22

In Riverside Park an old man sits, regarding the Hudson through his marmoset eyes. His face is matted with hair and his tangled beard is like the inter-rusted brush on the Palisades. Under the warm sun he wears three coats, and all of his sleeves are frayed. He munches peanuts, grovelling slowly, methodically, into a bag filled with them, cracking the shells and spewing the fragments forth upon himself. An evangelist with a large Adam’s apple and an ecstatic gleam in his eye sits down beside him. “Brother,” he rumbles, “God is everywhere.”