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man’s reasoning. Not afraid of death, huh? My, that must make you a real psychopath. But he had seen almost immediately that he should not have told the man that he was like a Holocaust denier. “I said like a Holocaust denier. Like, ” he protested lamely when Louis escorted him out of the party and told him to enjoy the bracing walk home, dressed as Jesus.
    No , thought Leo, as he landed his right hand, fingertips first, on the cold nubbly of the curb, I am definitely more than a body, but I believe I am less than a soul .
    Then, with a fluid agility that hadn’t been his in years, Leo tucked his head and vertical body behind the leading edge of his rounded arm. Some latent muscle memory from five months of jujitsu at the McBurney YMCA on West Sixty-Third Street when he was ten? Leo seemed to recall that this YMCA had in fact served the adventurous class of men described in the song. Now, he felt a point beneath his stomach become the axis of his spinning mass, and he knew to use that dragony breath to take the hit when, after about 120 degrees, his trunk met the sidewalk, hard. Next was his hip and ass, which rolled over not just the concrete but also a busted padlock on the scene by chance. Then came his knees and feet, with a thwack. That was followed by his trailing left arm, which lay down gently, and his gloved palm, which landed and sprang back, the way a conguero lands a hand on the taut hide of his drum.
    Leo stood up. He was fine. Just fine. Right as rain.
    Leo stood up again, this time more carefully. Okay, maybe fine was an overstatement. But ambulatory and intact. A bit exhilarated, actually.
    His bike lay twisted in the street behind him, its front tire still clamped in the groove of the new light-rail system tracks they were laying all over town. Only now did he notice the yellow-and-black warning signs that would have made him aware of the hazard his bike had to cross. The graphics depicted pretty much what had just happened: a bicycle with its front wheel caught in the maw of the track, the blockish pictogram rider hurtling over the handlebars. An honest piece of graphic art; a tiny, two-line picture poem, thought Leo, and he started to upbraid himself for his carelessness and lack of attention.
    But wait. On one corner—the direction from which he’d come—the warning sign was there, but it was swathed in black plastic, taped up tight.
    The thought came like a revelation: This was no accident. They obscured that sign because they want me eliminated.
    Some part of him said, No, don’t be ridiculous . But then why was only one sign shrouded?
    The dips and swoops, the rapid-cyclings, had been with him for a while now, but these revelatory thoughts were new. They arrived at the peaks of the swoops. That’s when things really started ringing, when it seemed that he was at the center of things, that the very planet was pulsing with connectivity, and he was one of Tesla’s bulbs.
    Was it really so far-fetched? That there would be some agency tasked with keeping tabs on wayward members of the intellectual elite? No, it was actually quite reasonable, Leo thought. Big Data and all. So, yes, it was possible that he was being singled out, being watched, being followed. It was probably connected to his blog, on which he’d lately been considering what exactly a shadow government would look like, how it might work. Maybe he’d been getting too close.
    On the dips, he saw that such notions were perhaps paranoid delusions and that he might need psychiatric help. But he was unwilling to submit his mental processes to the purported care of professionals who might have all sorts of limitations and biases and, yes, agendas. And the swoops outnumbered the dips, so why complain? Shimmering on the bright edge of every day was the possibility that he was going to discover a grand unifying theory. That was not a condition to be treated; that was something to hold on to.
    He started again toward work, wheeling his