The city train was more crowded and I felt people staring at us, not in any kind of antipathetic way but out of naked curiosity. We were so obviously different. Their gazes followed us in and out of the car and almost every moment in between.

The train was full of somber, inconspicuous commuters; working people; young pigeon-toed women clutching their handbags, paunchy men with their arms crossed. After we shared perfunctory background information about ourselves – he's "going to university" for physics, I'm starting a new job – Roger managed to steer the conversation to Her Majesty the Queen: she has more power than you might think actually, and I thought, what is it with the English and their queen? Here we are in Tokyo and I have to hear this. I looked away during a pause in the conversation and perceived a wild burst of fiery red light in the darkness right outside the window. I turned to see a hovering, laser-projected logo on the tunnel wall and it said:

Yahoo!

The ride took about an hour and a half and we still weren't there. We got off at some arbitrary station that seemed deep in the city but then we realized it was the business district – a forest of office buildings with corporate logos on the top, empty for the night. A sweaty man with glasses offered to help. "Where are you going?" he said haltingly. We tried to tell him and he said OK, and he made some strange remark about girls, were we looking for girls, and we said ha, no no, but he did tell us what connection to make to Shinjuku Station. We thanked him and he bowed and nodded and thanked us.

We went out to dinner that night with Jo and Michael and his wife and the kids, at a good French restaurant. We sat at a long table in the back and had spicy Australian wine and I had the lamb and it was all very good, and we talked about this and that and I admired Jo diagonally, in vain.

Then the next morning it was time to go, just like that. Kevin had to go to work and so Kate drove me to the airport and walked around the terminal with me a little while, killing time. We browsed a clothes store – it was odd to be engaged in such mundane behavior so soon before our separation. But finally I had to pass through the gate and we embraced and like always Kate said, "You're shaking!" and I said yes I know, I'm a trepidatious man.

I landed back in Tokyo nine hours later, at about 7:30 at night, went through customs, took the shuttle to the hotel, checked in, and there I was, in Tokyo with the night ahead of me. I went down to the lobby and noticed a line of taxis outside. I got in the back of a taxi and told the driver I wanted to go into Tokyo. He didn't understand a word. I wrote "Shinjuku Station" in my little notebook and tore out the sheet and gave it to him. I had read about bars and nightlife at Shinjuku Station.

He scribbled something and handed the paper back. It said "25,000." That was like, $250. I briefly considered giving it to him but figured there had to be a better way. He gestured with his hands and said something in half Japanese, half broken English, articulating how far away we were, how that was a normal price. I said no thank you and slipped out of the cab.

I was asking someone at the front desk how to take a train to town when a young English guy sidled up to me.

"You going into town?"

"Yeah."

"So am I. Let's go together."

"Sure." I didn't want to say no. How do you say no to a complete stranger in a place that's strange to both of you? But I had fantasized about being alone in Tokyo, of having a solitary and unpredictable experience. And I was sorry to give that up.

We got our directions and took the shuttle back to the airport and descended to the lower levels of the terminal, where the trains were. The deeper you went, it seemed, the less English there was. At the bottom there was nothing anywhere but Japanese characters: exit signs, train schedules, poster ads, everything was a colored blur of lines and squiggles. I had a sense of truly entering a different world, where my reference points had vanished. We went to the ticket booth and with difficulty got the man to understand what we wanted, and we found a train to take. We could take the express or the cheaper local commuter train and the English guy, Roger, said he wanted to save money so I said OK fine, and we took the slow train, and I already began to regret having met him.

After the fights Kevin and I walked through the downtown Olympic Park, the strange mass of international tourists, the tents and kiosks with pins and other souvenirs. We looked for a place to drink but everything was crowded and awful so we took the monorail out of the neighborhood. We got out and walked up a steep pedestrian street with young street life, musicians and people sitting in the middle of the pavement watching. We walked across a big empty green bordered by office buildings and lit by just a few lamps and there was no one in sight.

On Friday, my last day, we went into town in the car and ate breakfast at a chic café, the kind with wooden chairs and flowers and everything written on a chalkboard. We had parked in a cul-de-sac near steps that led down a steep hill facing the city and someone put the baby down on the top of the steps and I took a picture of her from above and beside her on the pavement there was a junkie's discarded needle.

We drove around more, went to Kate's parents house again, went to a great big shopping center out in the country somewhere with a long escalator up to the supermarket. The aisles and aisles of packaged food, the weary people stopping on the way home from work, the inescapable light, it always makes experience immediately mundane. I strained for evidence that this was still exotic in some minute way, as I was far, far away from home, but I could not, and felt hollow and tired, infected with the petty melancholy of something idly pleasant reaching its end; like a child on a Sunday night.

Last Friday I went out after work just like always, liberated, with limitless possibilities and mysteries ahead. Jason and I met up with Christina in front of the Ciel Rouge on 7th Ave., and it wasn't open yet of course, so we walked down to 14th Street and found an old Irish bar with a long green awning. "It looks like they might have beer there," said Christina.

Inside it was dark and cool and it smelled dank and dead-flowery somehow, a sharp, rich stink from industrial-strength cleaning agents and hundreds of man-years of bad cologne. It seemed like we were in some other city in a faraway state – when we left I said maybe the Southwest somewhere – the place was too cold and spacious and empty for Manhattan.

After one drink there we went up to the Ciel and sat in the back garden and P. C. came too, and Jake, and Jason's friend Ed and Lis and Nora finally, and I drank mojitos and picked wet mint from between my teeth, and everyone talked and had a good time. Christina went to the Knitting Factory and Jason and Ed left, then everyone else got up to go and it was dark now and I hadn't even noticed. Jake and P. C. and I met P. C.'s friend Bret and this other guy Tom and we walked to a pool hall nearby. It was some weird new-looking place with a bar upstairs and tables downstairs and everything was chromy-clean and slick and awful. Jake left and the four of us played, Tom and I beating Bret and P. C. in a few games, and I guess I drank Heineken, I'm pretty sure. 

The interior architecture seemed to preclude conviviality or even the most incidental human contact.

We walked farther east now, to Paddy's. I want to describe how we knew upon walking in that we had to leave but I'm not sure how. The crowd was not precisely unfriendly but sort of leeringly territorial, flush with the idea of themselves. We turned on our heels and walked uptown to some other place, a place I'd been, and ordered drinks and sat like assholes in chairs by the wall, waiting for God knows what to happen.

Finally Bret left and Tom and P. C. and I met Christina back downtown at Bar 81. We sat around the corner of the bar and drank and talked and I was starving so I went with Christina to get pizza and we got back and drank some more and played pool. I was unhinged, dancing around the pool table. In fact did not play so badly. But I wish I had been more conscious.

After the first few hours of blackness I got hit hard in the morning. I craved sleep but it only seemed to come in fitful spurts punctuated by agonizing nausea. There was no comfort anywhere. I got up once and took some Advil and water and assessed the true scope of my misery.

Then I woke up at 4 o'clock and felt fine.

Yesterday it was the hottest day of the year so far, and the heaviest with humidity. In the middle of the afternoon there was a cloudburst and rain fell in great big drops. Chris opened the back door of the office and went out on the fire escape.

"It's raining but it's still just as hot. Check it out," Chris said. Denis and I stuck our heads out. It was true. It was pouring but the air was still thick and hot. It occurred to me that I had maybe never felt that before.

Kevin and I went to the downtown Olympic Park to watch boxing that night. The arena was really an elaborate circus tent built around steel scaffolds and bleacher seats, ready to be taken down and forever disappear. Inside the vibe was edgy and mean – I wondered why and then I realized there were virtually no women at all in the entire place. Starving, I got in line for more of the awful, bland food they were serving at all the events. And beer. 

We watched a succession of semifinal fights graduating up the weight classes: tiny, wiry light flyweights giving way to bantamweights, lightweights, bigger, slower, stronger. We struggled to make sense of what was happening in the ring and sometimes the outcome was obvious and sometimes it was not, and sometimes the judging seemed arbitrary and maybe unfair. Many boxers were from former Soviet Republics: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. It was hard for American boys like us not to root against them in a "Rocky IV" kind of way. With their unpronounceable polysyllabic names and machinelike demeanor they seemed immediately forbidding, their humanity calloused by years of tortuous nationalistic training.

In the audience men shouted at each other in different tongues. They cursed in Russian, Spanish, English and everyone understood everyone else perfectly well. Several times I thought men might wade furiously through the crowd to grapple with each other. We sat directly behind fans of the British super heavyweight Audley Harrison, a black family – maybe his family – carrying a Union Jack. Evander Holyfield sat at ringside and got up between each bout to greet fans across a partition. He posed grandly for pictures, signed autographs. Kevin went down there with his camera and it was funny to look down and watch him stare dully at Evander and the clamoring throng.

The peeler clattered in the sink. 

I remember when I was a kid, I would watch sports on TV with a ravenous passion. I didn't much care who was playing. I had teams I liked but it was enough to watch the formal green expanse of any field fill up the shimmering screen and to see things happen on it; balls bouncing, flying; officials at their marks, measuring, assessing; cleated players with uniforms bearing bold, block digits. A numerological world of ineffable mystical representations. Formal chaos.

I once watched, enrapt, an indoor soccer game on the dining room TV of the Colbys' apartment in New York. It was me and Lis and Lenny, the parents had gone out. What delight there was to be visiting this manic, thrilling place; and within it to be safe at a table looking up. Watching the ball careen ferociously around the curved boards, to be cleared or kicked on goal with momentous urgency by this player or that one or the other; the ones in lime green or the ones in orange, it didn't matter, it was happening.

Lenny's mom had left us a pan of brownies with Swiss milk chocolate bars melted on top.

The little gasp the microwave gives when you turn it on.

 Off to the discovery of somethin', on a Friday night.

I walked from the subway, 1:30 in the morning, and P. C. was up, tip-tapping away at his computer, playing Scrabble online or God knows.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey, Campesino."

It had been a longer night than I expected, hustling out of work at six and going to dinner and then going to the one-woman show by my co-worker's sister. It was quite good and funny, she talked about how their dad had a mail-order bride from the Philippines. Later we asked Geoff how much of it was true and he stuck his tongue between his teeth and laughed. 

We all went out drinking after that and talked about seeing celebrities, how they seem small in person, how they disappoint us, how we want to connect with them and how they fill us with rage.

On the way home from the train my mind was preoccupied with a fantasy rant against religion: ALL these doctrines, I thought: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Nazi, Buddhist – all of them, right? – they all distance man from God. All their mechanisms for piety, for, rationalization, for redemption, they can only serve to distance us from God, and what insanity that is! What reckless, awful insanity. Because out of that you get all the strife, the killing, the hatred, the torture. That's what you get when you deny the one truth: everybody knows. Let them know. Let them feel.

Long after we broke up, she used to send me letters with confetti inside.

We went to the New South Wales Art Gallery and saw some Australian abstract art, lots of it earth-toned and sandy-looking, as if such pigments were the only ones available in this desert continent. Then we walked through the Botanic Garden, where plants and shrubs and flowers and palm trees strained the margins of our path. We had lunch on the veranda of a café in the middle of the park. It was incredibly beautiful, tree flowers at eye level, birds chirping. Kate and Kevin were still sort of fighting. We had a bottle of wine that tasted like blackberry, and I had steak, and Kevin ate almost nothing but buttered bread. After lunch we wandered to the harbor and the Opera House, through the weird international throng of Olympic tourists.

When we got out of the train Kevin didn't know which way to go. It was raining even harder and I was wearing a thin wool sweater that got soaked through and that stifling wet-wool smell filled the air around me. We got on a bus going the wrong way and finally we got off and got in a taxi cab.

The casino was disappointingly similar to every other casino everywhere else: a vast room with muted gold light, a ceiling high like the sky, the faint stink of cigars, a carpet with a tessellated turquoise and purple pattern. People from all over the world but a prevalence of Pacific Islanders and Asians; businessmen from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. I had some noodles with greasy duck from the noodle shop on the concession floor downstairs. Everything there was sad and ugly in harsh white light. Dazed families, packs of bored teenagers, not quite knowing what they were doing but doing it anyway. We lost at blackjack for awhile – I think I lost about a hundred. And that was it, we went home to Kate and the baby.

Thursday was strikingly beautiful. We went walking with Julia sleeping on Kevin's chest and Kate and Kevin arguing: Kevin was meant to get swimming lessons at the gym; he said he would but he hadn't and Kate was hectoring him and Kevin was snapping back at her defensively. I walked a few paces behind them, between them, watching them keep a mean little distance from each other. It seemed they had always fought like this and maybe always would and that's not necessarily bad, as long as they stay together – maybe it's worse the day they stop.

That night Kevin and I went to the casino in the pouring rain. I had taken a caffeine pill to counteract jetlag and now I was wired to the point of agitation; on the train into town I desperately hung on to Kevin's words, scouring them for meaning. I confessed to him how wired I was and he laughed.

The other morning on the bus to work I was in a mildly hung over reverie, slouched in my seat with my forehead leaning bumpily on the cool glass. I became vaguely aware of a man in front of me barking loudly into his cell phone. An older man, with a gruff Brooklyn accent.

Suddenly a woman in the front yelled out, "Sir! Would you please stop that?"

"What? I can't talk? Mind your business," he protested. And at the same volume as before he said into the phone, "I don't know, some woman is telling me to quiet down."

"You're very loud, sir," she continued.

"I'm not bothering anybody. Am I bothering anybody? Everyone raise their hand if I'm bothering you. See? No one raised their hand."

Another woman, sitting across the aisle, said to him, "You know, it really is annoying."

Things more or less calmed down after that.

There is no God and there is no devil but there is temptation. And there is righteous resistance to temptation borne of an instinctive apprehension that to succumb is wrong. Not wrong because God says so. Not wrong because man says so. Wrong because on a deep level, an unconscious level, we all know this: When you harm another you are harming yourself. Why? Because there is no other. "Other" is an illusion. We are all manifestations of the same being. And in spite of ourselves, in spite of our desires, in spite of our religious delusions, we know this is the only real truth. Though I deride all organized religions, the Christian notion of "do unto others" comes close to expressing this. The thing they got wrong, once again, is that the dictum does not come from God – it's much simpler than that. It comes from pure logical truth. To harm another is not sinful; it's perverse.

Somewhere in the course of the development of civilization we forgot this simplest truth, oneness. (Animals, incidentally, have not forgotten. They never do anything that is not morally justifiable. Animals do not – they can not – "sin." And it's not because they wouldn't take pleasure in doing so. It is simply not in their nature to violate nature.) And we had to invent an apparatus to maintain order in the face of this fracturing of consciousness. We had to invent God. How foolish – and foolhardy – to imagine that God is something outside ourselves. Because if it's outside of ourselves we can never be fully reconciled with it, and so our religions themselves become elaborate means to rationalize and support our transgressions. And in many cases, to exploit them.

The current wave of child molestation and denial in the Catholic Church is a clear example of the failure of religion, and religious orthodoxy in particular, to save man from temptation. These men who seduced young boys, young girls – who violated their vows but did much worse of course – are not inherently evil. Banish that facile interpretation from your head. They were sorely tempted, and the gravity of their temptation was proportional to their piety. These were not cynical men who entered the priesthood without faith, intending to rape the mouths and asses of the first altar boys they got their hands on. Of course not! They were religious men. Their faith – not just the hierarchy of the Church itself (though that counts for a lot) – actually enabled them to repeatedly molest children.

The Christian notion of forgiveness is to blame. Sin and redemption – that magical, compelling moral narrative that seems to invest every Christian life with meaning – actually provokes terrible deeds by the faithful. Original sin and inherited sin mark believers as sinners and they live down to that expectation. But there is no original sin – there is only original sanctity! And it's by denying our sanctity – and embracing our "sinfulness" – that we have gone so far astray.

"Look in your sister's room," P. C. said, as he walked past me to the kitchen.

"Look in my sister's room?" I said.

"Yeah."

"You want me to look in my sister's room."

"Look in her room."

I got up and walked over uncertainly and peered in the open doorway to find her slumped sideways on her bed, shoes on, face buried in a tangle of bedspread and pillow.

"She came home earlier and I said how are you and she said, ‘I'm shitfaced'," P. C. explained. "She went into her room."

"Did she tell you why she was shitfaced?"

"She went in and I expected her to come back out and tell me but she just like that, went down and that was it. Like that."

She winced a bit. "The things you do for fun in India you can't do here. I don't know, I read," she said. She ate tortilla chips in tiny bites. Sometimes a piece would crumble off and fall in her downy drink and she would pluck it out and pop it in her mouth. "I see how people live on television," she said, "and it's very different from life in India. I wonder what it would be like to live like that. I think I would like to try."

"But life on television isn't like real life," I said.

She looked across the room for a moment. "People going out to bars and drinking, and laughing, and doing things like playing pool," she said. "I think I would like someone to show me what that is like."

And I realized she was right: life in America is like life on TV. She was describing my life, and it had more in common with a beer commercial than with anyone's life in India. And I also realized what she really wanted from a man, an American man, and I realized I could give it to her if I wanted but I knew that I didn't and it was sad.