The dull whoosh and bump of the train subdued him, and he didn't wake until Hoyt Street was just a dot on the wrong side of the line. "In each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence". He picked up his heavy head and looked toward a face vaguely Asian, a voice vaguely British, then down to the three fingers he had jammed as a placemark in the pages. He grinned. "Things separate from their stories have no meaning." "Movement itself is a form of property." He nodded his bowed head. "It's a good book."

Franklin came and the train hissed to a beleaguered rest and they rose and followed a crowd up the switchback steps toward darkened sky and steaming pavement. "I'm headed this way." They shook hands and parted, and the night lit up like a flash bulb. The ambling throng on Fulton quickened its collective pace a step, and sure enough, soon the sky was open. Voices cried mock surprise and whoops of laughter melded with the horns of livery cabs and Saturday nightlife, and he weighed the wetness against the blisters on his feet and the awkwardness of it all, then broke into a run, head bowed and shoulders bobbing.

When he was well soaked he stopped up under a yellowed awning and realized the futility of his prisance. His shoulders relaxed and he leaned against the corrugated metal storeguard and watched the rain as it came in sheets, dive bombing the pavement to explode in bits of translucent shrapnel which scattered in all directions and spread like waves down the asphalt in mesmerizing cadence and immeasurable repetition, punctuated by lightning and the pistol cracks from the sky above. He looked down Franklin towards dark enclaves huddled on covered stoops or waiting at the threshold of pulsing clubs and raucous bars, all of them audience to nature's ouvre, an act he might have missed had circumstances been slightly different. But could they have turned out any other way?

Everything is necessary. Every least thing. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away, what omitted. He put the book in the crook of his arm and stepped into the downpour, relishing in the respite from the late night summer swelter.