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    Andrew’s worst day in New York.

    Thanksgiving thoughts bred scents of roasted turkey and baked cinnamon. Vibrations in the subway window soothed his aching head as subterranean darkness gave way to sun-soaked sprawl.

    Outside on the platform, a trio of Yeshiva-tailored boys tossed coins onto the tracks, a dangerous folly carried out in the absence of the station’s usual patrolman.

    Things needed to end with Niko. The man planned a trek across America, and despite their relationship barely existing, he insisted on taking Andrew.

    He was four blocks down Brighton 12 when a feminine howl ripped through the air. All heads turned as wailing sirens grew deafening on approach. Police cruisers rushed past, their rubber treads screeching before opened doors hatched dozens of officers onto the pavement.

    Grouped tightly, the blue swarm crowded the stoop to Samil’s building. Gunshots popped, sending Andrew into the foyer of Cyril’s building.

    Screams heralded the shattering of the entry door, and he cowered under the lobby console table as crystalline flurries blew across the floor. Gunfire rattled before Radek came crashing through webbed glass, shards blanketing his arms with red rivets.

    Brown boots crunched over the glass, and in them stood Cyril, handgun raised and firing. A storm of bullets ripped into the drywall and clouded the small space with dust. Cyril’s short legs jerked like a tormented puppet before his body folded.

    Radek screamed as ammo exploded from his pistol.

    A bullet struck his right arm, sending blood and skin across the wall behind him. Seconds later, the tall thug vanished as if never there. Three policemen raced through the broken entry, one kicking Cyril for proof of death.

    Lifeless eyes held Andrew through broken, twisted spectacles. He leaned out and pulled the eyeglasses away, petting Cyril’s thinning hair. With two fingers, he gently pushed the old man’s lids down, their warmth his goodbye.

    A crowd dispersed outside; the inevitable didn’t warrant a second glance.

    Andrew pushed through loitering onlookers toward the paramedics, who brought out strapped to a stretcher. Samil’s bloodied scalp was missing patches of hair, and a bulbous contusion swelled his lower face.

    “My friend,” he choked.

    “You’re his friend?” The paramedic’s braids moved with her as she helped hoist the stretcher into the ambulance bay. “Can you ride with him?”

    Andrew climbed inside and took Samil’s hand, the fingers bent, painfully obtuse like a Picasso sketch. Paramedics cut open Samil’s shirt, revealing boot marks on his fleshy stomach.

    The shared space became a closet with its doors shut, and Sam, his face a bloodied pulp, muttered in Polish. “Did they arrest them, Andrej?”

    Lying was all he could muster. “They got them all, Sam-Sam.”

    Lips parted, exposing a mouth of missing front teeth.

    Samil wheezed. “They killed Konrad,”

    “Honey,” the paramedic asked. “Are you his family?”

    Andrew shook his head.

    “They won’t let you into the hospital with him,” she said. “Go home and bring back one of your parents. They’ll let you check in on him then,”

    “My mom,” he whispered.

    The woman nodded. “You go get your mom now, okay.”

    No—he couldn’t do that. Things happen, Andrej. She said this once, but the violence that brought him here was nothing compared to this, and if he told her, then she would learn what got him in it.

    I’ll always love you.

    I made you, so I know you’re a good man.

    Matka said those words the night he confessed to liking boys.

    Nothing in this world will ever stop me from loving you.

    Samil began choking as the machine hooked to him hiccupped.

    Both paramedics huddled over him, sending Andrew back to the doors. Their hands worked faster than he could follow, doing everything expected, but nothing mattered when his first friend in New York stopped breathing.

    Andrew sat alone in the subway car, mindless of his blood-soaked shirt. He hungered for the Pilar since no amount of trauma overcame the healing power of provoked strings.

    He wandered the street in a daze, his arms colliding with pedestrians. The setting sun cut an orange line down Astor Place, a radiant border between painful realities and comfortable detachment.

    Saint Marks housed its regulars, shiftless and waiting for anyone to liberate them from their checkerboard doldrums.

    The clerk called after him. “You can’t leave that music on in your room.”

    Andrew wheeled about, his bloodied shirt giving the clerk pause.

    “Even if it’s that classical shit,” the hefty man said, suddenly friendly. “You can’t leave it on if you ain’t here.”

    Andrew trotted up the stairs, the Pilar’s beautiful noise beckoning.

    Terror flooded his brain—the locks were gone.

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