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know there really was some kind of catastrophic, ancient flood because every society’s got one folded into its mythology.
    Somehow, the Immortal Five-minus-One got clear and surfaced above ground. No record of how or when or where, not even a snarl of competing stories, just an infuriating and impenetrable
somehow
. Maybe they regrouped outside the yard, rancid with panic but still hoping Amuse would pop up magically unscathed,
hey guys, looking for me?
, and they’d all have a laugh, gloom and horror flash-melted, disbelief turned inside out. Maybe they propped each other up, each man refusing to let the next think the worst, and fanned out to their parents’ apartments to wait in vain for his call, straining to imagine the jubilant escape story Amuse would whisper from inside his bedroom closet, or the jailhouse check-in he’d mumble through aching, swollen jaws.
    I think they knew, though. Whatever happened and however they got free, I’ve always had the sense they saw and heard and felt him die. I see them sprawled across a curb, keening hysterically at the dawn sky, sucking down long shuddery drafts of air as if oxygen were comprehension. Staggering home numb and weak, vomiting on their own stoops, waking up in bed unable to remember how they got there.
    The remains were “found” in the tunnel the next day, by Bracken. Amuse had been run over by a train—got high and passed out on the tracks, that was the story.
A tragic accident
, Bracken called it in the NYPD’s press statement,
and a lesson to those who persist in glorifying a criminal activity and downplaying its risks.
Amuse was described as
a career vandal, wanted by police for inflicting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to MTA property.
    It’s practically a cliché now, cops killing writers. Happens in every graffiti movie, even that German one. The police are always evil incarnate, menacing the ragtag underdog crew from the margins and then showing up when the dramatic arc starts sagging and taking somebody out, accidentally-on-purpose. All the adolescent shenanigans screech to a halt and the remaining characters reevaluate their lives and either pay tribute to their fallen comrade with a major artistic accomplishment or decide to get out of the game and go legit.
    In real life, motherfuckers just lose their minds and destroy everything around them.
    When I was younger I used to fantasize about killing Bracken for what he did to Amuse—and by extension to Billy, to Dengue, to Karen, to me. I’d imagine everything from elaborate kidnap-and-torture scenarios to simple ruses where I’d pretend to be hurt or demented and get his guard down, then cast off my infirmity and pull a weapon. The last thing I always did before slitting his throat or click-clacking the rifle or pressing the trapdoor button was reveal my identity and watch his eyes register the knowledge that yes, this kid had every right to end his life.
    I gave it up when I started high school, on a hunch that the guidance counselors at Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy would consider Obsessively Plotting Filial Revenge a poor extracurricular activity. And also after staring myself down and admitting that I wasn’t really that guy.
    Instead, I started casting around for a way to grant Bracken and his porcine brethren some humanity, out of a desire to preserve my own. I mean, look: exterminators kill roaches. That’s their job. To them, roaches are vermin. They need to get got. When the exterminators go home at night they aren’t fretting about all the bugs they’ve gassed. They’ve got kids and wives—the exterminators, that is, although I guess the roaches too—and they drive them to swim meets and oboe lessons and tuck them into bed at night and all that.
    You see what I’m getting at. Vandal Squad cops don’t view writers as anything more than a problem to be solved, and