“What can I do for you girls?” he said.

“We baked you some banana bread,” the pudgier sidekick said, brandishing a foil-wrapped loaf.

The other two girls rolled their eyes. “She baked you banana bread,” Caitlyn said. “We had nothing to do with it.”

“I hope you like walnuts,” the baker girl said.

“Ah, I getcha,” Katz said.

A confused silence fell. Helicopter rotors were pounding the lower Manhattan airspace, the wind doing funny things with the sound.

“We’re just big fans of Nameless Lake,” Caitlyn said. “We heard you were building a deck up here.”

“Well, as you see, your friend Zachary’s as good as his word.”

Zachary was rocking the Trex board with his orange sneakers, affecting impatience to be alone with Katz again, and thus evincing some good basic pickup skills.

“Zachary’s a great young musician,” Katz said. “I wholeheartedly endorse him. He’s a talent to watch.”

The girls turned their heads toward Zachary with a kind of sad boredom.

“Seriously,” Katz said. “You should get him to go downstairs with you and listen to him play.”

“We’re actually more into alt country,” Caitlyn said. “Not so much boy rock.”

“He’s got some great country licks,” Katz persisted.

Caitlyn squared her shoulders, aligning her posture like a dancer, and gazed at him steadily, as if to give him a chance to amend the indifference he was showing her. She clearly wasn’t used to indifference. “Why are you building a deck?” she said.

“For fresh air and exercise.”

“Why do you need exercise? You look pretty fit.”

Katz felt very, very tired. To be unable to bring himself to play for even ten seconds the game that Caitlyn was interested in playing with him was to understand the allure of death. To die would be the cleanest cutting of his connection to the thing-the girl’s idea of Richard Katz-that was burdening him. Away to the southwest of where they were standing stood the massive Eisenhower-era utility building that marred the nineteenth-century architectural vistas of almost every Tribecan loft-dweller. Once upon a time, the building had offended Katz’s urban aesthetic, but now it pleased him by offending the urban aesthetic of the millionaires who’d taken over the neighborhood. It loomed like death over the excellent lives being lived down here; it had become something of a friend of his.

“Let’s have a look at that banana bread,” he said to the pudgy girl.

“I also brought you some wintergreen Chiclets,” she said.

“Why don’t I autograph the box for you, and you can keep it.”

“That would be awesome!”

He took a Sharpie from a toolbox. “What’s your name?”

“Sarah.”

“It’s great to meet you, Sarah. I’m going to take your banana bread home and have it for dessert tonight.”

Caitlyn briefly, with something like moral outrage, observed this dissing of her pretty self. Then she walked over to Zachary, trailed by the other girl. And here, Katz thought, was a concept: instead of trying to fuck the girls he hated, why not simply snub them for real? To keep his attention on Sarah and away from the magnetic Caitlyn, he took out the tin of Skoal that he’d bought to give his lungs a break from cigarettes, and inserted a big pinch of it between gum and cheek.

“Can I try some of that?” the emboldened Sarah said.

“It’ll make you sick.”

“But, like, one shred?”

Katz shook his head and pocketed the tin, whereupon Sarah asked if she could fire the nail gun. She was like a walking advertisement of the late-model parenting she’d received: You have permission to ask for things! Just because you aren’t pretty doesn’t mean you don’t! Your offerings, if you’re bold enough to make them, will be welcomed by the world! In her own way, she was just as tiring as Caitlyn. Katz wondered if he’d been this tiring himself at eighteen, or whether, as it now seemed to him, his anger at the world-his perception of the world as a hostile adversary, worthy of his anger-had made him more interesting than these young paragons of self-esteem.

He let Sarah fire the nail gun (she shrieked at its recoil and nearly dropped it) and then sent her on her way. Caitlyn had been snubbed so effectively that she didn’t even say good-bye but simply followed Zachary downstairs. Katz wandered over to the master-bedroom skylight in hopes of glimpsing Zachary’s mother, but all he saw was the DUX bed, the Eric Fischl canvas, the flat-screen TV.

Katz’s susceptibility to women over thirty-five was a source of some embarrassment. It felt sad and a little sick in the way it seemed to reference his own lunatic and absent mother, but there was no altering the basic wiring of his brain. The kiddies were perennially enticing and perennially unsatisfying in much the same way that coke was unsatisfying: whenever he was off it, he remembered it as fantastic and unbeatable and craved it, but as soon as he was on it again he remembered that it wasn’t fantastic at all, it was sterile and empty: neuro-mechanistic, death-flavored. Nowadays especially, the young chicks were hyperactive in their screwing, hurrying through every position known to the species, doing this that and the other, their kiddie snatches too unfragrant and closely shaved to even register as human body parts. He remembered more detail from his few hours with Patty Berglund than he did from a decade’s worth of kiddies. Of course, he’d known Patty forever and been attracted to her forever; long anticipation had certainly been a factor. But there was also just something intrinsically more human about her than about the youngsters. More difficult, more involving, more worth having. And now that his prophetic dick, his divining rod, was again pointing him in her direction, he was at a loss to recall why he hadn’t taken fuller advantage of his opportunity with her. Some misguided notion of niceness, now incomprehensible to him, had prevented him from going to her hotel in Philadelphia and helping himself to more of her. Having betrayed Walter once, in the chilly middle of a northern night, he should have gone ahead and done it another hundred times and got it out of his system. The evidence of how much he’d wanted to do this was right there in the songs he’d written for Nameless Lake. He’d turned his ungratified desire into art. But now, having made that art and reaped its dubious rewards, he had no reason to keep renouncing a thing he still wanted. And if Walter were then, in turn, to feel entitled to the Indian chick, and stop being such a moralistic irritant, so much the better for all concerned.

He took a Friday-evening train to Washington from Newark. He still wasn’t able to listen to music, but his non-Apple MP3 player was loaded with a track of pink noise-white noise frequency-shifted toward the bass end and capable of neutralizing every ambient sound the world could throw at him-and by donning big cushioned headphones and angling himself toward the window and holding a Bernhard novel close to his face, he was able to achieve complete privacy until the train stopped in Philly. Here a white couple in their early twenties, wearing white T-shirts and eating white ice cream from waxed-paper cups, settled into the newly vacated seats in front of him. The extreme white of their T-shirts seemed to him the color of the Bush regime. The chick immediately reclined her seat into his space, and when she finished her ice cream, a few minutes later, she tossed the cup and spoon back under her seat, where his feet were.

With a heavy sigh, he removed his headphones, stood up, and dropped the cup on her lap.

“Jesus!” she cried with scalding disgust.

“Hey, man, what the fuck?” her resplendently white companion said.

“You dropped this on my feet,” Katz said.

“She didn’t throw it on your lap.”

“That is a pretty amazing accomplishment,” Katz said. “To sound self-righteous about your girlfriend dropping a wet ice-cream container on somebody else’s feet.”