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solidity. It had been there before I was born, was there as my memory had first been awoken, would be there long after I was dead.
    I had that feeling again. That I was being followed, only it was more acute than before. Involuntarily I looked toward the Doric columns at the threshold of the waiting room. A man was standing there. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit and a fedora low over his forehead. I had the impression that I’d caught him looking away, although since a newspaper hid most of his face, how could I tell? But the conviction that this man was following me, and had been doing so for the past couple of days, seized me and wouldn’t let go. I felt hived off into two different people—the one who knew absolutely that he was being followed, and the other who stood beside him, observing, rationalizing the feeling away.
    I went into a phone booth and asked the operator to put me through to the Stevens Institute. Moments later a receptionist answered. I cooked up some story to make the receptionist to give me the address—it was somewhere way uptown. I hung up and glanced at the big clock again. It was nearly five.
    The man hadn’t moved. I went downstairs to the subway then waited around the corner by the ticket office, all the time telling myself how foolish I was being. When I’d all but given up I saw him again, coming down the same stairs. He was past me and through the turnstiles in a flash. It had all happened in such a whirl that once I’d gotten hold of myself again, it was probably too late to go after him. Or perhaps I didn’t really want to. Still a side of me resisted ceding to this absurd notion that anyone was following me. How could he be, I reasoned, when he’d appeared a good five or six minutesafter I’d gone down into the subway. By that time, normally, I might have already left the station.
    I jumped on a crowded train. As it worked its way uptown, I reflected on the events of the day. Nothing was any clearer than it had been before lunch. Instead of giving me an outside perspective, seeing D’Angelo had plunged me deeper into myself. I remembered that brief moment of euphoria in the garden, willing myself to believe in D’Angelo’s suburban idyll. I thought about his wife. No doubt she was bored out of her mind in Howard Beach. Bored with her husband coming home so late every evening, bored with their colorless existence. When she’d touched my shoulder, I’d felt a frisson and knew she’d felt it too. I imagined what it would be like to have an affair with her. The Manhattan assignations, the lunchtime cocktails. The afternoons at my apartment. Undressing her, laying her down on my bed. The desire. The cold, mechanical expulsion of it. I shook the idea from my mind.
    The sky was a darkening gray. I was somewhere past Columbia. Very few people were around, and no one at all on the tree-lined street that the Stevens Institute was on. That was good, because at least I could now be certain that I wasn’t being followed. I wondered why Esterhazy had been committed this far away; weren’t there several downtown psychiatric hospitals? The Institute was a modest, anonymous-looking building. The one odd thing was that two military guards stood outside the main entrance—that threw me for a moment. I showed them my doctor’s license and when one of them asked if I worked there, I took a chance and said yes. Through the doors I found myself in an atrium. A reception desk at one end was manned by a young man who I assumed was a medical student, earning a few extra bucks on a weekend.
    “I’ve come to check on a patient I had committed heretwo days ago. Here’s my card. The patient’s name is Peter Esterhazy.”
    The receptionist had me wait in an area just off the atrium. I looked about, took in the details. Fresh paint, shiny carpet, new chairs. The place had only just been opened or renovated, and was a hell of a lot smarter than your average New York psychiatric hospital. Nobody