“Uptown” was printed in large letters over stairs leading down to the subway that would take him north to the 42d Street he had read about. It wasn’t hard to figure. The streets were in numerical sequence. Everything in this country was easy.

He felt good. He was excited once again to be at large in a big city at night. He was hungry, but food could wait until he had scooped up enough money to eat sumptuously, a word he had picked off a billboard on his ride that afternoon into the city from the highway.

Entering this country had been nothing. He had expected some gringo to shoot him when he slipped over the fence. He had expected to be taken aside at some point and questioned. But no one had detained him. No one seemed suspicious of a well-dressed Mexican hitchhiker who spoke good English.

Staying near the border was not for him. He was too smart for that, although coming to New York had scared him: Wall Street and Broadway and big buildings, all that mental baggage he had brought with him from American movies. He found the big buildings, but he also found boarded-up windows in old buildings, a wrecked car on a sidewalk, a drunk collapsed in a doorway—things that gave him confidence. It was every city in the world. It was Mexico City and Jaurez. No different. And now it was night, and there were fools out there waiting to be stripped. And he was Adrian Martinez, the smartest man in the world.

He felt flushed with adrenaline as he went down the steps, picked up a token, went through the turnstile and walked out onto a long silent concrete platform. He stood with his back to a tiled wall and watched a tall man out near the edge where the platform dropped to the tracks. The man was wearing thick glasses and was holding a folded newspaper close to his face, every few seconds tapping his free hand against a steel stanchion, maybe making sure it was there,  ready to grab it if someone tried to push him onto the tracks. At the end of the platform there was a man lying against the wall with his knees drawn up, apparently asleep.

It was cool down here below the street. The air was stale with some kind of chemical odors. The silence added to a feeling of loneliness.

When the train came, Adrian stepped into a lighted car where people were sitting on hard benches looking bored, each by himself, no two together, no one speaking. He stood near the door and grabbed a pole when the car lurched forward. He smiled at a black woman sitting near him. She looked away.

It was not just himself, he decided. People here were not friendly. They said America was a nation of friendly people, but all he could see was lonely people keeping to themselves.

He got off at Times Square and went up to the street and walked down a sidewalk crowded with tourists. He didn’t like the glare of lights and the ambitious eyes moving past him. He kept his hands in his pockets, afraid to touch anything. The atmosphere of crime and dirty sex made this a good place to hunt, he decided. But first he wanted a woman, and not one of the standup reptiles outside every storefront trying to promote something.

What he wanted he found in a hotel lounge a few blocks away. She looked like an out-of-town housewife, about forty. She was alone at the end of the bar. She had a black handbag on her lap and was moving a finger slowly around the rim of her wine glass.

“You a school teacher?” he asked.

He had been sitting two stools away from her for more than two minutes, studying labels on the crowd of bottles blocking the mirror behind the bar.

“You talking to me?”

“It is the ambition of my evening,” he said.

“To talk to me?”

“You are very beautiful.”

“You some kind of whacko?”

“That is entirely possible,” he said. “I am a stranger here. What is a whacko?”

And that brought a thin, self-conscious smile and nearly a minute of silence as she pondered something on the surface of her glass.

“And what is the oracle of the wine glass telling you?” he said.

He could see in her searching gaze the pain of loneliness. That she allowed it to reach her eyes was all the encouragement he needed. He moved over and bought her another wine. During the next glass she told him she lived in New Haven, Connecticut, and was the mother of three children. And during the following glass she told him she had been replaced in her husband’s affections by a twenty-two-year-old receptionist. She was getting a divorce, she said, and was in New York on a job interview and had a room on the seventh floor with a window that looked out on a brick wall.

“A brick wall? That’s hard to believe.”

Regarding him with eyes of uncertain focus, she said, “You don’t believe it?”

“I’ll have to see it,” he said.

He had to help her off the stool and get past the tables in the lobby. And upstairs she leaned on him while he unlocked the door. She didn’t think he should help her undress because she had been doing it all by herself all her life and had always been faithful to her husband and had never done anything like this ever before and would he promise not to hurt her.

She was asleep when he got dressed. He found only eighty-four dollars cash in her handbag, plus department store cards and a Visa card, all of which were in her name. But an American Express card was in the name of Milton Seymour. He wanted to take all of her cash but decided to leave twenty dollars even though he imagined she could get money from her Visa card. He couldn’t account for the generosity. Maybe it came from gratitude for the sex, maybe it was to create the illusion that he had paid for it. It was just an impulse. All the way to the Grand Hyatt in a cab he memorized Mr. Seymour’s signature on the back of the card, but he needn’t have bothered. The smiling clerk at the counter just ran the card through a scanner and handed it back, saying, “Enjoy your stay, Mr. Seymour.”

In one of the nicest hotel rooms he had ever been in, Adrian lingered a half hour under the shower thinking even if the woman woke up and notified American Express that her card had been stolen, the hotel here wouldn’t know it. They had cleared the card, and he could put a meal on it and wine or anything else he wanted. For such a minor crime in such a big city, the police wouldn’t be out looking for someone using the credit card of Milton Seymour.

But he was unable to get a meal at the hotel. The restaurant was closed and he had to go down the street and sit at an unwashed table eating a tasteless sandwich from a vending machine. It was like being back in the prison dining hall in Jaurez.

Later, on his way to Times Square, he wiped his fingerprints off the card and dropped it in the gutter.

It was more than two hours after walking in and out of bars around Times Square before he pushed a woman aside and slid onto a stool next to a man who had just extracted a fifty-dollar bill from a wallet fat with fifty dollar bills. The man was alone and apparently drunk.

“I was here first!” the woman yelled at him. In anger she pushed him against the man, causing the man’s drink to spill across the wooden counter.

“Oh, hell,” Adrian said. “That woman’s crazy. Please, we’ll get another.”

The man gave him a timid smile.

Adrian fingered a twenty out of his shirt pocket and, catching the barwoman’s attention, ordered “whatever my friend is drinking.”

“No sissy drinks,” the man said. “Bourbon and water.”

“A man’s drink,” Adrian said. “I’ll have the same.” He pointed to the man’s change from the fifty. “I wouldn’t leave those bills on the bar.”

The man made several stabs at two twenties, finally crumpling them and stuffing them into his shirt pocket. A pellet of drool hung on a thin thread from his bottom lip.

“Thieves all around here,” Adrian said, glancing at three men on the wall behind him who looked like street criminals he had seen in American movies.

“You talk funny,” the drunk said. “You some kind of foreigner?”

“A theatrical affectation,” Adrian told him. “I’m an actor.”

“I knew a girl once in a … some kind of cereal commercial.”

Warmth spread over the man’s face when the barwoman brought their drinks. He couldn’t take his eyes off the cleavage inside the open collar of her white shirt. He studied her buttocks and legs when she walked away. Adrian leaned close to him and said, “You want a woman?”

The man was bobbing an icecube, licking moisture off his finger. Adrian was about to repeat the question when the man turned bloodshot eyes and wet lips toward him. In a deadly serious tone, he said, “I would adore to have one.”

Adrian could see the wallet in the pocket just inside the jacket. He put his mouth right up to the man’s ear. “At my apartment just down the street. Young girls. Very clean. Very beautiful.”

With harmless innocence, the man said, “Are you a pimp?”

“A manager,” Adrian told him. “But we can’t talk here. Let’s go outside.”

The man thought about that for nearly a half minute, his mouth breathing over wet lips, eyelids sagging drowsily. Finally he lowered a leg off the stool. “Let’s go,” he said.

Adrian walked behind him to the sidewalk, holding both his arms, steering him through the crowd. They went west toward 8th Avenue.

“These girls clean?” the man said.

“Immaculate,” Adrian told him, glancing up the sidewalk. There was no one moving toward him. He gently pushed the man backward against a large plate-glass window. “I have to know you can pay,” he said.

“No problem.” The man reached for his inside breast pocket.

Adrian, watching pale fingers removing the wallet from the pocket, didn’t see the two men running across the street behind him. He had just snatched the wallet from the drunk’s hand when something struck the back of his knee, crumpling him to the sidewalk. Adrian grabbed the leg and squirmed from under it and was suddenly lifted to his feet and rammed against the glass, a big black face crowding his frightened eyes.

“You get the fuck out of here and never come back. We catch you here, we beat the shit out of you and throw you in jail. You fucking hear me, BOY?”

In terror, Adrian’s head jerked up and down. The man was a giant. His face was bristling with anger. There was a second man holding the drunk, talking to him. They didn’t act like thieves. Were they cops? Don’t cops wear uniforms?

The big man turned Adrian around and shoved him into the street. “Keep going, BOY! Run, BOY!”

Adrian ran. He ran to the opposite sidewalk and up through the crowd, no thought of anything but getting away.

He turned the corner onto 7^th Avenue and kept on running south, away from the square, away from the lights. His leg ached. His chest was heavy with pain. He had to stop, lean against a pole and catch his breath. He wanted to go to the hotel. He wanted the luxury, the big lobby, the big bed, the clean bathroom. He wanted to look at himself in the big mirror. He wanted to remind himself who he was, what he deserved, where he belonged. But his confidence was gone. He felt sick and frightened. He wasn’t sure who he was. He wanted to hide. He wished he was under that filthy blanket behind the driver of the truck that had brought him to the   city.

Wiping tears from his eyes he limped down the sidewalk, his knee in agony where that big son of a bitch kicked him. He had to stop at a steel railing of a subway entrance, try to rub pain from his leg.

He noticed a man in a doorway no more than ten feet from him. The man was clutching a small paper bag, holding it to his chest as though afraid someone might take it—a witless, helpless drunk. He was in a soiled shirt and rumpled pants held up at his waist by a rope. He was saying something to himself, singing.

Adrian walked over to him and stared at the frightened face, offended by the stink of wine and body sweat, offended by the poverty and the man’s helplessness. He clenched his fist and drove it into the man’s face, knocking him against the door where he hung for a moment then slid to a heap on the pavement.

Why had he done that?

He trembled as he looked at the man, at the blood pouring from his nose. He glanced up and down the sidewalk, across the street, into an alley. No one had seen him.

He ran to the subway terrified of getting caught. He stood near a steel stanchion waiting for the train. He would go wherever the train took him. He would get out of this city. He would find a highway and maybe go back to Mexico.

The End