It was his honor, publishing me.

I dragged up to the front like a greenhorn with a trunk and Finnity went to hug or kiss and I went to shake his hand.

I gave a speech—and the speech was my Acknowledgments (the book itself didn’t have any). I had a lot of people to thank. My mother, for one, who fled Poland, for giving me the money to travel to Poland, only so I could write a book about her life. (I left the inheritance from my father out of it—spent.)

I thanked my Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe, whom I visited and interviewed in Israel, and my cousin Tzila, who drove me directly from a Tel Aviv club to a shabby Breslov minyan in Jerusalem so I could interrogate a former block commander who’d been interrogated before by better, the obscurer relations, honorary inlaws, and strangers who’d responded to my letters from Kraków, Warsaw, Vienna, Graz, Prague, Bratislava, the good people of Los Angeles, and of Texas, Florida, and Maine (survivors), the faculties of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, and the stern lady clerks of the Polish State Archives, who helped me sift cadastral registries, deportation manifests, and Zyklon B inventories, who not only confirmed Moms’s memories—the color of a hat ribbon or shoelace, the flavor of the cream between favorite wafers—but who gave them flesh and future too—the location of Gruntig’s butcher stand (by the mikvah, on what became the corner of Walecznych and Proletariuszy Streets), the fate of schoolfriend Sara (Cuba, aneurysm)—assisting with the granular details: how many grams of bread my uncles were allotted in what camp on what dates, how many liters of soup were allotted per prisoner per week/month in what camp vs. the amount on average delivered. How my grandparents last embraced in Zgody Square, Kraków ghetto, 10/28/42, 10:00.

Appreciated—and when I was finished everyone stormed to congratulate me, shake my hand, and Caleb nodded, from a huddle of girls, and Aaron nodded too, gesturing for a smoke above a scrim of critics, reviewers. Someone congratulated me by hugging and kissing and someone said, “Introduce me to your mother.” But Moms wasn’t in attendance, she hadn’t been invited. “She wouldn’t have enjoyed it—this isn’t exactly her crowd.”

I leaned between brass poles, velvet suspended into satisfied smiles. Aar sparked a joint and we smoked it and the air was gassy and my suit was wool and Cal filed out with the girls.

We stumbled down 10th in celebration, or observance—in memo-riam—afterparties bearing the same relationship to parties as the afterlife to life. Straggling to get cash, to get cigs and a handle of vodka, to decipher the Spanish on a wall shrine to a child shot or stabbed, to do chinups on new condo construction scaffolding.

Gansevoort Street: everything smelled like meat and disinfectant. The bouncer was a big black warty dyke bound in leather and chains, checking IDs, grabbing wrists so as to break them, to stamp the back of the hand and someone said, “This is like the Holocaust,” and someone said, “The Holocaust wasn’t airconditioned neither.”

Behind the bar were crushed photographs of the uniformed: cops, firefighters, Catholic schoolgirls. Businesscards between the slats, as if phone fax email were all that held the walls together, all that fused the landfilled island.

The bartender served Cal and me our sodas and we took them to a banquette in the back to mix in the vodka while Aar ordered a whiskey or scotch and while it was being fixed wound his watch and left a bill atop a napkin and left.

Someone had the hiccups, someone slipped on sawdust.

Kimi! publicized by the banquette:

“The deal is the publisher’s picking up the tab for beers and wines,” and Cal said, “Why didn’t you say so?” and Kimi! said, “How many do you need?” and Cal counted how many girls we were sitting with and said, “We need six of both,” and Kimi! snorted and Cal stood to go with her, but instead they went to the bathroom.

I had to go to the bathroom too. But all of college was crammed into the stall, Columbia University class of 1992, with a guy whose philosophy essays I used to write, now become an iBanker, let’s call him P. Sachs, or Philip S., sitting not on the seat but up on the tank, with the copy of my book I’d autographed for him on his lap—“To P.S., with affect(at)ion” rolling a $100 bill, tapping out the lines to dust the dustjacket, offering Cal and Kimi! bumps off the blurbs, offering me.

“Cocaine’s gotten better since the Citigroup merger.”

A knock, a peremptory bouncer’s fist, and the door’s opened to another bar, yet another—but which bars we, despite half of us being journalists, wouldn’t recollect: that dive across the street, diving into the street and lying splayed between the lanes. Straight shots by twos, picklebacks. Well bourbons chasing pabsts. Beating on the jukebox for swallowing our quarters. “This jukebox swallows more than your mother.” “Swallows more than The Factchecker.”

The Factchecker changed by the party, the season. Any fuckable female publishing professional could be The Factchecker—if it could be proven that she was between the ages of 18 and 26, and that she had fucked precisely zero people since arriving in NY.

Last call was called, and Kimi! went up to tab bourbon doubles for us and for herself a gin and tonic and Cal and I drank ours and even hers and shared a cig between us and my mouth tasted like nickels, like dimes, and my gums needed a haircut.

The lights went up, the jukebox down, I hurled a cueball at the dartboard—Finnity had left with The Factchecker, Cal asked, “Anyone want to come back to my place?”

We still had vodka in the bag, two girls in each cab, two cabs taxiing to the Bowery, to the apartment Cal’s parents, half Jewish and full Connecticut stockbrokers each, had bought for him. I was in the back and he was in the back and Kimi! was between us (The Factchecker’s roommate was up front), and I asked if anyone had talked to Aar but Kimi! was already calling him though she must’ve been calling his office, because he didn’t have a phone on his person, this was before everybody had phones on their persons.

Aar was waiting outside Cal’s building, wrapping his silk scarf around a Russian or Ukrainian or close enough gift—a present to himself shivering in only a frilly cocktail waitress shirt and a drink umbrella skirt and a nametag. Cal poked with the keys, Aar poked his Slav from behind with a handle of rye, and we all crowded into the elevator, stopped on every floor, Kimi! and Missy having plunged into pressing all the buttons.

I’d lit a cig on the street and was still smoking in the elevator and the cig I was smoking was menthol.

Missy, being The Factchecker’s roomie, whining to Kimi! and me about her job as a temp receptionist, and “Why can’t I get a job at an agency?” and “Can you I’m begging you introduce me to Aar?” as Cal scoured around stuffing tightywhities into drawers, as Aar and his Masha? Natasha? he’d picked up from hostessing the restaurant of the Jersey City Ramada, the same place I’m sure he’d picked up the rye, set about mixing Manhattans.

Cal tidying the shelves, rearranging and flipping what he must’ve considered the respectable reads, the larger and wider reads, the complement of Brontës, the Prousts, the Tolstoys, centrally and spine out, exchanging the livingroom’s Flags of the Confederacy poster for the kitchen’s canvas of abstract slashes by a dissentient Union Square Lithuanian, fussing with the stereo, putting on some hiphop, some rap, clearing away the motivational improve your vocab lectures he worked out to. I left Kimi! and Missy to help him move the treadmill to the bedroom, left him trying to fold the treadmill into the closet at the buzzing, went to the door and buzzed them in: a dozen people, a 12-pack, dangling in the hall, dangling like keys passed from the fire escape to the acquainted, from the acquainted to the strangers they’d invited, assisterati and receptionistas arriving, schedulers and reschedulers early and late, marketing and distribution cultureworkers I didn’t know and who didn’t know me but we, this was our business, pretended. More pot and coke, which, as P.S. said again, had gotten better since the Citigroup merger. Tequila in the sink, martinis in the shower. Ash in both and in energy drinkables. Masha or Nastya was asking if we had any games and after Cal realized she didn’t mean Monopoly mentioned that his neighbor was a firstperson fanatic—not the literary gambit, the gaming—and suddenly six fists were knocking at Tim’s door demanding to borrow his system, and Tim, calculus teacher at Stuyvesant, answered the door red and tousled senseless, and hauled into Cal’s his system and even connected it to Cal’s TV with the bigger screen and bigger speakers, the night blooding the morning as P.S. and some random hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy tested each other in mortal combat avatared as lasertusked elephants and wild ligers with rocketlaunching claws, as Aar left with his Slav who had to get back to Staten Island by her cousins’ curfew, as Tim’s girlfriend who had the flu trundled over in a balloonpocked blanket and scowled and sneezed and coughed and left taking Tim but not his system with her, as some random hair-curtained-in-the-middle guy left with his decentbodied girlfriend, as Cal grinded Missy and took her into the bedroom, as I fumbled with Kimi! and got a burp, which sent her to the bathroom to vomit, which sent Missy to the bathroom to help her, and P.S. kept playing with himself, and in the hall Missy was into hooking up with Kimi! but not Kimi! with Missy, P.S. suggested they call The Factchecker to confirm whether and which sex acts she was perpetrating on Finnity, Missy and Kimi! left, P.S. left with them, and after opening the fiercely bulbed fridge to find expired mustard and ketchup sweating, just sweating, I suggested calling for delivery, but the good place was closed and we were just a block outside the bad place’s delivery zone, and the freezer wasn’t just out of ice but out of cold from being left open, and there was a cushion wet on the floor in the hall, and there was sleep without dreaming.