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brush beside the path, where a primitive contrivance was waiting for him, a plank of wood with spikes driven up through it. Impaled, horribly injured, he quickly bled to death.
    The other men were disgusted. There were loud cries of anger. One remark stayed with me.
    “No safe place, man,” said Billy Sullivan, a heavy guy from Staten Island, twenty-five now, who’d served two tours and come back stammering, plagued by nightmares, hands shaking so bad he could barely, at times, so he told us, get the bottle to his lips.
    No safe place. Danny seemed to have gone on a sustained rampage after that. I think he went berserk. He was lucky to have survived. But it was the aftermath that mattered. In Danny’s nightmares, the Vietnamese he’d killed rose up from the earth and came after him. Night after night they came back, night after night he was pursued by the running corpses of his victims until he awoke in sweaty suffocation and could still smell their bodily corruption in the room. Sometimes the smell lingered all day long. Later he talked more about the loss of his buddy. He said he didn’t try to replace him, instead he became cold and isolated, embittered to the point of numbness. This grieving man withdrew emotionally, as do all of us who grieve.
Robbed of a friendship that had been the one tender sound, the single grace note in the cacophony of violence and insanity and death, he shut down his humanity. Better not to feel.
    It was also clear he was drinking heavily, alone, every night, so as to mentally climb down from the state of combat readiness in which he spent most of his waking hours.
He couldn’t help it. In his mind he was still in the jungle. So his morose, apparently resentful presence was at least in part the function of a chronic hangover. Agnes later confirmed this to me.
    Again she came to the hospital, and again we went for a beer. It was a strange relationship we had at first, those stray hours snatched at the end of a long working day. We soon became lovers. I brought her downtown to Walt’s loft at the bottom of Chambers Street. I was still living there but it wasn’t satisfactory. The facilities were minimal, and with Walt’s irregular rhythms of existence I found it difficult to work the long hours demanded of me. They stayed up so late, they made so much noise! There were days when the psych unit seemed a haven of tranquillity by contrast, the company of the mentally ill preferable by far to that of Walt’s carousing painter friends.
    There had been tension between Walt and me for some months. At first he welcomed Agnes. In those days almost all the females who came through the loft were hippie girls he found it easy to seduce. Painterly mess for some reason never failed to turn them on: trestle tables heaped with squeezed tubes, tools and brushes everywhere, wine bottles, a paint-spattered floor. Three windows faced west toward the river; at the other end of the space the windows faced east to Broadway and south to the near-complete twin towers. We were close to the site of what once had been the Washington Street produce market. The area was cheap because the Port Authority had recently torn down what it called a commercial slum, actually a viable community of saloons and coffee shops and a few blocks of stores specializing in electronics and radio parts. But by the time I moved back to the city it was mostly artists you saw on the streets down there, painters and sculptors who like Walt had moved into the empty warehouses to take advantage of the light, the high ceilings, the low rent or even no rent at all.
So north of Chambers an artist community was in formation, while south was a wasteland where the bulldozer and the wrecking ball had reduced all to rubble, the rubble then dumped into the Hudson for landfill.
    Agnes did not at once regard Walt as some kind of bohemian art god, and was not prepared to worship. I’d told her about my disillusionment with his work. There was