by Joseph Wallace

Kara and I lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on East 85th Street back then, a grimy fifth-floor walk-up in a crumbling prewar brick building. Each morning we watched the lawyer who lived in the next apartment head off to work, fat and happy in his pinstriped suit. At night, we would listen to him moan as the women he brought home beat him, the sound of the blows coming through the wall like bass notes from music played too loud.

Men in dark jeans and hooded sweatshirts roamed the roofs of the buildings across the street, searching for an open hatchway or a window left ajar below. At first, when they saw me watching, they would take off, running and leaping across the rooftops. But then they got used to my presence, glancing across the street as if expecting to see me watching.

Once one of them caught my eye and waved, raising a casual hand in a gesture that I read as complicity. But the first time Kara and I went away for the weekend, someone broke into our apartment, climbing from the roof of our building in through a window I had forgotten to unlock.

The burglar ransacked our closets, scattered our food across the floor, ripped through our pillows and mattress as if infuriated to discover that we owned nothing of value. He left behind a comb, a stub of a cigarette, and one perfect handprint in grease on our bedsheet. When we pointed this out to the cops, suggesting that it might yield an identifiable fingerprint, they laughed at us. "Call if one of you gets murdered," they said. "Then maybe we'll start lifting fingerprints."

Hungry for a breath of open air, we would walk to a small concrete park perched high above the East River. Steel-gray and turbulent, the tidal river flowed in angry eddies past concrete channel markers and rocky islands, carrying garbage-laden barges and small pleasure boats and clots of unidentifiable junk along with it.

We were looking down at the river when I noticed a small motor yacht acting strangely. It was tacking back and forth, fighting the currents, slewing dozens of feet side to side for every yard of progress it made downriver.

As the boat drew closer, I could see one man behind the wheel and another perched on its bow. The one in the bow was grasping the rail with his left hand and wielding a long boat hook with his right. Again and again he would dip the hook into the water, then draw it back, empty.

"What is he, whaling?" Kara asked.

"Maybe he dropped something, and he's trying to get it back," I said.

As I spoke, we both saw that the man was, in fact, trying to hook some large object floating in the choppy water. Long and waterlogged, it kept slipping off the hook and spinning away. Then the boat would tack and the man would heft the hook, waiting for another try.

I stared at the object, trying and failing to resolve its elongated shape into something recognizable. But Kara had no such problem.

"It's a body," she said.

As soon as she spoke, I realized she was right. It was the corpse of a man wearing dark pants and a white shirt. He floated face down, arms spread out from his sides, the back of his head breaking the surface of the gray water like a lost ball. I saw that his feet were bare and found myself thinking, absurdly, how dangerous it was to go barefoot in New York City.

The man on the boat made another effort, hooking the drowned man around the waist and pulling back hard. The body began to rise from the river, water streaming off the white shirt in silver rivulets that gleamed in the sunlight. But then the head dipped down in a bow, and once again the corpse escaped the hook.

The boat tacked in pursuit, but that wasn't what interested me. I was staring down at the drowned man, my mind alive with questions that would never be answered. Who was he? Had he committed suicide, jumping off one of the row of bridges that lay just upriver? Or had he been murdered? Had his killers thrown him into the water, not caring if he was found, or did the river work the body free from some supposedly permanent resting place?

Had anyone reported him missing? Would anyone mark his death, or was he just another John Doe, destined to be buried out in Potter's Field?

How long had he been dead? At what point would a body sink of its own accord? How would immersion in the frigid water affect decomposition? How much did he weigh now, and what did that weight feel like on the end of a boat hook?

And one overriding question, the most important one, paramount in this young writer's mind: How can I use what I'm seeing?

Someone grabbed my arm, turned me from the scene down below. It was a slim young woman in jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt. An infant lay sleeping in a stroller at her feet.

The woman was weeping, her cheeks flushed, her eyes red from grief and anger. "I don't understand you," she said. "That's a person down there, not a thing. But I see you staring down like you just don't care."

Her fingers dug into my arm. "I don't understand you," she said again. "How can you bear to watch?"

I shook off her hand and turned back to the scene below, knowing that the answer to that question, at least, was easy.