Chapter One

Chapter 1



He crashed back into himself and felt the Easter evening damp. Dolls and chains hung in ritual fashion from the branches surrounding him, and through the knife-hacked oak trees he could make out great luminous spires and domes, and older, grim, but luxuriant blocks of apartments sealed with steel-plate louvers as if against attack. Beside these rose skeletal scaffoldings on which, judging from the hives of lights, whole families perched on open-air platforms while resourceful or desperate individuals dangled in slings and sacks suspended from guy wires. Across the sky, as though projected from behind the sulfur-tinged clouds, flashed pictograms and iridescent banks of hypertext. The word vitessawas repeated often . . . and slogans like efram-zev . . . the right mood at the right time.He felt hypnotized by the messages, information raining down like some new kind of radiation. Then there were streams of news images and giant flickering headlines . . . al-waqi‘a still a threat . . . voyancy links now halfprice. . . He’d been standing there for a long time, he thought, having woken suddenly by the fountain, amazed to find that his hair was long and so blond it almost seemed to glow in the dark.

It reminded him of a childhood story but he couldn’t pin it down. Then he realized that of much greater concern was that he couldn’t remember where he was. It was a park of some kind, a vast shadowy garden in some siren-filled city. But which one? He heard a voice . . . garbled and yet unnaturally clear, seeming to come from inside his head. I’ll take Manhattan. It was a man’s voice, both far away and far too close. What did that