I noticed the synagogue on Eighth Avenue for the first time today as we took the baby to the doctor for her shots. A vast building with stained glass and a Star of David perched atop the cupola, stark in the white winter sky. I felt foolish for not having noticed it before. This is our neighborhood.

A minute later, a thin woman pushing a stroller smiled at us and stopped.

"Excuse me," she said. "Is there a synagogue near here somewhere?"

Lightning flashed and thunder rolled and the snow fell relentlessly tonight.

The Enterprise - 27

Though we had no money coming in, the Product appeared to be resonating with a certain audience. At long last Tony, the operations guy out west, provided to us a simple reporting interface where we could track usage and even scrutinize individual user sessions.

The traffic growth was thrilling to observe. It burbled in the single and low double digits in the weeks around the soft launch - mostly reflecting the false activity of internal testing. Then it spiked one day - 347! Three hundred and forty-seven. Such a hopeful number. Expansive. A fat and happy number. Looking at it was like watching the sun burst through the clouds. It seemed to signify nothing less than the approbation of the cold and fickle world outside. From that momentous day on it kept rising in fits and starts, sometimes modestly, sometimes in bewildering leaps. Weekends seemed particularly busy, as were the hours from about 3 pm to dinnertime.

When you clicked the link for each day's total users you descended a level deeper to find transcripts of each session. There they all were, uniquely identified by long strings of random letters and numbers; mysterious, authentic, the surreptitious record of every interaction everyone had ever had with it. The Product. There were thousands of them, page after page after page. You had the feeling you'd stumbled upon a new world. Except it was your world all along.

I clicked a link. Here's what it showed:

Input: faggot
Output: Hello! I'm pleased to meet you. How may I help you?

Input: faggot
Output: That's a bad word. I know about sports! Ask me for the latest scores.

Input: faggot faggot faggot faggot faggot
Output: You really do have a foul mouth. Would you like to play a game?

Input: DIE FAGGOT DIE
Output: That's not a particularly nice thing to say.

I clicked another.

Input: sexy
Output: Hello! I'm pleased to meet you. How may I help you?

Input: ur sexy
Output: That's an interesting thing to say.

Input: thas cuz i m inrested in fukking u
Output: Me?

Input: fuckk my rear
Output: Your what?

Input: i wan u 2 stik ur metal cock n my ass
Output: You want me to what your what? I can show you news and weather.

Input: fuk me u HOTT ROBOT
Output: That's very flattering, but I'm not in the mood right now. Would you like to use my dictionary?

I looked over a few more. With few exceptions, the interactions tended to gravitate closely around either of two themes: highly profane abuse – often savagely racist and/or homophobic – and extremely explicit petitions for sex. In many cases both were present in a single interaction.

As the baby lay in her crib staring at a mobile, and I sat in the glider with a guitar, I watched a man and a woman in their living room across the street and down the block. The man approached the window. A flash went off.

It's curious that the Tucson shooting is being described as an assassination. If that's what it was - if Jared Loughner had meant to kill Gabrielle Giffords - why did he shoot all those other people? His lunacy is to blame, obviously, you might say. But John Hinkley was crazy, too. (Consider how far backward we've gone in the time between Hinkley and his handgun and Loughner and his semiautomatic - what an insult to Brady and the effort that bore his name, what a joke!) I get a sense that everyone else was shot just because Loughner could shoot them. That was the elemental calculation in his unsound mind. And why could he shoot them? Because he had the right gun, and the right amount of bullets. It may sound reasonable to say, "Guns don't kill people, people do," but here's what an insane person thinks when they've committed to killing someone: "This gun wants to kill people. And I'm going to let it."

The Enterprise - 26

There was an aura of renewed conviction in the workplace as the cold, new millenium began in earnest. In Brett's absence, Tom had inherited the dev team. He managed quietly, without bluster or fanfare. His charges responded in kind. Everyone seemed content to labor incrementally on prosaic tasks, tip-tapping away as the radiators hissed.

There remained a disruptive, manic force in our midst: Robyn. She came in late and left early, but while she was there she made her mark. Rushing around the office with a box cutter. Purple hair in a pony tail. Running for the ringing phone. Scolding us for one thing or the other.

She was a musician, like many others in the office. She'd been hired at Mr. Fun's recommendation – they knew each other from before. He told me how he approached her about it.

"I call her up and say, 'Hey. There's a job for you, maybe.' She says, 'OK, what?' 'Office manager. You can type, right?' 'I can type.' OK, she can type. So I ask her, 'How's your head these days?' She assures me. She says she's better now."

"Better now?" I asked.

"She assured me."

One day we received an email from her. The subject line read: Bathroom procedure. The body read as follows:

After you're done doing whatever it is you do, you'd best be deploying some of that lemony-fresh Lysol or whatever the fuck it is. Have a little compassion for your fellow man or woman. These are close quarters in which we live.

Best,

R.

Upon reading this, Bob marched directly into the bathroom. Immediately, the white noise of contents under pressure being released into the atmosphere was audible through the door. It went on for an unnervingly long time – ten seconds, maybe. A pause. And then it began again. Another pause. And again, longer this time. By now the sickly sweet deodorizer, a complicated formulation of synthetic scents suggestive of mountain mists and gently rotting flora, was seeping into the room, eye watering, oppressive. Bob finally emerged, slammed the door, and returned to his cubicle.

Shoveling Snow at Night

I went out to shovel late at night, the snow all up and down the walk all soft and crystalline. I thought I must be alone; this is one of those things you do, you're all alone. But a cab was idling at the light up on the corner. I imagined the back door flying open, a passenger scrambling out, skittering on the packed ice in his dress shoes. With a gun. The cab departed silently. I put my shoulder down, hit the blade on a crack.

Another car, an SUV, pulled up from Seventh Street. A man got out the passenger side and walked up to a nearly identical car parked by the corner.

"Good morning," he said.

"Morning."

He, too, drove away.

In the distance, north on Prospect Park West, there was something going on. Blue and red lights pierced the lamplit snow. A few minutes later an ambulance drifted by on its dismal errand. That's about when I was done. I threw out one last handful of salt, kicked my boots against the wall and went inside.

America: the country that loves guns and hates profanity.

The Enterprise - 25 - What Goes Through Your Mind?

"What goes through your mind?" howled biz dev Lisa from the middle of the floor. She was brandishing the day's New York Times high above her head. "What goes through your mind?!"

We looked up at her mutely, hands prone over our keyboards.

"What goes through your mind when you get off the elevator?" She gazed around at us lividly. "When you get off the elevator every damn morning and you step over the goddamned newspaper without picking it up?!"

Had I ever even seen it, at the threshold? And if I had, what did I think? I searched my conscience. Vaguely, I remembered noticing it once. If I was at all tempted to pick it up it was covetously – that shameful, queasy feeling you get when you see something of value unattended. The infantile impulse to take. But not me. I'm a civilized man. I know the line between what's mine and what's not mine. That's not my news. I tiptoed around it as if it were a sleeping baby. And never gave it another thought. Eventually, it now occurred to me, I no longer saw it at all.

"Well think next time!" Lisa demanded, and released the Times so it fell flat on the floor with a thwap! She paused briefly, hands akimbo, then brusquely turned away with a sigh of disgust. The paper remained there, conspicuous, accusatory, for the remainder of the day, the guileless smile of the newly installed George W. Bush somehow serving as a reproach.

This was the day of our first Christmas party, for which an entire Mexican restaurant had been rented for the evening. David had recommended the place. He knew someone who ran it, or owned it, or tended bar. Something.

"Did I tell you guys about the mango margaritas?" he asked from his partition.

"Yes," answered Steve.

"You have to try the mango margaritas."

Sam was in the office for the occasion. I spotted him sitting crosslegged on the floor between Julie and Lisa. A few others had gathered around him, some sitting on desks, some leaning on cubicle walls. They listened intently, nodding, laughing when they were meant to laugh, looking down at him with veneration.

"I think we can take on the big providers!" Sam proclaimed. "We are in possession of a media property. We can take on the Disneys, we can take on the AOLs. Don't think we can't!"

Nods all around.

"Content consumption is changing," he continued. "We're the leading edge. I'm telling you." He peered over his glasses and fixed his audience with a pointed stare. "And you are the team that's going to make it happen!"

A flurry of self-conscious giggles rippled through the gallery.

"I'm not kidding. Don't sell yourselves short! You're the ones. You're the ones right here, right now. This time – now – belongs to you!"

The impromptu lecture ended with more nods, smiles and coos of agreement. Finally everyone returned to their desks and Sam continued to wander the room, joking, backslapping, dropping to a knee for an earnest interaction with this or that employee. He only ever entered his office to put on his coat to leave.

We walked to the restaurant in loose groups reflecting a combination of team affiliation, desk proximity and other, vaguer kinship. When the cold air struck outside it suddenly seemed inappropriate, unprofessional even, to discuss work. Jokes were made. Our language drifted further into the vernacular, sometimes the profane. We were intoxicated ahead of our inebriation.

In the warm glow of the restaurant, decorated by Christmas lights and tinsel, everyone looked different. There was something open, unprotected, in their faces.

The expense of a DJ had not been spared for the occasion. He worked his turntables diligently, holding one side of his headphones to his ear, and selected deliberately from crates containing hundreds upon hundreds of records. He had the sober bearing of someone who worked in life-or-death; an anaesthesiologist, an airline pilot. Boom! Bap! Boom! Bap! went the music. Some swayed shyly on the periphery of the floor. Only Neil and his wife danced, a bit imperiously, and awkwardly, adapting a North Jersey two-step to the hip hop. From the speakers, a command alternated with a warning: Shake ya ass! But watch yaself!

People drank, and laughed, and, red-faced, shouted into each other's ears above the din. Is this who they all really were? Or were they now somebody else?

Sam called everyone to the bar for a toast. He raised his glass and saluted us all for our efforts, assuring us that success and its glorious rewards were well within reach. He toasted the West Coast team in absentia. And then he remembered something else he had to say, something more important yet.

"One other thing. Can I make sure I have everyone's attention? Everyone?"

The room quieted down.

"I want to make sure we celebrate the incredibly hard work of Brett Morgan. He gave so much to bring us where we are today."

I turned to Tom and whispered, "Is he dead?"

"No, no," Tom replied quickly.

"Brett, wherever you are right now," Sam continued, gazing at an arbitrary point on the pressed-tin ceiling as though he'd located Brett's astral body, "know that we are thinking of you."

"Is he locked up in a mental home?" I asked Tom.

"No, no, no."

"Then what?"

Tom made that grimace I would come to know so well. "He's taking a little time off."

"Cheers, Brett. Get well," Sam concluded solemnly, and we all raised our glasses, in silence this time, and drank again.

Often the baby agonizes for something and it's impossible to know what it is. When she's prone, protected, warm and fed, when all that's left to do is to relax, to bask, she'll suddenly stiffen and jut out her legs, as though straining for something unattainable. And then she'll cry.

When she looks in my eyes I'm convinced she knows something I don't know. For all her inarticulate burbles and cries she somehow seems more wise.

The Enterprise - 24

My roommate Sean had lapsed into a deep depression. Every night I'd find him in his customary spot on the couch, gazing torpidly at the TV, a Camel Light between his fingers. He used to be all right. What happened?

He used to have a job. As an assistant to a TV producer, a friend of his. The job was supposed to be cool. It was supposed to be easy. He was invited to submit ideas for shows, even, if he ever had some. To maybe do some voiceover. Who knows, a little acting. If he wanted to. He was a born talent. An adept and instinctual performer. But he froze on the spot.

One late afternoon his boss, his friend, called me up. His voice was strained with dread.

"Do you know where Sean is?"

"No."

"He never showed up today."

"You called him?"

"No answer."

Of course we were both certain that he'd entered some fugue state, that he'd run away to die. That whatever he'd done, he'd done emphatically, once and for all, preempting all hand-wringing and palliative platitudes. It was an affront, a powerful gesture. A familiar figure gone precipitously absent gains an aura of solemn authority, as though already peering at us from the Great Beyond. I felt angry, scared. Ashamed.

When I got back home he was asleep on the couch.

"What? Jesus, what fucking time is it?" he mumbled drowsily.

"It's six something. Seven."

"Jesus fuck. Godammit. Must've slept all day."

"Artie's looking for you."

"Really? Fuck. Godammit." He sat upright now, rubbing his forehead.

"You should really call him."

"Jesus. What time is it?"

"I told you six forty-five."

"Oh yeah. Sorry. Right." He reached out to the coffee table, plucked a cigarette out of the pack, and placed it between his lips. He sparked his lighter once, twice, a third time before it lit. He took a long, deep drag and life resumed.

The Enterprise - 23

At around 12:30 – on days when there was no catering – the problem of lunch arose. We were doubly cursed with myriad options and the means to afford them all. We drifted in and out of habits, solitary and communal, seeking some unattainable peak of petty pleasure. We thought we craved a terminal state of satisfaction. What we really craved was any terminal condition at all. We should all have trundled in to work with baloney and mustard on Wonder Bread, carrot sticks, a bruised Mac and Devil Dogs in a black metal lunchbox. Then we might have been happy. Instead we wandered Chelsea or paged through the takeout pile.

There was a vegetarian restaurant on Union Square called Zen Flesh. They specialized in fussy assemblages of grain, greens and indeterminate protein, accompanied by cloyingly sweet dipping sauces and dressings. Seitan was often in evidence. The dishes arrived in cardboard boxes. You'd open them to find what looked like a handful of twigs, dirt, dead leaves and gravel drizzled with a zigzag of marmalade. It'd cost you ten bucks, twelve with tip. For some reason we ordered from them again and again and again. Until suddenly we stopped. No one said a word. We just stopped ordering food from Zen Flesh.

Many times we walked to Sunshine Falafel, a hole in the wall on 17th. The man behind the counter did nothing but make perfect falafel sandwiches, one after the other, for hours and hours, his wife beside him at the till. The line extended thirty feet down the block. He never looked up, never looked at you. He'd pause briefly after each customer, tongs prone, like a pitcher coming set. Not a glance, not a word. After you voiced your order he'd give an almost imperceptible nod and return to immaculately economical, mechanical motion: three balls in the pita, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, a ladle of tahini, a dusting of paprika. Hand her the money. Take the change. Turn around and walk away.

Jimmy was especially fond of Sunshine. There was something idiosyncratic in what he ordered. No onions, maybe. Extra pepper. I don't know. One day the falafel man looked up and squarely met his gaze.

"Usual?" he said in a thick Syrian accent.

That was the one and only time we heard him utter a word.

From time to time we tired of Sunshine, too. For long stretches we ordered dumplings from a Chinese place on 23rd. You could have vegetable. You could have pork. They were doughy, weighty things, fist-sized, slathered in a sesame mud.

I took a bite off the top of one and watched the misshapen remains slide through my chopsticks and fall back in the box with a clump.

"Don't think about how they look," Julie insisted. "Eat them! They're delicious."

We went to a neighborhood pizza joint frequented by construction guys and cops. They served a Sicilian-style pie they called grandma's, pasta dishes steeped in butter and oil. We spent small fortunes at the Whole Foods buffet on Sixth: lemon-rubbed, grilled tofu; carrot salad with cumin, lime juice and edamame; braised leeks; forbidden rice. It was irreproachably delicious. Evidently nutritious. But just as soon as we found paradise we departed in search of somewhere else. The garish barbeque place on 23rd. The designer salad delis crowded with professional women in pantsuits and heels. The cheap Indian place one block up on 25th, where all the cabbies go, where they slap your food on a styrofoam plate that bows and cracks under the curry's weight.

We patronized a gourmet grocery store on 23rd Street that sold gargantuan heros filled with prosciutto, mortadella, mozarella, pepper turkey, Genoa, pepperoni, sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, balsamic vinegar, provolone, soppressata, beef tongue, lardo, bresaola, capicola, whatever the fuck you want. Sandwiches big as your thigh. Sandwiches that sink into your gut over the course of the afternoon like a listing ship.

On a few occasions that somehow seemed desperate we visited a trendy and expensive diner, where we ordered things like huevos rancheros and ostrich stew. One day as we waited for our table, Steve pointed out a figure whom he declared to be a fairly well-known, sexually desirable actress with a triple name. She bore a voluminous handbag.

"No," said David.

"I'm telling you man, I think it's her."

"It is not her."

"You sure?" Steve insisted. "I'm pretty sure it's her."

David shook his head emphatically, holding a hand up in protest. "Trust me Steve. I know what she looks like. It's not her."

Steve shrugged. Soon we were led to our table, a few feet away from the woman in question. It was her.

Sometimes we walked a mile east and back to Popeye's Fried Chicken, over on Third. The lumpy, Crisco-rich biscuits had a way of sitting in your throat. The chicken made you want to kill yourself.

When we tired of variety we sought glum predictability, a functional solution. For a lengthy spell we went to the nearest Subway shop and punished ourselves with their stingy, oversalted meats; their cold, pale lettuce; their mealy tomatoes. One day I heard Steve's voice behind me in line. He erupted in anger at the worker who was handling his sandwich at the present step in its assembly.

"No!" Steve shouted. "No!"

"Sir?" the man responded, startled.

"No! Start again!"

"Sir?"

"Throw it out! Start again!"

The half-dressed sub lay crookedly on the preparation counter, olives and pickles strewn haphazardly along its spine.

"Don't! Don't take that off! Forget it!"

"Yes?"

"Throw it out and start again!"

The rattled employee finally disposed of the offensive sandwich and began anew. That was the last time we went to Subway for a while. But we returned.

The Enterprise - 22

It occurred to me one day in early December that I hadn't seen Brett in a while. Normally he was hyper-present: banging away on his guitar, stomping around the office to peer over people's shoulders, boots up on the conference table barking at the staticky entities on the other end of the phone. Today he was gone and I tried to remember the last day I saw him. I could not.

I swiveled around to Steve, the recently hired quality assurance manager.

"Have you seen Brett? Where's Brett?"

Steve craned his neck over his partition and scanned the environs like a periscope.

"I dunno."

"You dunno? You work for him."

Steve shrugged. "Dunno where he is."

"Has he been gone for a while?"

"I dunno," he frowned. "Can't remember."

"Don't you think that's weird?" I asked.

"What?"

"The fact that he was here and now he's gone."

He shrugged again. "Don't ask me, man. I'm just sitting here trying to write a fucking test plan."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know."

David rolled over between us.

"Is this a conversation I should participate in?" he inquired eagerly.

"Maybe," replied Steve. "I dunno, man. I think it's over."

David scrutinized Steve's face and mine in turn as we sat in silence. I rolled back and forth a little. I liked the sound the casters made against the wood. Finally we broke off and returned to work.

The Enterprise - 21

On the street I discreetly observed the vagrants and the crazies, those who operated out of bounds. I was fascinated by their brusque, discombobulated intrusions upon the cozy realm in which the rest of us were coddled. It was difficult not to perceive within their batty declamations the stark ring of truth.

As I left the gym one day I realized I needed a quart of milk. On a corner a block away I spotted the reassuring neon glow of a deli. But as I approached I detected a hulking shadow by the doorway.

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN PLEASE GIVE TO THE HOMELESS," the man wailed monotonically. "PLEASE GIVE. PLEASE GIVE TO THE HOMELESS."

People walked by him in a slight arc, as though magnetically repelled. Without a glance.

I asked myself a craven little question: Do I really need milk? I turned around at the edge of the sidewalk, back across the street.

"DON'T GO MY BROTHER!" the man pleaded after me. "I'M YOUR LONG LOST LITTLE BROTHER!"

Still other strange things happened on the street and underground. I was at Union Square, waiting for the uptown 6, late on a scotch-soaked night. A man walked down onto the platform, a stocky white guy in his thirties. He wore workboots, a hooded sweatshirt under his denim jacket. His jeans were faded and frayed from honest work outdoors. He was in a state of extreme agitation.

"Fucking COCKSUCKERS!" he raged. "Fucking douchebag son-of-a-bitch COCKSUCKERS!"

He slammed the standing subway map with his elbow. It rang like a dull gong.

"Internet rich-kid MOTHERFUCKERS!" He glared around, red-cheeked and a little out of breath. "You fucking hipster motherfucking CUNTS!"

I turned my head and gazed tensely at the trash between the tracks. I hoped he would not kill me. But I thought he might. Why not? In time he wandered out of sight, his curses reverberating down the tiled walls.

On my way to work one morning, my reverie was interrupted by a deranged woman at 110th and Malcolm X.

"They lie! They lie! They lie!" she howled. "They lie in circles on the street!"

One day I was on a train. A fairly crowded train. It was reaching peak velocity between stops, the point at which it sways uneasily on the tracks. A somnolent man was leaning on a window when it suddenly popped out and disappeared into the blackness. The roar of wheels and wind filled the car as he flailed, his head and torso dangling in the dark. He caught his balance and – petrified, ashen – backed away from the awful, noisy hole. He gazed around at us with a curious smile. Almost apologetical. A few smiled back, nodding gently. No one said a word. He stepped gingerly through the throng, like a man returned from outer space. Then he took a spot at a handrail and waited for his stop like everybody else.

Me, I got home and filled my shaker up with salt. I watched as the crystals formed their conical pile at the bottom and the powder escaped vaporously at the top.

The Enterprise - 20

Brett lurched across the floor one morning, grabbed an empty chair, swiveled it around and sat facing me.

"Sex," he stated.

"Hmm?"

"Sex!"

"What about it?"

"Exactly! What about it?"

"Yeah?"

"I type in 'sex.' How does the application respond?"

"I see."

"I see?"

"No, I see. The application, let's see, I mean, uh..."

"What does it say when someone says 'sex'?"

"Right."

"Because that's the first goddamn thing everyone's gonna say to it."

"Probably."

"It might not be the sort of thing you pick up in Judy's fucking usability testing. But trust me."

"I suppose you're right."

"Faced with a blank screen. A keyboard. People are gonna type S-E fucking X."

"People are predictable. We're in the business of predicting people."

"It's the first and the last thing on everyone's goddamned mind." He gave a sly smile. "You know what's everything in between, of course."

"In between sex?"

"Death."

"Death. Wow."

"Death is the other thing."

"Yeah. I don't know how we sh–"

"We got death covered already."

"We do?"

"Someone says, 'I want to kill myself.' What do we say? In your opinion."

"Don't do it? There's so much to live for?"

Brett closed his eyes and shook his head.

"Please type your zip code and I will provide you with the phone number for the nearest suicide prevention hotline?"

He shook his head a little harder. "Nope."

"Then what?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Someone says they want to kill themselves. We say nothing."

"We change the subject? We present the home screen?"

"Nope. Nope. Nothing."

"We say nothing? In other words, we don't say anything?"

"Precisely," he stated, satisfied.

"Blank screen?"

"Empty space."

"Wouldn't that constitute a tacit endorsement?"

Brett shrugged. "Lawyers told us."

"Lawyers?"

"They examined the question and determined that in order to fully protect ourselves from any conceivable liability, we should go dark."

I pondered this a moment.

"So forget about death. Sex."

"Right, so–"

"So what does it say?"

"What does it say?"

"The application. I came over, I sat down. I said 'sex.' What do you say?"

"That's very interesting."

"Really? Interesting."

"What an interesting thing to say."

Brett thought it over for a little while.

"I like it."

And so I began writing my first domain. The Sex domain.

The Enterprise - 19

There was a bodega on our corner, run by Yemeni brothers. Each morning they fried up a giant, tangled pile of bacon on the griddle and the thick, rich smell would pour out in a steam plume from the vent to 105th.

Jeff the Happy Homeless Guy stood on the corner all day, every day, like it was his job. I never did see him more than half a block away on either side. He was perpetually drifting past the bodega door, on his way to nowhere. He'd signal me cheerily, eyes alight, flashing a chipped-tooth grin. Then his face would fall. He'd mumble something to indicate he was in need, always as though it were an unexpected and exceptional circumstance. Can ya help me out? It was important to him – maybe important to me, important to us – that this transaction not become as rote as the exacting of a toll. So it became a little ritual: the bright greeting, the solemn appeal, the inevitable donation, the warm parting of ways. At the end he usually asked after my sister and told me to tell her something I couldn't quite understand.

A conversation I overheard between a man and a woman in their thirties, walking down Seventh Street in the Slope:

Woman: "'Singin' in the Rain' was in 'A Clockwork Orange'?"

Man: "Yes it was."

Woman: "I had no idea!"

The Enterprise - 18

Outside of work I drifted around Manhattan in endlessly overlapping figures. The gym on the Upper East. The bar in Gramercy for shooting pool. The Park, the Village. Trying not to let the antenna of my StarTAC poke me in the balls.

I lived in Spanish Harlem with my sister Sue and our friend Sean. Every day I'd walk home from the 6 at Lex and 103rd: down the sidewalk blown by wisps of trash; past the garden cantina with the plastic chairs, the tires in a pile, the knee-high grass and weeds. The liquor store on the corner with the yellow sign and the bulletproof booth. I once bought a bottle of wine I'd noticed in the window, vintage 1972. For twenty-eight years it had rested in its spot in the display while the hood lived and died beyond the glass: babes paraded in prams by proud and hopeful moms turned into truant youth, dealers and gangstas, some to be felled by rivals for turf, some by brothers in arms for a trifle – a slight, a rumor, an accusation. A girl. The man who once screamed and strained for his mother's breast now lay on the corner in a gently expanding pool of blood. Through it all the stupid bottle of French wine looked on. I took it home. It was piss.

For many years before I moved I'd ride the Metro-North down. My sister already lived here. But a Connecticut boy never really needs a reason to see the City. It exerted a magnificent gravitational pull, out of the woods and down the coastline, through the dollhouse towns of Fairfield Country, behind a jumble of graffiti'd warehouses and finally: Grand Central Station. I was always fascinated by the stretch of elevated track between 125th Street and the plunge under Park Avenue. I recognized that this was, objectively, a bad area. You could tell from the overgrown lots, the cracked windows, the peeled-paint signs. But in the late sun shining from the west it sparkled like a jewel. This was the paradoxical result of decades of violence and neglect: glass everywhere, crushed nearly to powder, from car accidents, break-ins, discarded bottles. It gave the impression that the streets of this city were paved not with gold but with diamonds.

It would be crazy to live here, I thought to myself, gazing out the train. I tried to imagine how different my life would be, how strange and wonderful and awful it would be, if I lived right there in that scintillating ghetto.

The Enterprise - 17

My friend Mike from back in Connecticut had a big idea of his own. I went down to his apartment, a creaky industrial loft in Chinatown, after work one Tuesday. The space was spare, with splintering floors, a computer, a hammock strung from wall to wall. Several sixteen-millimeter Russian windup cameras were stacked in a corner. He had an angle on them from some ex-pat named Boris. He bought them cheap, fiddled with the insides so they'd work a little better, sell them to NYU film students. This wasn't the big idea.

There were four of us in at first, besides Mike. There was Adam, from back home too. There was Jim, one of our circle in the city. There was Evan, a bleary-eyed doctor friend of Mike's. We gathered in folding chairs in a circle around nothing. As Mike began his pitch, a dull, rapid pounding emanated from beyond the ceiling. Though it was rhythmic it was not musical. It was relentless and oppressive, the beating heart of a great mechanical beast.

"What is that?" I interrupted.

"That's the sweatshop. The sewing machines."

"When does it stop?"

"Never. Well, sometimes. But mostly never."

Gradually, haltingly, Mike outlined his plan. It seemed sensible. He wanted to build an online interface too – a video player, specifically, tricked up with features and controls – through which people might learn languages. We asked him what we imagined to be wise and diligent questions: What's the business model? What's the exit strategy? He offered few answers.

"I'm going to need some money," he declared.

We each pledged thousands of dollars in exchange for shares in this vaporous endeavor. We did it automatically, dutifully. Not one of us considered not buying in. Certainly not if the next guy was. It would have seemed contrary to the spirit of the gathering. It would have seemed rude.

I was certain the enterprise was doomed.

We made plans to meet again and parted under the robotic throbbing of the machines.

The Enterprise - Prologue

Tom begged me not to write this book.

"I dunno, man," he said, grimacing, squirming on his barstool.

"What? Why? Why not?"

He shook his head. "It's just that–"

He looked up for a moment, jiggling the warm remains of his martini.

"Never mind," he said. He took his penultimate sip. "Never mind. Forget it."

He always did this.

"What? What? What?" I pleaded.

Now he smiled, a little warily. Preparing to explain it after all. He always did this, too.

"I wouldn't do it."

"I know you wouldn't fucking do it. Why shouldn't I do it?"

"I dunno, man."

His left leg was fidgeting and he appeared distracted. It was a source of great distress to me that he was not supportive.

"You won't look bad," I assured.

He put his hand up. "Don't care about that. Not the point. Not the point."

"What is the point?"

"I dunno man." He sucked a breath in through his teeth. "Just doesn't seem like a good idea. That's all."

I peered into the watery remains of my Johnny Black on the rocks, a goddamn familiar sight if ever there was one. I felt Tom's approbation press against the walls of my body: my chest, my shoulders. It had all the more authority for being inchoate, unexplained. Unjustified. It existed beyond justification. Beyond words.

"I wouldn't do it," he repeated.

"I know you wouldn't do it."

He spun towards me and adopted a reasoning posture, hand extended to the side. Then, haltingly: "What do you expect to gain from– What's the point of– Is it that important to you to–"

"I'm not out to fuck people. It is not my intention to fuck people."

His expression broke a little bit. "Really?"

"Really."

"Then what is the point?" he asked.

"It's all I got, man."

He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. "Explain."

"Some people are programmers. Some people are project managers. Some people are this or that, biz dev, VP, blahdee blahdee blah."

"Yeah?"

"And I'm not any of those things."

"So?"

"So this is all I got. All I've got is my story. And the inclination to tell it. This is what I have."

My mouth was dry. I had a feeling I had waited my entire life to speak those words. They hung gravely in the air between us as I drank the icy water from my glass.

"All right," Tom said. "I changed my mind."

"You changed your mind?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"I think you should write it."