Because who were you when you were bare-assed, as it turned out? Surprise: you were that guy who'd looked his son in the eye that very afternoon and said, Do what's right. Hand on his shoulder, expression stern, finger wagging in his face. Do what's right, son. Treat the women with respect. Don't be making no babies you can't take care of. And then that selfsame night after four bourbons and a perfumed smile it was Aw, fuck it. Another mother betrayed, another son ushered into the funhouse of his father's hypocrisy, another relationship shot to hell…

All part of the journey that had led him to this night.

Man, he thought, suddenly coming back into the moment, back into the full awareness of his corrosive anxiety. Man, look at this place.

It was a sight to see, all right, the city in the rain. The night city, empty everywhere, with only the wind moving in it. Without people, without traffic, the avenue was reduced to the shadowy shapes of things. The rectangles of office buildings to the left and right of him, the smaller rectangles of newspaper boxes on the sidewalk, the shepherd's crook of a lamp pole in the light of its lamp… Everything seemed two-dimensional like that. Even the depth of the receding street seemed a trick of perspective.

People had taken the evacuation order seriously this time. There was not a body moving anywhere, not a footfall on the street but his. The rain spat and whispered against the macadam as if it were falling in an empty field. At moments, when the wind subsided, you could hear the stoplights changing color. You could see them swaying there above the intersections, one gleaming circle of red after another in the storm-streaked dark. Then there was a double metallic gulp, like a robot swallowing, and all the red circles turned gleaming green. There was something lonesome and almost poetic about it. The city was practically beautiful, he thought, once you got rid of the people.