There were screams, but their pitch was such they could have been peals of a more complex pain, some delicious resistance or erotic taunt.

Descriptive narratives that editorialize frequently fail because they blur the picture.

Her face, what I could see of it, had the expression of expectation and remorse, smooshed all together like a fresh flour paste.

I kept looking in and looking down, checking my belt and scaffold. Half fearful.

Fully hard.

In contemporary male writing, narrative action often gets frozen in an adolescent dreamworld where desire is configured to represent not so much a plot whose protagonist seeks to retrieve some lost relationship to an idealized past, as a mosaic of conflicting wants, an anarchy of motives that refracts more than points, bubbles more than flows.

This morning’s paper again told of a man who talked his way into women’s apartments, claiming to sell encyclopedias of exotic knowledge. Once in, he’d force them to undress and cook for him, while he read to them from the Talmud or a book on abnormal psychology. Afterwards, he’d rub their elbows with virgin olive oil and make them recite from the second edition of The Moosewood Cookbook or the L section of the Franklin Encyclopedia. It was the way knowledge circulated that got him off, the way information made the rounds from one place to the next.

From the mirror on the back wall, I think I see him looking at me. I can’t be sure.

The window fogs.

Once you have selected the key events, determined their relative importance (show and tell), and their connections, rethink the strategy of your plot line. Will simple chronology suffice? ... Such connections in time, place, and character can be virtues, but they do not create a sense that the events have a necessary and logical relationship, a syntax, that allows us to understand the events individually and as a whole.

My belt snaps, as does one of the cables supporting the scaffold.

I hear something inside the apartment. It sounds like guinea pigs gearing up for dinner, or

Going down I see: Graffiti on the side of the building: TERRY LOVES BETH; PUTA MADRE; FLACO RULES; FOR MORE SOPHISTICATED HEAD CALL 900-312-9292; a man dressed in lime green Speedo tights clutching a butcher’s knife approaching a chicken tied to a makeshift altar; a one-legged pigeon on a ledge.

One woman said he wore a monogrammed yarmulke and spoke with a lisp. Another woman said he told her he needed her window to shoot videos of high dive suicides.

The idea of falling: a fevered pitch; taupe-colored water; the first speed on an electric fan; plastic forks; short circuits; a tattooed kidney in lemon; raw sewage a well flossed halo bean dip not missiles conflation hanky tie foil-wrapped morning breath minus eight and

The appeal of cleaning high-rise windows engaged youthful dreams I had about living in the city. Possibility, anonymity, the usual suburban desires. Playing God without the power to change a thing. An omniscient narrator with a point of view. Glass barriers to private lives.

I imagine what they see when they see me, a solitary human figure fifty stories above ground, suspended by wires like some absurd marionette, a huge squeegee in my hands, belt ringed with assorted cleaning paraphernalia. Some gasp, then bang the drapes closed — often with a suddenness that stuns. Others love to perform, to have an audience that’s not a judge, an audience whose only function is to give them an uncontaminated scene, make the world easier to read.

Reading someone reading you, you lapse into the second person, are yourself reflected, in glass, mirrors... World becomes gesture, a pantomime of impulses, a grammar of motion.

The newsstand on Eighth Avenue boasts the largest selection of magazines and newspapers in the city. Sports, politics, skin, cars, trades, current events, etc.

E-pis-te-mol-o-gy: The force of gravitation, which for any two sufficiently massive bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them...   2) Grave consequence; seriousness or importance.

Grav-i-ty: A theory of the nature of knowledge.

They’ll never catch him. There is nothing to catch. There is no man, no singular beast who plots and creates, makes it and takes it away. He is a dictionary entry, a few blips on a chart on a screen in a room. There is nothing to know. Knowing is no thing. Desire is all. Webs. Triangles. Plaids. The gravity of need. The distance between any two points.

Just press the button and in sixty seconds you have your picture. Watch as the chemicals pool, coalesce, figures develop, define themselves before your eyes, providing you with the perfect image.

The roof could use a coat of paint.