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leading the crowd became even louder, but the words did not resolve into meaning, and most of the crowd, marching toward us, remained obscured by darkness. Then, as the crowd, all of them young women, passed under thestreetlamps, their chanting became clearer.
We have the power, we have the might
, the solitary voice called. The answer came:
The streets are ours, take back the night
.
    The crowd, several dozen strong but tightly packed, passed under my window. From several floors above, I watched them, as their faces came in and out of the spotlights of the streetlamps.
Women’s bodies, women’s lives, we will not be terrorized
. I shut the window. It was only a little bit cooler outside than it was in the apartment. Earlier that evening, I had gone walking in Riverside Park, from 116th Street down to the Nineties and back. It wasn’t cold yet, and the entire time I was out in the park—as I watched the dogs and their owners, all of whom seemed to have converged on the same paths as I had, an endless stream of pit bulls, Jack Russells, Alsatians, Weimaraners, mutts—I wondered why it was still so warm in the middle of November.
    Coming up the hill to my place, just as I crossed the corner of 121st, I saw my friend. He lived only a few blocks away, and had been out shopping for groceries. I hailed him, and we spoke briefly. He was a young professor in the Earth Sciences Department, four years into the uncertain seven-year journey to tenure. His interests were broader than his professional specialty suggested, and this was part of the basis for our friendship: he had strong opinions about books and films, opinions that often went against mine, and he had lived for two years in Paris, where he’d acquired a taste for fashionable philosophers like Badiou and Serres. In addition, he was an avid chess player, and an affectionate father to a nine-year-old girl who mostly lived with her mother on Staten Island. We both regretted that the demands of work kept us from spending as much time together as we would have liked.
    My friend was especially passionate about jazz. Most of the names and styles that he so delighted in meant little to me (there are apparently any number of great jazz musicians from the sixties and seventies with the last name Jones). But I could sense, even from myignorant distance, the sophistication of his ear. He often said that he would sit down at a piano someday and show me how jazz worked, and that when I finally understood blue notes and swung notes, the heavens would part and my life would be transformed. I more than half-believed him, and would even occasionally worry about why I seemed not to have a strong emotional connection with this most American of musical styles. Too often, it merely sounded sweet to me, cloying even, and I especially disliked it as background music. As my friend and I talked, a homeless man sang just across the street from us, and we caught his voice in the snatches as the wind came over in gusts.
    These pleasant thoughts were interrupted by a presentiment of the conversation I would have that evening with Nadège. And how odd it was, hours later, to hear her strained voice, in counterpoint with the protesters down below. She had moved to San Francisco a few weeks before, and we had said we would make an effort to work things out at the distance, but we’d said the words without meaning them.
    I tried to imagine her in that crowd, but no image came to mind, nor could I picture her face as it would be if she’d been in the room with me. The voices of the protesters soon faded, as the marchers drifted off with their flags and whistles toward Morningside Park. The heart-altering thump of their martial drum went on, and then that faded too, and I could hear only her diminished voice at the other end of the line. It was painful, this breaking apart, but it surprised neither of us.
    T HE FOLLOWING EVENING, ON THE 1 TRAIN , I SAW A CRIPPLE dragging his broken leg behind him as he