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lay on the floor, shooting marbles across a richly colored rug. A tattered toy lion mounted on wheels, its lead dangling, carried a rider in the form of a small monkey with a wizened face and clasped hands. The three—boys and monkey—looked up as Conrad and Mr. Pittilio passed. The boys smiled. “Gotcha,” said one.
    â€œGood evening, John, James,” Mr. Pittilio said. “Melchior,” he added, nodding to the monkey. And to Conrad, to his astonished gaze, he remarked, “Strange little creature, that one.” The boys waved, flicking their hair out of their eyes. Conrad stared at the monkey, who stared back with black, iridescent eyes.
    Conrad followed Mr. Pittilio up to the next landing, each step more and more crowded with teetering stacks of books, and then at last through a door on the top floor, which led to a narrow staircase.
    A cold wind filtered down through that stairwell. The stairs rose into a small glass house with a steeply pitched roof, more ornate than an ordinary street vestibule and opening to the sky instead of the sidewalk, its faceted glass obscuring the pearly light. Conrad breathed in the cool air, with its aftertaste of cinder and wood smoke, its underlying flavor of the East River, rushing darkly between its banks a few blocks away.
    When they stood in the glass house at last, Conrad looked out onto the roof, trying to see through the bevels. Everything was muted, softened. He seemed to be looking through a thick mist, the blue and purple shades of evening chalky behind the thick glass.
    â€œReady?” Mr. Pittilio asked, standing aside, looking down at Conrad.
    Conrad nodded.
    â€œClose your eyes, then,” Mr. Pittilio said. And he placed his hands upon Conrad’s shoulders and turned him toward the door. Conrad felt the fresh air from the opened door, heard the sounds of the rooftop come into sudden, sharp focus. Mr. Pittilio steered him a few paces onto the roof. Conrad could feel the gravel beneath his shoes. He could feel someone looking at him.
    â€œLemuel Sparks,” Mr. Pittilio said then. “Mr. Conrad Morrisey.” And he gave Conrad a push.
    CONRAD HAD MADE it his business in life to transform the ordinary object into something treasured, something beautiful. He was, though he came to it accidentally, a gilder, a person who layers the blemished surfaces of the world with gold, a veneer fragile and vulnerable as a decomposing leaf.
    Educated as an engineer, Conrad had made his home in northern New Hampshire, where his first job—blasting a tunnel through a mountain called the Sleeping Giant—had brought him. But early in his career, early enough to make an abrupt about-face, he had been fortunate to discover a method and formula for gilding that had placed him far and away above other craftsmen of the same pursuit.
    The magic of alchemy. It had started with their house, his and Rose’s house, which, with its gingerbread trim, called for embellishment, Rose had said, flinging her arms wide the first day they saw it. It called for gold, like Hansel and Gretel’s sugar house in the wood. And so, experimenting during those first few years in their house, Conrad had stumbled across the technique that would eventually allow him to earn a living for the rest of his life.
    He could, through his craft, make time stop, or at least delay its passage. For though gold is a soft alloy in general, it is, he knew, amighty metal in all other ways, the path of entire civilizations diverting to its source. And he had in his time gilded some strange things, things that made him wonder about their owners—the unembarrassed man with the collection of plaster phalluses, or the woman with her dead dog’s collar and tags. But there had been plenty of common objects, too—baby booties and golf balls. He had gilded capitol domes and church spires, weather vanes and the masts of boats. Sealing the plain old world in shimmering layers of