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ELEVEN

Item 1. One bunch alstroemeria. Do not buy these from the corner deli. They must be purchased from Val’s Bloomers on Twenty-Eighth Street. And do not substitute any other flower.

Eddie is standing on the sidewalk at West Third Street and Sixth Avenue with his Film Festival tote bag over one shoulder and no phone. He’s studying a crinkled street map of Manhattan, trying to figure out how to get to the first location on Cookie’s errand list, Val’s Bloomers, as the din of the city ricochets around him. He looks up the avenue toward Midtown, where skyscrapers gleam in the sun. Val’s is that way. Who needs a phone?

He passes a ragtag crowd at the public basketball courts, cheering and heckling a four-on-four basketball game. He passes a cabbie shouting a streak of elaborate curses at a jaywalker darting through traffic. He nearly trips over two dogs lunging at each other, tangling their leashes as their owners dance and tug to keep them apart. Clouds of fragrant smoke puff up from a kebab truck as an old man with a staticky bullhorn shouts about the end of days and a woman in a colorful headwrap hawking sunglasses from a folding table shakes her head in bemusement. Three teenage boys twirling Frisbees on their fingertips wait at the crosswalk next to a woman in a black abaya with gold stitching on the sleeves. A man in U.S. Navy whites dives into a cab, narrowly missing a pair of women in gray tank tops arguing about where to have lunch.

The people keep coming. They wear business suits and school uniforms and maxi dresses and Canadian tuxedos and hijabs and Mets caps and nuns’ habits and pajama tops and camo leggings and printed kurtas. They walk in sneakers, pumps, sandals, brogues, loafers, flip-flops, stilettos. They race uptown, saunter downtown, jog crosstown, change course on a speck. They spin, twist, step, and leap. Some shuffle, some sprint, some just stand. But they never seem to crash. It’s like they know one another, see one another, are one another, like everyone in New York is a single being. Everyone except Eddie, who hugs the edges of the buildings to stay out of the way. He wonders if he’ll ever learn the dance.

Give it time, Eddie.

Val’s Bloomers is easy to find with his crinkled map. The city’s grid up here makes much more sense than the cockeyed jumble of streets in Cookie’s neighborhood.

Before he enters, he takes a Polaroid of the storefront for Cookie, being sure to center the Val’s sign so she’ll know he really was there. Inside at the counter, he smiles at a woman in a daisy-print jumpsuit and points at the word alstroemeria on his list. “I need a bunch of these.”

“For Cookie?”

Eddie’s eyes widen. “How did you know?”

“Albert told me someone new would be picking these up,” she says. “You must be someone new.”

“I guess so,” Eddie says. “I’m Eddie.”

“Nice to meet you, Eddie, and before you ask, no. I’m not Val. Val died in the eighties. I never met her. Wait here.”

She ducks into the back. While she’s gone, Eddie scans the store and wonders about Val. He imagines her as a beautiful dark-skinned woman in a different daisy-print outfit, maybe a full, 1950s-style skirt and collared oxford. He pictures the day she assumed the lease on this shop, a slender storefront wedged between two much larger flower sellers. Her business is modest, but her customers are loyal, so she does well enough to make a little living. He sees her in a small workroom above the shop, a room that she’s converted into a little studio apartment, with flower-printed wallpaper, upholstery, carpet, bed linens, even towels. Every surface—table, counter—is crowded with vases filled with the fresh flowers that didn’t sell that day. She breathes air that’s always dense with the scents of roses and lilacs. A sportscaster on the crackly old radio calls a New York Yankees game as she eats raspberries from a bowl. He doesn’t see anyone else there, but she doesn’t seem lonely. She has friends, flowers. The image makes him feel contented, like a swaddle.

Snap back, Eddie. The jumpsuit woman is holding out a colorful bunch of blooms for you to take. “Last of the alstros today,” she is saying.

“Thank you.”

“I saved them for you. Well, I saved them for Cookie, but you know what I mean. Tell her to get better soon, would ya?”

Eddie smiles, pays eleven dollars and eighty cents, and leaves.

He hates the idea of carrying a bunch of flowers around the city—the way the bright blooms peek out the top of his tote bag feels conspicuous—but he soon sees that no one here is looking at him or his flowers at all. No one cares. Perfect. Next item.

Item 2. A two-pack of Viva paper towels from CVS on Fourteenth Street, on sale for ninety-nine cents.

This one’s easy. He retraces his steps back downtown to CVS, where he takes a photo of the doorway and buys the last two-pack of paper towels they have. Lucky again, even if they won’t fit in his tote.

Back on the sidewalk, he sees a pair of goth girls in thick makeup standing next to a fire hydrant, smoking. The hydrant is covered in neon graffiti, made even brighter by the girls’ black skirts and combat boots. It’s a great picture, he thinks. He decides to capture it for Cookie. He tucks the paper towels under his arm, then pops open the Polaroid and snaps, just as the two girls look over at him and wave. The camera whirrs and spits. Eddie retrieves the little plastic card, then looks back at the girls, who are flipping him off now. Embarrassed, he turns quickly and walks on.

Down the block, some distance from the girls, he looks down at the picture, and gasps.

The girls aren’t in the image at all. Instead, the photograph is centered on a boy about Eddie’s age, or a year or two older, standing in front of the fire hydrant. His jacket is boxy and cropped, his stovepipe trousers tapered to the ankles. His clothes are frayed, like they’ve been worn awhile, and his hair falls messily over his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He holds a hat in one hand, an old-fashioned porkpie that reminds Eddie of the hat on Cookie’s ceramic bulldog. But it’s his stare that takes Eddie’s breath. He’s looking straight at the camera with a half smile, a knowing expression, eyes piercing through the photograph and into Eddie’s own. Shining eyes, impossibly bright even in the sunshine, as if they are lit from within. Eddie’s never seen eyes like these, never felt eyes trained on him like this.

Except, you have seen these eyes before . Remember?

Eddie thinks back to the taxi at Port Authority. He thinks back to the photograph across from the fainting couch. Those were the same eyes. And now they are here, in this photograph.

But they can’t be. Can they? No.

He spins back toward the fire hydrant. The goth girls are still there, looking the other direction now. But the boy in the suit? Nowhere. Not at the hydrant, not up the block, not down the block. Nowhere.

Just then, a roar from underground, and a whoosh of air from the subway grate at his feet. The sudden wind catches the photograph and blows it into the traffic. Eddie watches it dance from car to car to car, until it flutters over a construction barrier and into an open manhole.

Eddie collects his breath. Maybe he imagined the boy in the photo, he thinks. Maybe it was just another imaginary moment. Nothing new.

Item 3. Two pieces of opera cake from Patisserie Gaston on Cornelia Street. DO NOT DELAY, they close at two p.m. If they have no opera cake left, get two eclairs. If no eclairs, two apricot tarts. If no apricot tarts, a package of Fig Newtons from the tobacco shop on Christopher.

Eddie instinctively reaches for his phone in his back pocket to check the time—is it two o’clock yet?—but of course his phone isn’t there. He looks around to see if he can spot a clock in a window or ask someone with a watch, but all he sees is a bit of graffiti, a message scrawled on the mailbox at the curb: It’s Later Than You Think .

Hurry up, Eddie. Hurry up.