M ilgrim remembered Union Square from twenty years before, when it had been a place of broken benches and litter, where a corpse might go unremarked amid the huddled and unmoving bodies of the homeless. It had been a flagrant drug bazaar, in those days, when Milgrim himself had had no need of such a place. But now it was Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, Whole Foods, Virgin, and he, Milgrim, had gone equally far, it sometimes seemed, in the opposite direction. Addicted, not to put too fine a point on it, to substances countering a tension at the core of his being; something wound too tightly, perpetually threatening to collapse his person; imploding, as though a Buckminster Fuller tensegrity structure contained one element that perpetually tightened itself counter to the balance of forces required to sustain it.