She began crying again.

It was just as well. If she hadn’t cried I might have. Instead I set about reassuring her.

“Calm yourself down,” I told her. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m comfortable here. In a sense. Uh. And I have food, see, and enough water, and I can breathe my silly head off through this tube, and it’s not that bad, really it’s not. If I have to wait here for a day, or even two days, I can manage it.”

She cried a little more, and then she calmed down, and I talked some more, and she talked a little, and I thought about things and started scrunching around for the bottle of water and the sandwich, and then the loudest noise in the history of sound happened.

I asked what it was.

“Thunder.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It looked like rain all day.”

“Oh.”

And when the first drops of water trickled through my breathing tube, I realized exactly what was going to happen.

I was going to drown.

I closed my eyes, and I gritted my teeth, and I composed my spirits, and I waited for my whole life to flash through my mind. But it didn’t work quite that way. Not my whole life. Just the past couple of weeks-

Chapter 2

Leaving New York in the middle of February was not exactly like the expulsion from Eden. There was one similarity – I was driven, by third-string devils if not by an angel. And there was one major difference – I was glad to go.

For a lot of reasons.

The weather, for instance. I live in four and a half rooms five flights above sea level on 107th Street west of Broadway, and the weather there is rather nice for about nineteen days in the year, and none of those days come in February. It had been a mild winter up until then, a deceptively mild winter, and it even seemed as though the winter was coming to an end, and then the groundhog did or didn’t see his shadow, whichever is the bad omen.