable, he wonders if that isn’t fallacious. Comfort doesn’t enter into the life of an insect any more than it enters into the life of a rock. Butterfly is still one moment, in motion the next. It has no expectation of comfort, no way of identifying it. Then the thought occurs to him, as spontaneously as the butterfly, that all qualities he applies to himself and his fellow humans—there is that beautiful neighbor getting into her car with that sullen expression; there is the rapacious building manager who is trying to get him out of his apartment; there is a broken woman making her way through the world—are in the end manifestations of that same pathetic fallacy. Sometimes he thinks his feelings are chemical impulses not much different from the ones that drive the butterfly, except that he is aware of them, an