Free Ninety Days by Bill Clegg Page A

literary agency had been. I don’t say anything to Luke, but as I head toward home that night I think, I won’t tell Jack and I’ll just get it over with.
    The next day, I grab my little blue and red knapsack and head up Sixth. The store is a combination pawnshop and rug showroom. It’s huge and dark with great piles of carpets rising from the dusty floors and spider plants withering in the window. As I wait for someone to come out from behind the piles of rugs to help me, I imagine how many unseen rooms like this exist in the city, spaces behind doors I’ll walk by a thousand times and never see. Since coming back, I’ve been amazed by how little I’d noticed before. Streets I’d walked on for ten years and never saw what was on them: pink town houses, eighteenth-century synagogues, ceramic shops, spectacular doorknobs, Italian bookshops. As with so much, I had been aware of so little off my narrow path or outside my own limited world. And there are so many worlds—fashion, academia, real estate, dance, education, firefighting, finance, advertising—each feeling, I imagine, like the center of the universe. All these separate and self-contained worlds making up entire cities within the city, coursing alongside and invisible to one another. How is this occurring to me for the first time? I wonder. How small my life and the world it happened within both seem now. What I know: book publishing, restaurants that serve vodka, crack dealers and crack dens. Bookstores, literary agencies, rug-strewn, book-crammed living rooms of editors and authors; gloomy apartments where people smoke themselves into shaky shadows, these I know. And now there are all the meeting rooms where I go each day and the diners and coffee shops we descend on in packs after. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are the rooms for sex addicts and crystal meth addicts and debtors, and the rooms for all the people who love them—a whole empire of rooms filling regularly, every hour of every day and with no one paying or getting paid to be there. Invisible cities, invisible rooms we pass by until by way of desperation or desire or ultimatum they are revealed to us. Like this room—a dusty cavern with spider plants, Persian rugs, and now a knapsack filled with silver.
    A middle-aged man with a trim beard, dark skin, and a bright, singsong voice comes out and says hello and can he help me. I unpack the silver and after he’s inspected each ingot and coin he pulls out a calculator and begins to elegantly tap the keys until, after a minute or two, he turns the face of the gadget to me and on its screen is a figure just north of six thousand dollars. Nearly three months’ rent, I calculate, and right away, without pausing, I say, Deal.
    After he slowly writes out a detailed receipt and cuts me a check, I rush to the nearest Chase branch—the one at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street—and deposit it into my checking account. I go to the teller instead of an ATM, thinking the money will make its way into my account faster. I hand over the check, grab my second receipt of the day, and head toward the door. I enter the small vestibule that separates the inside of the bank from the street. I’ve been here before, hundreds of times—it’s the branch where Kate and I opened the business and client trust accounts for the agency—but suddenly I remember the last time I visited, over two months before, deep in the bender that landed me in the emergency room at Lenox Hill. I remember that I’d run out of drugs and exceeded my ATM limit for the day, so with passport and cash card in hand, I rushed to this branch. Rough from many sleepless nights and crashing from more than an hour without a hit, I withdrew three thousand dollars, stuffed it in the upper front pocket of my black Arcteryx jacket, and headed for the door. In my hurry I failed to notice that the zipper on the bottom of the pocket was unzipped, and when I stepped out of the bank into the