No, not a wasted trip at all.
THREE
The last time he was in Times Square, the air-raid siren howled and suddenly the good citizens of Manhattan were cockroaches after God had flicked on the kitchen light. They skittered into the lobbies of buildings and theaters, crouched inside subway entrances, wedged shoulder to shoulder in doorways. Another tedious drill robbing ten precious minutes from their lunch hour. The last civilians off the street were cabbies and truckers and motorists, who squeezed in with the rest after pulling over. Carney thought this last part strange—keeping the roads clear for evacuation. Soviets drop the bomb, Broadway traffic is the least of your hassles.
Then there was just a cop standing in the empty intersection, policing the nothing.
Doomsday rehearsal. At the siren, Carney darted into the Horn & Hardart and took a spot by the window with the rest of the refugees. At least in a bomb shelter, in a skyscraper basement, you could kid yourself you’d have a chance. What protection was plate glass against the Big One? Carney pictured the windows of the high-rises bursting into shards, ripping the air. The Automat’s slots were tiny apartments for sandwiches and soup, and he made their windows explode, too, onto the scuffed linoleum. Everybody staring at the street. That’s what they did during air raids: stare dumbly into the street. As if this time something might happen. Carney jammed in with white strangers: in elevators, trains, and on doomsday. The old white lady next to him cradled a poodle and said, “I hope they do drop it.” The dog stuck out its tongue.
The siren stopped and the massive contraption of the city chugged and shuddered as it resumed operation. Carney proceeded to his appointment with Harvey Moskowitz, and on his way back home he saw Ernest Borgnine on the uptown train eating two hot dogs.
Tonight he was on another Moskowitz rendezvous, but Times Square ’round midnight was a different creature, an incandescent, stupefying bazaar. White bulbs rippled on and off in waves across the bold marquees, thin neon tubes capered and pranced—a pink martini glass, a galloping horse—among a clamor of honks and whistles and big-band brass out of dance halls. The last screening of A Raisin in the Sun let out across the street （he’d promised to take Elizabeth but it hadn’t worked out yet）， next door to The Guns of Navarone （which would have been a Ray and Freddie opening-day special, but no more）， and their audiences stepped onto the glistening, hosed-down concrete. Some drained to subway platforms and others were only starting the evening pursuit, peeling off to side-street saloons and knock-twice unmarked clubs. High up on Forty-Fourth Street, the big, busted Timex advertisement was working again, the mechanical arm with the space-age watch on its wrist chopping up and down: The Action Watch for Active People. The Great White Way was full of Active People to be sure, theater mavens and gamblers, goons and drunks—and also crooks, crooks aplenty in service to the next big score.
Midnight, rise and shine. He’d been keeping crooked hours since he slipped into dorvay again, after all these years. Carney first heard the word in his financial accounting class, which had been held in a dingy lecture hall in the basement of the Economics Building. One was not assigned this room if one was held in high esteem, Carney gathered, but Professor Simonov was accustomed to indignities from his former life in a never-specified eastern European country. Occasionally the professor shared anecdotes of that period: surveillance, gallows humor in bread lines, a bedridden wife. The secret police were called “The Muntz” or “The Mintz,” Carney couldn’t be sure. Whenever the radiator clanged in interruption, Simonov halted his lecture until the pipes relented before his murderous gaze. Word had it that he never gave anything less than an A, as if to deliver one constant in the world’s capricious order.
One day in October, while impressing the importance of scrupulous vigil over one’s accounts, Simonov recommended that they pick one time every day for bookkeeping and stick to it. “It doesn’t matter when you do it, but get it done.” His father, a textiles merchant back in the old country （Romania? Hungary?）， preferred the dorvay, that midnight pasture, for squaring his accounts. “We’ve forgotten now, but until the advent of the lightbulb, it was common to sleep in two shifts,” Simonov said. “The first started soon after dusk, when the day’s labor was done—if there were no lights to see, what was the point of staying up? Then we woke around midnight for a few hours before the second phase of sleep, which lasted through the morning. This was the body’s natural rhythm, before Thomas Edison let us make our own schedule.”