The new apartment consisted of a single room the size of a small warehouse: solid-wood desk and table, low-slung black leather chairs, filing cabinets, the playpen of the bed. Unlike our previous habitats, it had personality. It was butch. Unsmiling, hygienic, and butch. The man who lived here would have definite elixir theories about his yogurts, his knee bends, his nudist vacations. Well—whatever—now’s the time, one would have thought, for Tod and me to kick off our shoes and get the feel of the place. But no. We had our own personality question to straighten out. And in the second cab, heading east, seeing the personnel, those who are faceless, and those who are all face, all hair and gesture, I wondered if everyone needed new identities when they came to New York. Or was it just us. Just him. Not “Tod,” not any longer. The name on the bell, the name on the door, the name on the envelopes under the table lamp: they said John Young, John Young, John Young. Scraps of paper, issuing from the city, came twirling in through the cab window. We healed them with our doctor’s hands and placed them about our person. Letters, membership cards, bills, receipts. All said John Young. What else was out there? Cars, of course. Of course cars. Cars, cars, cars, as far as the eye could see.
Next stop was the ID parlor, the identity basement, deep down, and hard on the senses, with that sharp dry-cleaner heat and, further back, the padded shunting, the press and release of enslaved machinery. We dealt with a wised-up kid, a specialist, an urban idiot savant, who wore a thimblelike monocle. At one point, early on, this kid was counting out money and saying something like, you haven’t got a choice there and if you don’t like it you can shop around, when we said, in a voice I’d never heard before, a voice that no longer pretended to be nice, a voice that expressed all the effort of pretending to be nice for so long, ” Tod Friendly’? What the fuck kind of name is that?”
“There,” said the kid. “Clean.”
We had to keep going away and coming back again. The basement stall got harder and harder to find our way out of. We tried to eat. We fished stuff out of the trash cans in Washington Square Park, a sandwich, an apple intact but for the missing bite, then to the Superette for nickels and dimes. Time passed. Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are. Until this final exchange.
“Well then,” we said, with perhaps inappropriate bitterness, as the kid handed over our new papers, plus a whole ton of money. “I’m at your mercy.”
“Double,” he said.
“You tell me.”
“I hope he told you how it goes on this same-day shit. At a weekend.”
“Good.”
“Yeah. From the Reverend.”
“You’re expecting me. My name is John Young.”
And that was it. My name is John Young.
The longest day, it really was the longest day ever. Already the train ride seemed years distant, like Wellport, like old age. But John Young couldn’t sleep. With its sounds of many cars and few birds, dawn faded. And John Young lay there, wanting fear to be over. Over … I thought of the chess players in the park, where we sat for so many hours, the chess players, more various by far than the pieces they wielded (the players not erect, not regulated, but mumbling, shambling, rhomboid). Each game, it’s true, begins in disarray and goes through episodes of contortion and cross-purpose. But things work out. All that scowl and elbow and tenseness of posture, all that agony—it works out. One final tug on the white pawn, and perfect order is restored; and the players at last look up, smiling and rubbing their hands. Time will tell, and I put my trust in time, absolutely. As do the chess players, of course, every move legitimated by the slapped clock.
Thank God. He’s out. Like a baby. Though naturally I’m still here: even in the darkness I keep a watch upon the world. Sometimes—now, for instance—I look down on Tod, on John, as a mother might (mother night), and try to find hope in the innocence or neutrality of his sleep.