He wasn’t going to die. He knew that. Didn’t he? The streets at that moment safer than they’d been in years, and he was never more than thirty feet from the door of a building, though the physical insistence of the storm was extraordinary, fire-hose-level insistent. Since his last step he’d been suffocated, encased in Styrofoam, buried alive, disinterred, drawn and quartered, plunged whole into an icy lake, battered by shovels, whipped and spun and trampled and given a righteous slap on the ass to get the lungs fired up again, and when he ventured forth another tenuous step into the void, perhaps following John in a northernward direction, perhaps charting his own new trail west to the Hudson, matters of velocity and heading having been delegated to the murky realm of telepathy and Tarot, cardinal points having become remnants of a lost age, he had the sense that he very well could be stepping off a cliff. On the upside, he was pretty sure that the mental patient chasing them wouldn’t be faring any better.
Well, he was mostly right about that. The counterman from the Cosmic, who, with all the precision of an inadequately tranquilized rhino, had come weaving across the hospital lobby at John, plowing into chairs, flattening a revolving wire stand of reproductive health brochures, his bruised brain a tangle of sparking wires that resolved into carbonized, half-formed curses, many of which, if salvaged, might have proved innovative, even poetic, packed as his quiver was with a broad spectrum of linguistic twists and cultural biases, and had, bummer for him, caught the attentions of the off-duty cop, Mr. Mustache, Officer Kissler when on the beat, not just another stick of lobby furniture to be trashed by our mercury-tongued counterman as he prepared to sing his polyphonic aria of profanities, which had begun with the aforementioned silently intoned Motherfucker but that, afterburners alight, would soon enough soar to the perilous heights from which the terminator becomes a haw closing over the land and sea, exposing in the wake of the shadow’s blade all the voices of all the peoples, amplified by the shimmering black glass of the sky, an anthem of curses and blasphemies rising from the surface, funneled through the raw red throat of this prophet, humble diner employee, head wound victim, who had only just formed the word Horse in his cottony mouth when Officer K. stuck out one Bates steel-toe three-quarter patrol boot and brought him down hard. A knee in his spine, left arm in wrench-lock hold, the counterman wriggled and tried to throw the bastard off, but the officer gave a little tug and his shoulder socket became a fiery ring and he cut that shit out but fast.
John and my father, having fled before the takedown, had plunged into the storm like a couple of foxes diving for lemmings and didn’t know they’d been saved, so their antagonist existed at that moment in the pseudo-quantum state of lying in forced prone restraint position on the filthy linoleum back at Roosevelt while simultaneously pursuing the two of them in the snow, if only in their imaginations—though their shared belief that at any moment a pair of iron hands would pincer their shoulders and they’d be in short order eating their own teeth must count as a shade of reality in which the counterman’s existence was as real as the genuine article’s. My father would have something to say about the third and fourth state of the counterman’s existence, the one here, in these pages, and the one there, in his pages, but if you really want to play around in the garden of meta, try The Horseshoe Crab or his first one, El El Narrows. (It’s 1968, Mexico, and el-el protagonist tartamudo, Duo—the el el additionally a play on the 
of Longshore Laredo, the U.S. company pouring funds into the Dirty War—hamstrung by his tripping tongue, has ceased talking and is instead writing a bildungsroman, protagonist of which is a character named Duo. Halfway through El El Narrows [coincidentally, also the title of Duo’s novel], writer Duo is shot by a soldier on a dark street, in a neighborhood colloquially known as Los Estrechos, the Narrows. In the closing pages, which come quite early, we learn that it was Duo’s own brother, Salmar, who pulled the trigger. Duo’s novel is left unfinished, another unfertilized egg destined for the frying pan. I digress, but you get a sense of what I’m dealing with.)
My father had lost sight of the younger, swifter companion as soon as they’d hit the open air, and he’d trudged dutifully down the hospital’s arcing driveway and into the street, where it seemed possible that the snow might be shallower. He’d turned right, to what he felt assured was the north, and had been staggering blindly, with every step expecting said cliff, when a dark form appeared at his elbow. In his fright, he pitched face-first into the snow, his shoes carving channels, and he flopped around in the powder, his sweater failing to forestall the avalanche up his torso while his pants committed the same act of betrayal on his nethers.
Oh mother of Christ, he shouted around a mouthful of snow, and rolled onto his back, where at least he might be able to fend off the attack with some sort of pawing/kicking action, and it was from that position that he made out a familiar beard, a hat, and an extended glove, which grabbed his hand and hoisted him up. It was John, of course, who’d been right there all along.
You’re going the wrong way, John yelled through his scarf.
Yes! my father shouted back. Am I?
John possessed a couple of preternatural physical talents, one of which was an instinctual connection to the earth’s magnetic fields, which granted him an ability to navigate perfectly under any circumstances (the other was hawk-like eyesight; on a planar stretch of Nevada highway, he could read a billboard at two and a half miles), and his gut told him thataway to the Apelles. I wonder now if John, like a chess piece, was capable only of certain proscribed movements that night; if perhaps his directional gift was nothing more than an expiration date. Looking into the past, aren’t we all chess pieces? Why shouldn’t the same hold true when we look into the future?
Together they trudged northward, and after a couple of blocks unmolested by the counterman, they assumed he had surrendered to the blizzard. My father arrived back at the Apelles around 2:00 a.m. John, who made a detour, arrived around 3:00 a.m.
The timeline is what allows me to see clearly through the aged panes of wobbled glass, straight through to that night. Sure, temporal triangulation is an analgesic, a distraction from this ragged sack of retrospection I’m dragging along the concrete behind me. But the precise timing, everyone’s movements that night executed as if according to an exquisite plan—we were even then a complication, each one of us a gear locked in rotation with all the rest, marching forward in conjunction, pausing, marching forward, pausing, none of us any more or less culpable than any other. Just a grand machine executing a design.
30.
Do you remember Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1913, caused a real ruckus at the Armory Show? It was one of my mother’s favorites. It is one of my favorites because of Duchamp’s precise expression of superposition, of the possibility of multiple physical states occupying the same position at the same time—the nude not at the top and bottom of the staircase simultaneously but possibly in either place, or somewhere in between—it fills me with hope. The nude is both everywhere and nowhere. I’ve come to understand that if my perception could be altered, I might be able to see exactly where she is, which is to say: everywhere. Perhaps then I might be able to see where I am. A fundamental truth of my life, probably obvious to you by now, is that I have never been able to determine my own position.