I Saw a Man Read Online Free

his learning of their world was not always helpful. The police pressured him to give them leads, while the growing currency of his knowledge began to unnerve some of the older boys. Michael in the dark was one thing. Michael knowing too much was another thing altogether.

    The A train Michael took from SoHo up to Inwood followed the route of a Lenape hunting path that once traced the length of Manhattan’s forests and hills. One morning, as if he’d sensed a regeneration of that route’s purpose in Michael’s visits, Nico had called him on what he was doing. They were hanging out at their aunt’s apartment at the time, a studio high in the projects on Tenth Avenue.
    “ El tronco ’s a hunter, bro, I tellin’ you,” Nico said from the couch, speaking to Raoul but holding Michael’s eye. “Ain’t you, Mikey?” he continued, flicking a toothpick at him. “A lootin’ puta. Ain’t that you? Jus’ divin’ on us wrecks up here.”
    Michael laughed it off at the time, but for a few seconds he’d felt the air tighten between them. Not so much because of the threat in Nico’s voice, but because they all knew, whether intentionally or not, what he’d said was true.
―
    Five years after first meeting Nico and Raoul in their case-worker’s office, Michael published BrotherHoods. He’d hoped the book would help the brothers, but it didn’t. HBO bought their life rights, for $25,000 each. They said they wanted to make a series. That they wanted to use their characters to build a long-running franchise. Box sets, advertisements on the sides of city buses. But nothing came of it. For a brief period the two of them basked in their newfound notoriety. But in the end the attention, the money, fanned their troubles more than doused them. As the book became the talked-of publication in Manhattan, Nico, its central character, began a sentence upstate for unlawful possession of a firearm. Raoul, in trouble with a dealer and without his brother’s protection, went to stay with a cousin in a one-bed in Pennsylvania. At the same time as they left the city, readers across Manhattan were being introduced to them. On subway trains, park benches, under duvets by the light of bedside lamps. Throughout New York and beyond—in Vermont, San Francisco, across the whole country—students on college lawns, commuters on trains, middle-aged couples on sofas were all embarking on the small tragedies of the brothers’ lives.

    Within weeks of publication Michael was receiving requests for interviews and to appear on talk shows. The New York Times, which had once run his pieces, now ran a profile on him instead. While he was researching and writing the book he’d neglected his personal life. Although he’d begun a couple of relationships, none of them had withstood the intensity of his research, nor his split existence at each end of the island. Increasingly his thoughts had been taken up with the brothers, and then with the writing of the book, with their lives in its pages. For five years he’d lived not just alongside Nico and Raoul, but also often through them, his own life becoming a shell of routine and observation. Now, though, on the other side of the book’s publication, women suddenly seemed available to him. He was thirty-five and single, and had been anointed by New York success. He started seeing his publicist. Then there’d been a Dominican journalist. Her interview with him had been challenging, even aggressive. But afterwards she’d invited him to dinner and they’d soon become a couple. When that had eventually ended, in the weeks following a reading at Columbia, Michael had gone home with not one but two of the students who’d been in the audience.

    He was aware of the clichés he was living, of how predictable it looked. But, he told himself, he wasn’t harming anyone, and wasn’t this, perhaps, part of what he’d earned during those three years of riding the A train the length of the island and then another