The man: "Such a small splinter of life, don't you think?"

"Two and three-quarters," Rune responded. "And counting."

Was this guy over the edge or not? Rune couldn't decide.

The blonde spoke. She asked Frankie, "What's good?"

"Like, I don't know, I'm new here."

"We're all new everywhere," the young man said meaningfully, looking at Rune. "All the time. Every three minutes, every two and a half minutes. David Bowie said that. You like him?"

"I love him," Rune said. "How'd he get two different-colored eyes?"

The man was looking at her own eyes. He didn't answer. Didn't matter; she forgot that she'd asked him a question.

Rune found her lipstick and carefully put it on. She brushed out her hair with her fingers. She decided she should be more coy. Looked at her watch. "Two minutes. Less now."

He asked her, "Want to go to a party?"

Rune looked into his eyes. Brown, swimming, paisley. She said, "Maybe. Where?"

"Your place, darling," he said.

Oh, that again.

But he caught the expression on her face and, suddenly sounding much more down to earth, said, "All of us, I mean. A party. Wine and Cheez-Its. Innocent. Swear."

Rune looked at Frankie. He shook his shaggy head. "My sister's gonna have her baby anytime. I gotta get home."

"Please?" Downtown Man asked.

Why not? Rune thought. Recalling that her last date had been when there was snow piled up in the gutters.

"One minute," the man said. "Our time is almost depleted." He was back in the ozone and was speaking to the blonde. She looked at the orange-haired friend and said, "We need a movie. Pick one."

"Me?" the Woodpecker asked.

"Hurry," the blonde whispered.

The man: "We have less than a minute until the floods mount, the earth will tremble…"

"Do you always talk that way?" Rune asked.

He smiled.

The Woodpecker grabbed a movie from the shelf. "How about this one?"

"I can live with it," the blonde answered grudgingly.

Frankie checked them out.

The man said, "Poof. Time's up. Let's go."

"This is an example of Stanford White's finest work," Rune told them.

Riding up in a freight elevator. A metallic grinding sound, chains clinking. The smell was of grease and mold and wet concrete. Floors under construction, floors dark and abandoned, fell slowly past them. The sound of dripping water. It was a building in the TriBeCa neighborhood-the triangle below Canal Street-dating back to the nineteenth century.

"Stanford White?" the blonde asked.

"The architect," Rune said.

The mysterious man said, "He died for love."

He knew that? Rune thought. Impressed. She added, "Murdered by a jealous lover on the top floor of the original Madison Square Garden."

The blonde shrugged as if love were never worth dying for.

The Woodpecker said, "Is this legal, living here?"

"But what, of course, is legal?" the man mused. "I mean whose sets of laws apply? There are layers upon layers of laws we have to contend with. Some valid, some not."

"What are you talking about?" Rune asked him.

He grinned and raised his eyebrows with ambiguous significance.

His name had turned out to be Richard, which disappointed Rune. Somebody this truly renegade should have been named Jean-Paul or Vladmir.

At the top floor the car stopped and they stepped out into a small room filled with boxes stenciled with block Korean letters, suitcases, a broken TV set, an olive-drab drum of civil defense drinking water. A dozen stacks of old beauty magazines. The Woodpecker strolled over to them and studied the covers. "Historical," she said. The only door was labeled "Toilet" in blotchy black ink.

"No windows, how can you stand it?" Richard asked. But Rune didn't answer and disappeared behind a wall of cartons. She climbed an ornate metal stairway, which was in the middle of the room. From the floor above she gave a shrill whistle. "Yo, follow me… Hey, you imagine the trouble I have getting groceries up here? As if I buy groceries."

The trio stopped cold when they reached the next floor. They stood in a glass turret: a huge gazebo on top of the building, its sides rising like a crown. Ten stories below, the city spread around them. The Empire State Building, distant but massive, stern like an indifferent giant out of a Maxfield Parrish illustration. Beyond it, the elegant Chrysler Building. Southward, the city swept away toward the white pillars of the Trade towers. To the east, the frilly Woolworth Building, City Hall. Farther east was a blanket of lights-Brooklyn and Queens. Opposite, the soft darkness of Jersey. Through the glass of the domed ceiling they could see low clouds, glowing pinkish from the city lights.

"She's out-my roommate," Rune explained, looking around. "She's playing Russian roulette in a singles bar. If I don't find her back by this time, eating ice cream from the carton and watching sitcoms, that means she got lucky. Well, that's how she describes it."

Rune pulled off her jacket; it went on a hanger, which she hooked onto the armature of a bulbless floor lamp that held an ostrich-feather boa and a fake-zebra-skin sport coat. She unlaced her boots and set them on the floor next to two battered American Touristers. She opened one, looking over shirts and underwear, which she smoothed, adjusting away creases, refolding some of the wild-colored clothes, then took off her socks and put them into the other suitcase.

To Richard she said, "Dresser and dirty clothes hamper." Nodding at the suitcases.

"You rent this?" the Woodpecker asked.

"I just live here. I don't pay any rent."

"Why not?"

"Nobody's asked me to yet."

Richard asked, "How did you get it?"

Rune shrugged. "I found it. I moved in. Nobody else was here."

He said, "It becomes you."

"Being and becoming…," Rune said, recalling something she'd overheard a couple of guys talking about in the video store a week or so ago.

He lifted his eyebrows. "Hey, you know Hegel?"

"Oh, sure," Rune said. "I love movies."

The circle of the floor was divided by a cinder-block wall, which she'd painted sky blue and dabbed with white for clouds. On Rune's side of the loft were four old trunks, a TV, a VCR, three futons piled on top of one another, a dozen pillows in the corner. Two bookcases, completely filled with books, mostly old ones. A half-size refrigerator.

"Where do you cook?" asked the Woodpecker.

"What does it mean, cook?" Rune replied in a thick Hungarian accent.

Richard said, "I feel something epiphanic about this place. Very watershed, you know." He looked in the refrigerator. A bag of half-melted ice cubes, two six-packs of beer, a shriveled apple. "It's not turned on."

"It doesn't work."

"What about utilities?"

Rune pointed to an orange extension cord snaking down the stairs. "Some of the construction guys working downstairs, they let me have electricity. Isn't that nice of them?"

The Woodpecker asked, "What if the owner finds out, couldn't he kick you out?"

"I'd find someplace else."

"You're a very existential person," Richard said.

And the blonde: "I want to start our party."

Rune shut the lights out, lit a dozen candles.

She heard the rasp of another match. The flare reflected in a dozen angled windows. The ripe raw smell of hash flowed through the room. The joint was passed around. Beer too.

The blonde said to the Woodpecker, "Play the movie, the one you picked out."

Rune and Richard sat back on the pillows, watched the blonde take the cassette from the Woodpecker and open the plastic container. Rune whispered to him, "Are you two like an entity or something?" Nodding at the blonde. Then she thought about it. "Or are you three an entity?"