I don't know exactly when it was that I became aware of footsteps in the room above mine. They were measured steps, failing lightly but in obvious patterns, suggesting a predatory meditation, as of pygmies rehearsing a ritual kill.

The mornings were cold and dark. Down the street the rounded doors of the firehouse remained closed except for one day at dawn when a truck nosed slowly out, its lights dissolved in low fog, silent men clutched to its sides, apparitional in black slickers. Derelicts were everywhere, often too wasted to beg. Many of them had an arm or leg in a cast, and the ones with bottles mustered sullenly in doorways, never breaking their empties, leaving them behind as they themselves moved north to forage, or simply disappeared. Two feeble men wrestled quietly, humming wordless curses at each other, and an old woman limped into view, bundled in pounds of rags, an image in the penciled light of long retreat from Moscow. I opened the window and touched the brittle crust of snow settled on the ledge. The fire engine went speeding down Broadway, pure sound now, shrill wind, a voice from the evilest dreams.

A boy named Hanes, the fairest of Globke's assistants, came to see me one afternoon. He brought mail, newspapers, contracts and some cash.

"You were seen in a drive-in restaurant in Ocala, Florida," he said.

Hanes was barely twenty, poetically delicate in appearance, and it was hard to imagine him at work in the Transparanoia offices, a place where squat men, out-sweating the effects of air conditioning, were willing to hack off slabs of their own body fat to sell by the pound over transatlantic phone hookups.

"You were also seen at the airport in Benton Harbor, Michigan. According to the thing in the paper, the person who saw you walked up to you and said: 'Hey, Bucky, where you going?' And you said back: 'To get some Chinese food.' Then a two-engine plane rolled up and you got aboard."

Hanes sat on the edge of the unmade bed. His eyes never left me. I remembered a night on the West Coast some months before. The country's blood was up, this or that atrocity, home or abroad, and even before we hit the stage the whole place was shaking. We were the one group that people depended on to validate their emotions and this was to be a night of above-average fury. In our own special context we challenged the authenticity of the crowd's passion and wrath, dipping our bodies in coquettish blue light, merely teasing our instruments for the first hour or so. Then we caved their heads with about twenty thousand watts of frozen sound. The pressure of their response was immense, blasting in with the force of a natural disaster, and it became even greater, more physically menacing, as they pressed in around the stage, massing for the holocaust, until finally it broke, all hell, and the only lucid memory I later had was of someone slightly familiar pushing across the stage, his face brilliant with pain, eyes clearly seeking me through every layer of chaos, Hanes, stopping now to punch the drums, whirling in his torn shirt, a sleeve hanging empty, Hanes himself, tumbling backward over a bank of amps.

"I've got a new Garrard changer," he said.

"Glad to hear it."

"My tone arm setup has zero tracking error."

"Do one thing for me," I said. "Take these contracts back."

That night there was a fire in an oil drum on the street below the window. Four people stood around the drum, occasionally tossing wood and garbage into the flames. I tried to read one of the newspapers Hanes had left. The words made no sense to me. I looked at the cover of a magazine and could not quite put together the letters in big block print. In time I fell asleep in a chair, remaining there after waking. There was a knock at the door. I went to the window and looked down to the street, where three of the people were still gathered, bouncing on their toes in the cold. The fourth was at the door, an ageless girl in defeated wet fur, trying to blink her way back to the realm of events. Her long druid's face rested on a package she carried high on her chest.

"I'm Skippy, Bucky. I just want to give you something from somebody and I won't hang around and bother you, I really promise and all. Can I come inside for a minute and no more?"

"But not your friends," I said.

"There's a body in the hall downstairs."

"Probably mine."

"First off this boy I know from New Mexico, Bobby from New Mexico, made me promise to tell you he knows where to get some unbelievable hash that you can have for nothing and you don't even have to talk to him. I'm pretty sure that's it — hash, for nothing, unbelievable."

"I turn on and off with the radio now."

"It's okay really because that's not the something I'm supposed to give you anyway."

She handed me the package.

"What is it?" I said.

"They want you to hold it here because they trust you and there's no other safe place. Someone will come and pick it up at the right time."

"Who wants me to hold it?"

"Happy Valley Farm Commune."

"What's that?"

"It's a new earth-family on the Lower East Side that has the whole top floor of one tenement. Some of them are ex-Desert Surfers."

"They don't trust each other. But they trust me."

"I guess so," she said. "Three of them are outside now. But they didn't want to come up. They want to show you they respect privacy. They want to return the idea of privacy to American life. They have shotguns, they have handguns, they have knives, they have blowtorches, they have army explosives, they have deer rifles. They stole whatever's in that package. I'm supposed to tell you that Dr. Pepper is going to analyze the contents as soon as they can find out where he is. So once they find him and either get him to Essex Street or go to wherever he is, someone will come over here and get the package. I'm supposed to say Dr. Pepper, analyze, Essex Street, get the package. I'm pretty sure that's it."

"Your friends aren't too well organized, are they?"

"They're getting it together. It takes time, I guess. They're new to the city and all. But they think what you're doing right now is really something."

"What am I doing?"

"Returning the idea of privacy to American life."

"Nice seeing you," I said. "Always nice to see nice people. If you ever want the package and I'm either unconscious, dead or not here, have your friends kick in the door. I'll leave the package in an obvious place."

"My name's Skippy."

"I know."

"I can come back later if you want. Whatever you want, Bucky. I can bring my friend Maeve. Or I can come all by myself. Or I can just send Maeve."

"None of those," I said.

"Okay, real glad I came up and all. I was in Atlantic City when you did the four straight hours. Bobby from New Mexico was in Houston the night you weren't there. Said it was killer. Broke his left wrist jumping off a wall. Real ga-ga night. Okay, have to go now. Too bad we didn't get too much chance to really talk. But it's okay, Bucky. I'm nonverbal just like you."

From the window I watched her talk with the three men before all walked off in a light snow. I heard the footsteps again, someone pacing in a complicated pattern. The package was about twelve inches square, not heavy, wrapped in brown paper sealed with plain brown tape. I dropped it in a small trunk in a corner of the room. It took a long time for the fire in the oil drum to go out. I put on Opel's coat and waited for first light.

Slowly along Great Jones, signs of commerce became apparent, of shipping and receiving, export packaging, custom tanning. This was an old street. Its materials were in fact its essence and this explains the ugliness of every inch. But it wasn't a final squalor. Some streets in their decline possess a kind of redemptive tenor, the suggestion of new forms about to evolve, and Great Jones was one of these, hovering on the edge of self-revelation. Paper, yarn, leathers, tools, buckles, wire-frame-and-novelty. Somebody unlocked the door of the sandblasting company. Old trucks came rumbling off the cobblestones on Lafayette Street. Each truck in turn mounted the curb, where several would remain throughout the day, listing slightly, circled by heavy-bellied men carrying clipboards, invoices, bills of lading, forever hoisting their trousers over their hips. A black woman emerged from the smear of an abandoned car, talking a scattered song. Wind was biting up from the harbor.

I had the door half-open, on my way out for food, when someone spoke my name from the top of the next landing. It was a man about fifty years old, wearing a hooded sweat shirt. He was sitting on the top step, looking down at me.

"I've been waiting for you," he said. "I'm your upstairs neighbor. Eddie Fenig. Ed Fenig. Maybe you've heard of me. I'm a writer, which gives us something a little bit in common, at least retroactively. I write under my full name. Edward B. Fenig. You're tops in your trade, Bucky, looking at your old lyrics, never having attended a live performance. So when I saw you from my window yesterday when you were crossing the street this way, I was naturally delighted. Sheer delight, no exaggeration. Maybe you've heard of me. I'm a poet. I'm a novelist. I'm a mystery writer. I write science fiction. I write pornography. I write daytime dramatic serials. I write one-act plays. I've been published and/or produced in all these forms. But nobody knows me from shit."

Americans pursue loneliness in various ways. For me, Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain. I was preoccupied with conserving myself for some unknown ordeal to come and did not make work by engaging in dialogues, or taking more than the minimum number of steps to get from place to place, or urinating unnecessarily.