CHAPTER I

Every morning I hate to be born, and every night I’m afraid to die. I live my life within these parentheses, and since I’m constantly walking a tightrope over hysteria, I’m perceptive to the dilemmas of other people as they cross their own chasms.

I’m a script-writer by trade, specializing in mystery shows. I’m married to an actress. We’re both of us second-raters in the entertainment business…mostly anonymous to the public, fairly well-known to our colleagues. Between us we make from ten to twenty thousand dollars a year, depending on the breaks. This is only fair money in our business.

It seems like a fortune to our families, and we dazzle them with our glamour. We hate this, but we can’t dispel the illusion that General Sarnoff claps me on the shoulder and calls me by my nickname. Now we’ve given up trying. We realize that people want their friends to be glamorous, so we’ve stopped trying to avoid undeserved admiration. But I can’t stand deception, and if I appear to be cynical in this story, it’s because I’m leaning over backwards to tell you the truth. As a matter of fact I’m the reverse of cynical…rather naive, in love with adventure and romance, with the moral and ethical standards of an Eagle Scout.

This is all I intend telling you about myself, because the story isn’t about me; it’s about some tightrope walkers I know, and their strange adventures in this fantastic frontier town we natives call The Rock. The Rock, of course, is Manhattan Island, the only part of Greater New York that we consider to be the genuine New York; and in our business there is a very small society of natives born and raised on The Rock. You’d be surprised at how few there are.

The Rock is the roaring frontier of the new life we are all beginning to live, a life that is a terrifying mixture of the conscious and unconscious levels of our minds. It is new and terrifying because the unconscious depths which were concealed up to now, have become exposed, and participate openly in our every-day life, turning it into a savage, merciless war.

It’s like those subway rides you take on trains that tunnel deep under the city, emerge abruptly into the daylight to roar past third-storey windows, and then plunge down into the lower levels again. So, when you meet people on The Rock, you never know when some unexpected turn will carry you up for a flashing glimpse through the windows of their souls, or down into the black depths of their hatreds and formless desires.

Adventurers from all over the world crowd into our town, just as fortune-hunters went west a century ago. In the old days in Denver and Fargo you fought for your life and your fortune, but in our frontier town you fight for your sanity as well. The drives and ambitions, the deep passions and compulsions, the blind search for symbols and compensations that bring the bandits to The Rock are naked and exposed, and this is where the danger lies. A man may declare war on you because you’re a threat to his job, or mer