The students and occasional professors walking by would mostly mock and jeer at him; he wasn’t worth the trouble to refute anymore, not here at least. Whatever Christian souls might have been passing had no stake in such controversies. By trying to be intellectually respectable he had lost them as well, falling, as the saying goes, between two stools.

I would watch his efforts from a distance, curious but not wanting to be drawn into argument. His cornflower blue eyes had a buried panic in them, like the modern world was too much for him, like he felt compelled by his very fear to come to the heart of downtown to fight against its mindless swirling madness, to have his say against error, to save. He was in the park for two years before vanishing

Another guy I saw a few times was this shirtless, retarded-looking white dude in loose green sweatpants missing the drawstring, who sang his heart out over tapes of old soul classics. He had black plastic glasses held together by tape and a likeably ugly face like Stephen King’s. People stopped to laugh at him but soon began to enjoy his performance. He really had the moves down, all that old gut-bucket showmanship of pointing accusingly at the sky, going up on your toes to wail a high note and then dropping to your knees to plead with your baby not to leave.

That was the first time I had ever heard “I Can’t Get Next To You.” His repertoire was all agony: “Standing In The Shadows of Love” and “Bernadette,” the tragic Temptations and Four Tops stuff you don’t hear much on the radio. He looked like he lived at home with a TV-dead maiden aunt and had never had a date, but he was feeling it. Those songs were probably his best friends. Maybe his heart had been broken or maybe no one had ever bothered and that was what was killing him or maybe he felt just fine.

The police walked him out and took his batteries ó radio-playing is illegal in the park and I followed after to make sure they weren’t rough on him. I saw him one other time a few weeks later and they shut him down again, to the boos of a fair-sized crowd. My girlfriend was moving up that winter and I hoped he’d come back in the spring so she could see him too, but as far as I know he never returned.

Some days nice weather is as annoying as a fire drill; it requires you evacuate the premises but gives you no particular place to be. After much circling around I always seem to touch down at the park. For one thing, it’s about the only place you can sit. I don’t like to read outdoors, there’s too much to see, but it’s good to have a book with you to reassure people you can still hear the small silent voice of reason rising up invisibly from the pages.

It shows how little power the police really have that just walking from one end of the park to the other three or four guys will try to sell you pot. One dealer used to call me Mr. Book-Man whenever he saw me, which always cracked me up, but most of the time the offers felt like insults.

In the southwest corner guys are waiting to hustle chess and in the northwest sometimes there’s speed Scrabble. These games are like an emblem of city life: Here we do it fast and we do it with anybody, and money has to change hands. This is what happens to childhood games here, they all grow furtive and professional.

I suspect our lunatics are sent to us on a rotating basis, like missionaries. The new one is a Latin gentleman with a wooden sword who wears a dirty grayish-brown trenchcoat off his shoulders like a cape. Waving the sword about him, he delivers a long speech asking for work in the movies. You want to tell him he’s in the wrong place, that even shows set in New York come from L.A., but you’re afraid to wake him from his enchantment.

Some air of olden grandeur clings to his person despite its recent shabbiness. He seeks fame and glory like the musketeers of yore, but on the screen, the only place it exists now, maybe the only place it can ever exist. He wants to live full-time in the world of human dreams, with the moon for a nightlight and his feet propped up on a pillowy silver cloud. He is looking for the secret door to that large and brighter world, oddly by asking after it on the street in broad daylight.

Where’s he from? Somewhere. What’d he do before this? Something else. The truth is questions are rude. I don’t ask because I don’t care enough to be genuinely friendly and I don’t really like to play with people anymore either. I confirm a secret pact of silence, not with a look even but by not looking very long, by more or less minding my own business and moving on.

The creationist, the soul-singer, the swordsman: I don’t collect crazies but it does cheer me up sometimes to see them. If they can get through the endless plate of days set before us then maybe Mr. Book-Man will too, and with no drug stronger than fresh air and a few of the more common household illusions. That people still read, that our better feelings will always matter, and that there are some things only a stranger can hope to understand.

A propos of nothing, Brad asked if either of us had ever broken a bone when we were kids. It turned out none of us had. I never learned how to swim or ride a bike, I said, the only way I could have broken a bone back then is if a bookcase fell on me.

I thought about our friend Chuck, who fifteen years ago had wiped out on his brand-new motorcycle and wound up in the hospital with his head and neck in pincers to prevent the slightest movement while he healed. When we visited his hospital room, Brad had looked in awe at the sight of him lying there and, sort of dumbstruck I guess, mentioned that he himself had never even broken a bone.

You’ve lead a charmed life, Chuck had replied bitterly.

* * *

A man was going from bench to bench performing a little magic trick and asking for money to support a charity that gives parties for children with AIDS. As he spoke he made a coin appear and disappear between his fingers. He had longish crinkly brown hair combed back behind his ears, and wore black jeans and an oxford shirt with an orange laminated card clipped to the pocket that said Kids Party Project. Pretty much everyone gave.

We’d heard this guy was a fraud. Most people don’t realize it, but con men are anything but a dying breed these days. Brad had been taken in by a guy who said he’d been beaten up by the cops and needed two hundred bucks to get back to Boston. Having no thought of the price of a bus ticket, Brad went with him to the ATM and gave him that much money on the spot. He saw him again the next day and many times after that, telling the same story over and over and raking it in every time, since real police brutality was all over the papers that summer. Alex had once been tricked by a guy coming out of his building who said he needed change for a parking meter. The guy somehow walked off with a twenty-dollar bill of his which he said he was going to go break while he had Alex staying behind to hold the entry door for him. There aren’t even any meters in that neighborhood.

The magician walked past where we sat, stopped and reconsidered, and came back to try his wonderful luck against our three sour faces. In his speech he said they also help the sick children get the medication they need. What kind of medication do you give them? I asked. He said they don’t give them medication. But you just said you give them medication. We help them get medication, he said. He answered very quickly, with no hesitation and showing no trace of anger at being challenged, but he was obviously avoiding the fact that he could not name a single AIDS medication. I asked him what his organization was and he pointed to the card, which had no photo, seal or signature, and which he had probably made in fifteen minutes at Kinko’s.

Well, good luck, I said harshly. Maybe if I had really pushed it there’d have been a fight and we could have gotten Brad the broken bone he is so curious about. I looked up the organization when I got home and as far as I can determine it does not exist, though it probably should.

I had been sure he was a liar just looking at him. He had the nervous twitching and ruined skin of a long-time addict. In fact, I had met him before on the street a few years ago. He had sat down on a stoop next to me and some friends and started telling us the whole story of how he had been falsely imprisoned and finally released on appeal, all probably leading up to asking for money, but when he paused I cut him off by saying, Actually, we’re having a private conversation here.

* * *

After he was gone the second time, we talked about other things, like wanting to make it out to a lake at least once before the summer ended, what we’d been reading and what we were supposed to be writing but weren’t, the screwed-up state of the economy today and what a dunce we’d been saddled with for president.

What we didn’t know was that Chuck had been killed in a bicycle accident the night before. I got a call on my machine late the next day. That unspoken thought of him, of Chuck alive and out in the world pursuing his aims with dedication, that image had been like a ray of false light still reaching earth from an extinguished source. A guy so gentle he’d kept a tame squirrel as a pet, kind, sweet Chuck was gone, now and forever unembraceable, while any number of shiftless bastards were walking around scot-free with pockets stuffed from our best intentions.

Watch out for liars, people. The way to recognize them is they make you feel good.

One day I stopped and looked at the scaffolding around the NYU tower at East 8th Street and Mercer and realized it had no purpose. It wasn’t even next to the building but instead twenty feet away around the edge of the plaza. If there were any reason at all for it to be there, it could only have something to do with security, as some kind of camouflaged fence. Just when I concluded it was secretly not temporary, it vanished.

I started to look more closely at things and realized that the chain-link fence around the arch at Washington Square was not protecting any kind of renovation. There were no workers, no tools lying around, no project underway; it was simply there. My best guess is it was installed to prevent graffiti, that its pseudo-utilitarian ugliness was considered preferable to allowing human insult to the social order. Recently I noticed they took it down for commencement weekend and put it back up again when the parents were gone.

In April they put scaffolding up outside my apartment building. It’s like the building is in fourth grade and had to get braces; it won’t be smiling anymore this year. Men perch out there hammering in a lax and sporadic fashion, the work going pretty slow when it goes at all. I sit at my desk imagining them as a flock of heartbroken woodpeckers come to roost, or Bunyanesque infants grown bored with their pickaxe rattles. Sometimes the knocks seem plaintive, like the moans of zombies calling a town’s remaining survivors out to join them in the penultimate scene of a horror flick. Sometimes the hammering falls into a groove and almost begins to mean something, to speak like drums — but I can’t answer, can’t even stick my head out to see because they’ve stapled heavy sheets of plastic over the windows, leaving me sealed in like a funky Tut.

No one knows when it will come down; they seem to find it comic I should ask. I watched them assemble it from my window, my last view of the world not the outlaw’s gallows but a marvel of modern efficiency built from specially-made blue tubes resembling designer pasta, x-shaped crossbars that snap into position in seconds, and a platform of ordinary two-by-fours nailed firmly in place. It was done in half a day and then no one showed up for a week. You take so much on faith in the city.

Life was good growing up in the suburbs, before you knew that’s where you were. You had a discreet and obedient little thermostat instead of a madly clanging radiator, thick shag pile to roll around on instead of clackety cold polished wood, and a nice garage to pull in to — you were expected to parallel park exactly once in your lifetime, on your driving test. At twilight the fireflies lit up like unstrung yellow Christmas bulbs and the crickets chirped their vespers of senseless lust and glee and a carpet of glory rose up from the lawns until you felt you were wading through it.

There was always scaffolding around at college but no one minded since you were usually moving in a matter of months. Freshman week we drank grain punch and climbed around on it like we were playing a giant Donkey Kong game. Junior year my girlfriend ate mushrooms and sat out on it in a state of trippy wonder until campus security came and gently talked her down. My last summer I even got a cushy job guarding it, with a hard hat and folding chair and thick novels by Melville, Joyce and Pynchon, which seemed themselves pointless feats of engineering, intricate sponges to sop up the flood of seemingly superfluous time.

It took me months to get used to the street noise here. People pour out of the bars wildly and triumphantly oblivious to my need for rest, just as I and my friends once poured out of the bars in someone else’s neighborhood. Prostitutes fight over the corner in voices as loud as opera divas, their indifference to the hour more shocking than their profession: sure, they’re shameless, but do they have any idea how late it is? Sometimes the city bus stops at the intersection and just waits there a full minute or two to get back on schedule, with a row of backed-up cars behind it each honking angrily at the one ahead. I hear car alarms and jackhammers more often than thank you and you’re welcome.

I guess I stay here for the conversation but it dies out a little more every year until you start to understand why they keep the jukebox turned up so loud in bars. Old friends get wary or just worn out; our lives either converge to such a degree they’re hardly worth discussing or diverge beyond all relation. Still you stay for friends you never see, the way you came for museums you never visit.

I tried to look at all the renovation in my neighborhood as a gladsome indicator of prosperity, but it didn’t help. I’m tired of this place, tired of streets that are torn up every time you turn around for no reason while a trash can someone had to drag out to warn of a pothole will be sitting in the middle of the street for a week, tired of cones and vests of safety orange and the urgent warning beeps of trucks backing up, tired of plywood tunnel detours and signs that say pardon our dust. I don’t want to live in this city anymore, where the very walls perish around you only to be reborn in the agony of time. I want to live in a city that’s done.