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The funeral was scheduled for the following Saturday Under the circumstances, the family wanted to proceed quietly, with a brief service confined to close fa theh I told Arianna that I didn’t knohat to reat friends Our bond had hardly gone deep enough to earn hts I wondered if he intended this note as a punishh I could not think what sin I had committed to warrant it The other possibility was that he was sending ether different nature--that his death was, in a way only he could understand, a demonstration for iest

Jonas was spending the su in Tanzania; Stephanie had won a coveted internship in Washington, working on Capitol Hill, but at the ti with her parents in France and could not be reached I did not think that Lucessi’s death had shaken me all that badly, but of course it had--my emotions, like Arianna’s, were blunted by shock--yet I showed the good sense to call the one person I trusted whoet on the phone Liz’s fa at a bookshop in Connecticut I’m sorry about your friend, she said You shouldn’t be alone Meet me at Grand Central at the ot into Penn Station early FridayI took the 1 train uptown to Forty-second Street, changed to the 7, and arrived at Grand Central at the height of the rush Except to change buses at Port Authority in the ht, I had never been to New York City, and as I ascended the ramp into the terh the ages, bowled over by the randest of cathedrals, not soht, worthy of pilgrinified by the sheer size of the place The ses of constellated stars, soared so majestically overhead it see foran overnight bag She hugged htly than I was prepared for, and it was in the shelter of her eht of Lucessi’s death, like a cold stone at the center ofat my parents’ apartment in Chelsea," she said "I won’t take no for an answer"

We took a cab don, through streets clogged with traffic and great walls of pedestrians that surged forward at every intersection This was early 1990s New York, a tieable chaos, and although I was, later in life, to live in a very different Manhattan--safe, tidy, and affluent--ed with heat and light, that it remains my truest vision of the place The aparthth Avenue--two shth Street of a sarde productions and a men’s haberdashery called World of Shirts and Socks Liz had explained that her parents only used the place when they came into the city to shop or take in a show Probably nobody had been there inI called Arianna to tell her where I was staying, and she said that she’d arrange for a car toand drive us to Riverdale There was no food in the apartment, so Liz and I went up the street to a small café with tables on the sidewalk She told me what she knew of Jonas, which wasn’t veryI’d never quite understood what he was doing there--he was a biologist, or wanted to be, not an archaeologist--though I knew it had to do with extracting fossilized pathogens from the bones of early ho in the dirt all day long, dusting rocks with a paintbrush"

"Sounds like fun"

"Oh, to him it is"

I knew this to be so Sharing a roo exterior, Jonas was deeply serious about his studies, so toward obsession The core of his passion lay in the idea that the huanise, of abstract thought--none of these was doifts, we remained chained to the same physical limitations as every other creature on the earth We were born, we aged, we died, all of it in a relatively short span of time From an evolutionary point of view, he said, this simply made no sense Nature craved balance, yet our brains were completely out of sync with the short shelf life of the bodies that housed them