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appetite, rather than any strenuous regimen of exercise, had helped him keep his youthful build.
    The man walked past a dry cleaner, a bookstore, a bar, a bodega, a botanica. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans, jingling a few coins; he whistled a shapeless tune.
    When he arrived at the sandwich shop, he grasped the worn handle of the door without noticing the closed sign, and attempted to enter. When the door did not immediately open, he seemed baffled. It took him a moment to decide there was no mistake on his part. He looked at the illustration of the gargantuan sandwich above the door. He studied the fingerprinted placard. Shading his eyes, he peered through the window at the darkened interior of the store. Had he possessed a driver’s license, he would in all likelihood have removed it from his wallet and examined it just to verify that he was indeed Rory Honeyman, and that this was his place of business.
    Having made up his mind that the forlorn shop was, after all, his establishment, and that it was still locked up tight when it should have been opened for an hour in anticipation of the lunch-time rush, Honeyman stepped back from the door and muttered two words: “Goddamn Nerfball.” Then he pivoted and stalked away, with an angry determination.
    Honeyman walked north on Washington until he came to Fourteenth Street. The smell of coffee grew stronger, then weakened. At Fourteenth, he turned east, toward the river. The neighborhood became dingier, poorer, unkempt. Abandoned buildings alternated with tough-looking lounges (ladies welcome) and apartments sporting broken windows patched with cardboard and tape. Factories and warehouses began to predominate. A fish- processing plant exuded a maritime stench. A cat prowled hopefully outside the building. Honeyman thought he recognized Cardinal Ratzinger.
    The cross-town street finally dead-ended at the Hudson. A rusty chain-link fence separated the street from a flat wasteland of weeds studded with abandoned tires, plastic bags, shopping carts, car hulks.… Across the sprawling river Manhattan reared in all its grimy glory.
    At Honeyman’s left stood a building. Before it, Honeyman paused, his former certainty of purpose momentarily faltering.
    The problem: whether to enter the door before him or not. If he entered, he might possibly find his missing employee, and thus be able to open his store before he missed the entire lunch-hour trade. On the other hand, it was just as likely that he would encounter some bizarre event-in-progress that would draw him, whirlpool-like, into its centrifugal embrace, shanghai and waylay him with voices and flesh, drink and dope, schemes and plots, and completely waste his entire afternoon. Maybe even the whole day. A week. A month. A year. The rest of his life? Who knew? It had happened before, to others.… But wasn’t he wasting his life now already? Hadn’t he been for twenty years, since that single im- plosive day, under the Mexican sun, where his life had collapsed, impelled by his own impulsive actions, down to a singularity, infinitely dense, inescapable, poignant with the foreclosure of everything outside itself? Hush now, son, that’s a question for 3 a.m., if ever, not a bright June afternoon.…
    So Honeyman contemplated the building before him a moment longer.
    The structure was five stories tall, composed all of muted red brick, aged by over a century of weather. The uppermost courses of brick were embellished with decorative motifs, achieved by the ingenious stacking of master masons: herringbone, twill, cross- hatching. Copper flashing, long verdigrised, ran around the eaves, surprisingly unvandalized for a building deemed abandoned. The roof was of slate, in decent repair. The windows were all painted black. The building occupied an entire large city block.
    At one corner of the building, closest to the river, reared an enormous square smokestack, capped at the top with more brick embellishment.
    There was a