He has lived here for two years, replacing a man from Trinidad who returned home to live out his retirement in the house he’d built for his family. Les and Cecil were already living here when he moved in. Leon arrived four months ago, from Carriacou by way of Canarsie. Of these men he knows only what can be gleaned through proximity: who has a family to phone and who does not, who works the day shift and who the night. Their eating habits. The sounds of their sleep.

It is his ninth apartment in nearly two decades, all of them more or less alike—nondescript buildings in Flatbush, grease-encrusted kitchenettes, radiators that clang and keen and hiss. In his early years in New York, he had bothered to befriend his roommates. When he moved in here, Les and Cecil had tried to make conversation with him. Where was he from? How long had he been in New York? Did he have a wife? Children? To these questions he gave gruff answers or dodges, and they quickly learned to leave him alone. Now he comes and goes like a ghost. His roommates step aside when he wants to use the stove, the bathroom. They are a bit afraid of him, a big man with a look of warning in his eyes. Let them be.

At work it is the same. When he first started driving, there were many others at the garage from the West Indies, but the population has turned over several times since then, and now it’s almost all Gujaratis, Sikhs from Punjab and Chandigarh, Bangladeshis, and West Africans. Their foreign tongues draw a curtain around them, leaving him to himself.

At night in bed he feels waves, mild and gentle, against his skin.

Sometimes he misses the water so much his bones ache with longing. Yet it is, ironically, all around him. In New York, he has never lived more than five miles from Manhattan Beach, hardly farther from the water than his grandmother’s house had been. During his shifts, he shuttles passengers over the East River on the coral steelwork of the Williamsburg Bridge, under the Hudson through the Lincoln Tunnel, crosses the Harlem River on any number of quaint bridges. New York is a city of islands. When he was freshly arrived, he’d purchased an old guidebook from a dollar cart outside of a used bookshop. In the back of the book, along with sections on tipping and local slang (“flying rat,” “bridge-and-tunnel,” “yooz”), there was a map. Manhattan and Long Island and the glassy-sounding Staten Island—these he knew. But there were other islands he’d never heard of: Randall’s, Roosevelt, Ellis, Wards, Hart, Governors. Over his years here he has learned many more: North and South Brother, South and East Nonations. Goose and Hog and Rat. Hunter and Shooters and Swinburne. Mill Rock and Heel Tap Rock. The Blauzes, the Chimney Sweep Islands, Canarsie Pol. Ruffle Bar and Rulers Bar Hassock and Hoffman. U Thant and Mau Mau and Isle of Meadows.

But though in New York he lives on an island surrounded by islands, sometimes—as he rides the B46 from the fleet garage back to Flatbush, or wrestles a bunch of grapes into a plastic bag at the Korean grocery on Beverley, or scrubs the toilet on a Tuesday—it will occur to him that he is, at this moment, on an island, and he will find this impossible to believe. He cannot feel the islandness of New York.

One day when he had been in the city two months, he took the subway out to Coney Island. He’d never seen a roller coaster before and he watched as load after load of people careened shrieking over the wooden tracks. He strolled the boardwalk, got fried clam strips and a hot dog with onions at Nathan’s. It was September, and warm. After lunch, he walked down the boardwalk steps to the sand and slipped off his loafers. He walked to the water’s edge, cuffed his pants, and waded in a few steps. But even then, with the water lapping against his ankles and the seabirds circling overhead and the vegetal scent of shallow water in his nostrils, he did not quite believe it was the ocean he was feeling and seeing and smelling.

Back home, whether you could see the sea or not, you sensed it. He’d sensed it in the schoolyard, tasted it in the blood from his split lip after a boxing match with his friends. When he bicycled down the road to work at dawn, the ocean was a magnet, pulling his feet through their slow revolutions until he crested the rise by the radio tower and there it was, the sea, tossed before him like a net. He’d felt it in the island’s interior spaces, too, in his grandmother’s kitchen with the white curtains and the refrigerator rusted by the salted wind, at Paulette’s Place where he and his friends drained bottles of Cruzan and Bounty, and especially within the walls of the eggshell-blue prison on Commerce Street, where he sometimes put his cheek to the moist concrete floor and thought of wet sand warping silkily beneath the weight of his steps.

He found it impossible to separate his life there from the sensation of being surrounded by water, a sensation he hadn’t realized he’d felt all day, every day, until he touched down in New York and felt its absence for the first time. It wasn’t just that at home he could smell salt everywhere, or feel the humid breezes tossed off by the sea, or gauge his nearness to the water by the way the light shifted, while in New York, so remarkably, arrogantly immune to its environs, he could not. At home, the sea was consciousness itself. Always, you knew it was there, and that within it was everything else: answers and mysteries, that which could be seen and that which could not, those things that were remembered and those that had been forgotten. In New York the ocean was an irrelevancy, a vestigial thing beyond and apart from the thing itself, the city: the buildings packed in tight as tissue stanching a nosebleed, a glass-and-steel rising that pierced the sky.

THERE IS another life he lives. It flows beneath this one. He feels it like being far out in the water and sensing all that depth beneath you. In this other life, he has never driven a taxi through the snow-hushed streets of New York. He has never spent a birthday eating stale samosas in the holding lot at JFK. He has never lain awake at night listening to his roommate’s snores. He has never been to New York at all. He never took a plane away from his home, never watched the island disappear into the sea as the plane lifted into the sky. Never the eggshell-blue prison. Never the shocked faces of everyone he’d ever known. Never that night and never that girl. Never and never and never.

On the table, the iPhone in the gray case rings. The ringtone is that maddening banana song. Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch. Go fucking figure. He picks it up and says hello.

THE LITTLE SWEET

COULD IT BE? Surely it wasn’t him, I told myself as I sat in my cubicle that afternoon. There could easily be five men named Clive Richardson—ten, two dozen—in the five boroughs, never mind that I had no reason to believe that the man who had been a suspect in my sister’s death was in New York in the first place. I stared at the manuscript for “the new Mann” on my computer, unable to think, let alone work, for the rest of the day. At five-thirty on the dot, I fled.

Back in my studio I sat on my bed beneath the harsh light of the bare bulbs. It wouldn’t be accurate to say I was thinking about what to do. I had not been thinking when I left my phone in the taxi and I was not thinking now. It was more like I was waiting for my body to writhe into instinctive action and carry me along with it. I ate a few bites of my salad. I sat and felt the time drip. Then I dug a handful of quarters from the change jar on my desk, ran out of my studio and up the stairs, and went out into the evening in search of a working pay phone.

I hadn’t used a pay phone since I was a middle schooler calling my parents for a ride home in Pasadena. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d noticed a pay phone in New York, but it turned out there was one not a five-minute walk from my apartment. Apparently I had been walking past it for over a year without noticing it, and though rationally I knew it had been there all along, that in the city one’s mind renders much of the detail in the landscape invisible out of necessity, still, in that moment, I had the uncanny impression that this sorry-looking kiosk spackled with bird droppings and gum and Sharpie graffiti tags faded as the names on an ancient gravestone, had been planted here just now, for me, to make possible whatever was going to happen. I picked up the phone and heard, to my disbelief, a dial tone. I deposited my quarters and dialed my own number.

The phone rang and rang. I was about to lose my nerve and hang up when a soft voice said hello.

“Hello?” I replied.

“Yes?” the voice said.

“Yes,” I echoed. “Are you the taxi driver? I’m the one who accidentally left this phone in your cab.”

I regretted the word accidentally as soon as I said it. Nobody who had actually left something by accident would bother to say so. It was a tell, a slip. But I was being paranoid. He would take no notice of the word. Why would he?

“My shift begins at five A.M. I could meet you in midtown tomorrow morning to return it.”

“Can I come to you? I’d like to get it tonight if possible. I need it for work.”

I did not need it for work. But the lie flowed seamlessly. I had to see him tonight. I had to—what? I had no plan. I felt only a need to lock eyes with this man, to speak to him, to make something happen and see what it would be.