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feet off her bed. “What makes you think the world is ready for ‘the blond Duke Ellington’?” Before he could seriously explore this possibility, however, or investigate any other potential options open to him, his sister focused all attention on herself with an orgy of ill-chosen pharmaceuticals. As his parents’ sanity and already shaky union foundered, Clay had to wonder if poor departed Cynthia had it better than any of them.

Walking unsteadily from the bar, Clay saw that a pre-pubescent youth was holding a girl of indeterminate years at knife point against an attractive building on Columbus Avenue. This conclusion to the evening’s festivities seemed somehow fitting.
    Clay had never actually seen someone held at knife point. Instinctively he stopped to watch; a dull thudding filled his chest as he braced himself for bloodshed. He searched his mind for some dramatic plan of rescue, but what little control over his mental functions he had managed to retain after discovering the beautiful girl in the restaurant had evidently vanished with her.
    The boy, who must have been no more than thirteen, seemed a full-fledged product of the city’s harshest influences, and though the girl appeared to be little more than an urban consumer with limited charms, Clay found himself saddened at the sudden tenuousness of her future. “Hey,” he heard himself call feebly. The boy glanced over his shoulder with a smirk that reinforced Clay’s suspicions about his inability to meet the city’s standards of heroism. Then, as both he and the boy caught sight of a police car drawing slowly across Columbus Avenue, the pre-teen took his knife from the girl’s throat and bolted around a corner, leaving Clay to face her. With a toss of overly processed hair, she looked Clay up and down and then walked past him without a word. “That’s okay,” Clay murmured. “Nothing to it.”
    The remainder of his trip home was uneventful. Reaching his apartment, he unlocked the door with unsteady fingers and staggered onto his bed, yawning and stretching as he listened to the night’s telephone messages.
    â€œHow’s your progress, boy?” The first voice was his uncle’s. (Clayton’s brother Wynn had given Clay a month to come up with the outline of a project for a grant he’d scrambled up “to motivate the boy.” All that held things up was the slight matter of a theme: Clay was no closer to a topic than he’d been six months earlier when Wynn had first told him about the project. Not that the world would end if he forfeited the grant his uncle had arranged, Clay thought; the idea of someone giving him more money than he had already was too ludicrous to consider seriously.)
    Wynn was still trying to convince him that the whole thing was symbolic. “… just the push you need,” the voice droned on, “to do something of value with your life.” Clay sighed, stopping the machine before his uncle finished. “Right,” he said. “That’s probable.” That he might be of value to his ever-devoted parents, Wynn, the firm so busy seeing to the rights of famous addicts and deposed dictators on the loose was a winning concept, if one had a penchant for surrealism. He poured himself a modest cocktail and waited for inspiration to strike.
    The next thing he knew, his slumber was shattered by the shrill ring of the telephone. The voice of Charlene Watford, who hadn’t contacted him since he’d emigrated to New York, made the perfection of his evening complete.
    Since Charlene had made no effort to see him when she’d first come to the city, two scant months after his own arrival, Clay had presumed her new life in Manhattan was too streamlined to accommodate a rude intrusion from her past; clearly she wanted all traces of life in the slow lane erased from her resume. Her decision to relocate to New York had been as