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He
asked himself what kind of game it was and whether the pauses to talk were part
of the game or a clear sign that they didn't know the rules. He made up his
mind to take a walk. After a while he felt hungry and went into a little Middle
Eastern restaurant (Egyptian or Jordanian, he didn't know which), where they served
him a sandwich of ground lamb. When he came out he felt sick. In a dark alley
he threw up the lamb and was left with a taste of bile and spices in his mouth.
He saw a man pushing a hot dog cart. He caught up to him and asked for a beer.
The man looked at him as if Fate was high and told him he wasn't allowed to
sell alcoholic beverages.

"Give me
whatever you have," Fate said.

The
man handed him a Coke. He paid and drank the whole thing as the man with the
cart went off down the dimly lit street. After a while he saw a movie theater
marquee. He remembered that as a teenager he used to spend many evenings there.
He decided to go in, even though the movie had already started some time ago,
as the ticket seller informed him.

He sat through only one scene. A white man is arrested by
three black cops. Instead of taking him to the police station, the cops take
him to an airfield. There, the man who's been arrested sees the chief of
police, who's also black. The man is no fool and he figures out they're working
for the DEA. Through unspoken assurances and eloquent silences, they reach a
kind of deal. As they talk, the man looks out a window. He sees the landing
strip and a Cessna taxiing toward one end of it. They unload a shipment of
cocaine. The cop opening the crates and unpacking the bricks is black. Next to
him, another black cop is tossing the bricks into a fire barrel, like the kind
the homeless use to keep warm on winter nights. But these cops aren't bums.
They're DEA agents, neatly dressed, government employees. The man turns away
from the window and points out to the chief that all his men are black. They're
more motivated, says the chief. And then he says: you can go now. When the man
leaves, the chief smiles, but his smile quickly turns into a scowl. At that
moment Fate rose and went to the men's room, where he vomited up the rest of
the lamb in his stomach. Then he left and went back to his mother's.

Before he went in, he knocked at the neighbor's door. A
woman more or less his own age opened the door. She was wearing glasses and her
hair was up in a green African turban. He explained who he was and inquired
after the neighbor. The woman looked him in the eye and asked him in. The
living room looked like his mother's. Even the furniture was similar. In the
room he saw six women and three men. Some were standing or leaning in the
kitchen doorway, but most were sitting down.

"I'm
Rosalind," said the woman in the turban. "Your mother and mine were
very close friends."

Fate
nodded. Sobs came from the back of the apartment. One of the women got up and
went into the bedroom. When she opened the door the sobs got louder, but when
the door closed the sound vanished.

"It's my
sister," Rosalind said wearily. "Would you like some coffee?"

Fate said yes. When the woman went into the kitchen, one of the
men who was standing came over and asked whether he wanted to see Miss Holly.
He nodded. The man led him to the bedroom but remained outside, on the other
side of the door. The neighbor lady's body was laid out on the bed, and beside
it he saw a woman on her knees, praying. Sitting in a rocking chair next to the
window was the girl in jeans and the black dress with yellow flowers. Her eyes
were red and she looked at him as if she'd never seen him before.

When
he came out he sat on the edge of a couch occupied by women speaking in
monosyllables. When Rosalind put a cup of coffee in his hands he asked when her
mother had died. This afternoon, said Rosalind in a calm voice. What did she
die of? She was old, said Rosalind with a smile. When he got home, Fate
realized he was still holding the coffee cup. For an instant he thought about
going back to the neighbor's apartment and returning it, but then he thought it
would be better to leave it for the next day. He couldn't drink the coffee. He
set it next to the videotapes and the urn containing his mother's ashes, then
he turned on the TV and turned off the lights and stretched out on the couch.
He muted the sound.

The
next morning, when he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a
 
cartoon.
  
Rats
 
were
  
streaming
 
through
 
a
  
city,
  
silently
 
squealing.

He
grabbed the remote control and changed channels. When he found the news, he
turned on the sound, though not very loud, and got up. He washed his face and
neck and when he dried himself he realized that the towel, hanging on the towel
rack, was almost certainly the last towel his mother had used. He smelled it
but didn't detect any familiar scent. In the bathroom cabinet there were
various bottles of pills and some jars of moisturizing or anti-inflammatory
cream. He called in to work and asked to speak to his editor. The only person
there was the girl at the next desk and he talked to her. He told her he wasn't
coming into the magazine because he planned to leave in a few hours for
Detroit
. She said she
already knew and she wished him good luck.

"I'll
be back in three days, maybe four," he said.

Then
he hung up, smoothed his shirt, put on his jacket, looked at himself in the
mirror by the door, and tried and failed to pull himself together. It was time
to get back to work. He stood with his hand on the doorknob, wondering whether
he should take the urn with the ashes home with him. I'll do it when I get
back, he thought, and he opened the door.

He was home just long enough to put the Barry Seaman file,
a few shirts, a few pairs of socks, and some underwear in a bag. He sat in a
chair and realized he was a nervous wreck. He tried to relax. When he went
outside, it was raining. When had it started to rain? All the taxis that went by
had fares. He slung the bag over his shoulder and began to walk along the curb.
At last a taxi stopped. When he was about to close the door he heard something
like a shot. He asked the taxi driver whether he'd heard it. The taxi driver
was Hispanic and spoke very bad English.

"Every
day you hear more fantastic things in
New
York
," the driver said.

"What do you
mean, fantastic?" he asked.

"Exactly what
I say, fantastic," said the taxi driver.

After
a while Fate fell asleep. Every now and then he opened his eyes and watched
buildings go by where no one seemed to live, or gray streets slicked with rain.
Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. He woke up when the taxi driver
asked him what terminal he wanted.

"I'm going to
Detroit
," he said,
and he went back to sleep.

The two people sitting in front of him were discussing
ghosts. Fate couldn't see their faces, but he imagined them as older, maybe
sixty or seventy. He asked for an orange juice. The stewardess was blond, about
forty, and she had a mark on her neck covered with a white scarf that had
slipped as she bustled up and down assisting passengers. The man in the seat
next to him was black and was drinking from a bottle of water. Fate opened his
bag and took out the Seaman file. Instead of ghosts, now the passengers in
front of him were talking about a person they called Bobby. This Bobby lived in
Jackson Tree,
Michigan
, and had a cabin on
Lake Huron
. One time this Bobby had gone out in a boat
and capsized. He managed to cling to a log that was floating nearby and waited
for morning. But as night went on, the water kept getting colder and Bobby was
freezing and started to lose his strength. He felt weaker and weaker, and even
though he did his best to tie himself to the log with his belt, he couldn't no
matter how hard he tried. It may sound easy, but in real life it's hard to tie
your own body to a floating log. So he gave up hope, turned his thoughts to his
loved ones (here they mentioned someone called Jig, which might have been the
name of a friend or a dog or a pet frog he had), and clung to the branch as
tightly as he could. Then he saw a light in the sky. He thought it was a
helicopter coming to find him, which was foolish, and he started to shout. But
then it occurred to him that helicopters clatter and the light he saw wasn't
clattering. A few seconds later he realized it was an airplane. A great big
plane about to crash right where he was floating, clinging to that log.
Suddenly all his tiredness vanished. He saw the plane pass just overhead. It
was in flames. Maybe a thousand feet from where he was, the plane plunged into
the lake. He heard two explosions, possibly more. He felt the urge to get
closer to the site of the disaster and that's what he did, very slowly, because
it was hard to steer the log. The plane had split in half and only one part was
still floating. Before Bobby got there he watched it sinking slowly down into
the waters of the lake, which had gone dark again. A little while later the
rescue helicopters arrived. The only person they found was Bobby and they felt
cheated when he told them he hadn't been on the plane, that he'd capsized his
boat when he was fishing. Still, he was famous for a while, said the person
telling the story.

"And does he
still live in Jackson Tree?" asked the other man.

"No, I think
he lives in
Colorado
now," was the response.

Then
they started to talk about sports. The man next to Fate finished his water and
belched discreetly, covering his mouth with his hand.

"Lies,"
he said softly.

"What?"
asked Fate.

"Lies,
lies," said the man.

Right, said Fate, and he turned away and stared out the window at
the clouds that looked like cathedrals or maybe just little toy churches
abandoned in a labyrinthine marble quarry one hundred times bigger than the
Grand Canyon
.

In
Detroit
,
Fate rented a car, and after he checked a map from the car rental agency, he
headed to the neighborhood where Barry Seaman lived.

Seaman
wasn't home, but a boy told him he was almost always at Pete's Bar, not far
from there. The neighborhood looked like a neighborhood of Ford and General
Motors retirees. As he walked he looked at the buildings, five and six stories
high, and all he saw were old people sitting on the stoops or leaning out the
windows smoking. Every so often he passed a group of boys hanging out on the
corner or girls jumping rope. The parked cars weren't nice cars or new cars,
but they looked cared for.

The
bar was next to a vacant lot full of weeds and wildflowers growing over the
ruins of the building that had once stood there. On the side of a neighboring
building he saw a mural that struck him as odd. It was circular, like a clock,
and where the numbers should have been there were scenes of people working in
the factories of
Detroit
.
Twelve scenes representing twelve stages in the production chain. In each
scene, there was one recurring character: a black teenager, or a long-limbed,
scrawny black man-child, or a man clinging to childhood, dressed in clothes
that changed from scene to scene but that were invariably too small for him. He
had apparently been assigned the role of clown, intended to make people laugh,
although a closer look made it clear that he wasn't there only to make people
laugh. The mural looked like the work of a lunatic. The last painting of a
lunatic. In the middle of the clock, where all the scenes converged, there was
a word painted in letters that looked like they were made of gelatin:
fear.

Fate went into the
bar. He took a stool and asked the man behind the bar who had painted the mural
outside. The bartender, a heavy black man in his sixties with a scar, said he
didn't know.

"Probably some
kid from the neighborhood," he muttered.

Fate
ordered
a
beer and cast a glance around the bar. He didn't see anyone
who might have been Seaman. Beer in hand, he asked loudly whether anyone knew
Barry Seaman.

"Who wants to know?" asked a short guy in a Pistons
T-shirt and a sky-blue tweed jacket.

"Oscar Fate," said Fate, "of the magazine
Black
Dawn,
from
New York
."

The bartender came over and asked whether he was really a
reporter. I'm a reporter. For
Black Dawn.

"Man," said the short guy without getting up from his
table, "that's a fucked-up name for a magazine." His two fellow
cardplayers laughed. "Personally I'm sick of all these dawns," said
the short guy. "Why don't the brothers in
New York
do something with the sunset for
once, that's the best time of day, at least in this goddamn neighborhood."

"When I get
back I'll tell them. I just write stories," he said.

"Barry
Seaman didn't come in today," said an old man who was sitting at the bar,
like Fate.

"I
think he's sick," said another.