My thoughts slowly merged with the pain behind my eye. I pressed a thumb against the bridge of my brow and the ache lessened maybe three decibels.

"Leonid," Katrina said.

The headache flared back.

"Yes?"

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. It's just a twitch."

"I was hoping that we could talk," she said, lowering into the chair next to me.

"I swear Dimitri's fine," I said. "The only trouble he's got is girl trouble. And you know young men been runnin' after that since buckskins were in style."

"About us."

"What about us?" I said, wondering at the brightness of the pain.

"I've been back home for over a year now, Leonid."

"Yeah?"

"You're still so… distant."

I looked at my wife then. She was a few months past fifty-one, but regular exercise, spa treatments, and minor cosmetic surgery had kept most of her youthful beauty intact. Those pursed red lips could whisper the nastiest things in the dark of night.

It had been a long time since those lips had been next to my ear.

"It's not you, Katrina," I said. "It's, it's… you know how you read sometimes about men going through midlife crises?"

"Yes."

"I'm having a goddamned lifelong catastrophe. The ship is sunk and white-tipped sharks are headed my way."

"I don't understand," she said.

"You see these hands?" I asked, holding up my mitts.

"Yes?"

"They look normal, don't they? Just some big hands on a stout man. But if you look close you can see the blood on them. Blood and shit and, and, and maggots turnin' into flies. I wash 'em every night, and every morning they're filthy again."

"Is it because I left you for Andre?" she asked.

"No, baby, no. That's the dirt on you. That's your guilt."

"Why did you take me back if you don't love me?"

"Because you asked me to forgive you."

"But you never have."

The pain broke through some kind of barrier and now it was behind both my eyes. I lowered my face into those hands and grunted.

I stayed like that for a minute or two, and when I sat up Katrina was gone from the room.

I HAD THREE TABLETS of Tylenol with codeine in the medicine cabinet. A dentist gave them to me after a tooth extraction. I took one and sat in my office chair with the shades drawn, the lights turned out, and my eyes closed.

Thirty-seven minutes later, by my father's Timex, the only physical thing he left me, I opened my eyes.

The pain was still there but it was as if it had been sent to another room. I felt it through the wall, pulsing and singing red. But I could think again. I could concentrate through the bifocal lens of the medication.

I KEPT RON SHARKEY'S file in a locked cabinet next to my desk. It was quite thick, as it went back all the way to the time that I framed him and he was sent to prison.

I opened the folder to the first page but realized that thinking about Sharkey at that moment would break down the fragile wall the drug had erected. So instead I pulled out a file from Rinaldo's briefcase that I had not yet perused. It was labeled RELATIONS.

There were fourteen single-spaced typed pages, most with photographs paper-clipped to them, detailed synopses of Angie's friends, family, and daily acquaintances.

Paging through these names, I was even more aware of how dislocated I felt. It was as if the codeine had snagged in that moment of alienation that characterized my life.

Focusing on the subjects' professions, I decided on the one I was most likely to catch at that time of day. I studied his history and habits, his relationship to Angie, and his picture, taken without his knowledge.

"LEONID, " SHE SAID AS I was about to go out the door.

"Yes?" I tried to sound friendly, open.

She had changed into a beige dress that accented her figure. Katrina had a figure that any man from twelve to a hundred and twelve could appreciate. The hem came down to the middle of her calf and the neckline did an arc just under the beginning of her cleavage.

"I'm sorry for what I said about Mardi. It's really very nice that you want to help her."

"That's Twill for you," I said. "He knew that Mardi needed a job to take care of her little sister, and that I needed someone to sit in my receptionist's chair. You know, his social worker told me that he could be president if he didn't have a record."

Usually Katrina loved talking about the virtues of her children. But she wasn't going to be sidetracked that afternoon.

"Will you at least try, and keep trying, to talk to me?" she asked.

That question was another kind of test. No… a final exam.

At first my body was facing the door, only my head was turned toward Katrina. But I rotated the full hundred and eighty degrees to appreciate her aggressive question. I could have apologized and said I'd try. But what difference would that have made? She wasn't going to leave and neither was I.

"What if I were to tell you that I came up behind a man and shot him in the head?" I said. "Left him leaking blood and brains in some back alley somewhere. What if I told you about a grieving widow and three little kids with no father or life insurance or friends to help them out? Is that the kind of talk you want to hear, Katrina? Is that what you want to share with me?"

My words were both truth and metaphor. I had never been an assassin. But I had destroyed whole families, regardless of that.

Katrina was testing me as I was going out the door to earn our rent and food. Instead of taking the exam, I gave her my own questions to ponder.

She winced at me. Behind her was the nimbus of my headache, some lost soul haunting me for reasons that put fear into my wife's eyes.

"You should go," she said. "We'll talk about this later."

BEING A BOXER, EVEN an amateur like me, one learns to deal with manifestations of pain and concussion. I walked down the street toward Central Park, dragging the headache and the drug-induced mental bifurcation behind me like the chains of lifelong servitude. That's why, for so long, black men dominated boxing. That ring encompassed our entire lives. We were in training from the day we were born.

I entered the park at Eighty-sixth Street and found my regular route. It was a bit off the beaten path, mostly quiet. There were a couple of teenagers getting high on a boulder, and two lovers, whom I heard but did not see, coming to the partially stifled climax of their lovemaking as I walked by.

A big white guy in tattered clothes came up to me when I was almost to the East Side.

"Gimme a dollar, man," he said.

There were arcane tattoos on his hands and face, and probably the rest of him too; old blue and red and yellow stains that had begun to fade and spread.

"Say what?" I asked.

"I said gimme a dollar. And hurry it up before I make it five."

"I tell you what, mothahfuckah. You come here and take it from me."

"I got a knife in my pocket," he warned.

I couldn't help but smile.