After the Leonid meteor storm during the fall of 1833, one man from Manhattan Island began to shrink. Whether there was a connection between the fact of the meteor storm and the fact of his shrinking was a question beyond him or—probably—any of the best physicians, scientists, and astronomers of the era. Perhaps the storm and the shrinking just coincided, and there were other causes. No one could have known then, and we don’t know now—it stays a muddle. Yet the fact was that one man was reduced to two inches height in November 1833, and remained, in every other sense, a complete person: his memories, his intelligence, his identity, his physical proportions stayed as they were. But he had lost 66 inches of his height.

The storm of 1833 landed over and across the United States and Canada with awesome force and beauty, and during the long, deep nights of that autumn men and women stepped out from wherever they were—Lydia and Levi were in Manhattan, at the time—to get a view of the light show. Lydia, her hair curled and pushed up in a topknot, wearing a long satin gown, with linen chemise underneath, and evening slippers, stretched herself out on the balcony one late November evening, around 11 PM. Her husband, Levi, sat in a chair next to her (he wearing a long black overcoat—a capote—with trousers and a linen shirt).

At the time Levi worked as a law clerk in an office off Fulton Street in the Financial District, was 30 years old, and considering working as a reporter or editor for one the city’s many rags. His wife Lydia was a homemaker, and, at least in her public life, an easygoing and “I will not be bothered” sort of woman. But they had an interesting private life. Levi had a kind of bee in his bonnet—a sexual obsession—for women’s feet—that is, for his wife’s feet. As he wasn’t shy about telling her what he liked, Lydia learned about it very early in their courtship.

In the evenings, after the last meal of the day, she’d unlace her square-toed leather boots and then change into her slippers. But often, instead of doing this on her own, she’d let him—often at his insistence—go through the little routine for her—sometimes from under the bed, and other times kneeling down in front, as one of her maids would have done. “You’re very strange,” she told him, and indulged him. After they’d been married for a few months, it began to feel less and less strange, and his own habits and preferences started to rub off on her. She came to enjoy, and actually look forward to this new aspect of their marriage, and of her own life, perhaps to a greater degree even than Levi himself (who also thought his preferences were ‘strange’, but never really kicked the view that he was playing with old fantasies). Soon, it became all too real for him.

The night of the Big Event, he and she had watched the Leonids together. ‘Together’ meaning that she had watched them, stretched on the balcony, and he had lain underneath her chair most of the time, with his face as a footstool, propping up her unwashed feet. The scent of her bare feet from the square-toed leather boots was strong. It intoxicated him. She commanded him to lay there quietly under her feet for a half-hour—and then, maybe (if he was still enough), she would allow him to get up and watch the storm with her. Beside his head were her satin slippers, which she bought last week, and falling around his head, in waves, was her purple satin night robe. Seeing nothing but the blackening purple of this robe out of the corner of his eye, smelling nothing but the leathery, cheesy scent of her unwashed feet, which covered his face, and hearing nothing but the sounds of the night and, every other minute or so, a gasp of pleasure from his wife as she watched the Leonids, his thinking came slowly and vaguely, but he eventually realized that ‘This wasn’t a typical night for either him or her’—wouldn’t he rather watch the meteor shower with his wife? But it wasn’t his idea. It was Lydia’s. She had suggested, around 11 PM, just before they walked off to their rooms (separate chambers, as was then common in Manhattan apartments), that they sit out that evening and watch the meteor storm together. And he agreed.

For about twenty minutes she rubbed her feet over his face, covering his mouth, reclining, with her heels crossed at his forehead, covering his eyes and pressing down on his neck with her arches, and lightly pinching his nose with her toes (an unspoken order for him to start loudly inhaling). At 11:20, she looked down at him with some surprise. She had large feet, but they seemed larger, somehow. They covered his face entirely (he was still breathing them in calmly and regularly, as she asked). She moved her feet from his face. “Stop, Levi—you can stop.” He stopped and stood up, then walked over to the chair beside her and sat down. After a minute of silence he’d rallied some of his thoughts together, and turned to her: “It’s cold tonight, isn’t it?” She nodded, “It’s frigid. Find me my slippers and we’ll move inside.” He did so—when they stood up, something was odd. She seemed larger, taller, somehow. Not by comparison with the chair or the bushes or the door or the house itself, but with Levi. Levi said something before she could speak, or move a step: “Lydia, stand against the light for a moment, dear. Something’s off, here.” She stood with her back to the door, and he moved toward her. Yes, something was off, if she wasn’t standing on her toes (she wasn’t). He was just as tall as she was (5’4”). He had shrunk four inches in twenty minutes.

They were both silent for a moment, and the sounds of the crickets and the wind went on behind them (along with that splendid meteor shower, also silent).
“I don’t understand this at all. Am I dreaming?” Lydia said. But the words didn’t seem to be hers.
Levi felt strangely and unreasonably guilty about what was happening (what was happening?), as though he were the cause of it. He should have an answer. But he was shrinking. He was shrinking before her eyes (and she, and everything around her, was growing before his).

 “I’m…No, I don’t know. Let’s go inside.” He ran inside and strode, leapt up the stairs to his room. He stood before the mirror for a moment, and then turned around in confusion and despair. His wife was at the door watching him, her eyes welling with tears and her arms pinned down at her sides. She swept across the room to one of the chairs, and sat down rigidly. She couldn’t talk, and her tears didn’t seem to be hers, either. She seemed to have heard and felt them, to have seen all this, somewhere. “Where did it happen before?” she thought to herself—No, all of this is new. This has never happened before. Levi staggered back against the bed, and then turned around to his wife, who was looking at him strangely.

He ran over to her and pushed his head, trembling, against her knees. He had shrunk, after coming indoors, another four inches, and was now just about five feet tall. She thought about calling a doctor or a preacher, but he waved her off, in shame and horror. What would a doctor know? (And a doctor would only broadcast this to the medical world—his mind raced too far ahead, and he saw his life as a free man ended, pinned like a butterfly in some glass casket, his clothes stripped off, his miniature brain removed for study…horrific). He shivered.

And he was shrinking more rapidly. He was four feet in height. “But what about Rev. Thayer?” she asked.

 “Rev. Thayer, Rev. Thayer”…he turned the name around in his head like an incantation. Who was Rev. Thayer? He finally remembered. “No, no, no…not him, never him.” Who needs a preacher in times of real trouble? And again, he could not confide in such a man safely. His condition would be known. (Levi then asked himself the question—Why shouldn’t the world know that he was shrinking? He could think of no answer to such a question except: 1) He may be dreaming; or 2) If he's not dreaming, then perhaps this is due to…what? Guilt or Shame? Something he ate? The cold air? The meteor storm? His wife? (He looked at Lydia’s tear-stained face, and shook his head.)

Nothing was making sense, and meanwhile he was down to three and a half feet, the height of a five-year-old.

“I’ll get you some warm milk,” Lydia said – hardly realizing what she was saying – and bustled out of the room, leaving her red satin evening slippers behind. Levi got up from the floor and climbed up onto the bed, with some trouble. For the first time he seemed to be aware of the smells and the lights around him. A candle burned by the mirror, and another by the nightstand. The only smell, he realized, was the smell of Lydia’s sweat on his face, sweat that was still somewhat wet, though drying. Strange as it was, his despair and confusion seemed only to intensify his arousal, and he began to stiffen.  Way down beside the bed he saw his wife’s slippers, now huge. He climbed down from the bed.

Fifteen minutes passed before Lydia returned with the milk. She looked around for her husband, on the bed, by the mirror, by the chair, and then by her shoes. She couldn’t find him. She called his name, but there was no response. Putting the milk down by the large cherry-wood dresser, she sat down to put on her slippers, left and then right. She felt something wriggle under her right foot, and drew back in a panic, rattling the insides to dump them out onto the floor. A voice, very faintly, protested. “Lydia,” she heard, “it’s me. It’s Levi.” She gasped, and dropped the shoe. She saw her husband now, about five inches in height, crawl out of the shoe and stumble out onto the deep-red & green carpet, in rose patterns.

A casual observer strolling between the Bowery and Fulton St. late one frosty night in November 1833 would have seen a young woman running with all her strength, wildly waving her hand for an omnibus. At all hours of the day and night (and above all during those November nights, when so many couples and groups and individuals were out on the town to watch the meteor storm, or to stargaze, or to drink, or gamble, or find other means of entertainment), the omnibus, just recently introduced to the city, was running quaint and smooth along the tracks. The crack of the cabman’s whip, his loud cursing, the noisy grunting and complaining of the sleek white horse, or the hailing of the passengers who strategically positioned themselves in front of the horse and whip – or tried to run it down – carried a long way in the chill air.

But amid all that uproar and stench and hurry and sound there was the voice of one woman calling out in more agitation than the rest. She caught an omnibus and was taken three blocks down to visit a doctor. She knew what she wanted (there seemed no other choice): Swaim’s Panacea, which was said to stopper every kind of sickness between syphilis and the common cold. What was in it? Sarsaparilla, she heard, and then some secret ingredient—sometimes mercuric chloride did the job, sometimes a powerful acid that corroded the lining of the stomach or small intestine (the patient would be laid up for a week purging out the corrupted lining of his stomach), and sometimes sugar. When she met the doctor, he asked what was wrong. “It’s my husband,” Lydia said (because this lady is the same). “Dr. Gibson,” she went on, “poor Levi—for the last three days he’s been confined, and only my friends have seen him. Meanwhile consider that Mr. Och, his partner at the firm, has been frenzied terribly about him at work. His wife told me, ‘Levi has been inattentive in conversation. Charles says that at work he appears unusually fatigued, and sometimes drifts off to sleep. He says it’s been altogether a damned rummy situation, and he's advised him to stay home and see a physician. He will take up the costs.’ Oh, Dr. Gibson, whatever shall we do? Is it cholera again (I’ve heard about the plague in London)—Doctor is it that or could it be something worse?” (That is, she hinted: Could it be syphilis? Gibson’s Swaim’s Panacea was usually prescribed as a cure for syphilis.) “I’m losing my head over him. I can scarcely put two thoughts together." She panted, anxious to get home with the Swaim’s as quickly as possible.

Dr. Gibson rubbed his chin and nodded, which he appeared to consider a strict aid to concentration. His eyes drooped sleepily, and then his nose began to run. “There’s a snappy chill outdoors, my dear, so I don’t have time to follow you back. I regret…that is, my advice, dear child,” he blew his nose with his handkerchief and then sharply cleared his throat. “My dear, here is some sarsaparilla mixed with Swaim’s. Come back to me tomorrow, and we’ll look at him together.” He handed her a bottle of amber liquid, waved off her money, and lumbered back to bed. Lydia thanked him profusely and then left.

She ran back home, where the candlelight still glimmered in the upper story, and then ran to the icebox (a new invention) to take out the milk she promised her husband. She shut the icebox door and then ran, milk in hand, to the fireplace to heat it up, “I hope—oh, I hope I’m not late.” A minute later, she ran up the stairs and looked around for her husband.

And this is where we left them last. Fifteen minutes had passed since she left the house and hailed down an omnibus, which took her to the doctor’s. After placing the warm milk on the cherry-wood dresser, she scanned her eyes around the room, and finally, after putting on her slippers she—well, she stumbled upon a five-inch tall man: a five-inch tall man, who was also her husband.

Levi tumbled out of the shoe and alternately crawled and lunged his way over the rose-patterned carpet to his wife. “Oh Levi!”
“Lydia—”
“Come here—what is happening to us?” She reached down and picked him up, then set him down on the dresser by the milk. “Why were you crawling in my shoe?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Oh, I’m still shrinking.” Lydia, he thought, you’re the size of the apartment building—you’re at least 70 ft. high.
 “Drink this—please drink some of this milk.” She studied the room quickly by candlelight, and then yanked a button from her dress, a button which, to him, was about the size of a saucer. She dipped the button into the glass of milk mixed with Panacea, and carefully set it down in front of him. “Take a sip, Levi, one sip. Please.” He looked up at her eyes, now the size of a glass pane from one of the oriel windows projecting out of their front parlor, and at her worried, unsmiling mouth, larger than any lioness’s and, for a brief moment, was disengaged from his mind. He seemed to be watching everything go on below him, the tiny man and the gigantic world, the button-saucer filled with milk, the candlelight, and the beautiful face of a giantess, a giantess in the form of his wife, Lydia, looking down on him. “Drink it, Levi. Hurry—drink it. You’re shrinking before my eyes.” He still froze.

Then, as the thunder after a lightning-bolt, he felt her pluck him up with one hand, and tip the button-ful of milk into his face with the other. He woke up, gulping down the sweet milky liquid, for a full ten seconds. Then it ended, and he felt himself gently deposited on the cherry-wood dresser, wheezing and choking. “I’m sorry about that, Levi, but I had to prod you. It’s just milk mixed with the Swaim’s Panacea I got from Gibson’s. Sarsaparilla, he told me, and something else.” Levi tasted the liquor, and the something else. He licked his lips in a daze, still coughing, and tasted something distinctly metallic. “Could be mercury,” he said. “Could be ordinary New York water.” He smiled sadly, tasting sugar. “And maybe a few gumdrops.” He stood up shakily and looked up at his wife, towering above him now. “Am I still shrinking?” He clapped his hands on his legs, and slapped and wrung the milky cure-all from his arms. “I don’t seem to be.” 
Lydia shook her head, “No, Levi. You’ve stopped, I think. But you’re smaller.”
“Smaller than what?” he asked. He stared up at his wife, and did a quick calculation. “You must be twice as tall as you were, Lydia.” He moved back a few steps, and looked down at his shoes. “How tall am I?”
 Lydia leaned her face down to the edge of the dresser, and measured him with her eyes. “You’re two and a half inches, about…well, about two inches. I can’t say exactly.” Levi looked over the edge of the dresser, and found an abyss below him. He felt woozy and nervous, and then the hopelessness returned. What now? He thought. “Lydia, what do we do now?”

She shook her head. Work was over, obviously, at least until he returned to his normal size. Fortunately she had money, about $11,000, from her marriage. They would be forced to sell the house, leave their friends, and move to a different place, &c., &c., until something altered (that is, until his size altered for the better). After five years of living together like this, perhaps several other people could be confided in. Until then – she thought ahead – I must return to the appearances of single life. With a low heart she turned her face down to her husband, pacing sorrowfully, chin to chest, and with matted clothes and hair across the dresser-top. He finally stopped in his tracks, and looked, a bit frightened and somewhat wearily, up at his wife. He said something quietly, but she couldn’t hear him.

She bent down her ear to his level, and pointed to it, indicating that he must repeat himself. He shouted, “I have an idea!” and then explained his plan.

“What strikes me first, of course, is that any sort of legal work will henceforth be impracticable, if not impossible. I cannot make my condition known—Lydia…dear [how strange it feels, he thought, to call a 180 ft. woman ‘dear’, even if she is—was—your wife]…please don’t press me on this point, because at the moment my defense doesn’t go beyond the fact that ‘I am nervous about showing myself to the world as I am’), so it follows that we must leave the city at once, to avoid gossip. Let us escape suspicion and gossip, for the time being, by traveling out of the City—and the more distantly we travel, in my view, the better.

“Now to business—how  we will accomplish this: send a letter tonight, stamped with my seal and pressed with kisses and perfume and flower petals or whatever you like, to Lucy Och, Charles Och’s wife. At my dictation, you will write a love letter to this woman, detailing my undying and eternal passion for her, my enchantment with her beauty, my wish to arrange a rendezvous, and so on. Simultaneously, you will send another letter, in your own words, to Charles Och, in which it is revealed that I have been making unwanted advances against his wife, Lucy. You do not name yourself, but hint that Lucy told you this in confidence, and wishes it to be kept a private matter. Lucy may deny or aggressively affirm this—it matters not. Charles will be enraged, and will likely challenge me to a test of my manhood or somewhat else. But tonight, we will leave this house and turn East toward the Ferry at Corlears Hook (a messy district, yes, but you must get out quietly). That’s my idea.”

Lydia raised her head, studied her husband for a moment, and then lifted him up and gave him a smacking kiss. “It shall be done!” she saluted him, mockingly, though not without a few tears glazing the corners of her eyes, and put him back down. “I shall write the two letters at once. First give me the salacious and raunchy tale of romance, and don’t spare me. As for the wronged and injured wife, resentful of her husband and the world, well, I suppose I’ll do all right with that. I’ll fetch my pens and paper, and then call an omnibus.” She turned out of the room (rather, to him, she ‘stormed out’—or, as a 21st cen. comparison, you can imagine Liberty stooping off her pedestal for a quick bath in Hudson Bay. The sudden gale of wind would upset a few helicopters circling her crowned head, or her yellowy-white torch, wind-swept).

She came back, they wrote the letters, and then left the house. Where would they go first? And what would happen to them, or what sorts of people would they meet, that night and in the future? She dropped him between her scented breasts (about 15’ by 12’ each), with the perfumed letters, and then stole off in an omnibus down Fulton Street, toward the Ferry, east of Manhattan.

As Lydia strolled down the street with her husband between her breasts, she remembered a passage from the second book of Gulliver’s Travels, in which the Brobdingnagian Maids of Honour passed the hero around like a doll among themselves, how ‘The handsomest among these Maids of Honour,’ Swift writes, ‘a pleasant frolicksome Girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples; with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse me’ for not going into further detail. A smile crossed her face; she felt an urge, on the sudden, to share this little souvenir with Levi. But she didn’t dare to speak to him, even around the little trickle of people and talk she passed on her walk. Instead she straightened her dress, and drew him somewhat more snugly into her cleavage, which, despite the near-freezing temperatures, was beginning to sweat under her full-length woolen dress.

After passing the Ochs place, Lydia slipped both letters under the door, and then continued walking east toward the ferry. In fifteen minutes, she was approaching Corlears Hook, the red-light district of the day (the word ‘hooker’ probably originated here, among the seedy gambling houses, the smoky saloons, the greasy restaurants, the crumbling tenements, and the houses of ill repute, where girls stood out in their woolen worsted knee-highs, and their gaudy skirts, passing their inviting words and wandering eyes on the men in top-hats and thick black coats, who carried long polished canes with golden knobs and ebony ferrules). That November night they lined the street, and middle-aged men with scabby faces and pockmarked skin traded witticisms with them. Sometimes the men circulated around with escorts, and other times they stood at the doorways, knocking feebly or forcefully—wheeling around apprehensively, or waiting on the stoops for permission to enter.

Levi himself felt uncomfortable in his position, and hoped that his wife would stop or sit somewhere, every quarter of an hour. Her sweat began to drip down onto his face, into his mouth, and over his clothes. Her pores, moles, tiny hairs, everything, though for the moment invisible, was awkwardly wedged against his flesh. Again, the smell of his wife surrounded him, her sweat, her perfume, but this time it was oppressive, and in the stifling atmosphere he clung to the sweat-saturated wool above him. 

As Lydia walked down the street at this late hour (it was now past midnight, and turning toward dawn), she pressed Levi closer against her heart, which, for good reason, was beating very rapidly. A woman approached her suddenly out of the dark, a tall maiden out of the shadows, who hid her face and pulled Lydia off to the side, before that good woman could fathom what had happened to her.

“Madam, how much are you going to make tonight?” The dark lady pivoted around, as though to make sure her flanks were guarded .
“You must have the wrong person,” Lydia said, unscrewing her hand, “I don’t know you. You must let me go at once.”
But she persisted, “Lady, lady” – while clamping her hand again on Lydia’s tiny wrist – "really, tell me how much."
 “I insist,” she said, now reddening and growing more alarmed. “I insist that you let me go.”

But then a door opened squeakily behind her, and two more figures joined that first worthy woman. Together they dragged Lydia inside a building and led her upstairs, through some ratty, mildewing tenement halls where the water dripped down from the ceilings continually, where the building was unequipped with any piping or plumbing system, and where the people within the rooms she passed seemed and sounded older than New York, than America itself. Three women on the third floor from the ground (as far as she could judge) surrounded her and then sat her down on a foul-smelling cushion. 

Levi perceived some of this and certainly heard most of it from where he had been positioned in his hideout, between Lydia’s breasts. He was aware that something in their plan had gone awry, and waited, well, ‘in the dark’ – swallowing his apprehension until someone had exposed him to the light, or carried him into the light.

The light was blinding, and at first he could see nothing. But one by one, the dimensions of the room, and the objects and people within the room, were defined. Three young women stood in a semi-circle in front of him, as he was still perched between his wife’s breasts. It seemed to be Lydia’s dress, gown, and linen chemise the girls tore off first. If they had harbored any designs to steal his wife’s clothes, or to, somehow, employ her alongside them (a demented, hopeless, and impossible object, he thought, considering his wife’s social position and connections), they immediately threw everything aside. He watched them as they watched his two-inch long form sprawled out against his wife’s right breast,; they watched with mouths agape, and with a kind of wonder and lust in their eyes, as he attempted, pitifully, without success, to scale and then hide behind her breast. They watched as he looked high in in the distance, and saw Lydia’s two arms tied at the wrist far above him. As, behind him, he made out the few words that she was casting in his direction, through her gagged lips: “I’m sorry,” “I don’t know what has happened,” and the like. And then, finally, he turned to face their three captresses, who stared down at him, astonished, and with hunger in their eyes. What sort of women were these? He was terrified to find out.

 Then a voice boomed up from the floor below, calling for Charity and Cordelia. The last, whose nature as well as name we will soon learn, was Christina, the one whose hand clamped down on Lydia’s wrist in the inky gloom of the Lower East Side. Christina, 5’10” and formidable, was the girl who nigh singlehandedly dragged Lydia, up the stairs, the two others merely accompanying. Why she did this is unclear: she might have been insane, she might have wanted the night off, and money for her efforts, or she might have been motivated by certain sadistic impulses, as common among the lower classes as the upper, and in one sex as much as the other. Charity and Cordelia departed together with quick steps, meanwhile peeking backward at Levi, chattering girlishly, and casting sidelong frowns and grimaces at Christina, who paid them no heed—indeed her eyes never left the little man, but stayed on him unsealed, focused, a playful glimmer showing now and then behind the coal-dark and smoldering passion of her pupils. When the door had shut, she advanced toward him with deliberate steps, and took him up, despite Lydia’s muffled outcries.

Levi punched and fought against her hand as far as he could, but without effect.

“Tut tut,” she clicked her tongue against her teeth. “No, no, no. You must try to behave, my little friend.” She looked over at Lydia, who was staring wide-eyed and helpless at her. “Oh, girly, you’ll be fine. Alonzo doesn’t want you, no one else here will take you—seeing the risks involved—and now I can do without you. When the two others climb back up here, in good spirits, they’ll let you go, and you’ll be free to go. Have no fear. As for your little dainty here,” and she looked down on the little man, “Well, you’ll have trouble finding him again, I’m sure.” Christina peeled off her old, low-heeled leather boot, and slipped Levi within, angling him down to the rank, battered, encrusted toe-section. “Tonight, tomorrow, and forever, my dear,” she said, turning to Lydia-- and Christina, that dangerous & formidable woman, fitted her damp knee-length woolen stocking back into the boot, and stepped out the side-door with a light step into the night.

During the five minutes that elapsed between Christina’s exit and the return of the other two girls, Charity and Cordelia, Lydia had time enough to reflect on the previous six hours of her life, which loomed in her mind huge and forbidding, in some ways totally eclipsing, for her, the last twenty-five years of her happy existence. She thought of her family, who lived North, in Dutchess County, and she thought of her father, the latest in a long line of English wine merchants. She thought of Levi, of course, who was perhaps lost to her forever—she thought of her married life, of her future, gone, lost in an instant. She thought of their home, which would soon be sold to the first buyer. She thought of Lucy and Charles Och, who would rise in an hour and open her two letters, and dreaded the explanation she would have to give them: she now looked at her husband’s little ploy and found it wanting, not only in decency but in design. And all that plotting for what! So that he could escape notice for a few days, perhaps, or maybe a year, before a cure could be found.

Most of all she felt ashamed, ashamed—but then the door creaked open, and she watched as the two girls, Charity and Cordelia, peered around the side with cartoonish expressions on their faces. They gave each other quick looks, and then rushed in, “What’s happened! What’s this about? Where is she?! Christina!” Lydia, undaunted, glared her eyes at them—she was still bound and gagged, and waited, waited. “Un-gag her,” said Charity to the other. Lydia waited, and then stood up and walked toward the door without a word. “Hello, ma’am!” one of the girls called her. 
Lydia spun around, “What! What can you possibly want from me!”
“Ma’am, here, please—ma’am, take my twenty dollars. Alonzo wishes a small atonement for your trouble.” Charity spoke.
“Pray, who is he?”
 “Why, he lives here, ma’am. He wants nothing to do with those street women, those tramps, your Christinas, please you. He owns this establishment and he proprietates it, ma'am, and he offers you twenty dollars for your trouble, that you must take it and leave peacefully. Here’s your clothes, and here’s your trinkets, ma’am." She paused. "I have one question only, if you please, ma'am,—what was –”
 “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stop there." Lydia took command. "In any event, I will not report you, Alonzo, or the rest of your mangy, rotten establishment to the Law. I say that I will not report you—but (she reconsidered)--but on one condition: you must tell me where Christina has gone. She has stolen something valuable from me—more valuable than these paltry and replaceable clothes and knickknacks you’ve returned to me—and I must find her within the hour. Tell me where she resides.”
 “Oh, ma’am, I'm sure I don’t know,” said Charity, looking over at the silent Cordelia, and then down at the bare and moldy planks in the floorboards. “I don’t know, nor may I guess, ma’am.” The girl paused, then lurched forward and flung herself at Lydia’s dress. “Oh, ma’am, she paid me for this. She put us both up, Cordelia and I, and we have nothing. Please say nothing to Alonzo, please say nothing. Think of your family, ma’am, then think of mine, overseas, all alone. Say nothing, please, say nothing, I beg.” Lydia’s heart melted instantly, and felt a terrible pity and shame come over her. 
“No, no, of course,” she said. “No, I’ll say nothing. Just, please, tell me where the other woman has gone to. Where can I find her? I shall tell no one, I swear to you.” And she looked over at Cordelia, off in the corner of the room, who was bending over and collecting Lydia’s articles.
“She rambles, ma’am. She moves about, and Alonzo will verify—”
“I want nothing to do with Alonzo, and I don’t want his money, but if you can tell me where she has lodged last, I will leave you at once.”
Cordelia spoke up. “Chatham Square was where I saw her last, in the Bowery. Go there, and you might have luck. Goodbye.”
“I’ll go there then. Where is the nearest omnibus?”
“Three blocks down.” Lydia wrenched herself free of Charity’s grip, grabbed her possessions, pulled on her clothes, draped herself in an overcoat and hood, and left the building without a word. She could waste no more time.

As she left the brothel and rushed down the street, dawn was spreading faintly behind her, toward the ferry. Her heart ached inwardly, as she thought “If, if, if we could have passed over the last hour, if I hadn’t written those two letters, and cut off all our connections with the Ochs and the rest of the city (and my family! Oh, what will they think?)—and if, oh, if Levi were still here, and hadn’t caught this disease, if he hadn’t shrunk—oh, who up there is testing me!” At the rim of the west, the sky was still bright with meteors—the storm would be visible throughout the daytime hours as well, shimmering from above the rings of the sun, down below the edge of the horizon. Nothing answered her up there – not even that yellowy-white globe in the sky, everlastingly pulsing out its gaseous flames of dull-gold, drowning not only the night but brightness itself – not even the sun seemed to mean anything. The sun, and every other star up there, is a cruel and a pitiless creature, even in cold November.

But at least the night was ending, even if that meant Charles Och would join her in her chase for Levi. She had the jump on Charles, and simply must avoid all mention or thought of him. She must not run into him in the street, and she must not run into any of her friends, who would doubtless observe and make some comment about her haggard, sleepless face, her unkempt hair, and the ragged and torn linen clothes under her woolen overcoat. What a night!

The usual urban to-do was starting up again, as the warm purple and orange glow in the east began to warm the coast of America, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Lydia, tired as she was, found an omnibus and stepped off at the Bowery. She hurried down to Chatham Square, not knowing precisely where to go, or what to expect, or what she should hope to find. It was “a messy district” here, as well, and she found many of the same establishments she found down at the Hook, where she was mugged and lost Levi. But here the places were younger, just having begun to sprout up within the last two or three years. Above the theaters, across from the restaurants and saloons, under the rickety wooden houses, down the alleyways—she knew, with more certainty, now that it was daylight, that here was the real New York Underworld. Despair crept over her, but she swatted it away and pushed onward. She would find Levi, and he would be alive. She would arrest the harlot, that demoness – the woman who seemed everything she was not – and bring her to justice (not for stealing her husband, which no one would believe without physical evidence, but for stealing her honor, and her property). “One must go on—I must not give up hope.” And in her heart, as the morning began to grow bright, not all hope was lost, or could be lost.

She entered the nearest cabaret theater, ascended the stairs, and asked to speak with the manager. To her surprise, she was not turned away. A man with a lively eye and a jaunty step walked in, and raised her hand for a kiss. She pulled away, and asked his name.

“Fields,” he said. “Name’s Henry Fields.”  
“Mr. Fields,” said Lydia, “I’m looking for a woman who has stolen from me, a woman I’ve been told has recently procured a room nearby. She works as a dancer, and I am seeking information.”
 “A girl, huh? Find a constable. Find a watchman.” He was ready to leave. [At the time, New York had no police force.]
 “This is a private matter, Mr. Fields, and I wish that it be kept private, for the present.”
“Ah. What’s the dame go by. What’s her name.”

“Christina, I believe. Do you know any?”
 “Do I know any?" His eye sparkled. "I should think so. I should think I know one. Why, I know one—and she doesn’t work here, believe me. But I know of one. Go up the street two blocks and find Mose and Lize’s saloon. Ask for a Miss Jane Abbott. She stayed there last week and for all I know she's staying there still, Ms. –I didn’t get your last name.”
“Lydia.”
“Ms. Lydia, I advise—I strongly advise you to take someone with you, if you don’t want no unpleasantness. Allow me to escort you, a little ways.”
“Mr. Fields, I am in a hurry, and I’m sorry but I must decline your offer, well-meaning and good-natured as it very well may be. I’m grateful to you for your information.” She set down Charity’s twenty, and abruptly left the room.
“My pleasure, Ms. Lydia, my pleasure. But wait—my card. I must write you a letter.”
 Lydia doubted that Fields’ signature could be of much use to her, but waited the five seconds it took him to write it. She thanked him and turned left at the entrance, pacing herself, but pressing herself forward into the clamor and energy of the street. She would find Christina. She would get her justice, even in the face of absurdity—of whatever happened to her, whatever unjust calamities had been forced upon her after the last seven hours.

Levi was now sucked into the Inferno – he was lost in the vortex, in the toe, of Christina’s right walking shoe. He was pressed down into the leathery insole, caught down by a tidal rush of pressure under her woolen knee-highs. The fabric was old, and rarely—if ever—washed, soaked with sweat and covered in grime, all of which he could feel and smell, if not see (light and a little fresh air entered faintly and yellowishly now and then through a tiny aperture to his side, and it was during those brief snatches of light that he was able, shadow by shadow, to determine where he was in Christina’s wet and overheated shoe.

After what seemed like hours, he felt the girl stop, and as the pressure on his body diminished he guessed that she was sitting down. She raised her right shoe and rested it, gently, crosswise on her other knee. Levi slid down toward the tiny aperture, and saw the cobblestones, and Christina’s left shoe, far, far below. Then the perspective changed, and he slid down a tiny slide of debris, lint and dirt, to the heel of the boot. After taking her foot away and resting it delicately on the sidewalk, she hooked Levi up between her thumb and forefinger and brought him to her face.

“Now you must be strictly plain with me, you morsel, if you want to breathe air. Who are you, and why were you with that woman? Speak up!”
Levi, bewildered, and slicked over with the foul-smelling glaze from her shoe, was tired. He paused a moment. Christina, young as she looked, frightened him terribly and seemed capable of anything, perhaps even murder--and who would ever be called guilty of murdering a two-inch tall man, or who could be caught in the act!
 “Who Are You?” She dangled him over the cobblestones, 70 ft. below. 
 “Levi,” he said. “I’m just a lawyer, and I can’t tell you more. I don’t know how this happened to me. Six hours ago, I was not like this. We were watching the meteors, I shrunk, and we decided to leave town until…until…I am cured. We were just looking for a cure.” he said.

Christina nodded, and waited for a moment. “In that case, you may be useful to me. However, if you decide to be useless—you will never see your wife—no, my friend—" Levi struggled vainly against her fingers "—You will never see anyone, ever again. I tell you this, plainly, so you understand your situation.” 
 “Who are you? What do you want?” Levi shivered as the girl suspended him in the cold air, between her fingers. 
 “First: my name is Christina. And as for what I want: Don’t be a dunce. I want your money, Jack, I want your livelihood. I want to skip this indecent shithole. I want it all.”
“You won’t have it. Upon my life, you won’t have any of it—you, you—”
“Goddess? Or were you about to say something else?”
“Whore!” he cried out, with all the strength he had.
“Oh dear—I’m afraid, Levi, that this complicates my plan, somewhat. I had hoped to persuade you sooner, or at least for some clever lying, some gamely cheating—no, I believe you’re treating me wrong, you little shrimp. I don’t believe you understand anything at all yet. But don’t worry. Tonight, or tomorrow, or the day after, I will reform you.” She frowned at him tauntingly.
“What do you mean? If you kill me, you’ll get nothing. You will have to murder me.”
 “Oh no, again I’m afraid you’ve completely missed the point. Listen carefully: I won’t have to kill you—unless you would like to be killed by me (in that case I’ll oblige, after you write out a will, at my dictation—though I suppose I can leave your wife a few odds and ends, whatever will satisfy her)—I won’t have to kill you at all.” Christina lifted her right foot from the sidewalk, and pried off her woolen knee-high.

“We’re walking home,” she told him. “And when we arrive, I will give you ample opportunity, a rare chance, to talk with me again. But for now I will give you some advice, gratis: learn some wisdom. Thank me later.”

And with that, she dropped Levi into the stocking, all the way down to the toe. She slid her foot in immediately after, and again crossing it over onto her left knee, worked him into the underside of her toes. Women, and especially women of her description, seldom had fresh water to drink (beer and liquor were far more plentiful and cheap). And of the fresh water they were able to obtain, only a small portion was used for bathing—perhaps once a month they were able to clean themselves thoroughly. Levi’s trial was far beyond the pale, and he prayed any God or gods that would listen to him, for his protection and for Lydia’s. Christina chirruped to him pleasantly far above, “I will stop for dinner along the way, don’t worry. If you’re hungry, however, I regret that I won’t be able to feed you. I get what I can, and I scrounge what I can, wherever I can, when I must. Fortunately, for you, you probably won’t grow thirsty. And if you ever get hungry, don’t be squeamish about swallowing. I won’t be long.” And with that, he was plunged again into darkness, into the depths of her thirty foot long shoe, and this time in direct contact with her moist bare flesh.

 The reader will conceive that the journey Levi took to Christina’s room was the longest and most unpleasant of his relatively young life. He was plastered under the bare flesh, clad in the stockings, sealed in the leather boot, of a twenty-something year old stage dancer, covered in her sweat and grime, and doing the best he could to swallow none of it. It was the longest journey of his life, and possibly his last: his ship across the river, to the Inferno (he thought to himself grotesquely, as his imagination grew increasingly dank, lost, and clouded), would appear in the shape of this boot, the boot of a young woman. They stopped now and again. He knew when she was eating—he was surprised this fact stuck in his memory, somewhere among all the gross flotsam and odors passing around through her boot—and he knew when she was walking, but nothing else.

He may have been, once upon a time, attracted to the feet of his wife. But this was past all his erotic imagination and desire, and he could make no sense of it. The senses can be ‘overloaded’, as the expression goes, and this – contrary to general opinion – is never a very pleasant experience. Levi’s sense, stomach, and his brain were overloaded when they had stopped again, and he saw Christina’s face smiling down on him from above. He blinked two or three times, and wiped the girl’s foot-slime from his eyes, looking around. They were in a rented room in a boarding house, he guessed, and the dark girl was living alone.

“Ah, there you are,” she said, casting him a devious glance. “Feeling a bit more chummy, Jack? Or would you rather go straight to bed. I’m very tired myself”—dawn winked in the window—“So if you have anything to say, please hurry.” Levi straightened himself up, and stood up straight, or tried to stand up straight, and looked as impressive as he could. He thought for a moment, “If your name is really Christina, then perhaps you can help me. If you do this, I may help you. Please listen.” 
“Hurry, hurry,” she said, and let out a great yawn.

“I have dictated a letter to the wife of my partner in law, Charles Och, which specifies—in more than one word—my interest in her. A letter has also been sent to Charles himself, in my wife’s voice (the woman you abducted and presumably mugged—she may be lost still, for all I know), which conveys her outrage and supreme disgust with the affair. Though she does not name herself, her authorship is expressly implied in the tone and style, and in her intimate connection with the seducer. Here is all I ask: I address the letter to a Lucy, but I do not say Lucy Och or Smith or Circumference. I say Lucy alone. If you show yourself to Charles, today, and confess that you—not his wife—were the object of my illicit affections, I will hand over my estate to you, in toto. I swear it.”

 Watching the little man with a curious eye, Christina appeared to give this offer serious consideration. She flumped down at the ramshackle table, then stood up after a moment and picked Levi up. Sitting down on the bed, and dandling him over her crossed knees, she gave her verdict. “I’ll sleep on it, tinsel-nose, and tell you what I think in a few hours. If what you told me holds water, we’ll act on it today. If not, you stay in my possession until you decide to be useful. I have to sleep for a few hours. I suggest that you try sleeping as well.” She peeled the stocking from her foot, and then lowered him down to the toe. She stuck her foot in after him, and turned over onto the age-old mattress to go to sleep. And surprisingly, after a half-hour, Levi fell asleep too, under Christina's infernally disgusting toes–though feeling somewhat less hopeless than before, and anxious to find his wife. So tired was he that, even situated as he was, pressed into the mushy substance under Christina's toes, he soon forgot the world.

When Christina woke again, it was about 7 AM by the sun, and golden light was streaming in through the windows through a haze of dust motes. She slipped off her stocking and carried Levi, who was still fast asleep, to the rickety table in the center of the room. After laying him down atop of it, she walked over to her cupboard and extracted a slim, black vial of some watery substance. Wiping her lips with the back of her hand, she leaned back in her chair, and watched Levi sleep for a few moments. Then she stretched out her left hand, and lightly tapped him in the stomach with her middle finger. He leapt up immediately, and reached nimbly into his breeches for the gun that wasn’t there. Then he saw Christina smiling at him, and remembered.

“I’ve thought over what you proposed, and I don’t like it, Levi. I don’t like it at all.”
“What do you mean?” As he began to regain his consciousness of the past seven hours, and smell the awful stench arising from his clothes, he asked her what alternative she had.
 “Oh, it’s simple, Levi. I know what you want most, and I can press you there. I don’t have to pose a genteel Lucy and dress up for another comedy of errors. Your plan is simple. That’s not my style, Jack.” She poked him softly in the gut.
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t. But I do. You do think your troubles are great, I grant you, and supposing they be great, and supposing you alone shrunk last night or any other night, why, to be reconciled with some no-account lawyer like Charles Och should indeed be high up on your list. But I tell you you’re not alone, and I’ve seen and known of others like you. I could offer you better than that, you little shyster. Don’t you see anything yet? You’ve been poisoned. You’re poisoned, and I alone know of the antidote.”
“Why, then you must hand it to me! My offer stands. I’ll gift you my estate, everything I have!”
 “Yes, yes. But then I ask you what assurance do I have that you'll hand it to me? What guarantee? I say, you must first entrust to me what I want before I hand you the antidote."

Levi’s heart sank and then rose again—a sailboat dashing down an oceanic trough, and then reaching up for the crest of the oncoming wave. “Lydia…”, he whispered. Christina bent down, and heard the name.
“Your wife, yes. I reckon you’ve disappointed her enough, wouldn’t you say? I speak as one with an intimate knowledge of shame, though there are limits even I should never trespass. Consult your longsuffering wife on the matter of Lucy Och, my little friend. See how she responds to the idea of being the wife of an adulterer. The first crime you’ve already accomplished, I see—you are Lucy’s seducer—and I understand you there better than you think. What is that—for a lawyer of your distinction! (she sneered)—compared to showing the public what you've become! A mite! No, Levi. You needed cause to leave, and you snatched out your hand at the first to come, a small disgrace. Being the seducer of a Lucy Och would put you somewhere in the outermost edges of hell, would it not? you are a rake, but at least you're not a shrunken man. Isn't that how it was for you? Isn't that why you sent those letters?”
“Hold, please—stop…”
“Not yet. For a legal man, if that is what you are, you are most above the average: so clever with your makeshift arguments and apologies, your speeches-of-the-moment, and so very off-kilter and inconsistent in your conclusions. I’ve heard your type in the courtroom, Levi, and I know how impressive you sound—until court ends, and the effect wears off. How many speeches I’ve heard in my mind, after court ends, and how much emptier and less reliable they appear! It is magic work you men do, magic. But I won’t be bought—nor will Lucy, and nor will your wife. Lydia was her name?”
“Lydia.”
“She will never agree to this deeper shame. I tell you that. She will not be rumored as the wife of a rakehell, a hooker’s consort. And that is the end of your story. You lose.”

Levi paused, and asked for a drink. He was still besmirched and bespattered with the filth from Christina’s feet, and he wanted to be clean. “Before I decide my fate, at least give me water. Haven’t you tortured me enough?”
 She grinned, “You think you’ve been tortured…” Her lips twisted into a kind of scowl, and she stared at him bleakly, “Yes, yes, let’s get some water.” She poured out a capful of whisky, and broke up a few crumbs of moldy bread from the loaf she kept. He looked disgusted. “The repast of the poor, my friend—you see a woman’s reward for handing out fun, cheaply, to men such as yourself.  The want of money is an evil just as great as the love of it. And as you can see I never loved it enough, or mayhap it never loved me at all. Who knows? But here’s what I think, because I do think: the future belongs to me and such men and women as I am—the future belongs to the desperate of the world who are seeking their vengeance. They will find it, eventually.”
“Very philosophical,” Levi remarked. “I expected a she-demon, but I see I’ve found the Devil herself.”
“Ha! Yes, yes, you’ve found more than that. I’m the Devil incarnate, my little friend. You wonder how this City goes on burning? I keep it burning, kid. I’m the one who heats it up and stokes the flames. You should know me by now, being a lawyer. I have a reputation.”
“Probably, I think you may be mad, Ms. Christina.”
 “Well, I ought to be mad. And I wish I were, perhaps. But I'm sorry to say I’m not. I’m only losing, and I’m ready to start winning again."
“Perhaps you’re too young for such things, yet. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight?”
“Twenty-two,” she muttered, with black eyes aflame. “Twenty-two.”
He paused. “And the bath?”
Christina took a small pitcher of rainwater from the window, and sprinkled a few drops into a table-groove. Levi doused his hands, face, and arms in the clear liquid, and then stood up.

“What do you want me to do?” Levi had finished his bread-soaked whisky, and was ready to move.
“Well, you miserable atom”—Did she smirk? Levi asked himself—“As long as we’re playing this game, we’re going to follow my rules. I know a place on the West Side, where the pigs are slaughtered. Have you been there?”
 “It’s an Irish district, is it not?”
 “Irish, Dutch, Jewish, German, Free Slave—it’s poor indeed. (Perhaps you thought you’d seen the worst here. I tell you it’s not half as bad as the blood-drenched streets of the west.) We’ll go there. In that neck of the city, there’s a door where an Irish woman lives alone. What potions she prepares I don’t know, but we can go to her. I’ve seen others like you, men of the working class whom she disfavored and later kept. When I saw you in at Alonzo’s I reckoned only she could have done such work, and stole you up with her partly in mind.”
“There was more than that, girl. You’ve put me through hell.”
“And I would put you through hell again—believe that if you believe nothing else. But if you want your life again, as much as I want my own, then you must learn to suffer for my pleasure.”
“How is that?”
 “It is my pleasure that you should sign the document, this morning, handing over half of your money to me. It is my pleasure that we walk to the west, and that you become accustomed to your lowly position. You’ll be brought to heel before I return you to your size, I assure you. It will take us an hour’s walk before we arrive, but before then, you may come to appreciate—no, you may come to embrace—your position.”
Levi trembled, and his face grew pale. “I’m afraid of what you say—what can you mean by this?”
“Oh, I don’t expect you to understand, yet. I still have to break you down, make sure we have an understanding, know we’re on the same page. But by the time we arrive, you’ll understand completely, I have no doubt. There will be no games with my life anymore, Levi. I have too much to live for. This day will be mine.”
Christina reached for her knee-high stocking, and wrung it out. “You fell asleep in here once before, Levi. Maybe you’ll fall asleep again. Come here.” She picked him up, and smiled at him. “Try to enjoy this,” she said. “It’s our last hour together, and you’re only paying me half your life for the pleasure. But am I not worth everything?” Levi couldn’t respond to this madness. He froze with terror. She dropped him down, and he fell down to the soiled, smelly toe-region, once again.

“Here I come,” she announced, from above. And her huge, dry, and lightly calloused foot came down and covered him again in its world. He felt her fingers mashing him into place, and then felt one of her fingers pressing lightly against his loins, which—to his horror and shame—responded to the touch. As Christina turned her foot back to the Inferno—to him—of the boot, he was molded back into place at the farthest corner of the toe. Then she stepped down, and with the sudden orgasmic pressure of her foot, he exploded as never before in his life. Some horrible and unforgettable consummation had occurred, unasked and unwelcome. But it was done, even where he lay, in Christina’s shoe, and under the unspeakable stench of her foot. He was outraged and ashamed, but even so, he became aware that Christina’s shoe also smelled like Christina, and that no woman had ever before brought him to such a pass.

 She walked out of the room confidently, and was proud of herself. She couldn’t have planned that more perfectly. And that was only the first step.

Henry Fields, owner and proprietor of the Fields Theater in the Bowery, lazed against the brick wall of a tenement building while chewing a tobacco wad and occasionally hawking up the surplus into the gutter. To passersby, some of whom greeted him with a nod or a word or a smile, he was at ease and unconcerned, at peace with the world about him. But the more attentive observer would have noticed that while Fields looked everywhere at everything, straying his eye down the length of the street and up to the clouds and meteors in the sky, he saw one object alone. No, Mr. Henry Fields was not at ease. He was not in one of his casual or idle moods. His mind was not wandering. Henry Fields had fastened all his attention on one particular door on the other side of this particular street, and he waited for this door to open.

And when it finally opened, he saw that Ms. Christina emerged first, followed by Ms. Abbott. He saw the latter walk her out, halt at the entryway, and then turn back indoors. His alert and canny eye alone saw Ms. Abbott from the window of her saloon, watching Ms. Christina swerve away and finally disappear into the teeming crowd. And he saw that when Christina had merged with the crowd and was lost to sight down the broad avenue, another woman pushed forward into the crowd after Christina, a woman now slowing down and now jogging along at a quick pace.  He spit the remainder of his chew in the gutter and then cut off down a sidestreet in a westerly direction, to head them off.

A few blocks down, Fields spotted the second again, and watched her. She was still in pursuit of Ms. Christina, though now moving along more cautiously, every other minute glancing back over down the street, as though she expected at any moment for a large hand to fall on her shoulder, and for a booming voice to call out, with authority: “Lady, I am detaining you.”  This second woman – of course – was Lydia, or, as she was known to Henry Fields, “Ms. Lydia.” She had no doubt consulted with Ms. Abbott, as he’d recommended, and that lady had either given her warning (and directed Lydia to follow Christina at a distance, waiting for her chance), or simply wanted to avoid any ‘unpleasantness’ in her place of work, and to rid herself of both women without causing a scene. Knowing Jane Abbott, Fields knew her to be the kind of woman not only anxious to avoid a ‘scene’, but the kind who has long before washed her hands clean of any responsibility. If her clients or her boarders wanted to act up, kill each other, or steal, well, that wasn’t her business. Her business was to ensure that they paid her when they agreed to pay her. And Christina, like most of her shady and less respectable boarders, paid on time. If Lydia had told Jane Abbott anything, it would have stayed between Lydia and Jane and the vicious streets. And, thought Fields, that’s what Jane must have told her: “This is between you, Christina, and the street. I wash my hands of this.”

But though Fields was a deeply curious man, and was able to size up a person or situation pretty quickly, he thought little about what Jane Abbott had been revolving through her mind, or what were her reasons for distancing herself from the two other women – the real matter at hand was why Lydia was chasing such a dangerous woman, why she was following Christina. He was baffled, and – well, he was only human – the mystery fascinated him. Would there be a murder? A scuffle? A pickpocketing? A quarrel? Whenever Christina was involved with another woman, or whenever another woman was involved with Christina, one could be certain of a confrontation.

And this woman claimed she’d been robbed – pinched, mugged, cornered, perhaps – of something ‘valuable.’ Her clothes were well-to-do, and in disarray, and her face bruised and sleepless. That she’d declined to call enforcement, a night watchman or anyone else, for help, was curious, and seemed to suggest that she herself could have been implicated in some illegal or less-than-proper act. These were some of the thoughts that came to his mind as he loafed and leaned across the street from Mose & Lize’s saloon, the small part of his back against a brick wall, a big plug of chewing tobacco in his mouth, thinking, watching, and waiting.

Past the disreputable bars and bordellos between Bleecker St. at Martin and Greene, down the old decaying 18th century mansions from the Bowery to 6th Avenue, and up Sixth Avenue to the lower 50s – crisscrossing around & taking dozens of unnecessary detours – to the spot of Midtown just south of today’s Central Park, Christina’s route to the piggery district just west of Midtown seemed to Lydia and Henry Fields nothing short of erratic. But at last she stopped.

The building she stopped at was a wooden, unstable structure, perhaps a boarding house. The sort of language that wafted down from its upper stories sounded like English, but could have been any speech under the sun. The sound of a baby sobbing reached Lydia’s ears, and then Henry Fields heard a catfight beginning in some remote and unseen corner. At the front door, Christina turned around and glanced backward, and stared so long down the length of the street that Lydia, concealed a block away, hidden behind a stone quoin and shaded beneath a low canvas awning, felt her skin creep.

When Lydia was certain that Christina was inside, she came out of her hiding place and squeezed her way down the narrow lane, toward the old building. Then she felt a hand touch her shoulder, and wheeled around, terror-struck and chilled to the bones. Her veins warmed and her blood began to flow again when she saw the honest face of Henry Fields looking back at her. He steered her off to one of the nearby buildings for a conference. “Can’t be done,” he said. Lydia gave him a questioning look, and then turned her face toward the end of the street. 
“Apologies for the shock, Ms. Lydia, but this won’t work. She comes out in an hour, or two hours, and then,” he pulled up his coarse cotton shirt, revealing an ancient and timeworn pistol, flecked over with rust, “then we’ll nab her together. We’ll sit here and wait.”

Over the roofs of the neighboring houses, a black smoke began to arise from the factories and slaughterhouses. Two blocks down, in the central part of Midtown, she heard the sounds and caught the smells of the city. Twenty feet away, two gigantic hogs rummaged through the gutters, pawing their hooves through the debris, searching for food. But aside from those hogs, this street was strangely, uncannily lifeless. Not a soul was in sight.

“I’m grateful – more than I thought I could ever be – that…you’re here, that you’re present with me. I know you have a kind, disinterested, and unselfish heart.” Mr. Fields straightened his back and nodded, looking sagely and vigilantly off toward the boarding house, where the tabby cats were still screeching and scratching each other heroically. Fields heard the smash of a glass bottle and a thunderous oath. Then all was peaceful again.
“But Mr. Fields,” Lydia continued, “I must go on alone. Do not wait for me.” She began to pull away from him. “I must go into that building. I simply cannot wait.” 
 “This is most unwise, Ms. Lydia. I shouldn’t be a man if I saw you go in that door alone." He paused in thought. "I’ll conduct you to the door, and after that you’ll go it alone. That’s my oath.”
 Lydia wavered. “I can allow you that. You give me your word you'll go no farther?”
 “My word and my bond, that we link arms 'til we get the door. After that you can hazard what you may. I’ll wait at the landing.”
 “Fine. Let’s go.”
 “If it gets warm, don’t feel no scruples about hollering. I’ll have my gun cocked and at the ready. Call down from above, call down loud enough to wake the dead old dame across the street, call down until the whole bugeaten building keels over – I’m there instantly, pronto, toot sweet.”
 “Who says ‘toot sweet’?”
 “Well, I believe the French say it. They say ‘toot sweet’ stead of ‘at once.’”
“Of course they do. They’re French.”
 “Oh no – all the French know American and could be American if they wanted. They just stick to the Frenchie tongue out of pure perversity. I once met a Frenchman in a bar who I perceived was welching on me. I said to him, ‘You're shuffling the tits off that queen, you bet I'm watching you. You pay, Jacques, or this knife’s in your craw.’ (Apologies, Ms. Lydia.) I said, ‘You pay what you owe or you cut out ‘toot sweet.’ I spoke his tongue so he'd know where I was going. But then he cut back a step with one wide sneering grin over his face and said ‘Qu’est-ce que vous dites?’ as though he wasn't following where I was going. He told me to talk American to him so he'd get it. Well I did talk American to him then, and you bet he was out of there running hell-for-leather before anyone pulled out a gun. It’s my general view that all your Gallic types have American, but they just like their French better.” He smiled, then went on rambling. “Sheer perversity, I say. That’s a French trait predominantly. I’d have chased this fellow from hell to breakfast if I didn’t think he’d get a kick out of it. See, your American cheats because he’s hard-up or a hard-case. Your Frenchman cheats ‘cause he’d get a nice story out of it in the end. That’s how I see it.” Fields stopped and looked around. They were at the door. “Hold, Lydia. I hear voices. Listen.”

High, high above, on the fourth floor, they heard two voices, both women. A strange spell had fallen across the building, and even Fields began to feel solemn and nervous. He signaled to Lydia to move up, and then sat down quietly on the stoop, cocking his gun and resting it on his knees. He fingered his belt, and stared out the door into the street.

Two minutes later, Lydia was before the door. She listened, and looked through the crack. And what she saw within astonished and horrified her.

In November of 1833, in New York City, on Manhattan Island, toward the west of the Midtown, in a poor district where pigs were slaughtered, in a dilapidated boarding house, on the third floor, third door on the left -- a new civilization was beginning. To the western eye, to a traveler just arrived from a remote culture and nation on the planet, the structure of this society would have appeared somewhat barbaric and primitive. Scientific, cultural, political, social, and religious thinking, in fact all abstract thought, was of a very general, binary kind: Me and You, Us and Them, Her and Him, Either This or That, Yes or No. It was not an ancient society, at least in terms of its age. It was rather young, perhaps ten years old at the most – and even that estimate is somewhat too generous. Its population was also rather small, ranging between 500 and 1000 people (the number changed, sometimes drastically, day to day, but the total population most likely did not exceed 1000 individuals).

The leader of this society was a thirty-year-old woman named Clara. And everyone she governed lived in the small, somewhat cramped space of her rather dingy room, in which was a stove for heat, a bed, a closet, a chamber pot, and some shelves for books and various liquids and foodstuffs. Small, intricately designed cages, boxes, and living quarters were also spread about at even intervals across the floor. In these places the people lived, though whether or not they lived well or poorly, or were happy or discontented with their condition, were not easily answerable questions.

It would seem on first glance that this society had descended to a very low level of development. The leader appeared not only to tolerate but to encourage slavery on a large scale, and the leader herself seemed to make little effort, and to care not at all, when it came to providing for her subjects’ health and happiness. These people who lived in boxes and cages, men and women both, therefore descended themselves to a very low level of human and cultural development. They learned – those who survived – to scavenge for their food and clothing like true savages. They lost everything they had, and their memories and desires, in time, seemed not to extend beyond the hour or the day. The Now became everything. The Present was all. Meanwhile, their lives were bought and, each knew, could be snuffed out in an instant, for no discernible reason: there was no cause for death in this room, or under this leader, there was only cause of death.

Sometimes they were crushed (purposefully or not), and sometimes they were devoured. Sometimes they served some more fleeting and ephemeral purpose (Clara wanted some kind of fulfillment or another, sexual or otherwise). It was a horrible life altogether, yet it soon strangely became – for nearly everyone – the only life possible. This was the world that Lydia saw, without seeing, through the crack in the door. One can imagine, feel himself, the horror and dread she must have been feeling, as she searched for her husband. But there’s no longer any reason to prolong this part of the story. Lydia would soon find him, and he would be alive.

When she first narrowed her vision through the crack in the door, and then waited for it to adjust to the light, she saw only the window and recognized Christina standing next to the window. Christina was holding in her hand a bedraggled figure or figurine, a man or a woman – on that point Lydia could reach no satisfactory degree of certainty. However in her thoughts she called that figure “Levi," until other evidence showed beyond a doubt that it was some other person or object. Then she saw and heard, before the eyehole, a green dress swishing about the room. There was another woman inside here, well-dressed, tall, and – she waited – with dark-red hair, held up in a knot. Her profile was sharp and classically beautiful, with a long nose, sharp chin, and tall, thin neck. Who was she?

She heard talking, though the exact words uttered and the trend of the discussion escaped her. It was the only sound in the building now (as she listened more acutely, and more self-consciously, around her). She stepped back from the third door and walked several steps down the hallway. Here before the first door on the left, too, there was a small eyehole running through the thin, decrepit wall, affording her a glimpse into the room within. Bare walls, bare ceiling, and bare floor – not even a bed. She opened the second door as quietly as she could. Bare walls, bare ceiling, and bare floor – nothing to sit on, and nothing on which to set another object. Indeed, as she looked over the banister, down two flights, she realized, suddenly and with an appalling sense of awakening out of one nightmare into another, that the only person inhabiting this building was the lady in the green dress, third floor and third door on the left. Who was she? And why was Christina here with her? And why did she bring Levi here? (Unless she left him in her room – though in either case, Henry Fields was here with a gun – What luck! Lydia thought, gratefully – and would detain the woman on sight.)

Then, before she could think, the door opened down the hall, and the lady in green walked out. She turned to the right, and saw Lydia. She smiled and waved over at her, signing her over. Lydia strode forward.
“Hello there! Who are you?”
 “I’m Lydia. I’ve come to find my husband, the man that woman inside your room has abducted. Presumably you know all about it. I ask for only two things: that he be returned to me, and that Christina, the woman inside your room, follow me out." 
 “Yes, yes. Levi is his name?”
Lydia was alarmed, for some reason. This was not how she envisioned the encounter. “Levi is in there?”
“Oh yes. He’s waiting for you. Christina I cannot speak for; I’m sure she can speak well enough for herself, in any case.”
“I’m sorry, but I must see him.” 
“Certainly, certainly. My name is Clara, and I’m very pleased to meet you, Lydia.”

When Lydia entered the room and saw the cages and boxes full of hundreds of people, when she heard them talking in low tones like bees, and saw their work – in short, when she first experienced this room, which had become its own universe, she nearly swooned with fright and amazement. She turned around and looked at Clara. “Who are you?” she asked.
“I already told you, Lydia. I’m Clara.” Suddenly she heard the name thrown up like a benediction, swelling in volume, from the hundreds of people scattered in groups and clusters around the room. It was repeated, solemnly, like an invocation to a god or goddess. “Why are they doing that?” Lydia wondered, in her dream.
Clara shrugged. “I suppose they like the sound of it. Who knows? Who cares?”
Then Lydia became aware of Christina standing by the window.  In her hand she was holding Levi, who looked over at Lydia with unconcern, without recognition, and then turned back to Christina’s face.
Christina greeted her with a smirk, but for the moment said nothing. “Levi! You’re alive!” There was no response.
 Again she called out, “Levi! Don’t you hear me?!”

But the result was the same, and Lydia felt like she was on the verge of tears. All at once the humiliation and shame she felt was so great and so overpowering, she wanted to die on the spot, even in the middle of her own nightmare (what a nightmare this had become—for her).
“I guess Levi doesn’t feel like talking to you at the moment,” said Clara, from behind. “He seems perfectly content as he is. He knows that we’ve promised him the antidote to his…well, his illness…within the hour, and he has agreed to the conditions.”
“What are you talking about? What antidote? What conditions?”
“The antidote,” Clara said, now more clearly and emphatically, “the antidote to his shrinking. He will become large again, but only on condition that he disowns you as his wife.”
 “This is ludicrous! Of course he would never agree to something so foolish. I cannot believe this—if he need divorce me or disown me in order to become large again, then – well, I know what I would do! I would stay shrunken! Levi!” she stopped, as she felt herself moving into a pleading, confessional vein. She was ready to beg for his life, for her own life, for their marriage. And who were these women! And why would Levi not – at the very least – speak or turn his head to her! 
"I already told you," said Clara, as though Lydia had spoken (she might have). "He is tired of you. You are beginning to annoy me." 
There was a gasp from some far corner of the room. The phrase You Are Beginning To Annoy Me was repeated once, twice, and then began to break up into its constituent parts, until only stray, random syllables -- Noy You Beg Me Ing -- remained.

“Levi, turn your head. Look at me. Please. I beg you. I am more lost and confused than I’ve ever been.” Perhaps half these words were spoken aloud – but not one, apparently, had the least effect on anyone else in the room. She was ready to advance on Christina, whom she would not condescend to address personally (Henry Fields, she thought, would take care of the whore). But if Levi wouldn't respond to her, then – and this is when she knew she was lost – Christina didn't need to lift a finger, or say a single word. Lydia was like a runner who had arrived late, just as the race was ending and the prize was won. She was late, late, late.

And then she felt a sudden revulsion come over her. All her organs, her very brain and heart, were flooded with venom, horrible poison. She started to tremble, and her knees began to buckle underneath her – she felt sick, as though she were going to faint. Lydia ran out of the room and down the stairs as fast as she could, without a word. Her last memory was of Clara and Christina exchanging a glance, and of Levi – of Levi! And he, her old love, was smiling.

But that wasn't the end. Though the pinch of the game had passed, that wasn't the end by a long shot. Deep down, Lydia’s rush from the room felt to her like some new beginning to another story – perhaps a happier tale, or perhaps another just as desperate. She sped down the stairs head over heels and almost slipped at the bottom. Henry Fields, who was alert from the moment she left the room, and waiting for a call, took Lydia up and did his mortal best not to appear as utterly confounded and thunderstruck as he felt. At the final landing she collapsed, and then struggled to stand up and keep on running – she didn’t know where, and she couldn’t give a straw, as long as it was away, far away.
"By the Eternal Goddamn! Lydia, what in heaven's name has got into you!”
“Oh, Mr. Fields…” She recalled something. “No talking, – Please keep your voice down…”
“Keep my voice down? Why the devil should I do that? Tell me what happened! Fill me in! Or shall I go up myself, now?” He flipped out his pistol and was ready to mount the stairs. But Lydia tugged at his sleeve.
“No – Please wait – Stay here – Let’s—” she sighed in exhaustion—“Let’s go. Let’s leave this place.”
 Fields stepped back a yard to study her more roundly. “Leave? Why, whatever for? What satisfaction have you gained? I'm not leaving with my hands empty, Ms. Lydia.”
“No, but I must, I must. I –”

She would have continued, but just then she happened to look up from where she lay, sprawled out, to the uppermost story of the building: there was Christina leaning casually against the banister, smiling down on them. Fields followed Lydia’s staring eyes, and then his own eyes widened and he unclasped his hand. Yes, when Fields saw the woman on the third floor, it was all over: he dropped Lydia’s chemise and bounded up the stairs with his gun drawn. Christina watched all this with apparent interest, and seemed most laid-back and casual (an act, probably), and began to stroll down toward the second floor landing, where she lolled back against the wall and waited for Mr. Fields.

“This is a surprise encounter, Mr. Fields. Indeed, I didn’t expect to see you here. So why are you here?”
“Hellfire, you damned hussy.” He was steaming and looking past her to see if she was alone. “Don’t be smart with me. I’m here for you, & I’m here ‘cause you’re a damned pinching doublecrossing kind of vixen, and I know not only your type, but I know you. So tell me what you stole, quick, and hand it here.”
“I’m sorry to say that I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Fields, at all. And I must be going.”
“No, you shan’t be going nowhere until the woman below gets what she’s come for. You know what that is as well as she. Whatever it is –I don’t care if it’s half a wormeaten cabbage– hand it to me and we’ll go our ways. Are you looking for a sequel, Ms. Christina? Are you looking for fire or blood? You won’t find it here unless you truly want it.”
“Oh, oh. Mr. Fields—truly – there has been some monstrous mistake. I hold nothing of Lydia’s. Nothing. Now, I’m very sorry – I know you to be a good man on occasion– but, you see, you should not have interfered.”

Just then another voice echoed from above, and both Fields and Christina craned their heads upward to see who it was. “Mr. Fields is it? I’m Clara. Come up, come up.” Fields, suddenly perplexed, loosened his grip on Christina, who saw her opportunity and darted down the stairs, past Lydia, out into the street. Fields ignored the woman above and chased after Christina, and his gun fell from his hand with a great clatter onto the wooden planks of the stairs, when he was halfway down the last flight. He ran with all his power.

When Lydia saw the gun a few steps above her, and Clara, still placidly observing her from the third floor, her veins began to grow warm, her pulse quickened, and her face flushed over with some new mad and vindictive purpose. She knew, all of a sudden, what had to be done. Snatching the fallen pistol, she raced up the stairs and entered the room, where Clara had retired. There were the boxes and cages again, and there she heard the strange buzzing that seemed to arise out of the very floorboards, and there she saw Clara seated on the bed, composed, smiling pleasantly at her.

“Lydia, how sorry I am about our earlier misunderstanding. But it seems – if I read you right – that you’ve come to your senses at last. How happy I am, and how delighted. Now that Christina is gone, I would like to stay here and talk with you personal—” But the gunshot reported the rest of this speech, and Clara, her face in disbelief, in utter shock and horror, fell down on the floor, dying, unable to go on. A small gush of blood burst from her chest-wound, temporarily. And then Lydia turned around without saying a word, shut the door, and descended the stairs slowly. Henry Fields was at the bottom, his arm slashed open, bleeding.

“A tourniquet – I need more bandages.” Lydia ripped off her sleeves, and bound his arm up. They waited on the steps for a minute, afterward, and then Lydia handed over the gun.
“Do you have matches?” she asked him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Burn it. Burn the place to the ground.”
He glanced over and studied her face. Her hands trembled like leaves in a storm. “I’d be tried and sentenced for arson. The fire will spread.”
“I shall be tried for murder. You heard the gunfire. As for you, no one else lives here, or nearby. We will take an hour to set it up, and put together a controlled blaze.” He was doubtful, and still opposed it.
But Lydia had seen too much horror to fear anything. “If you help me, I’ll give you $5,000. If you only help ignite this horrible & accursed place, I’ll reward you handsomely, on the spot. I leave the city today for the west, and you shall be free to accompany me. You’ll have no reason to fear the law.”

The theater manager hesitated, contemplated the stanched, drying blood of his wound, and allowed himself to be persuaded. Together they set up the kindling and then fired it up. The first floor caught in one moment, the second five minutes later, and then the building itself collapsed, and was smothered along with the fire, under its own weight. At least one decadent civilization had finally fallen, and received its due.

Two hours later, Ms. Lydia and Mr. Fields were on a Baltimore & Ohio line train due west to Cincinnati, the Queen of the West, and the hub of the recently finished, spanking new Miami & Erie Canal. Fields had left his assistant manager in charge for the next few months, because he was taking a ‘hiatus’, as he put it (at least until the City’s slapdash investigation of the burned-down boarding house came to a close). Lydia had packed all of her necessary articles and a few sets of clothes in a couple old trunks. The apartment on Fulton Street would be sold to a small-time editor from a paper around Bowling Green. She considered seeking a job at the Cincinnati Gazette, at the time one of the largest papers in town aside from the Enquirer and Advertiser. Also springing up during this time were some of the Abolitionist rags, which would famously (mid-decade, a few months later) be the targets of some of the largest riots and fires of the century. Cincinnati was a budding, humming, overbrimming steamboat, canal, and river town, and perhaps the best harbor toward which she and Fields could sail and eventually set anchor.

As they stopped in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Columbus, they stood out under the huge, far-reaching mantle of the stars and watched the last days of the Leonid meteor storm. Some things Lydia had never told her companion. And Mr. Henry Fields, being the man he was, both good and bad, crooked and kind, kept his own peace. Her husband Levi, he knew now, was not a fortunate man.

Ex-husband Levi, one might say. He stood on the table in Christina’s boarding-house, watching her pack her things and stuff them into several of her own trunks. She would be moving out the next day, and they would be taking the train out west. Something had happened in Midtown. A fire had spread out across a block, and though – as yet – there were no confirmed deaths, several people, including Christina herself, were suspected of, at the very least, arson. She had been seen in the neighborhood, an hour before the flames engulfed it.

“I cannot understand this, yet. I’ve done what you asked, and what Clara demanded, but my size doesn’t seem to have returned as yet. Indeed I feel quite the same as I always have. I don’t mean, Christina, to seem partly fearful or apprehensive about this, but is it possible that Clara lied to you?”
“No Levi, that doesn’t seem possible to me. Wait an hour or so, and don’t worry so much.”
“And then my mind has been full with thoughts of Lydia. What could she have thought, when I was – it hurts me more, when I recollect it – when I failed to respond. I cannot imagine.”
“No, Levi. I make bold to suggest that you ought not to try imagining or picturing or regarding any of that as being of any future consequence to you whatever. She shall soon forget about it.”
“Yes, I’m sure, and I hope so, of course.”
“Of course. While I greatly enjoy, beyond words, our little chats, Levi, climb inside my shoe and clean it a bit before tomorrow.”
“What? But you can’t be serious.”
“No, I'm very serious. (Though I reckon you won't always find that that's the case.) This time I am serious.” She picked him up and carried him over to her old shoes, which were just underneath the bed. “I need clean shoes for the excursion tomorrow, and I simply have no time to work them myself. So you must clean them for me.”
Levi looked at her dubiously, and with some fear. “But, see what I have already done for you: the $4,000, the trip, the --”
“And consider what I’ve done for you, Levi. Remember that. You shall have your life again. Get working.” She turned away and busied herself with other things. Levi resigned himself to the task at hand, and started to lick the shoes for her. He had fallen a long way indeed, although he still focused, hopefully, on the next day, when the potion would become operative, and he would begin to grow again.

An hour later, Christina withdrew the shoes from underneath the bed and inspected them. She smiled at Levi. “I’m pleased with this, very pleased.”
Levi, despite himself, smiled and felt obscurely gratified with the praise, and proud of his workmanship. 
“In celebration of my exodus from the city tomorrow, let us spend the night together on the town, get dinner. And after all, little guy, I’ve got nothing here. Curl up in your spot, underneath my toes.”
Levi expressed a faint objection, a slight disagreement, an alternative. “I’m worried that the formula, that the formula’s active ingredient may have been delayed too long. Maybe we should return to Clara, and question her. I don’t know why –”
“No, no, Levi. Just be patient. Be more patient. And think of the life that is coming to you. Think of the future. I cannot express to you, however much I wish I could, how grateful I am to be quitting the skirts of this downhill moldering town. And I cannot help but judge you and perceive a thin air of ingratitude surrounding you when you aim to oppose me in this. Is this opposition, Levi? I’ve sacrificed the last day for you, haven’t I?”
“No, it's only concern, it's worry – is worry opposition?”
“Worry, in this case–I assure you–is irrational and unnecessary. Be patient, I say. Be very, very patient. Climb down under my toes – I’ll not warn you again.”
Levi waited for her toes to cover him, and was overwhelmed again by the pressure, scent, and presence of Christina’s feet. He grew erect at once, and – against his best interests, concerns, and thoughts – began to feel grateful. He would try to be more patient with her. Day by day, we change, he considered. Tomorrow he would return to his size, and then they would leave together. Tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and for the rest of their lives, he would be grateful for what Christina had done for him. He remembered how she had fitted him carefully in her drawers, just as they were leaving, and how a man had tried to detain her. She pulled him out, briefly, and exposed him to the light. Then there was the sudden flash of steel on flesh, and he was plunged back in beside her womanhood. Perhaps she had saved him then, he thought. He inhaled deeply, and began to kiss and lick between her sweaty, bare toes. She seemed to appreciate this, and curled and flexed her toes in response. Though at first he disliked nearly all that she seemed to like, he would learn – in time, day by day – to be more patient.

--------------------------------------------

That same morning Charles Och woke up from quiet dreams to find his wife with another man. Two letters had arrived early that morning, one for him, and the other addressed to his wife, Lucy, scented with lilies. The butler handed them to him at sunrise, when Och, bursting like another sun out of bed, stood by his chamber window and watched the people passing by in the street. Craning his body halfway out, he looked off toward the western horizon, and saw the meteors falling below the reach of the sun.

Charles gave a quick and interrogative, though very puzzled, look at his butler – who shrugged his shoulders and frowned. “These arrived early, did they?”
“Yessir. During the night.”
Charles observed – with surprise, and some interest – that his legal partner had written to his wife Lucy, and included the return address on the envelope. The letter addressed to him was anonymous and, as he scanned its contents, penned in a hurry by someone – he guessed a woman – who seemed to be in some distress. That the two letters could be connected did not at first cross his mind. It was not until much later in the morning, around 8 o’clock, when he was setting up his desk at the office, arranging papers, and sorting through files, that he realized – with a curious shock – that Levi might have been less than forthright with him. Because it was at 8 o’clock that bright and frosty morning, in Fulton Street, that Lucy Och charged into his office and thrust her own letter into his hands. She was furious, insulted, and demanded to see his partner. He wasn’t in, Charles said. What was the matter? Read, read, and soon you’ll know all.

So Charles read, and then shared his own anonymous letter with his wife. To Charles, the case soon became very perplexing. About his wife he could doubt nothing: she had only received an unseemly letter from another man. Another man who addressed himself – though the handwriting seemed to be somewhat off – as Levi, his law partner. Charles Och resolved to walk down to the house on Fulton Street and ask Levi what was going on. He was puzzled, and very nearly offended.

But the house was empty on that sunny, meteor-flung morning, and neither Levi nor Lydia was at home. There was a note on the door, scrawled in large, black letters, which read: OUT. He decided to leave his card, and come back later in the afternoon or on the following morning. This was only a small mystery, he thought (and hoped), and would easily be cleared up after a single conversation. Someone had been playing a practical joke on him, and he was a man who could appreciate a good, rollicking joke. Yet -- he had hoped for a quick resolution.