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with his hands. The rotten floor creaked under him.
    â€œWatch it!” McCabe exclaimed. “You’ll be down there on your head.”
    He was. wonderful. He was what only an old New York City cop could be, possessed of a mentality in which there was neither the unexpected nor the impossible. Anything could happen in New York, and it usually did.
    â€œWhat do you see?” I asked Robinson.
    â€œMore of it. Just more of it.” He drew himself back and stood up, and he looked from my face to McCabe’s face.
    â€œWe’re four stories high,” McCabe said bleakly, his universe finally tilting on edge.
    â€œA lot more of it,” said Robinson.
    â€œI’ll phone it in. I’ll tell them there’s a cow pasture on the fourth floor of an old-law tenement.”
    â€œIt’s no cow pasture,” Robinson said.
    â€œThen what the hell is it? A mirage?”
    â€œI’m going down there,” Robinson said.
    â€œLike hell you are!”
    Robinson’s round face was no longer jovial, no longer the easy, controlled face of a black cop in New York, who knows how much to push and just when to push. He looked at McCabe, smiling a thin, humorless smile, and he asked him what he thought was down there through the hole to teacher Montez’s apartment.
    â€œHow the hell should I know?”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œMy ass, you know!”
    â€œWhat’s down there?” I asked Robinson, my voice shaking. “What did you see?”
    â€œThe other side of the coin.”
    â€œWhat the hell does that mean?” McCabe demanded.
    â€œMan,” Robinson sighed, “you been white just too goddamn long.”
    â€œI’m going to call in,” McCabe said. “You hear me, Robinson? I’m going to call in, and then I’m going to get the keys from the super—if there is one in this lousy rattrap—and I’m going to go into Montez’s apartment and I’m going to look right up your ass through that hole, and we’ll see who grows grass four stories up. And until I do, you don’t go down there. You understand?”
    â€œSure, man. I understand,” Robinson answered softly.
    Then McCabe pushed past the sobbing Mrs. Gonzales and slammed the kitchen door behind him. As if his slamming the door had created a current, the perfumed air rose out of the hole and filled the bedroom.
    â€œWhat did you see down there?” I asked Robinson.
    â€œHave a look?” Robinson suggested.
    I shook my head. Nothing on earth would persuade me to lie belly down on that creaking floor and hang over the edge the way Robinson had before. Robinson was watching me.
    â€œAfraid?”
    I nodded.
    â€œYou know what’s going to happen when McCabe gets the super and they go into that apartment under us? Just like he said—he’ll be standing there looking right up my asshole—then it’ll be some kind of optical illusion, and two or three weeks—man, in two, three weeks we won’t even remember we saw it.”
    â€œIt’s an illusion,” I agreed.
    â€œSmell it!”
    â€œJesus Christ, you’re looking at something that isn’t there!”
    â€œBut you and me, mister, and that lady over there”—he waved one arm in a circle—“that’s real. That’s no illusion.”
    â€œThat’s real,” I said.
    He stared at me a long moment, shook his head, then sat down on the edge of the break in the floor, slid down, rolled over, hanging on by his hands, and then dropped, landing in a crouch on the turf. He brought himself erect and turned in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, his eyes sweeping over what he saw. Like the grass he stood upon, he was bathed in a kind of violet sunshine.
    â€œRobinson!”
    He didn’t hear me. It was obvious that he didn’t hear. He raised his face to where I should have been, his dark skin bathed in the lilac sunshine, and