What I Loved

them.
    When I looked up at the narrow building on East Fourth Street between Avenues A and B, I knew that I could walk away, that I could choose not to know anything more about these overgrown children and their small, sad lives. I chose to press the buzzer, chose to yank open the door on the first floor of that old tenement building, and chose to walk down the hallway, and I well understood that I was moving in the direction of something ugly. I was also aware that the ugliness pulled me toward it. I wanted to see what it was, to get close to it and examine it. The tug was morbid, and by giving in to it, I felt that the loathsome thing I was looking for had already stained me.
    I didn't plan to lie, but when the somnambulant young woman behind the desk raised her eyes to me, eyes that were shielded by red glasses with wings, and when I saw twenty Split World covers on the wall behind her, one of which featured Teddy Giles with blood dripping from his mouth and a spoon that held what looked like a human finger, I lied spontaneously. I told her I was a journalist for the New Yorker who was researching small alternative magazines for an article. I asked the young woman if she would explain Split World to me—its raison d'etre. I looked into the brown eyes behind the red wings. They were dull.
    "I don't know what you mean."
    "What the magazine is about, why it exists."
    "Oh," she said, pondering the question. "Are you going to quote me? The name is Angie Roopnarine. R-O-O-P-N-A-R-I-N-E."
    I took out my pen and notebook and inscribed Roopnarine in large letters on the paper. "For example," I continued. "Why the name? What's the split?"
    "I don't know. I just work here. You should probably talk to somebody else, only nobody's here right now. They're out at lunch."
    "It's five-thirty in the afternoon."
    "We don't open until noon."
    "I see." I pointed to the picture of Teddy Giles. "Do you like his art?"
    She craned to look at the cover. "It's all right," she said.
    I plunged into the heart of the matter. "They say he has an entourage, isn't that right? Mark Wechsler, Teenie Gold, a girl who calls herself Virgina, and a boy named Rafael who seems to be missing."
    Angie Roopnarine's body grew suddenly tense. "That's part of your article?"
    "I'm focusing on Giles."
    She squinted at me. "I don't know what you want. You seem kinda wrong to be writing about this stuff."
    "The New Yorker hires a lot of oldsters," I said. "You must know Mark Wechsler anyway," I said. "He worked here last summer."
    "Well, I can tell you, you've got that wrong. He never worked here. He hung around, okay? But Larry never paid him."
    "Larry?"
    "Larry Finder. He owns the magazine and a lot of others."
    "The gallery owner?"
    "It's no secret." The telephone rang. "Split World , " Angie sang into the phone, her voice suddenly animated.
    I nodded at her, mouthed a thank-you, and escaped. On the street, I took a deep breath to quiet the anxiety that had clamped itself around my lungs. Why lie? I said to myself. Had I lied out of some misguided impulse to protect myself? Maybe. Although I didn't construe my posing as a huge moral lapse, I felt both ridiculous and compromised as I walked westward away from the building. Discoveries about Mark had a tendency to fall into the negative category. He had not worked for Harry Freund last summer. He had not worked for Larry Finder at Split World either. Mark's life was an archaeology of fictions, one on top of the other, and I had only just started to dig.
    Violet had left several urgent messages on my machine for me to come upstairs as soon as I returned home. When she opened the door, she looked pale, and I asked her if she was okay. Instead of answering me, she said, "I have something to show you."
    She led me to Mark's room, and when I looked through the door, I saw that Violet had turned the place inside out. The closet door was open, and although clothes were still hanging inside, the shelves were bare. The floor was thick with papers, flyers, notebooks, and magazines. I also saw a box of toy cars, another with bent postcards, letters, and broken crayons. The drawers in Mark's desk had been removed and were lying in a row beside the boxes. Violet bent over one of them, picked up a red object, and handed it to me. "I found it inside a cigar box wrapped in masking tape."
    It was Matthew's knife. I looked down at its silver initials, M.S.H.
    "I'm sorry," Violet-said.
    "After all these years," I said, and began