Alley Street Quotes

I can feel his presence here in every stone he has touched, every person he has lifted up, every street and alley and city that he has changed in the few years of his life, because he is the Republic, he is our light, and I love you, I love you, until the day we meet again I will hold you in my heart and protect you there, grieving what we never had, cherishing what we did. I wish you were here. I love you, always.

Rorschach's Journal: October 12th, 1985 Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "No.

Wait, you already know where you are?” Puck demanded as we edged toward the mouth of the alley, stepping over trash and piles of debris. “How does that work, cat?” “Most cities are very much the same, Goodfellow.” Grimalkin reached the edge of the sidewalk and peered back, waving his tail. “Trods are everywhere, if you know where to look. Also, I am a cat.” And he trotted off down the street.

I reach out to touch one of the walls, imagining that I can feel his life and warmth through it, and I look around again, up toward the rooftops and then all the way to the night sky where a few faint stars can be seen, and there I think I really can see him. I can feel his presence here in every stone he has touched, every person he has lifted up, every street and alley and city that he has changed in the few years of his life, because he is the Republic, he is our light, and I love you, I love you, until the day we meet again I will hold you in my heart and protect you there, grieving what we never had, cherishing what we did. I wish you were here. I love you, always.

I'm the oracle in my chest, Let the guitar scream like a fascist, Sweat it out, shut your mouth, Free love on the streets, but In the alley and I ain't that cheap, now

I hoofed it out of the alley, returned aboveground. Collided with people as I tore down the street, running fast as I could, chasing demons I would never catch.

I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak But I know now it doesn't matter how well I say grace if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eat So this is my wheat field you can have every acre, Love this is my garden song this is my fist fight with that bitter frost tonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced beneath the night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheek as i sang maybe i need you off key but in tune maybe i need you the way that big moon needs that open sea maybe i didn't even know i was here til i saw you holding me give me one room to come home to give me the palm of your hand every strand of my hair is a kite string and I have been blue in the face with your sky crying a flood over Iowa so you mother will wake to Venice Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chest now my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered bible it is the one verse you can trust so I'm putting all of my words in the collection plate I am setting the table with bread and grace my knees are bent like the corner of a page I am saving your place

Kaz Brekker didn’t need a reason. Those were the words whispered on the streets of Ketterdam, in the taverns and coffeehouses, in the dark and bleeding alleys of the pleasure district known as the Barrel. The boy they called Dirtyhands didn’t need a reason any more than he needed permission – to break a leg, sever an alliance, or change a man’s fortunes with the turn of a card.

I am a book. Sheaves pressed from the pulp of oaks and pines a natural sawdust made dingy from purses, dusty from shelves. Steamy and anxious, abused and misused, kissed and cried over, smeared, yellowed, and torn, loved, hated, scorned. I am a book. I am a book that remembers, days when I stood proud in good company When the children came, I leapt into their arms, when the women came, they cradled me against their soft breasts, when the men came, they held me like a lover, and I smelled the sweet smell of cigars and brandy as we sat together in leather chairs, next to pool tables, on porch swings, in rocking chairs, my words hanging in the air like bright gems, dangling, then forgotten, I crumbled, dust to dust. I am a tale of woe and secrets, a book brand-new, sprung from the loins of ancient fathers clothed in tweed, born of mothers in lands of heather and coal soot. A family too close to see the blood on its hands, too dear to suffering, to poison, to cold steel and revenge, deaf to the screams of mortal wounding, amused at decay and torment, a family bred in the dankest swamp of human desires. I am a tale of woe and secrets, I am a mystery. I am intrigue, anxiety, fear, I tangle in the night with madmen, spend my days cloaked in black, hiding from myself, from dark angels, from the evil that lurks within and the evil we cannot lurk without. I am words of adventure, of faraway places where no one knows my tongue, of curious cultures in small, back alleys, mean streets, the crumbling house in each of us. I am primordial fear, the great unknown, I am life everlasting. I touch you and you shiver, I blow in your ear and you follow me, down foggy lanes, into places you've never seen, to see things no one should see, to be someone you could only hope to be. I ride the winds of imagination on a black-and-white horse, to find the truth inside of me, to cure the ills inside of you, to take one passenger at a time over that tall mountain, across that lonely plain to a place you've never been where the world stops for just one minute and everything is right. I am a mystery. -Rides a Black and White Horse

So now, when three Landers, members of a street gang, approach me in the back alley behind the Library, knives drawn, the silver barrel of a gun pointed at my heart, I know I am ready.

I was nineteen at the time, prowling the streets and alleys with my usual supply of hot dogs, the street lights with their foggy haloes showing dark, formless shapes moving out from the darkness of the fog and disappearing again.

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Night, forever. But within it, a city, shadowy and only real in certain ways. The entity cowered in its alley, where the mist was rising. This could not have happened! Yet it had. The streets had filled with… things. Animals! Birds! Changing shape! Screaming and yelling! And, above it all, higher than the rooftops, a lamb rocking back and forth in great slow motions, thundering over the cobbles… And then bars had come down, slamming down, and the entity had been thrown back. But it had been so close! It had saved the creature, it was getting through, it was beginning to have control… and now this… In the darkness of the inner city, above the rustle of the never-ending rain, it heard the sound of boots approaching. A shape appeared in the mist. It drew nearer. Water cascaded off a metal helmet and an oiled leather cloak as the figure stopped and, entirely unconcerned, cupped its had in front of its face and lit a cigar. Then the match was dropped on the cobbles, where it hissed out, and the figure said: “What are you?” The entity stirred, like an old fish in a deep pool. It was too tired to flee. “I am the Summoning Dark.” It was not, in fact, a sound, but had it been, it would have been a hiss. “Who are you?” “I am the Watchman.” “They would have killed his family!” The darkness lunged, and met resistance. “Think of the deaths they have caused! Who are you to stop me?” “He created me. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Me. I watch him. Always. You will not force him to murder for you.” “What kind of human creates his own policeman?” “One who fears the dark.” “And so he should,” said the entity, with satisfaction. “Indeed. But I think you misunderstand. I am not here to keep the darkness out. I am here to keep it in.” There was a clink of metal as the shadowy watchman lifted a dark lantern and opened its little door. Orange light cut through the blackness. “Call me… the Guarding Dark. Imagine how strong I must be.” The Summoning Dark backed desperately into the alley, but the light followed it, burning it. “And now,” said the watchman, “get out of town.

Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.

I'm not saying I'm not bad. I'm not saying I'm special. But I'm not like the Allport Street girls, who stand in doorways and go with men into alleys. All I know is I didn't want it like that. Not against the bricks or hunkering in somebody's car. I wanted it come undone like gold thread, like a tent full of birds.

The dark is settling in. The sky glows yellow- pale- anemic from the city lights. The Tenderloin at night is a real horror show. Every 3 feet someone is accosting you with a plea for a handout or the offer of drug or sex. The men and women wander the streets and alleys with a threatening, violont want. Takers looking to take, hustlers looking to hustle, all trying to satisfy a craving that is parpatually unsatisfiable. And tonight I'm one of them.

Street people use cardboard all the time, and bum alleys are just shanties or lean-tos, though. They’re nothing like my house! Mine is deluxe! It’s a big, thick, super sturdy refrigerator box that I found at an appliance store!

It was pretty late and the streets were quiet so she was almost sure no one had seen her drag the soul eater into the alley... where she cut his head off with a samurai sword. God, she loved her life.

I bent down over my neighborhood, taking in the people there. At first, they'd just seemed arranged the same way they were everywhere else: in random formations, some in groups, some alone. Then, though, I saw the single figure at the back of my house, walking away from the back door. And another person, a girl, running through the side yard, where the hedge would have been, while someone else, with a badge and flashlight followed. There were three people under the basketball goal, one lying prone on the ground. I took a breath, then moved in closer. Two people were seated on the curb between Dave's and my houses: a few inches away two more walked up the narrow alley to Luna Blu's back door. A couple stood in the driveway, facing each other. And in that empty building, the old hotel, a tiny set of cellar doors had been added, flung open, a figure standing before them. Whether they were about to go down, or just coming up, was unclear, and the cellar itself was a dark square. But I knew what was down below. He'd put me everywhere. Every single place I'd been, with him or without, from the first time we'd met to the last conversation. It was all there, laid out as carefully, as real as the buildings and streets around it. I swallowed, hard, then reached forward, touching the girl running through the hedge. Not Liz Sweet. Not anyone, at that moment, not yet. But on her way to someone. To me.

If you boys want to beat each other’s guts out, I’m willing to let you, but I’d rather get Cam someplace safe and find out what she’s doing walking the streets at five in the bloody morning.” She started back down the alley, then stopped and added, “Oh, and Zach, if you’re going to run away from school, leave a note. Even Cam did that.

Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.

Think of music as being a great snarl of a city [...]. In the years I spent living there, I came to know its streets. Not just the main streets. Not just the alleys. I knew shortcuts and rooftops and parts of the sewers. Because of this, I could move through the city like a rabbit in a bramble. I was quick and cunning an clever. Denna, on the other hand, had never been trained. She knew nothing of shortcuts. You’d think she’d be forced to wander the city, lost and helpless, trapped in a twisting maze of mortared stone. But instead, she simply walked through the walls. She didn’t know any better. Nobody had ever told her she couldn’t. Because of this, she moved through the city like some faerie creature. She walked roads no one else could see, and it made her music wild and strange and free.

...he summoned up what he'd been told by numerous ladies was his most charming of smiles."But then we would never have met." Harriet muttered something that sounded very much like, "Unbelievable" under her breath, and then began marching down the alley toward the main street, apparently not moved in the least by his charm.

A cat came out of an alley, took a look at all the snow, and went back in. Farther on up the street a fat man, aproned and puffing, emerged from a restaurant and whiffed the cold air and gazed yearningly at the sky. As though even the dreams were up there, much too far away.

In this he was like most Midwesterners. Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of "We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capital building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the southwest... or was it the southeast?" If there are two Midwesterns present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote because they will spend the rest of the afternoon arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.

I've prowled the dirtiest back alleys of sadness, okay? And I know what it's like to fight for your life on those mean streets. So if you need someone to vent to or someone to be quiet with or someone to talk your ear off, I can be that person. I'm not scared of the dark places.

I looked at the door, at war with myself. On the one hand, I hated going anything Reth wanted me to. On the other hand, there was a mop with my name on it inside. "Fine, but if you try anything-" "Really, Evelyn,how I've missed your charming company." Keeping a wary eye on the faerie, I followed hi, through the alley. We made our way down the lamp-lined street, his step so light it bordered on dancing. I felt like a graceless clod next to him. Then there was the aspect of his ethereal, near-angelic beauty compared to my..well, for the sake of my self-esteem, it was probably best not to compete.

God will never lead us down dark alleys, only lighted streets.

Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a willfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter.

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through. Lean over me, at the bedside of my madness, and let me stand without crutches. I am am insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies. Significance stares at me from everywhere, like a gigantic underlying ghostliness. Significance emerges out of dank alleys and sombre faces, leans out of the windows of strange houses. I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost and which I cannot forget. I catch the odors of the past on street corners and I am aware of the men who will be born tomorrow. Behind windows there are enemies or worshippers. Never neutrality or passivity. Always intention and premeditation. Even stones have for me druidical expressions.

I want to see this lady out the front gate and into her car and off the street and out of town and then removed from the county and then the whole state and finally relocated to the place they call Tornado Alley in Kansas.

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal.

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself. I walked black streets and alleys alone; I passed out in cabarets. I backed out of two duels more from apathy than cowardice and truly wished to be murdered. And then I was attacked. It might have been anyone-and my invitation was open to sailors, thieves, maniacs, anyone. But it was a vampire. He caught me lust a few steps from my door one night and left me for dead, or so I thought.

In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.

when they’d stood outside a restaurant waiting to be served at the colored window, she thought, Miss Vignes would not receive her food out an alley window like a street dog. She couldn’t tell if she was offended, or if Miss Vignes was on her behalf.

I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood. I was so excited at the incredible turn of events which had brought me from a past of rejection, of slammed doors and blind alleys, of dead-end streets and culs-de-sac, into the bright sun of Italy, into a town made famous by one of the world’s greatest writers. I

He listened to the hooting of many metal horns, squealing of brakes, the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges in their stalls. Colonel Freeleigh's feet began to move, hanging from the edge of his wheel chair, making the motions of a man walking. His eyes squeezed tight. He gave a series of immense sniffs, as if to gain the odors of meats hung on iron hooks in sunshine, cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins; the smell of stone alleys wet with morning rain. He could feel the sun bum his spiny-bearded cheek, and he was twenty-five years old again, walking, walking, looking, smiling, happy to be alive, very much alert, drinking in colors and smells.

There is a story of a man on all fours under a street lamp, searching for something. A policeman passing by asked what he was doing. “Looking for my car keys,” replied the man, who appeared slightly drunk. “Did you drop them here?” inquired the officer. “No,” answered the man, “I dropped them in the alley.” Seeing the policeman’s baffled expression, the man hastened to explain, “But the light is much better here.

Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow. Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.

Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me--I didn't understand.

The alley is a pitch for about twenty women leaning in doorways, chain-smoking. In their shiny open raincoats, short skirts, cheap boots, and high-heeled shoes they watch the street with hooded eyes, like spies in a B movie. Some are young and pretty, and some are older, and some of them are very old, with facial expressions ranging from sullen to wry. Most of the commerce is centred on the slightly older women, as if the majority of the clients prefer experience and worldliness. The younger, prettier girls seem to do the least business, apparent innocence being only a minority preference, much as it is for the aging crones in the alley who seem as if they’ve been standing there for a thousand years. In the dingy foyer of the hotel is an old poster from La Comédie Française, sadly peeling from the all behind the desk. Cyrano de Bergerac, it proclaims, a play by Edmond Rostand. I will stand for a few moments to take in its fading gaiety. It is a laughing portrait of a man with an enormous nose and a plumed hat. He is a tragic clown whose misfortune is his honour. He is a man entrusted with a secret; an eloquent and dazzling wit who, having successfully wooed a beautiful woman on behalf of a friend cannot reveal himself as the true author when his friend dies. He is a man who loves but is not loved, and the woman he loves but cannot reach is called Roxanne. That night I will go to my room and write a song about a girl. I will call her Roxanne. I will conjure her unpaid from the street below the hotel and cloak her in the romance and the sadness of Rostand’s play, and her creation will change my life.

Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley,

She was fire, she was darkness, she was dust and blood and shadow. She hurtled through the streets, each step faster than the last as that black fire burned through thought and feeling until all that remained was her rage and her prey. She took back alleys and leapt over walls. She’d slaughter them all.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

Watching Tommy perform this scene, I wondered what his psychologist or psychiatrist had made of him. I tried to image Tommy's mind from the inside out. I saw burning forests, blind alleys, volcanoes in the desert, city streets that plunged into the ocean, barricades everywhere, and all of it lit in the deep-cherry light of emergency.

Books were cities I'd never visited, filled with pillars of great thoughts and streets of phrases, mazes of abstruse sentence structures and alleys of complicated syllables. They were stores that displayed a wide range of things, punctuation twinkling like the crest of a venerable family, sentences breathing peacefully, words whispering.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them passes a wild motley throng. Men from Volga and Tartar steppes. Featureless figures from the Hoang-ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav, Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws, In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace in our ear, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew. —THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH, “UNGUARDED GATES,” 1882

As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra — But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice — he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun — how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade — how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony — goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window- stained tomb. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either.

It was now autumn, and I made up my mind to make, before winter set in, an excursion across Normandy, a country with which I was not acquainted. It must be borne in mind that I began with Rouen, and for a week I wandered about enthusiastic with admiration, in that picturesque town of the Middle Ages, in that veritable museum of extraordinary Gothic monuments. Well, one afternoon, somewhere about four o'clock, as I happened to be passing down an out-of-the-way by-street, in the middle of which flowed a deep river, black as ink, named the Eau de Robec, my attention wholly directed to examining the bizarre and antique physiognomy of the houses, was all of a sudden attracted by the sight of a series of shops of furniture brokers, one after the other, from door to door along the street. Ah! these second-hand brokers had well chosen their locality, these sordid old traffickers of bric-a-brac, in this fantastic alley leading up from stream of that sinister dark water, under the steep pointed overhanging gables of tiled roofs and projecting shingle eaves, where the weathercocks of the past still creaked overhead. ("Who Knows?")

Paris. Bright miracle. But behind every bright thing creeps its shadows. The moon had its shadows and Paris had hers.They lurked in her back streets and back alleys, in parks and in basements.

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,— north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Down an alley a washing woman has set out laundry in pans near the rubble of an old high-rise. Another is washing her body, carefully scrubbing under her sarong, its fabric clinging to her skin. Children run naked through the dirt, jumping over bits of broken concrete that were laid down more than a hundred years ago in the old Expansion. Far down the street the levees rise, holding back the sea.

In February 62, Seneca came up against an unalterable reality. Nero ceased to listen to his old tutor, he shunned his company, encouraged slander of him at court and appointed a bloodthirsty praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, to assist him in indulging his taste for random murder and sexual cruelty. Virgins were taken off the streets of Rome and brought to the emperor’s chambers. Senators’ wives were forced to participate in orgies, and saw their husbands killed in front of them. Nero roamed the city at night disguised as an ordinary citizen and slashed the throats of passers-by in back alleys. He fell in love with a young boy who he wished could have been a girl, and so he castrated him and went through a mock wedding ceremony. Romans wryly joked that their lives would have been more tolerable if Nero’s father Domitius had married that sort of a woman. Knowing he was in extreme danger, Seneca attempted to withdraw from court and remain quietly in his villa outside Rome. Twice he offered his resignation; twice Nero refused, embracing him tightly and swearing that he would rather die than harm his beloved tutor. Nothing in Seneca’s experience could allow him to believe such promises.

Carlo’s basement apartment was on Grant Street in an old red-brick rooming house near a church. You went down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door. It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made. He read me his poetry.

There is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred eyes guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell your fortune, depending on your face. This is the city of mazes.

And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity.

Many things combine to show that Midaq Alley is one of the gems of times gone by and that it once shone forth like a flashing star in the history of Cairo. Which Cairo do I mean? That of the Fatimads, the Mamlukes, or the Sultans? Only God and the archaeologists know the answer to that, but in any case, the alley is certainly an ancient relic and a precious one. How could it be otherwise with its stone-paved surface leading directly to the historic Sanadiqiya Street. And then there is its cafe known as "Kirsha's". Its walls decorated with multicolored arabesques, now crumbling, give off strong odors from the medicines of olden times, smells which have now become the spices and folk-cures of today and tomorrow ... Although Midaq Alley lives in almost complete isolation from all surrounding activity, it clamors with a distinctive and personal life of its own. Fundamentally and basically, its roots connect with life as a whole and yet, at the same time, it retains a number of the secrets of a world now past.

The streets were already dark when Gringoire issued forth from the Courts. This gloom pleased him; he was in haste to reach some obscure and deserted alley, in order there to meditate at his ease, and in order that the philosopher might place the first dressing upon the wound of the poet.

Anomander Rake walked into Darujhistan. Howls rose like madness unleashed. The Son of Darkness reached up and unsheathed Dragnipur. Steam curled from the black blade, twisting into ephemeral chains that stretched out as he walked up the wide, empty street. Stretched out to drag behind him, and from each length others emerged and from those still more, a forest's worth of iron roots, snaking out, whispering over the cobbles. He had never invited such a manifestation before. Reigning in that bleed of power had been an act of mercy, to all those who might witness it, who might comprehend its significance. But on this night, Anomander Rake had other things on his mind. Chains of smoke, chains and chains and chains, so many writhing in his wake that they filled the breadth of the street, that they snaked over and under and spilled out into side streets, alleys, beneath estate gates, beneath doors and through windows.

I’ve often thought of a female Christ. David told me there’s one in a church in Montreal. Mostly the world can’t take it. Because of people’s feelings about the delicacy of women and also because of what a meaningless display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like slaves at home and finally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s all wrong, no matter what sex you are. . . or maybe you just grab one on the street and fuck her real fast—in an alley, or in her own bed. I mean if that’s the way it usually goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that drive the culture for 2,000 years? No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap. We like to eat them, or see them stuffed, we even like to wear them, but watch them suffer? Hear them wail?

Over the course of that day, spent, as all days, wandering the old and drafty streets of the city, from the edge of the university where he’s no longer welcome to the alley of used booksellers whose wares no longer speak to him, anders comes to see that the roller coaster, and nothing else will be the culmination of his tenure on the planet.

All that night, after I shut the door and left Number 16 empty, I went looking for the parts of my city that have lasted. I walked down streets that got their names in the Middle Ages: Copper Alley, Fishamble Street, Blackpitts where the plague dead were buried. I looked for cobblestones worn smooth and iron railings gone thin with rust. I ran my hand over the cool stone of Trinity’s walls and I crossed the spot where nine hundred years ago the town got its water from Patrick’s Well; the street sign still tells you so, hidden in the Irish that no one ever reads. I paid no attention to the shoddy new apartment blocks and the neon signs, the sick illusions ready to fall into brown mush like rotten fruit. They’re nothing; they’re not real. In a hundred years they’ll be gone, replaced and forgotten. This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it’s the old stuff, the stuff that’s endured, that might just keep enduring. I tilted my head up to see the delicate, ornate columns and balustrades above Grafton Street’s chain stores and fast-food joints. I leaned my arms on the Ha’penny Bridge where people used to pay half a penny to cross the Liffey, I looked out at the Custom House and the shifting streams of lights and the steady dark roll of the river under the falling snow, and I hoped to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.

The most compelling new idea that Bratton brought to life stemmed from the broken window theory, which was conceived by the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too. So with murder raging all around, Bill Bratton’s cops began to police the sort of deeds that used to go unpoliced: jumping a subway turnstile, panhandling too aggressively, urinating in the streets, swabbing a filthy squeegee across a car’s windshield unless the driver made an appropriate “donation.” Most New Yorkers loved this crackdown on its own merit. But they particularly loved the idea, as stoutly preached by Bratton and Giuliani, that choking off these small crimes was like choking off the criminal element’s oxygen supply. Today’s turnstile jumper might easily be wanted for yesterday’s murder. That junkie peeing in an alley might have been on his way to a robbery.

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.

If he got a thrill out of transforming these ill-gotten goods into legit merchandise, a zap-charge in his blood like he’d plugged into a socket, he was in control of it and not the other way around. Dizzying and powerful as it was. Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.

Here, I am surrounded by all of the signs of money crushing the life out of a place: the rich live inside tall town homes, the poor live in faded dirty tents if they are lucky, there are boarded-up businesses next to new juice bars, people either defecating in the streets or buying gourmet groceries, eating at overpriced restaurants or out of the dumpsters in the back alley. It’s a city of extremes.

This isn't a courtroom, pal," I said to Nelson, "this is the gutter. No fancy robes, no platitudes engraved in marble, no brass railing dividing the sides. This is the streets and the alleys. this is the Chicago we really live in. Here justice isn't dispensed with a wooden gavel, it's taken with your bare hands. It may be Tubby's world, a part of it, but it's also August Jansen's world, and my world, and yours. Darrow's a great man but this work comes after the fact, after the real battles of life are fought. Lawyers and judges pick up the pieces after the dust settles. Their job is to make sense of what's happened, not make it happen. That occurs in the gutter where blood and bone and horse manure and coal dust and sweat and fear blend and roil. In the end you either have hope or sewage. It can go either way, but it goes on.

In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a second or two, sometimes less, and the whole dizzying sequence scarcely more than two minutes. And there were ludicrous imitations of the second and third order; for the people in the street, startled, outraged, bewildered by her imitations, took on these expressions in reaction to her; and those expressions, in turn, were re-reflected, re-directed, re-distorted, by the Touretter, causing a still greater degree of outrage and shock. This grotesque, involuntary resonance, or mutuality, by which everyone was drawn into an absurdly amplifying interaction, was the source of the disturbance I had seen from a distance. This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self, became nobody. This woman with a thousand faces, masks, personae- how must it be for her in this whirlwind of identities? The answer came soon- and not a second too late; for the build-up of pressures, both hers and others’, was fast approaching the point of explosion. Suddenly, desperately, the old woman turned aside, into an alley-way which led off the main street. And there, with all the appearances of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires, of the past forty or fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic egurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who had possessed her were spewed out. And if the taking-in had lasted two minutes, the throwing-out was a single exhalation- fifty people in ten seconds, a fifth of a second or less for the time-foreshortened repertoire of each person. I was later to spend hundreds of hours, talking to, observing, taping, learning from, Tourette patients. Yet nothing, I think, taught me as much, as swiftly, as penetratingly, as overwhelmingly as that phantasmagoric two minutes in a New York street.

Linc didn't know if it was his imagination, but the streets seemed to have gotten older and dirtier - more so, surely, then was possible in the time that had gone by. What he remembered as the center of where the action was, and where all of life happened had turned into tired and shabby remnants of an age that was running down. Had the store fronts always been so grubby with their cloudy windows, half hearted displays, the paint around the doors dulled and peeling like the once-high hopes of some forgotten opening day long ago? Had trash always stunk like this, piled in alleys and strewn along the gutters? Above it all, high-rental buildings that had once thrust proudly toward the sky crumbled silently amid the winds, the rain, and the corrosive fames eating into them. They had degenerated into cheap hotels and apartments while business fled the cities for manicured office parks by the interstates. But the people no longer stopped to gaze at these buildings, in any case. The figures on the sidewalks hurried on, avoiding each other's eyes, enwrapped in their own isolation. Even those who stood or walked together aimed words at each other from behind facades that had become so second nature that even they themselves now mistook them for the persons atrophying within. A city of brooding shells, inhabited by beings who hid inside shells.

With failing bravado, Dexter tried to laugh. "You sound like you're dumping me!" She smiled sadly. "I suppose I am in a way. You're not who you used to be, Dex, I really, really liked the old one. I'd like him back, but in the meantime, I'm sorry, but I don't think you should phone me anymore." She turned and, a little unsteadily, began to walk off down the side alley in the direction of Leicester Square. For a moment, Dexter had a fleeting but perfectly clear memory of himself at his mother's funeral, curled up on the bathroom floor while Emma held onto him and stroked his hair.Yet somehow he had managed to treat this as nothing, to throw it all away for dross. He followed a little way behind her. "Come on, Em, we're still friends aren't we? I know I've been a little weird, it's just..." She stopped for a moment, but didn't turn round, and he knew that she was crying. "Emma?" Then very quickly she turned, walked up to him and pulled his face to hers, her cheek warm and wet against his, speaking quickly and quietly in his ear, and for one bright moment he thought he was to be forgiven. "Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will." Her lips touched his cheek. "I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry." And then she was gone, and he found himself on the street, standing alone in this back alley trying to imagine what he would possibly do next.

I took a step toward her, but she turned from me and stomped back to her car. I watched her drive off. After a moment, I walked up the limestone steps and through the phantom oak-and-glass front doors of the house where I grew up. I paced the hall, entered the long rectangle of dining room, rested a hand on the carved cherrywood mantel, then passed into the kitchen. The house was so real around me that I could smell the musty linen in the cedar closet, the gas from the leaky burner on the stove, the sharp tang of geraniums that I had planted in clay pots. I lay down on the exact place where the living room couch had been pushed tight under the leaded-glass windows. I closed my eyes and it was all around me again. The stuffed bookshelves, the paneling, the soft slap of my mother's cards on the table. I could see from the house of my dark mind the alley, from the alley the street leading to the end of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the crush of wild burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.

I met a Fatal today in the streets. He pulled me into an alley and whispered that he wanted to help with my idea—which he only knew about because he happened to be a Mind Reader. We talked for hours about the struggles he’s endured and how he wants to see Ordinaries and Fatals free once again. But we first need to find those who are hiding in plain sight. “Calum,” I whisper, knowing exactly who this Mind Reader is. The next page is a hurried collection of several days.

These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged. But down on Main Street, down on Towne and San Pedro, and for a mile on lower Fifth Street were the tens of thousands of others; they couldn't afford sunglasses or a four-bit polo shirt and they hid in the alleys by day and slunk off to flop houses by night. A cop won't pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater you wear is thick like the sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he'll grab you. So get yourselves a polo shirt boys, and a pair of sunglasses, and white shoes, if you can. Be collegiate. It'll get you anyway. After a while, after big doses of the Times and the Examiner, you too will whoop it up for the sunny south. You'll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you'll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semi-tropical nights will reek of romance, you'll never have, but you'll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine. As for the folks back home, you can lie to them, because they hate the truth anyway, they won't have it, because soon or late they want to come out to paradise, too.

Sometimes I am assaulted by the memory of a scene from that time on the street, a memory that flares up inside me and leaves me trembling. Other times I wake up sweating with images in my head, as vivid as if they were real. In the dream I see myself running naked, screaming voicelessly, in a labyrinth of narrow alleys that coil like serpents, buildings with blank doors and windows, not a soul to ask for help, my body burning, my feet bleeding, bile in my mouth, all alone.

Back in the time before Columbus, there were only Indians here, no skyscrapers, no automobiles, no streets. Of course, we didn't use the words Indian or Native American then; we were just people. We didn't know we were supposedly drunks or lazy or savages. I wondered what it was like to live without that weight on your shoulders, the weight of the murdered ancestors, the stolen land, the abused children, the burden every Native person carries. We were told in movies and books that Indians had a sacred relationship with the land, that we worshipped and nurtured it. But staring at Nathan, I didn't feel any mystical bond with the rez. I hated our shitty unpaved roads and our falling-down houses and the snarling packs of dogs that roamed freely in the streets and alleys. But most of all, I hated that kids like Nathan - good kids, decent kids - got involved with drugs and crime and gangs, because there was nothing for them to do here. No after-school jobs, no clubs, no tennis lessons. Every month in the Lakota Times newspaper there was an obituary for another teen suicide, another family in the Burned Thigh Nation who'd had their heart taken away from them. In the old days, the eyapaha was the town crier, the person who would meet incoming warriors after a battle, ask them what happened so they wouldn't have to speak of their own glories, then tell the people the news. Now the eyapaha, our local newspaper, announced losses and harms too often, victories and triumphs too rarely.

A spring sun was shining on the rue St. Honore, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Someone overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction. I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back - a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these. years: it was there though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the rue de Rivioli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine. ("In The Court of the Dragon")

Outsiders call the streets and alleys that comprise her world the slum. For her, it is just the place where she stays. You’d never happen onto her block unless you lived there too, or had lost your way, or were out on an evening lark seeking the pleasures yielded by the other half. The voyeurs on their slumming expeditions feed on the lifeblood of the ghetto, long for it and loathe it. The social scientists and the reformers are no better with their cameras and their surveys, staring intently at all the strange specimens.

Another gust whips through, and Addie folds herself against it, eyes blurring. She shuffles sideways, onto a narrow street, just to escape the violent wind, and the sudden quiet, the breezeless peace, of the alley is like down, soft and warm. Her knees fold. She slumps into a corner against a set of steps, and watches her fingers turn blue, thinks she can see frost spreading over her skin, and marvels quietly, sleepily, at her own transformation. Her breath fogs the air in front of her, each exhale briefly blotting out the world beyond until the gray city fades to white, to white, to white. Strange, how it seems to linger now, a little more with every breath, as if she's fogging up a pane of glass. She wonders how many breaths until the world is hidden. Erased, like her. Perhaps it is her vision blurring. She does not care. She is tired. She is so tired. Addie cannot stay awake, and why should she try? Sleep is such a mercy. Perhaps she will wake again in the spring, like the princess in one of her father's stories, and find herself lying in the grassy bank along the Sarthe, Estele nudging her with a worn shoe and teasing her for dreaming again.

Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mess over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being. Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years.

In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere.

Those who live their lives quietly, unmoved by either great sorrows or great joy, are often, in their final years, granted the dispensation of Discovery. Now, for the first time, they find out the secondary roads of the imagination, the side-streets, the alley-ways, the low doors each with a key in the lock. ...But those who have lived richly, exhaustively, staring into every face, attentive to every voice, are only too often pursued by the spinster Furies, and are driven at the end down avenues of stone where the walls reach to the sky, and the doors are sealed, and the pavements are rubbered against all sound but the beat of the hurrying heart.

Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

I suppose we were worn down and shivering. Three a.m. is a mean spirited hour. I suppose we were drenched, with the cold hose water trickling in at our collars and settling down at the tail of our shirts. Without doubt the heavy brass couplings felt moulded from metal-ice. Probably the open roar of the pumps drowned the petulant buzz of the raiders above, and certainly the ubiquitous fire-glow made an orange stage-set of the streets. Black water would have puddled the city alleys and I suppose our hands and faces were black as the water. Black with hacking about among the burnt-up rafters. These things were an every-night nonentity. They happened and they were not forgotten because they were not even remembered.

When abandoned babies were left out on the streets and back alleys, the Christians in North Africa organized baby runs and brought these babies to nursing mothers. The pagans were overwhelmed with the caring attitude of the Christians. Just as Peter predicted, unbelievers were led to faith in Christ and “glorified God” in the day of visitation. The excellencies of Christ are best revealed through the lives of those who are compassionate because they themselves are profoundly aware of their own shortcomings. The world can out entertain us; outnumber us; out finance us, but let it never be said that they can out-love us, for “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Romans 5:5).

But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice—he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma.

Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush. Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.

Look,’ said Giovanni, as we crossed the river. ‘This old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving.’ I looked out, beyond his heavy profile, which was grey—from fatigue and from the light of the sky above us. The river was swollen and yellow. Nothing moved on the river. Barges were tied up along the banks. The island of the city widened away from us, bearing the weight of the cathedral; beyond this, dimly, through speed and mist, one made out the individual roofs of Paris, their myriad, squat chimney stacks very beautiful and vari-colored under the pearly sky. Mist clung to the river, softening that army of trees, softening those stones, hiding the city’s dreadful corkscrew alleys and dead-end streets, clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone, walking along the river. ‘Some rats have gone in,’ said Giovanni, ‘and now other rats come out.

In heist movies, there's always a montage of scenes where the caper crew rehearses for the big day. The greaser person practices maneuvering through a mock laser beam field made up of string. The driver races through obstacle courses, back alleys, and dark city streets. The hacker pounds on her keyboard, staring at screens full of code. The gadget person demonstrates all their clever toys. The key master practices opening a safe. The muscle finds a few security guards to knock unconscious and wrestles guard dogs to the ground. The inside person seduces or befriends the target and gets them to spill their secrets. And the leader organizes it all with the help of her second-in-command. At least, that's the way it works in the movies. In real life, with a bunch of newbs who are scraping by with low-paying jobs, inflexible hours, difficult bosses, and a bunch of side gigs to make ends meet, just organizing a rehearsal heist was one hell of a task.

You know, Micah, that first night, when I saw you on Bridge Street, I wanted to kill you. I wanted to cut your throat and watch your blood soak into the dirt. I wanted to wrap a strangle cord around your neck and throttle you while you kicked and messed yourself." "I'm shaking in my boots," Micah said, looking Han dead in the eyes. Han stood and took a step toward him. "I'm what's hiding in the side street when you walk home from The Four Horses," he said. "I'm the shadow in Greystone Alley when you go out to take a piss. I'm the foot pad in the corridor when you visit the girlie at Grievous Hall." Micah's eyes narrowed, his self-assurance wilting a bit. Han could tell he was going back over a hundred suspicious sights and sounds. "You've been following me?" "I can come and go from your room, any time I want," Han said. "I can tell you what you say when you talk in your sleep. I know what your down low girlie whispers in your ear." He laughed... Michah licked his lips. "Perhaps you take some kind of perverse pleasure in stalking me...

When my mother died I was a baby,' Cyrus finally said. 'And so I didn’t really know what I’d lost until I was much older. I mean, maybe I still don’t. But there was this one day when I was fifteen or sixteen when I decided I was really going to feel it. Like, I didn’t get to have a day to grieve my mother properly when it happened. So I made one up. I skipped school and just wandered around downtown Fort Wayne listening to my Walkman, weeping wherever I went, trying to picture her in my head. I kept ducking into these alleys and side streets bawling my eyes out, imagining all the days she’d never seen me. All the days I’d never see her. I got dehydrated from all the crying, I remember feeling super thirsty. I remember stopping into a gas station to buy a Gatorade, and the clerk there asking if I was okay, if I needed any help. That’s such a funny detail, I’d forgotten about that till just now. It tasted like trash, so sweet it burned. But I chugged it! I was so thirsty from crying. I felt it I think maybe for the first time then. All that grief consolidated, concentrated into a single hard point. Like a diamond. That one day.

Not knowing what to do, I started walking down St. Mark’s toward Tompkins Square. All Day All Night. You Must Be Twenty One To Enter. Downtown, away from the high-rise press, the wind cut more bitterly and yet the sky was more open too, it was easier to breathe. Muscle guys walking paired pit bulls, inked-up Bettie Page girls in wiggle dresses, stumblebums with drag-hemmed pants and Jack O’Lantern teeth and taped-up shoes. Outside the shops, racks of sunglasses and skull bracelets and multicolored transvestite wigs. There was a needle exchange somewhere, maybe more than one but I wasn’t sure where; Wall Street guys bought off the street all the time if you believed what people said but I wasn’t wise enough to know where to go or who to approach, and besides who was going to sell to me, a stranger with horn rimmed glasses and an uptown haircut, dressed for picking out wedding china with Kitsey? Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood—as I did—the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.

Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb When yer laggin' behind an' losin' yer pace In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race No matter what yer doing if you start givin' up If the wine don't come to the top of yer cup If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holdin' on And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it And the wood's easy findin' but yer lazy to fetch it And yer sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long And you start walkin' backwards though you know its wrong And lonesome comes up as down goes the day And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin' And yer rope is a-slidin' 'cause yer hands are a-drippin' And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe's a-pourin' And the lightnin's a-flashing and the thunder's a-crashin' And the windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops a-shakin' And yer whole world's a-slammin' and bangin' And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm And to yourself you sometimes say "I never knew it was gonna be this way Why didn't they tell me the day I was born" And you start gettin' chills and yer jumping from sweat And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air And the whole world's a-watchin' with a window peek stare And yer good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flying And yer heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin' And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet And you need it badly but it lays on the street And yer bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat And you think yer ears might a been hurt Or yer eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush When you were faked out an' fooled white facing a four flush And all the time you were holdin' three queens And it's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean Like in the middle of Life magazine Bouncin' around a pinball machine And there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying That somebody someplace oughta be hearin' But it's trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed And no matter how you try you just can't say it And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead And the lion's mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth And his jaws start closin with you underneath And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign And you say to yourself just what am I doin' On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin' On this curve I'm hanging On this pathway I'm strolling, in the space I'm taking In this air I'm inhaling Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard Why am I walking, where am I running What am I saying, what am I knowing On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailin' On this mandolin I'm strummin', in the song I'm singin' In the tune I'm hummin', in the words I'm writin' In the words that I'm thinkin' In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinkin' Who am I helping, what am I breaking What am I giving, what am I taking But you try with your whole soul best Never to think these thoughts and never to let Them kind of thoughts gain ground Or make yer heart pound ...

It wasn’t until she had almost reached its lights that she heard another rider in the hills behind her. Ice slid down Kestrel’s spine. Fear, that the rider was Arin. Fear, at her sudden hope that it was. She pulled Javelin to a stop and swung to the ground. Better to go on foot through the narrow streets to the harbor. Stealth was more important now than speed. Beating hooves echoed in the hills. Closer. She hugged Javelin hard around the neck, then pushed him away while she still could bear to do it. She slapped his rump in an order to head home. Whether he’d go to her villa or Arin’s, she couldn’t say. But he left, and might draw the other rider after him if she was indeed being pursued. She slipped into the city shadows. And it was magic. It was as if the Herrani gods had turned on their own people. No one noticed Kestrel skulking along walls or heard her cracking the thin ice of a puddle. No late-night wanderer looked in her face and saw a Valorian. No one saw the general’s daughter. Kestrel made it to the harbor, down to the docks. Where Arin waited. His breath heaved white clouds into the air. His hair was black with sweat. It hadn’t mattered that Kestrel had been ahead of him on the horse path. Arin had been able to run openly through the city while she had crept through alleys. Their eyes met, and Kestrel felt utterly defenseless. But she had a weapon. He didn’t, not that she could see. Her hand instinctively fell to her knife’s jagged edge. Arin saw. Kestrel wasn’t sure what came first: his quick hurt, so plain and sharp, or her certainty--equally plain, equally sharp--that she could never draw a weapon on him. He straightened from his runner’s crouch. His expression changed. Until it did, Kestrel hadn’t perceived the desperate set of his mouth. She hadn’t recognized the wordless plea until it was gone, and his face aged with something sad. Resigned. Arin glanced away. When he looked back it was as if Kestrel were part of the pier beneath her feet. A sail stitched to a ship. A black current of water. As if she were not there at all. He turned away, walked into the illuminated house of the new Herrani harbormaster, and shut the door behind him. For a moment Kestrel couldn’t move. Then she ran for a fishing boat docked far enough from its fellows that she might cast off from shore unnoticed by an sailors on the other vessels. She leaped onto the deck and took rapid stock of the boat. The tiny cabin was bare of supplies. As she lifted the anchor and uncoiled the rope tethering the boat to its dock, she knew, even if she couldn’t see, that Arin was talking with the harbormaster, distracting him while Kestrel prepared to set sail.

The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city’s southern limits. I feared an aged that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many useless hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers and we put ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilation and culture. Ours was the land of poetry flowers, and nightingales—and poets searching for rhymes in history’s junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had trafric jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government officee. the streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn’t our own. Still our country wasn’t our own.

As Merripen gave the ribbons to a stableman at the mews, Amelia glanced toward the end of the alley. A pair of street youths crouched near a tiny fire, roasting something on sticks. Amelia did not want to speculate on the nature of the objects being heated. Her attention moved to a group—three men and a woman—illuminated in the uncertain blaze. It appeared two of the men were engaged in fisticuffs. However, they were so inebriated that their contest looked like a performance of dancing bears. The woman’s gown was made of gaudily colored fabric, the bodice gaping to reveal the plump hills of her breasts. She seemed amused by the spectacle of two men battling over her, while a third attempted to break up the fracas. “’Ere now, my fine jacks,” the woman called out in a Cockney accent, “I said I’d take ye both on—no need for a cockfight!” “Stay back,” Merripen murmured. Pretending not to hear, Amelia drew closer for a better view. It wasn’t the sight of the brawl that was so interesting—even their village, peaceful little Primrose Place, had its share of fistfights. All men, no matter what their situation, occasionally succumbed to their lower natures. What attracted Amelia’s notice was the third man, the would-be peacemaker, as he darted between the drunken fools and attempted to reason with them. He was every bit as well dressed as the gentlemen on either side … but it was obvious this man was no gentleman. He was black-haired and swarthy and exotic. And he moved with the swift grace of a cat, easily avoiding the swipes and lunges of his opponents. “My lords,” he was saying in a reasonable tone, sounding relaxed even as he blocked a heavy fist with his forearm. “I’m afraid you’ll both have to stop this now, or I’ll be forced to—” He broke off and dodged to the side just as the man behind him leaped. The prostitute cackled at the sight. “They got you on the ’op tonight, Rohan,” she exclaimed. Dodging back into the fray, Rohan attempted to break it up once more. “My lords, surely you must know”—he ducked beneath the swift arc of a fist—“that violence”—he blocked a right hook—“never solves anything.” “Bugger you!” one of the men said, and butted forward like a deranged goat. Rohan stepped aside and allowed him to charge straight into the side of the building. The attacker collapsed with a groan and lay gasping on the ground. His opponent’s reaction was singularly ungrateful. Instead of thanking the dark-haired man for putting a stop to the fight, he growled, “Curse you for interfering, Rohan! I would’ve knocked the stuffing from him!” He charged forth with his fists churning like windmill blades. Rohan evaded a left cross and deftly flipped him to the ground. He stood over the prone figure, blotting his forehead with his sleeve. “Had enough?” he asked pleasantly. “Yes? Good. Please allow me to help you to your feet, my lord.

from the upcoming novel, Agent White: A figure dressed all in black ran across the rooftops in the rain. A black cloak fluttered behind him as he ran two and sometimes three stories above the sidewalk where Ezra Beckitt stood. Long silver hair tied back in a ponytail flew out behind him, exposing ears that came to sharp points. His left ear was pierced with a silver ring, high up in the cartilage. Like the old man, this black figure wore a sword; but this weapon was long and thin, slightly curved. The blade stuck out behind him for three and a half feet, almost seeming to glow against the grey backdrop of the rain-soaked cityscape. Suddenly, the figure in black looked down into the street and saw Ezra there. More, he saw Ezra seeing him. Startled, he lost his sure footing and slid down the steep incline of an older building’s metal roof, the busy street below waiting to catch him in an asphalt embrace. The figure in black got his feet under himself and pushed, flying out into space above the street. For an eternity Ezra watched him, suspended in the air and the rain with his cloak spread in midnight ripples around him, and then the figure in black flipped neatly and landed on the sidewalk half a block away. The pavement cracked, pushing up in twisted humps around the figure in black’s tall leather boots. Before the sound of this impact even reached Ezra the figure was up and gone, dashing through the morning throngs waiting for buses or headed to the ‘tram station. Ezra saw a girl’s hair blow back in the wind created by his passing, but she never noticed him. A young techie blinked his 20-20’s (Ezra’s own enhanced senses picked up the augmented eyes because of a strange, silvery glow in the pupils) and turned halfway around, almost seeing him. And then the figure in black darted into an alley, gone. Ezra drew his service weapon and ran after, pushing his way through the sidewalk traffic. Turning into the alley he skidded to a stop, stunned; the figure in black was still there. The alley was just wide enough to accommodate Ezra’s shoulders- he couldn’t have held his arms out at his sides. Dumpsters spilled their trash out onto the wet pavement. The alley ended in a fire door, the back exit of a store on the next street over. Even if it was locked, Ezra didn’t think it would pose a real problem for the figure in black. No, he was waiting for him. Ezra advanced with his gun out in front of him, and his eyes locked with the figure in black’s. His were completely black- no pupils, no corneas, only solid black that held no light. The figure in black smiled, exposing teeth that looked very sharp, and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. He wore leather gloves with the fingers cut off. His fingers were very long and very white. “Don’t even think about it,” Ezra said, clicking the safety off his weapon. “I am a Hatis City Guard, an if you move I will put you down.” This only seemed to amuse the figure in black, whose smiled widened as he drew his sword. Ezra opened fire.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. Have they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

Syn paid the bill and they headed to the door with lust so thick around them, Syn couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else could see it. Furi reached back for Syn’s hand and he gladly offered it. He looked over his shoulder and threw him a seductive wink when Syn crowded in close behind him. As soon as Syn made it out the door, he saw four members of his team walking up the sidewalk. Well fuck me. “Hey, Sarge.” Pendleton, his demolitions expert was the first to speak up. Syn threw down Furi’s hand and quickly put some distance between them. “Yeah, hey fellas.” They’d all stopped and were staring back and forth between him and Furi. Syn couldn’t even look Furious in his eye after what he’d just done. Detective Green cleared his throat and pointed at Furi. “Don’t I know you?” “Hardly,” Furi mumbled. “Um, this is ... uh, uh. He’s my ... uh.” Syn cursed under his breath. Obviously his team already knew who Furious was. They all had detailed lists of Illustra’s entertainers and Furious’ image was not easy to forget. “Sarge, who’s your friend?” Detective Ruxsburg asked, a sly smile playing on his handsome face. “He’s um.” “He’s leaving,” Furi’s deep voice cut in as he eased his way through and walked in the opposite direction of Syn’s truck. “Fuck,” Syn whispered as he watched Furi turn the corner. “You better go after him and be ready to do some serious groveling,” his IT Detective said in his calm, cool voice. Syn didn’t say anything. His guys walked around him and went into the bar, leaving him feeling ashamed. He thought about running after Furi but choose to get in his truck and cut him off at the corner. He sped around the block and pulled into an alley hoping to intercept his angry date. When Syn got out of the truck Furi was turning the corner coming toward him. Oh hell. Furi had his hands crammed into his pockets and if the scowl on his face didn’t indicate how angry Furious was, then his choice of words when he finally reached Syn sure as hell did. “Get the fuck away from me.” “Furious, I know you're upset.” Furi spun around and glared at him with midnight eyes. “Upset! Upset! Look at my face goddamnit! Does this just look upset to you?” Syn put his hands up in a calming gesture. “Alright, you’re angry, and you have every right to be. I reacted badly back there. I was just caught off guard.” Furi was in Syn’s face and people on the street had begun to stop and stare. “Can we please move this off the sidewalk?” Syn tried to usher Furi farther into the alley and away from the nosy fuckers on the street. “Don’t fuckin’ touch me!” “I’m not gonna touch you! Damn, calm down. I just want to explain,” Syn argued. It seemed every time he was around Furi he was apologizing for something. “I’m sorry, okay. I should have introduced you properly to my team.” “How would the–” “Please, Furious. Let me finish. I should’ve told them your name and introduced you as my friend at a minimum. I’m sorry. I told you I fuckin’ suck at this dating shit, and if you don’t tell me to go fuck myself and give me another–” “Go fuck yourself,” Furi interrupted. He tried to move around Syn but Syn grabbed him around the wrist and backed him against the side of his truck. “No! I will not go fuck myself. I would rather fuck you.” “Well you pretty much shot that chance all to hell,” Furi yelled right back at him. “Have I?” “What do you think?

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE