I Saw a Man Read Online Free Page A

two sitting alone at his desk? But above all Michael had known it wouldn’t last, and that’s why he’d given himself so willingly to his unlikely present, half expecting every day to wake and find it already transfigured into his past.
    For Nico and Raoul, BrotherHoods and its author became another disappointment in their lives, confirmation, as they’d always suspected, that the world was set against them. Michael tried to keep in touch with them, but with the appearance of the book their already diverging paths accelerated. While Nico served his time upstate and Raoul sat out his self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, Michael’s publisher sent him on a national book tour. In a series of events across the country, despite his uneasiness in front of an audience, Michael began to discover a public persona—a diffident, dry humour that journalists and publicists billed as “British.” On the underlying issues of the book, though, he was never anything other than serious. The title, he’d explain to smatterings of readers in Ohio and Carolina, and then again to capacity auditoriums in Los Angeles and Austin, referred to us all. Not just to Nico and Raoul and the territories over which they and their peers fought, but also to the cheek-by-jowl neighbourhoods of Manhattan, of America, the world. Look about you, he’d told them. These people and their stories are happening under your nose. Their story is our story. No man, woman, or child is an island. Yes, the book was about two young Dominican men in Inwood, but it was also, through them, about us all, about our ability to live close, and yet so far from one another.
    The audiences had nodded, applauded, and afterwards asked for Michael’s signature on the title page of the book. When the paperback was published he donated a percentage of his royalties to education projects in Inwood and Washington Heights. But still, every time he said his sentence about neighbourhoods, about living close and far, he knew he himself was moving further away from the brothers who’d first lent him their lives. As he’d moved across the country on his tour, from hotel to airport to university, so Nico and Raoul had moved, too. Nico from cell to refectory to exercise yard and back to his cell again. Raoul from his cousin’s bedsit in Pennsylvania to another in Albany, to the room of a girl he’d met on the street, to the couch of her friend. Within just a few months the years Michael had shared with the brothers had become undone, unravelled by the publication of his story about their time together.

―
    The last time Michael had heard Nico’s voice was on a collect call from his correctional facility upstate. Michael was finally moving back to London. His mother, widowed three years previously, was ill. BrotherHoods was due to be published in Britain. It was time for him to leave New York. If he stayed any longer he was worried it would never let him go. Although he’d found his voice in the city, and his story, to remain would have felt like treading water. New York had been about transition. Now that transition had been made, he wanted to move on, which, for a reason he couldn’t quite fathom, meant moving back.
    When the phone rang Michael had been on his knees among packing boxes and bubble wrap scattered across the floor of his Sullivan Street apartment. He’d accepted the call, but before Nico came on the line he’d flicked the phone to answering machine. He’d already spoken to Nico twice that week and he couldn’t take another stilted, awkward conversation. Not now, as he was preparing to leave. So instead he’d just listened, standing in his half-empty apartment, a fire truck’s siren insistent on Sixth, as the voice of a man he’d once known as a boy filled his living room.
    “Hey, Mikey?” Nico said. He sounded lost in a large space. His voice deep, but somehow shallow, too. “It’s me, Nico. You there? Man, it’s Nico, pick up.”

    Michael heard the clang of