Activity

At least at night the phone didn’t ring. My feeling was, the soul is startled by the telephone and never at ease in its presence. Often on a midtown street someone’s cell would ring and half a dozen people would check their pockets to see if it was them being called, and I’d glimpse a flash of pani…

Anyway Ford, Sanch, Dan, me—that was Chambers St., and was going to be for five more weeks, until our lease ran out. Other friends lived scattered around the city in ones and twos, and this had allowed us four to provide, in the welcoming squalor of our living room, a kind of community center for t…

“Are you sure? Wait, let me find the coin,” I said as I went hunting through various pants pockets in search of one of the very special unspendable coins that mom had given me for throwing the I Ching, which I never did, for ancient Chinese guidance. The first toss came up heads. So that plus Alice…

"Can you stand to be forgiven?"

"No," he said. "Basically, no. I can't. It's better all around if I pay you."

Still kneeling, Denise bent over and tucked in her arms and made herself into an olive, an egg, an onion. From within this balled form came a low voice. "Do you understand what a huge…

"So what have you been doing with yourself?" Gary said.

"I've been helping a Lithuanian friend of mine defraud Western investors."

"Jesus, Chip. You don't want to be doing that."

Everything else in the world might be strange, but Gary's condescension galled Chip exactly as it always had.
…