Gone Tomorrow

window dressing only, and I didn’t want to spend a fortune. It was a tiny thing, in a big package made of tough plastic. I had the guy open it up with scissors. You can ruin your teeth on stuff like that. The stick came with a choice of two soft neoprene sleeves, blue or pink. I used the pink. Susan Mark hadn’t looked particularly like a pink type of woman, but people see what they want to see. A pink sleeve equals a woman’s property. I put the stick in my pocket next to my toothbrush and thanked the guy for his help and left him to ditch the trash.
    I walked two and a half blocks east on 28th Street. Plenty of people were behind me all the way, but I didn’t know any of them, and none of them seemed to know me. I went down into the subway at Broadway and swiped my card. Then I missed the next nine downtown trains. I just sat in the heat on a wooden bench and let them all go. Partly to take a break, partly to kill time until the rest of the city’s businesses opened up, and partly to check I hadn’t been followed. Nine sets of passengers came and went, and nine times I was all alone on the platform for a second or two. No one showed the slightest interest in me. When I was done with watching for people I started watching for rats instead. I like rats. There are a lot of myths about them. Sightings are rarer than people think. Rats are shy. Visible rats are usually young or sick or starving. They don’t bite sleeping babies’ faces for the fun of it. They’re tempted by traces of food, that’s all. Wash your kid’s mouth before you put it to bed and it’ll be OK. And there are no giant rats as big as cats. All rats are the same size.
    I saw no rats at all, and eventually I got restless. I stood up and turned my back on the track and looked at the posters on the wall. One of them was a map of the whole subway system. Two were advertisements for Broadway musicals. One was an official notice prohibiting something called subway surfing. There was a black-and-white illustration of a guy clamped like a starfish on the outside of a subway car’s door. Apparently the older stock on the New York system had toe boards under the doors, designed to bridge part of the gap between the car and the platform, and small rain gutters above the doors, designed to stop dripping water getting in. I knew the new R142As had neither feature. My crazy co-rider had told me so. But with the older cars it was possible to wait on the platform until the doors closed, and then jam your toes on the toe board, and hook your fingertips in the rain gutter, and hug the car, and get carried through the tunnels on the outside. Subway surfing. A lot of fun for some, maybe, but now illegal.
    I turned back to the track and got on the tenth train to pull in. It was an R train. It had toe boards and rain gutters. But I rode inside, two stops to the big station at Union Square.
    I came up in the northwest corner of Union Square and headed for a huge bookstore I remembered on 17th Street. Campaigning politicians usually publish biographies ahead of election season, and news magazines are always full of coverage. I could have looked for an internet café instead, but I’m not proficient with the technology and anyway internet cafés are much rarer than they were. Now everyone carries small electronic devices named after fruits or trees. Internet cafés are going the same way as phone booths, killed by new wireless inventions.
    The bookstore had tables at the front of the ground floor. They were piled high with new titles. I found the nonfiction releases and came up empty. History, biography, economics, but no politics. I moved on and found what I wanted on the back side of the second table. Commentary and opinion from the left and the right, plus ghosted candidate autobiographies with shiny jackets and glossy air brushed photographs. John Sansom’s book was about a half-inch thick and was called Always on a Mission . I took it with me and rode up on the escalator to the third floor, where the store directory told me the magazines were. I picked out all the news weeklies and carried them with the book to the military history shelves. I spent a moment there with some nonfiction publications and confirmed what I had suspected, which was that the army’s Human Resources Command didn’t do anything that the Personnel Command hadn’t done before it. It was a change of name only. A rebranding. No new functions. Paperwork and records, like