"Why don't you just relax?" Scott said.

Above the bar area there was a clock rotating in an openwork tower. From the table he could see through the bare trellis and clock framework to the elevators. He thought he could easily sit all afternoon watching the elevators rise and drop, clear pods ringed with pinpoint lighting. They moved soundlessly, clinging to the surface of a vast central cylinder. Everything was moving, everything was slowly turning, there was music coming from somewhere. He watched the people inside the elevators, deftly falling. High up, on the walkways, an occasional figure looking down, head and upper body. He wondered if the thing the woman tried to give him in the street might be a newborn child. The same musical phrase over and over, coming from somewhere.

"You photograph only writers now."

"Only writers. I frankly have a disease called writers. It took me a long time to find out what I wanted to photograph. I came to this country it's fifteen years. To this city actually. And I roamed the streets first day, taking pictures of city faces, eyes of city people, slashed men, prostitutes, emergency rooms, forget it. I did this for years. Many times I used a wide-angle lens and pressed the shutter release with the camera hanging at my chest from a neck strap so I wouldn't attract the wrong kind of attention, thank you very much. I followed derelicts practically to their graves. And I used to go to night court just to look at faces. I mean New York, please, this is my official state religion. But after years of this I began to think it was somehow, strangely-not valid. No matter what I shot, how much horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so fucking pretty in the end. Do you know? And so I had to work out for myself certain complicated things that are probably very simple. You reach a certain age, isn't that the way it works? Then you know what you want to do at last."