Aar dealt with insurance, got custody of Achsa—Miriam’s daughter, Ethiopian, adopted, then eight. He moved her up to the Upper East Side, built her a junglegym in his office. His neighbors complained, and then Achsa complained she was too old for it. He fitted the room with geodes, lava eggs, mineral and crystal concretions, instead.

The bookstore still stood—preserved by its historical foundations from the damage of scrapers. But Aar couldn’t keep it up. It wasn’t the customer scarcity or rehab cost, it was Miriam. The only loss he couldn’t take. He put the Judaica in the gable, garnished the best of the rest and sold it, donated the remainder to prisons, and sold the bookstore itself, to a bank. For an unstaffed ATM vestibule lit and heated and airconditioned, simultaneously, perpetually.

He kept the topfloor, though, Miriam’s apartment, tugged off the coverlets that’d been shrouding its mirrors since shiva, moved his correspondence cabinet there, moved his contract binders there—fitted his postal scale between her microwave and spicerack—the entirety of his agency. He kept everything of hers—the bed, dresser, creaky antiques, coffinwood, the clothes, the face products. Took her antianxieties and antidepressants and when he finished them, got prescriptions of his own. Meal replacement opiates—he’d chew them.

The only stuff he moved was Achsa’s, in whose old room he set up his rolltop and ergo swiveler. Computer and phone to accept offers, reject offers, monitor the air quality tests. He had different women working as assistants—Erica, and Erica W., and Lisabeth—junior agents in the kitchen, preparing my royalty statements, my rounding error earnings against advance. But on their days off and at nights he’d have his other girls over, his Slavs—helping them through their ESL and TOEFL exams, writing their LaGuardia Community College applications, fucking them, fucking them only in the stairwell, the hall, where Miriam’s scent didn’t linger—as insomniac corpses came and went for cash below, on a floor once filled with rare gallery catalogs and quartet partitur, just a ceaseless withdrawing, depositing, fluoresced, blown hot and cold.

Caleb, however—that September made him. He’d done better at history, I’d done better at English, he’d become a journalist directly out of Columbia, with bylines in the Times, and I’d become a bookstore clerk, but published first—a book.

Then I fell behind.

What destroyed me, created him—Cal—the sirens were his calling. After filing features on Unemployment (because he was happy with his employment), and The Gay Movement (because he was happy being straight), he put himself on the deathbeat, jihad coverage. He left the Bowery and never came back. He was down at the site round the clock, digging as the searchers dug, as the finders sifted, but for facts. Every job has its hackwork, promotions from horror to glamour. Not to my credit, but that’s how it felt at the time.

He tracked a hijacker’s route through the Emirates, Egypt, Germany—to Venice, Florida, where he proved himself going through the records of a flight school, turning up associates the FBI had missed, or the CIA had rendered. At a DC madrassa he got a tip about Al Qaeda funding passing through a Saudi charity and pursued it, cashed out on the frontpage above the fold. His next dateline was Afghanistan. He went to war. Combat clarified his style. He had few contacts, no bodyarmor. But when his letter from Kabul prophesied the Taliban insurgency, The New Yorker put him on staff. It’s difficult for me to admit. Difficult not to ironize. I was jealous of him, envious of risk. The troop embeds, the voluntary abductions, hooded with a hessian sandbag and cuffed, just to tape a goaty madman’s babble. He was advantaging, pressing, doing and being important, careering through mountain passes in humvees with Congress.

Cal returned to the States having changed—in the only way soldiers ever change, besides becoming suicidal. He was clipped, brusque, and disciplined—his cynicism justified, his anger channeled. He brought me back a karakul hat, and for the rest of his fandom a .doc, an ms. A pyre of pages about heritage loss, the Buddha idols the mullahs razed. About treasurehunting, profiteering (Cal’s the expert). About the lithium cartels, the pipelines for oil and poppies (Aar told him to mention poppies).

Cal certainly had other offers for representation, but went with Aar on my advice. The book sold for six figures, and got a six figure option, for TV or film, in development, still. I edited the thing, before it was edited, went through the text twice as a favor. But I’ll type the title only if he pays me. Because he didn’t use my title. Which the publisher loathed. 22 months on the bestseller list: “as coruscating and cacophonous as battle itself” (The New York Times, review by a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), “as if written off the top of his head, and from the bottom of his heart […] anguished, effortless, and already indispensable” (New York, review by Melissa Muccalla—Missy from my bookparty). The Pulitzer, last year—at least he was nominated.

My famous friend Cal, not recognized in any café or caffè famous but recognized in one or two cafés or caffès and the reading room of the 42nd Street library famous—writerly anti-nonfamous. I’ve never liked Cal’s writing, but I’ve always liked him—the both of them like family. He’s been living in Iowa, teaching on fellowship. All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

“And I’ve been working on the next book,” according to his email. This time it’s fiction, a novel. Aar hasn’t read a word yet. Cal won’t let it go until it’s finished. “And I’ve been thinking a lot about you and your situation and how you can’t be pessimistic about it because life can change in a snap, especially given your talent,” according to his email. Don’t I know it, my hero, my flatterer.

\

Caleb was off warring and I was stuck, ground zero. Which for me was never lower smoldering Manhattan, but Ridgewood. Metropolitan Avenue. Out past the trendoid and into the cheap, always in the midst of transition, enridged. Blocksized barbedwired disbanded factories. Plants where the bubbles were blown into seltzer and lunchmeats were sliced. My building was an industrial slabiform, not redeveloped but converted, in gross violation of the informal zoning code of prudence. Used to be a printing facility, the only relic of which was a letterpress, a hulking handpress decaying screwy out in the central courtyard, exposed to the weather, too heavy to move. From time to time I’d stumble on a letter, wedged between the cobbles.

The unit itself was a storage facility 20 × 20, not certified for even a moment of frenetic pacing let alone habitation, and with a rabid radiator the resident antisemite, but without a window, I had to take from the rear dumpsters a bolt of billiard baize for a doorstop, for ventilation. Sawhorses supporting a desk of doublepaned wired glass. International Office Supply wood swiveler, the least comfortable chair of the Depression. Banker’s lamp. Bent shelves of galleys, from when I reviewed, of my own galleys from when I’d be the reviewee. My mother’s potted cups, one for caffeine, the other an ashtray. In a corner my airbed and bicycle, in another the pump for both. Brooklyn by my left leg, Queens by my right, hands between them, an intimate borough. At least there was a door. At least there was a lock.

My apartment, my office—I had nothing to do but practice my autograph. I didn’t. I sat, I lay, pumped, adjusted the angle of recline.

I was the only NYer not allowed to be sad, once it came out what I was sad about, the bathroom was common and down the hall, all my sustenance was from the deli.

I bought a turkey sandwich, cheese curls, frosted donuts, lotto scratchers, Cossack vodka I’d drink without ice, from the spare change trough emptied and unwashed, Camel Lights I’d smoke out in the hall through the bars of the airshaft, smoking so hard as to crack a rib.