Encased in scratchy sheets, I opened the collection of Hawthorne stories I'd been reading, by the beam of a Duane Reade flashlight, before falling asleep back at the park. It was one of the inspirational classics I'd included in my travel kit. I had a cassette of Joyce, his pinchy voice reading of Stephen's Dublin journey. I had Leaves of Grass, of course, walking Walt being the New York beatnik king. Can't go anywhere without Leaves of Grass -- who knows when you might meet a pizza-bearing intern to give it to?

It was Hawthorne's short story "Wakefield," however, that proved most pertinent. It tells of a man "in the meridian of life . . . keeper of petty secrets hardly worth revealing," who "without shadow of reason for such self-banishment" leaves his home and takes up residence on the next street, where he lives, unnoticed, for "upwards of 20 years" before returning home "quietly, as from a day's absence."

But was it really possible to hide in such plain sight, to walk, as Wakefield must have walked, many times, on his own street "untraced by mortal eye"?

Only hours before heading for the top of the Bronx, I'd given this literary conceit a test run, on St. Marks Place between First and Second Avenues. For seventeen years I lived on this block, through much thick, much thin. It was here that all three of my children were born, where I wrote books and a hundred articles. How many times had I walked this oft-sallow thoroughfare, to buy a quart of Tropicana or to go to the IRT at Astor Place? Now it was different. Just a couple months before, in the name of dorm-room Liebesraum, NYU, factory for squares, had pulverized Julian's pool hall and the Academy of Music. Throughout the neighborhood, hipsters raised their angel-headed heads, cursing addled memory for the inability to recall what better thing used to be there. Still, how much could a place really change in six years, I wondered, standing across the street from my old building, looking up at the philodendron-filled fourth-story window that used to be mine.

Up and down the familiar stoop of my old building they went, a blonde woman with a ponytail, a young white man in a suit, a black guy in sweats, two Asian co-ed types, going about their business, gathering mail, jangling keys, vanishing down the still-brown stucco-bumped hallway. I knew not a soul. Where was Mrs. Showty, screaming at her pierogi-fed dogs, or the stern landlady, Mrs. Camilletti, who demanded her $167 rent by shoving notices in my mailbox signed the mgt. Dozens of people passed by on the street. I elicited not a single "Hey, man" or even a curt nod.

Then: "Thinking of moving back?" It was inevitable, I supposed. Dressed in black, with dark hair and walking a cruddy little dog, she had the weathered aspect of a veteran Lower East Sider, an ex-East Village Other reader, likely. Her face rang a distant bell, not that I was about to admit it.

Off my blank look, she said, with quick embarrassment, "Oh, sorry . . . thought you were somebody else." She turned and walked away.

So this was how Wakefield had disappeared. He refused to acknowledge his presence. Denied his own existence. The force of my naysay was enough to convince that lady with the dog I wasn't the Mark of St. Marks she imagined me to be. This was how memories were wiped clean, I thought, the way things were forgotten.

What an exultant feeling of freedom it was, then. I walked in celebration of my city, and of myself. But not as Whitman, hairy, horny chronicler of another New York, walked, not in the assumption that "every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you." I sang not of the connection of things but rather of their division, of the space between, and what was cordoned off. Once as hardy a perennial as a Tompkins Square oak upon these erstwhile immigrant grounds, I'd become an alien on my own block, another tourist in the night.