Milgrim had briefly shared an apartment in the East Village with a woman who’d kept an emergency supply of Valium in an aluminum fishing-tackle box. The box’s latch had a hole through which a small padlock could have been inserted, but she’d preferred to seal it with a plastic cable-tie, a slightly smaller version of the tie that now tethered Milgrim to this bench. When it was necessary to access the supply, Milgrim had determined, she’d snip the tie with pliers or nail-clippers, replacing it with a fresh one when she needed to reseal the box. This procedure made little sense, Milgrim had observed, but people did tend to be eccentric about their drugs. He’d supposed that the ties, like an embossed wax seal on a letter, provided proof that she was the last to have opened the box. Milgrim had looked for her supply of ties, the simplest way to bypass this, but hadn’t been able to find it.