So I kept walking, down Broadway and on to 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth, a.k.a. Koreatown. The street's Far Eastern company-man's kinkiness struck an appropriately desolate chord. In a club up a flight of stairs, several women sat in front of monitors playing erotic cartoons. A few doors west, there's a huge finished basement called Spot Cafe. You sit on a large leather couch and ring the motel-style bell on the coffee table. Give the lady $20, and she brings a plate of spicy gizzard salad; give her $120, and get a bottle of cognac. Me, though, it being 2:30 in the morning, I like to shoot a quick game of pool in an unadorned concrete-block room on the tenth floor of a nondescript office building. If a 50-year-old Korean businessman in a three-piece suit wants to join me, $5 a pop for a rack of nine-ball, and never once say a single word, that's fine, especially if techno music is blaring, I'm losing, and the attendant wears a white cotton fever mask while Dustbusting the other tables, all of which are empty.

I'd wanted to get lost so as to be found. To re-sanctify myself in the city. And here it was. It is the job of the city to constantly create these alienated images of the modernist dilemma, to make them beautiful and, if possible, funny. This is how we like it. This is the hit the city boy craves. So New York wasn't over yet, I decided, back at the Waldorf, downing a $19 "legendary" Waldorf salad, ordered from room service: the perfect meal-for-one when the clock radio flashes 3:34 a.m. In the office building across Lexington, the lights remained on. In the window directly across from me sat a young woman in a surprising scarlet dress. I'd seen her earlier, drinking coffee from a paper cup. Now, hours later, the light from her computer screen upon her face like a cybertime Vermeer, she was still typing. I watched her for some time, her long neck straight up, shoulders still, only her fingers moving. It was impossible to imagine her doing anything else. Then she stopped and turned to look out the window. She stared straight at me, and I could have sworn our eyes met. If they did, she did not acknowledge my voyeur's presence. She idly combed her hair with a blue brush and then went back to work.

DAY THREE

The sun was rising over the sign on the Jehovah's Witnesses building -- AWAKE -- as I crossed Mr. Roebling's bridge. I had to walk fast, for there was still a lot of Brooklyn to cover before I hit the Coney Island Beach. In Red Hook, I traversed Conover Street, past the santeria stands and towed cars, to where they fish for eels. I followed the F-train trestle beyond the endless automotive shops to Ocean Parkway, wider than the valley of the Himalayan Kali Gandaki, home to elephantine Syrian-American home décor and Eurasian garden gnomes. I paused before the electric-blue shingle of Dr. Joshua Chopp, practitioner of general dentistry (dial 800-50-smile), and the similar one of Dr. Lipp, the orthodontist. Then, in quick-arriving late afternoon, the sky grew wide, the breeze grew stiff and cold, and I was at the sea.

I've walked this way many times, often at dawn, when the Russian men, erstwhile Soviets, balance on their head and pump their legs, bicycle-style. That's when the cabbies, no longer like me, now from Lahore and Port-au-Prince, slink from the Surf Hotel, where the handwritten sign on the door says people who have created problems in the past not welcome, we love peace and quite. Morning is when the Hindus, staffs stuck into the sand, bathe in the Coney sea as if it were the Ganges. In winter, gleaming icicles drip like vampire fangs from the shuttered Thunderbolt, roller coaster of my youth.

From the top of the Bronx, I'd reached Brooklyn's bottom. With my boot heels' first thump upon the boardwalk, the Righteous Brothers came in on cue: "Unchained Melody" blaring from the gyro stand, the only seaside eatery open on this off-season afternoon.