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into the store two-three times a week when he’d first moved to Trenton in May. Bought lots of books—cheap paperbacks but great choices. He was a ‘seminarian’ he said—on ‘sabbatical’ for a term. But lately, last five weeks or so, I haven’t seen him and I kind of miss him. I’d been saving out some special old books for him. Someone who’d met Harvey here in the store, who sometimes hangs out here, said the other day, really shook me up, that Harvey had died—just last week.”
    “Died! Of what?”
    “In Trenton, it almost doesn’t matter how. Death just comes. ”
    “But—how?”
    “That wasn’t clear. A drug overdose, maybe. Or a drug dealer wanting the money Harvey owed him.”

Chapter Five
    O ften when I returned home, the apartment was empty.
    A look as of having been ravaged, ransacked.
    Smells of tobacco smoke, or hashish. Distinctive yet inexplicable smells.
    Slowly I would make my way into Harvey’s bedroom, and then his bathroom—hoping I would not find his body collapsed on the floor.
    And in the little nursery at the rear of the apartment—a patch of shadow beneath my desk-table made me start, and cry out in alarm.
    “Oh!”—though I could see that it was nothing.
    Thinking It won’t matter how. It just—comes.
    * * *
    And who else lived in the quasi-renovated English Tudor at 11 Grindell?
    Harvey knew none of his neighbors. They appeared to be, with the exception of an elderly white couple who lived below Harvey, on the first floor, a shifting population that sometimes included young children, mostly dark-skinned, with a scattering of “whites”—individuals who avoided my eye when we happened to meet in the vestibule, or on the stairs. In one of the third-floor apartments, a few days after I’d arrived to stay with Harvey, there was some sort of medical emergency: a loud siren, loud voices and footsteps on the stairs, a woman’s uplifted frightened voice, shouted instructions and cries and Harvey forbidding me to open the door: “You don’t want to know, Lydia. And I sure don’t, either.”
    Beneath Harvey, on the first floor, lived an elderly white couple who seemed rarely to leave their apartment, surname Baumgarten . They were so quiet, even in the aftermath of noise and clamor in my brother’s apartment, I worried for their well-being—“What if they’ve died, and no one knows? Shouldn’t we check on them?”—and Harvey said, frowning, “No. That’s a terrible idea.”
    Once, I did knock on the Baumgartens’ door, 1B. After a very long time the door was opened a crack, and a single eye, lashless, naked, staring in suspicion, appeared at about the level of my chin.
    Yes? What do you want? —a suspicious whispery voice inquired.
    And I could not think how to reply— Nothing! I want nothing from you only just—some evidence that you are—that you are not—that you are alive .
    But I could not utter such ridiculous words. I could not utter anything convincing or halfway reasonable stammering finally Excuse me! I’m so sorry to interrupt you, I think I have the wrong address .  . . .
    The door shut, the door was bolted from within.
    I never caught a glimpse of the Baumgartens again.
    * * *
    One of the assignments I’d brought to Trenton was a bound galley of a slender book titled Cleansing Rituals: Mother, Infant, Taboo which appeared to be a doctoral dissertation by a young assistant professor of anthropology at UC-Berkeley.
    I felt that familiar thrill of rivalry! Envy.
    Yet: I was determined to be utterly fair and judicious in my review. Where I wasn’t qualified to criticize, I would not criticize. I would look for much to praise.
    It was an honor, I’d thought, and a matter of some pride, that the prestigious Journal of the Anthropology of Religion had asked me to do a brief, five-hundred-word review of the book. It was not common for editors of such a peer-reviewed journal to assign reviews to academicians like myself who were so young, and