While everyone was waiting for the actress to arrive from her premiere, I sat in the corner seat of the white linen sofa at Eugene’s with my legs crossed, watching the rest of the party and regretting my decision to attend. I was surrounded by the very people that I had spent the last five years avoiding, people who had taken advantage of the death of our friend Rebecca to drag me back to their cathedral of modernist rococo on the Bowery. I had recently returned to New York, the city of my birth, from London, where I had been living. The decision to return was not mine. I had run out my visas, first in Europe, and then in the UK I had no other option but to return to America for the winter. Only now, as I sat on the sofa, watching Eugene, a man who could reasonably be called one of my closest friends, describe the materiality and the performance of a set of bookshelves he’d just installed, did I realize that I could have waited out the winter months in Papua New Guinea or China or some other place where I knew nobody and the European and British immigration authorities had no hold over me. I realized now that I would have been better off in Papua New Guinea or China or some other third place. I hadn’t seen Eugene or anyone at his party in the five years since I’d left New York for a brief trip to Rome, a city with its own problems, which I’d soon fled for London. I hadn’t told anyone that I was back from London, but then I ran into Eugene that morning when I made the mistake of pacing up and down the Bowery to clear my mind. I was living uptown, but, after Rebecca’s mother called to inform me of her death, which had not surprised me but did fling me into a state of something like shock, I felt the need to walk up and down the Bowery the way I did when I was last productive and of sound mind while in New York.