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then it would be definite, as daylight. As though the whole world were having sex, the sea and the sky and everyone. They’d be puppies and they’d be pigs. The air would fill up with the sound of songs, a hundred at a time. At such moments he knew what it must be like to be a composer or a great musician. He became a giant, swollen with greatness. A time bomb.
    The clock on the wall said 11:07. This is my lucky day: he made it a promise. He threw himself out of bed and did ten push-ups on the tile floor, still damp from its morning mopping. Then ten more. After the last push-up Birdie rested on the floor, his lips pressed against the cool, moist tile. He had a hard-on.
    He grabbed it, closing his eyes. Milly! Your eyes.o Milly, I love you. Milly,o Milly,o Milly. So much! Milly’s arms. The small of her back. Bending back. Milly, don’t leave me! Milly? Love me? I!
    He came in a smooth, spread-open flow till his fingers were covered with semen, and the back of his hand, and the blue heart, and “Milly.”

    11:35. The Art History test was at two. He’d already missed a ten o’clock field trip for Consumership. Tough.
    He wrapped his toothbrush, his Crest, his razor, and foam in a towel and went to what had been, in the days when the Annexe was an office building, the executive washroom of the actuarial division of New York Life. The music started when he opened the door: SLAM, BANG! WHY AM I SO HAPPY?
Slam, Bang!
Why am I so happy?
God Damn,
I don’t really know.
    He decided to wear his white sweater with white Levi’s and white sneakers. He brushed a whitening agent into his hair, which was natural again. He looked at himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He smiled. The sound system started in on his favorite Ford commercial. Alone in the empty space before the urinals he danced with himself, singing the words of the commercial.

    It was a fifteen-minute ride to the South Ferry stop. In the ferry building was a PanAm restaurant where the waitresses wore uniforms just like Milly’s. Though he couldn’t afford it, he ate lunch there, just the lunch that Milly might be serving that very moment at an altitude of seven thousand feet. He tipped a quarter. Now, except for the token to take him back to the dorm, he was broke. Freedom Now.
    He walked along the rows of benches where the old people came to sit every day to look out at the sea while they waited to die. Birdie didn’t feel the same hatred for old people this morning that he’d felt last night. Lined up in helpless rows in the glare of the afternoon sun, they seemed remote, they posed no threats, they didn’t matter.
    The breeze coming in off the Hudson smelled of salt, oil, and rot. It wasn’t a bad smell at all. Invigorating. Maybe if he had lived centuries ago instead of now, he’d have been a sailor. Moments from movies about ships flitted by. He kicked an empty Fun container out through the railing and watched it bob up and down in the green and the black.
    The sky roared with jets. Jets heading in every direction. She could have been on any of them. A week ago what had she said, “I’ll love you forever.” A week ago?
    “I’ll love you forever.” If he’d had a knife he could have carved that on something.
    He felt just great. Absolutely.
    An old man in an old suit shuffled along the walk, holding on to the sea railing. His face was covered with a thick, curly, white beard, though his head was as bare as a police helmet. Birdie backed from the rail to let him go by.
    He stuck his hand in Birdie’s face and said, “How about it, Jack?”
    Birdie crinkled his nose. “Sorry.”
    “I need a quarter.” A foreign accent. Spanish? No. He reminded Birdie of something, someone.
    “So do I.”
    The bearded man gave him the finger and then Birdie remembered who he looked like. Socrates!
    He glanced at his wrist but he’d left his watch in the locker as it hadn’t fit in with today’s all-white color scheme. He spun round. The gigantic