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men's room and ducked into the single stall, where I lowered my trousers to learn whether the procedure had begun to work. To blot out what I saw I shut my eyes, and to blot out what I felt I cursed aloud. "A fucking dream!" by which I meant the dream of being suddenly like everyone else.
    I set about removing the absorbent cotton pad from my plastic briefs and replacing it with a fresh one from a small packet I carried in my inside jacket pocket. I wrapped the dirty pad in toilet paper, threw it into a covered wastebasket beside the sink, washed and dried my hands, and, fighting off the gloom, went upstairs to pay my bill.

    I walked to West 71st Street, startled, at Columbus Circle, to see that the bulky fortress of the Coliseum had metamorphosed into a pair of glass skyscrapers joined at the hip and lined at street level with swanky shops. I wandered into the arcade and out, and when I continued north on Broadway I felt not so much that I was in a foreign country as that some optical trick were being played on me, that things appeared as in the reflection of a fun-house mirror, everything simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. Not without some hardship, as I've said, I'd conquered the solitary's way of life; I knew its tests and
satisfactions and over time had shaped the scope of my needs to its limitations, long ago abandoning excitement, intimacy, adventure, and antagonisms in favor of quiet, steady, predictable contact with nature and reading and my work. Why invite the unanticipated, why court any more shocks or surprises than those that aging would be sure to deliver without my prompting? Yet I continued up Broadway—past the crowds at Lincoln Center that I did not wish to join, the theater complexes whose movies I had no inclination to see, the leather goods shops and the gourmet food shops whose merchandise I didn't care to buy—unwilling to oppose the power of the crazed hope of rejuvenation that was affecting all my actions, the crazed hope of the procedure's reversing the strongest side of my decline, and aware of the mistake I was making, a revenant, a man who'd cut himself off from sustained human contact and its possibilities yielding to the illusion of starting again. And not through my own distinctive mental capacities but through the body refashioned, life seeming limitless again. Of course this is the wrong thing to do, the insane thing to do, but if so, I thought, what is the right thing to do, the sane thing, and who am I to claim that I ever knew enough to do it? I did what I did—that's all one knows looking backward. I made the ordeal that was mine out of the inspiration and the ineptitude that were mine—the inspiration
was
the ineptitude—and more than likely I am now doing the same. And at this batty speed, no less, as though fearful that my insanity is going to evaporate at any minute and I'm going to stop being
able to go on with all that I'm doing that I know very well I shouldn't be doing.

    The elevator of the small six-story white-brick apartment building took me to the top floor, where I was greeted at the doorway of apartment 6B by a chubby young man with a soft, agreeable manner who immediately said, "You're the writer." "I am. And you?"
"A
writer," he said with a smile. He led me inside and introduced me to his wife. "Yet a third writer," he said. She was a tall, slender young woman who, unlike her husband, no longer had a playful, childlike aspect in evidence anywhere, at least not tonight. Her long, narrow face was curtained by straight, fine black hair that fell to her shoulders and a little below, the cut seemingly designed to conceal some disfiguring blemish, though by no means one that was physical—she had an impeccable, creamily soft surface, whatever else she might be hiding. That she was boundlessly loved by her husband and the source of his sustenance was apparent in the undisguised tenderness with which his every gaze and gesture enveloped her,