Suspended above the buildings, in which people lived and worked was a luminous yellow glow as if the city was a banked fire. Above that was the huge black sky that covered everything. The neon signs of closed stores cast out fishing lines of light onto the shadowed street. In restaurants, he glimpsed a few late diners, most of them alone at their tables. In little grocery stores that stayed open all night, he saw people clutching plastic bags of fruit or cartons of milk, silently handing money to clerks. He kept close to the buildings, watching out for a policeman who might stop to ask him what he was doing out alone so late. A clock in the window of a jewelry store showed the hour: 11:50. People walked swiftly, as though they were hastening home before something happened. Across the street, he glimpsed a group of tall boys in baseball caps and billowing nylon jackets. They weren’t hurrying. They were shouting words, always the same four or five, as if they knew no other language to hurl in insult at the sky, at cars, at windows behind which, at those sounds, sleepers would be yanked from sleep just as Clay had been in the middle of the night in the hotel.
