Despite his vow to stop psychoanalyzing himself, for hours after lunch Rom tried to identify the new feeling inside him.  He finally settled on destiny.  He kept remembering a self-actualization class he'd taken at Berkeley.  The instructor had crystallized the course philosophy in two- letter words on the blackboard during the first class: "If it is to be, it is up to me."
     Now, in the twilight, amid the noises of his building, the clatter of the subway and the traffic of his thoughts, Rom looked at the Roman collar on the dresser.  It once had held such awesome mystery for him.  Now he saw it as a prop.  He looked around his poor, small apartment.  It was so unlike the antiseptic, oriental-rug, Danish-modern, cut-crystal world of the rectory.  But what a special place this was, Norfifth Apt. 15, this vortex of memory and fear and —  possibility.  He sat at the battered red dinette and drank coffee and watched darkness fall over Branch Brook Park.  Something about the night was different now.
     At around eight he straightened up the place, trying to decide what to eat. He removed the mask and the black imitation-silk scarf from the bag and fingered them a moment before putting them into the dresser drawer.  He examined the remnants of the reefer he had rolled at Cassandra's — now all but gone — then sat down on the bed.  After a moment he decided.  He checked his pocket cash, grabbed his jacket and keys and left.
     His first stop was the bodega, where he stepped up to the counter and asked, rather calmly, he thought, for a package of rolling papers. The hispanic man, about 35, looked at him questioningly for a second. "Papeles," Rom said.  The man smiled and held up a pack of Zig-Zag and one of Bambu. Rom chose the Zig-Zag, paid and, after the man counted out his change in Spanish, left.
     He walked across Park Avenue toward the house he'd lived in with his mother.  As he got within 200 feet of it, he found himself shaking.  He paused, wishing he still smoked cigarets.  Then, noticing the eyes following him, he approached the front steps, where a transaction was taking place.  Nearby, another "salesman" was helping someone in a car that had pulled over.  The dealers saw a white guy, over 30, casually dressed, saunter up, making the smoking gesture.
     As three dealers were working this particular spot, caution took a back seat to competition, and Rom found himself surrounded by young black men offering small plastic bags of marijuana.  Their first question seemed rehearsed, their second more urgent: "You a cop? How many?"
     Relieved that he didn't recognize any of them from his beating the other night, and that none seemed to recognize him, Rom pulled out two tens, feeling ridiculous and scared and hoping it didn't show.   "I got twenty."
     "Yo!" said the most aggressive one, a hulking teenager with a pink stocking cap.  "I got this gen'lman."  He took the bills and pushed two small bags into the same hand.  "You like this, come see me."
     In what seemed a silly convention, Rom thanked him and added, "Nice doing business with you."  He turned and walked slowly back up Fifth Street, the bags squeezed tightly in his hand, jammed deep into his jacket pocket. His armpits felt damp. He wanted to run.

     The first joint Rom rolled was a lumpy and tentative construction, but it took a light, and after three puffs Rom could smoke no more.  He realized this when he found himself holding on to the reefer for about 20 minutes, deciding whether to light it again. He remembered now how much he'd always liked smoking pot, and how much he had missed it.
     He opened another bottle of wine, his thoughts turning back to Portland, to his teaching job, to his parish.  He recalled the well fed faces of the boys in his classes.  They had nice homes, spending money, bright futures.  They had cars and CDs and Nintendos and no reasons for pessimism.  Those people, those places, seemed unreal now, like characters and scenes from a G-rated movie.  And all the good he had done, all the efforts he had made, seemed like Monopoly money here in the bazaar of hard streets.
     With the sports section of the Star-Ledger, Rom smashed a cockroach who'd brazenly begun a march across the table. He washed out a coffee mug and filled it with wine. He turned on the little radio and listened nostalgically to the hour-long block of oldies.  The Rascals' "Groovin" brought him back to the front porch — the one he had just left — where he'd sit and listen to the radio with his mother, he drinking Cokes, she struggling with a crossword puzzle, on sunny Sundays.  She'd liked that song.
     "Crossroads," the Cream version, took him across the park to Barringer High, where Stu Kleinman first played the song for him after school in the Music Appreciation room.  The Hollies' "Carrie Anne" transported him to the jukebox at Bodholdt's Diner, where he and Lopez convened for Taylor ham and eggs after serving Mass most Sundays.
     "Groovy Kind of Love," by the Mindbenders, reminded him of Carole DeCenzo and the street fair at St. Augustine's, where they held hands and made kissy-faces at each other.  He could smell the zeppoli the Italians sold from the wooden stands, could see the knots of dough being plucked up from the deep fryers, drained and sprinkled with powdered sugar and handed over, still warm, three for a quarter.  The Blondie tune "Rapture" evoked Maria and the little house in South San Francisco.  She'd loved Blondie.  Rom closed his eyes.  He could see her dancing in the kitchen, smiling, welcoming him home.
     After a moment, though, the fragile image turned on him, and his insides made a fist.  Rom moaned; he curled up on the edge of the chair and put his forehead on the table, knocking his wine to the floor.  His shoulders shook; tears flooded his eyes and spilled onto the table.  "Rapture" was still playing on the little radio, and he grabbed it and held it to his wet cheek until the song faded.  He shut the radio off and cradled it against his chest and cried until he couldn't anymore.
     He slowly sat back and after a long while gently put the radio back on the table.   He got up, went to the bathroom and showered.  He dried off and, after a moment of solemn, naked debate,  put on the black clothes he'd worn the previous night and laced up his black Adidas. He picked up the mask and turned it over in his hands several times.  He put it into his jacket pocket, then the scarf.
     An hour later, Rom was driving back down Bloomfield Avenue, stuffed.  He'd driven up all the way up to Bloomfield before stopping to eat.  He'd chosen the Short-Stop, a small diner right out of the ‘50s, next to the Garden State Parkway, where a mixture of young partiers and older regulars added a happy murmur to the sizzle of the grill and clatter of utensils.   He'd found a spot at one of the 12 stools along the counter — behind him, along the windows, were about eight more — and ordered the He-Man cheese omelet, featuring "3 Jersey Fresh Eggs," cheddar cheese, hash browns and toast for $4.35.
     The omelet — served up sizzling in its own skillet — had been excellent, as had the three cups of coffee now pressuring his bladder, but the meal had been spoiled somewhat by one annoying patron, a gaunt man whose age Rom couldn't guess — maybe 35, maybe 50 — who'd sat over by the cigaret machine drinking coffee and coughing in a horrible, tubercular hack.  For a few awful moments Rom had seen himself in that shape, somewhere not too far down the road.
     In his car, Rom fingered the cut on his chin and wondered if it would heal right.  He wondered what symptoms would appear first, and how soon.  He recalled the information the nurse had given him.  Night sweats.  Fevers.  Diarrhea.  Weakness.
     He tried to put it out of his mind now.  He just wanted to piss.
     He finally pulled in down the block from his building — naturally, his old spot was gone — and got out.  Nearby, an area between two apartment buildings was dark, and he stepped into the alley and toward the back of one building and started pissing against the wall. "When ya gotta go, ya gotta go," he muttered.  He flashed back to the two punks he'd surprised during their private moment and smiled.  Then, from somewhere behind the building, he heard angry voices.
     Rom finished and zipped up, then walked quietly to the rear of the building and peeked around the corner.  There in the dim light of the concrete courtyard stood a hulking black man and a skinny hispanic.  Rom recognized the black.  He wore an Oakland Raiders cap and had two gold front teeth — the guy who was beating up the woman in the car on Tuesday night! And the other one — was he the one who'd hit him from behind?
     "Come back to that window, bitch!" yelled the black.
     "Let's forget it, Darryl," said the other one.  "She got nothin."
     "Shut up!"  He yelled up again.  "Come back here."
     A voice came from the third floor.  "I tol' you, he ain't here and he ain't been here.  I ain't seen him for days."
     "I don't care where he is.  You give me that money or I get mad."
     "I ain't got it all, I tol' you."
     "Gimme what you got."
     "Wait a minute."
     "I'll wait a minute.  Then I'm comin' up after yo' ass."
     A few moments later, wrapped in a thin black sweater, a slender Jamaican-looking woman came out of a back door into the courtyard.  She handed Darryl something.  He showed it to his companion and laughed.
     "You gonna give me mo' than that or you ain't goin' back upstairs."
     "I tol' you, that's all I got."
     Now Darryl grabbed her.  She broke away and ran for the back stairs, but the other one cut her off and grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms to her body.  Now Darryl was moving toward her, looking around.
     In the alley, Rom was shaking, and he stepped back into the shadow.  "If  I think about it, I'll never do it," he muttered.  He hastily tied the scarf onto his head, then put on the mask and took a deep breath.  He said to himself quietly, tensely: "If it is to be, it is up to me."  He took another deep breath.  "I must be outta my fucking mind."
     Rom moved a few feet to a clothesline pole and, fueled by adrenaline, quickly climbed halfway up.  He looked down; he hadn't been seen yet.  He saw Darryl waving a knife at the terrified girl, now gagged by the other man's hand.
     Rom grabbed a clothesline and unhooked the pulley from the pole.  He pulled the double line taut and whispered a quick prayer.  He jumped from the pole with a fierce yell. Darryl turned around as the Son of Zorro, who was about to swing into the side of the building, let go of the rope and landed awkwardly a few feet from him.
     But Rom rolled with the fall and plowed into Darryl.  The girl wrenched free and Darryl fell onto the other man, stabbing him in the arm.
     Rom, who'd landed on his knee, limped back away from the struggling pair.  The hispanic was bleeding and yelling.  Darryl turned toward the figure in black.   "You one crazy motherfucker.  Now you gonna die."
     Rom felt the blood drain from his head.  He couldn't run, and he had no weapons. What the hell was wrong with him, anyway?  He was no damned hero!  He looked around crazily.  Near his feet was a flattened hubcap.
     Just then the girl kicked a garbage can from the first-floor landing of the back stairs, and it landed noisily on the bleeding hispanic.  When Darryl turned back to face the Son of Zorro, all he saw was a hubcap smashing into his face.  He never saw the garbage can coming down onto his head a second later.
 "Yeah!  Kill him!"  Rom spun around at the sound.  A kid was leaning out the window. "It's Zorro!"  Now more windows were opening, and Rom heard the sound of feet coming down the back stairs.  He limped down the alley.  "Great!" he muttered.
     A siren approached.  He hobbled across the street to the county training center next to his own building and clumsily scaled a five-foot fence.  He fell as he landed in the parking lot but bounded up and climbed over a small school bus and onto the garage roof, then over another chain-link fence into the back courtyard of his own building.  He could hear voices getting closer.  "Hey Zorro!"  "Yo, Zorro!"  In a first-floor apartment a dog appeared in the window and began barking hysterically.
     Rom stepped through the broken glass and garbage to the middle wing of the building. He reached the fire escape and leaped up to grab the lower rung of the ladder to pull it down.  Short by a foot, he fell to the ground.  Pain shot through his leg again.  His mask slipped.  He whipped it off, then, with a mighty one-legged effort, leapt up and managed to grab the rung.  He hung on it, and in a second it came down.  He climbed up to the second floor, then up the narrow, rusted stairs to the third floor as the counterweight brought the ladder back up again.  Grateful that he'd left his window open a few inches, he threw it up, tumbled through and fell onto the dark kitchen floor.  He lay there in pain, shaking, holding his breath.