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cabinet. From somewhere deep within the building, a radio poured out a skein of static-laden merengue music. Otherwise the morning was unusually quiet and still.
    I crept over to his desk, where his boxy, black-metal Underwood sat amid crumpled typewriter papers and crinkled carbons. Two or three mugs of unfinished coffee, each in a varying state of mossy decomposition, sprouted among the trash. His tear-off desk calendar announced today’s date: July 1. I pulled open the long, shallow drawer that ran the length of the desktop. Pencils, paper clips, white-out, thumbtacks, checkbook. No manuscript. I tried the three stubby, stacked drawers attached to the right of the desk. Nothing, save a bunch of law school stuff: lecture notes, photocopied briefs. . . . Giving up on the desk, I moved across the room to the filing cabinet. I tried the top drawer. Inside, heaped any which way, was a dusty pile of framed studio photographs of Stewart, documenting his progress from swaddled toddler to begowned scholar. In the second drawer was more law stuff:
Black’s Law Dictionary;
tomes entitled
Torts, Civil Procedure, Tax Law
.
    The bottom drawer was locked.
    I straightened up, hands on hips, and surveyed the room, scanning the thousand and one places where he might have hidden the key. Then, on a hunch, I crouched and lifted the corner of the rug near my feet. A key glinted on the floorboards. I unlocked the drawer and opened it.
    A treasure trove. Lying atop a row of fat file folders was the story he’d shown me the previous night, “Harrington’s Farm.” I removed this and placed it on the floor nearby. Some thirty or so folders were wedged in the drawer. He
had
been a busy boy. Rapidly finger-walking across the identification tabs, I saw labels that read “Deletes,” “Odds and Ends,” “Notes,” “Stories,” “Outline,” more “Notes,” and then “First Draft: Novel” and, finally, “Novel: Fair Copy.” I pulled this folder out, taking care to remember its placement between “First Draft” and a tab marked “Ideas.” I seated myself cross-legged among the dust bunnies on the carpet, composed myself, then opened the folder in my lap. In the pale light that filtered in through his grimy windows, I began to read.
    For the first, oh, two minutes, I read consecutively, starting at page 1. Then I began to rampage around in the thing—flipping ahead five, six, fifteen pages, going back to the beginning, fingering ahead to blaze through the ending, circling back to the middle.
    What I saw amazed and horrified me beyond any of my worst imaginings of the night before. Not because the novel teemed with life, incident, color, humor, and character (though it did), and not because it was written in a voice so different from the poetic murmur of the short story he had shown me (though it was). No. What astounded me, what broke upon me in a wave of incredulity, was this: the novel was a retelling of
my
life, a virtual transcription of the monologues with which I had entertained Stewart during the two and a half years of our roommatehood. It was all there. All of it. Not just the “Dispatches from Downtown,” with their ribald tales of romantic conquest and alcohol abuse, but the truly precious stuff, the irreplaceable personal lode of my childhood memories, with all their pain and yearning and loss. And all of it told just as I had told it to Stewart. Whole phrases leapt out at me that I recalled inventing, on the fly, during my monologues, those oral flights that I had imagined one day converting into my
own
novel! Only later would I see how artfully he had woven the story of a young slacker’s New York barcrawling into the tale of his troubled upbringing—the hero’s skirt chasing and boozing and thwarted artistic urges traced back to a heartbreaking abandonment by his mother. Only much later could I credit Stewart with having spied, in the tangle of my life, connections and motivations that had always eluded me. At