Gone Tomorrow

pretending to be, and the woman with the stroller trundled on behind me. After that, a small crowd gathered, full of concern. New York’s hostile reputation is undeserved. People are generally very helpful. A woman crouched down next to me. Other people stood close and looked down. I could see their legs and their shoes. The guy in the leather jacket was flat on the floor, twitching with chest spasms and gasping desperately for air. A hard blow to the solar plexus will do that to a person. But so will a heart attack and any number of other medical conditions.
    The woman next to me asked, “What happened?”
    I said, “I don’t know. He just keeled over. His eyes rolled up.”
    “We should call the ambulance.”
    I said, “I dropped my phone.”
    The woman started to fumble in her purse. I said, “Wait. He might have had an episode. We need to check if he’s carrying a card.”
    “An episode?”
    “An attack. Like a seizure. Like epilepsy, or something.”
    “What kind of a card?”
    “People carry them. With instructions. We might have to stop him biting his tongue. And maybe he has medication with him. Check his pockets.”
    The woman reached out and patted the guy’s jacket pockets, on the outside. She had small hands, long fingers, lots of rings. The guy’s outside pockets were empty. Nothing there. The woman folded the jacket back and checked inside. I watched, carefully. The shirt was unlike anything I had ever seen. Acrylic, floral, a riot of pastel colors. The jacket was cheap and stiff. Lined with nylon. There was an inside label, quite ornate, with Cyrillic writing on it.
    The guy’s inside pockets were empty, too.
    “Try his pants,” I said. “Quick.”
    The woman said, “I can’t do that.”
    So some take-charge executive dropped down next to us and stuck his fingers in the guy’s front pants pockets. Nothing there. He used the pocket flaps to roll the guy first one way and then the other, to check the back pockets. Nothing there, either.
    Nothing anywhere. No wallet, no ID, no nothing at all.
    “OK, we better call the ambulance,” I said. “Do you see my phone?”
    The woman looked around and then burrowed under the guy’s arm and came back with the clamshell cell. The lid got moved on the way and the screen lit up. My picture was right there on it, big and obvious. Better quality than I thought it would be. Better than the Radio Shack guy’s attempt. The woman glanced at it. I knew people kept pictures on their phones. I’ve seen them. Their partners, their dogs, their cats, their kids. Like a home page, or wallpaper. Maybe the woman thought I was a big-time egotist who used a picture of himself. But she handed me the phone anyway. By that time the take-charge executive was already dialing the emergency call. So I backed away and said, “I’ll go find a cop.”
    I forced my way into the tide of people again and let it carry me onward, out the door, to the sidewalk, into the dark, and away.

Chapter 28
    Now I wasn’t that guy anymore. No longer the only man in the world without a cell phone. I stopped in the hot darkness three blocks away on Seventh Avenue and looked over my prize. It was made by Motorola. Gray plastic, somehow treated and polished to make it look like metal. I fiddled my way through the menus and found no pictures other than my own. It had come out quite well. The cross street west of Eighth, the bright morning sun, me frozen in the act of turning around in response to my shouted name. There was plenty of detail, from head to toe. Clearly huge numbers of megapixels had been involved. I could make out my features fairly well. And I thought I looked pretty good, considering I had hardly slept. There were cars and a dozen bystanders nearby, to give a sense of scale, like the ruler painted on the wall behind a police mug shot. My posture looked exactly like what I see in the mirror. Very characteristic.
    I had been nailed but good, photographically.
    That was for damn sure.
    I went back to the call register menu and checked for calls dialed. There were none recorded. I checked calls received, and found only three, all within the last three hours, all from the same number. I guessed the watcher was supposed to delete information on a regular basis, maybe even after every call, but had gotten lazy about three hours ago, which was certainly consistent with his demeanor and his reaction time. I guessed the number the calls had come in from represented some kind of