Again and again, the process repeated. I pressed my face against the steamy window of the Polish butcher on Second Avenue. Two times a week I'd bought sausages from the man. Now, weighing a bunch of chops, he had more important things on his mind than remembering me. The sheer multitude of the city's faces, so much alike, liberated me from residual identity. In anonymity, I achieved perfect New York democracy. Everywhere I went, everyone I saw -- businesspeople puffing furtively on cigarettes in the rain outside marble-façaded buildings, or tearful teenagers screaming at lovers on street corners, or men in chairs listening to old songs on the radio by the doorways of tenements -- they didn't know me, and I didn't know them. There was nothing between us, nothing at all, and in this I rejoiced.

I was happy still several hours later, snug on my stiff sheets at the Deegan Motel, reading of how Hawthorne's Wakefield "lost his place and privilege with living men, without being admitted among the dead." Then, well tired from my wanderings, I once more dropped off to dreamless sleep.

DAY TWO

Seen from the Broadway Bridge, in the bitter, early-morning light: eight swans swimming in the Harlem River, bobbing between floating tires. Two men come roaring by on water skis, wearing thick wet suits, pulled by a pair of sleek cigarette boats. Passing the Marble Hill Metro-North station, both men lift their left legs like Rockettes. Then they zoom out of sight, up toward the Hudson. Riding the boats' wake, the swans never once raise their long necks to look. Hard-nosed, swans, not easily impressed.

I crossed over to Washington Heights, down Broadway through Harlem. Eight hours ago, I feared these streets. Now, with the mighty thoroughfare splashed by the slants of morning light, I strolled as a marveling traveler from a far-off land. Everywhere was the bustle of Flats Fix establishments, barbershops, plantain-piled vegetable markets, fishmongers, roots salesmen, beeper reconnectors, and long-distance parlors. Left and right were houses of worship, the Reverend Ike's massive old Loews 175th Street nestled in among a hundred storefront churches, including the Moment of Truth on 145th, where the pastor will also do your taxes, hence the slogan "Prayer is your payoff!" By the Two Minute Warning, "a sports bar" in the 150s, a man was tossed out the front door, Western movie-style. He bounced along the sidewalk and came to rest curled about a parking meter. "And stay out," the well-muscled proprietor said, slapping his hands together.

What urban pageantry all this seemed, with James P. Johnson on the headphones. Ol' James P -- in the twenties and thirties, they called him the Father of Stride. Willie the Lion, Fats Waller -- none of them played better. The sad part was that James P. spent much of his time writing Gershwinesque symphonic pieces that piled up, largely unheard, in his garage. Now, however, 67 years after he wrote it, Johnson's grand and grandiloquent Harlem Symphony (the first movement, "Subway Journey," suggests a majesty more suitable for the arrival of the mother ship than for that of the cruddy 1/9) was the supreme soundtrack.

Call it a cheat, cocooning myself in James P.'s buoyant pomp, so prewar,
so pre-everything. But what was I supposed to listen to, some Death Row dude? As a postmod citizen, I have the right to cue my own little MTV. So what if I needed a little aural salve to accompany certain landmarks like the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was killed, and the corner of 139th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, where one scuzzy winter day I got stomped, my nose broken, again. With James P. on, these events receded. I saw the Harlem I wanted to see: a place to dream my little bohemian dream of a New Jerusalem where necessary compromises about color transformed to honest celebration of difference. If it was a lie, big deal -- after all, I was only passing through.

Across 110th Street, paranoia set in. I knew I was in trouble when I stopped at a coffee shop, put a quarter in the table-side jukebox to hear an old fave, Wreckx-N-Effect's "Rump Shaker," and Alanis Morissette came out instead. From the top of the park on down, everyone looked familiar. But why shouldn't they? They were familiar people. That woman over there . . . wasn't she my shrink for a couple of sessions back in the eighties, the cognitive one? What a nightmare. I'd worked to get lost and wanted to stay that way. Uptown, cloaked in my all-consuming whiteness, I went undetected. But down here, those networked cell-phone talkers might as well have been providing coordinates on my position. Manhattan's gridlike streets had become an anti-anonymity minefield, each passing face another potential blown cover.