He stepped onto the platform, merging into a stream of passengers feeding countless other streams that formed a river of impatient strides moving toward the stairs. He recalled being in the lower levels before, the time he'd taken a shuttle down to Washington to stand in a boxing ring without ropes and . . . well, that was a lifetime ago. Wearing a dark sweater and distressed leather jacket with a fur collar, he climbed the stairs, passing an old friend descending to one of the two lower levels of tracks. His friend's hair was shorter than he remembered, and he wanted to turn and call out his former co-worker's name, but it was too late. His friend was already in the bowels of the great terminal that swallowed millions of travelers every week. He was sure he knew his friend's destination.

"Too late," he said to himself, pausing by a newsstand.

Too late. He knew that events bore the indelible stamp of time, and that was okay by him. He'd never liked making apologies.

He continued up the stairs and walked onto the Main Concourse, a cavernous space with a polished marble floor, balconies, and balustrades. He stopped and stared at the huge four-faced clock above the information booth, a meeting place for friends, business associates, and tourists. He also looked at the ticket booths and the arched dormer windows, bright light broken into long lines across the floor by bars protecting the enormous panels of glass.

He stood in the middle of the organized chaos, reflecting on how good it felt to stand in a crowd without being hassled. He then moved to the front doors leading to Lexington Avenue.

Opening the door on the far right, he stepped onto the sidewalk and disappeared.

November: shadows slide across the streets of Manhattan, painting every alley and avenue a deep shade of melancholy blue. The air is chilly and damp, pedestrians leaning forward and looking down at the pavement to avoid contemplating the despair curled up in the marrow of their bones. November. That's when I met him.

I was walking home from the Barrington-Karp Agency, thinking about the mind-numbing hours I'd spent that day attempting to put together a campaign to convince Jane Q. Public that a client's bra-the Miracle Cup-was as effective as cosmetic surgery in lifting her breasts proudly and firmly with lighter-than-air fabric not unlike material used in the manufacture of parachutes. My boss, Kellie Karp, encouraged me to think of skydivers perilously falling to earth before they pulled the ripcord. "You've got to approach the Miracle Cup as somehow defying gravity. The Miracle Cup is an open chute, a silky something to keep mammary glands airborne. We don't want skydiving breasts rushing toward the ground." Kellie Karp most definitely did not have a way with words, and her agency's success rested in large part on the fact that her employees usually ignored her rambling vowels and consonants.

"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity," I mumbled, huddled in my coat against the growing darkness as I walked through the West Village. I thought the author of Ecclesiastes had known a thing or two about life. There was indeed nothing new under the sun. Women had tried to save their sagging breasts from gravity for thousands of years, and I didn't need Kellie Karp's metaphors to understand the concept.

Nothing new under the sun, nothing new under the blouse.

The East River seemed darkly appealing. Its eddies and currents would close over me, with only seagulls, riding updrafts, as witness to my demise, and they weren't likely to call the cops and spoil the insurance payoff to my parents. My OCD boyfriend, Thad Nash from New Orleans, would grieve for exactly three months as prescribed by the DSM-IV, the bible of psychiatry, and then systematically find a woman to satisfy e-LoveSign's twenty-seven areas of compatibility. I wouldn't be missed for very long. As for my parents, they had regarded me as a lost cause after I declared a major in English with an emphasis on creative writing, and though they would grieve outwardly, inwardly they would be happy as clams that my education had finally paid off. And maybe they'd been right all along. My degree had earned me the right to brainstorm about D cups being pulled skyward on a magic current of sensuous Ultra Spandex KD-X, patent pending.

"I'm a loser," I said aloud.

A middle-aged woman, tucked into a raincoat and wearing cat-eye glasses, turned and looked at me as she hurried through the evening gloom, though I don't know why. New York has enough mumbling lunatics to keep head-turns to a minimum.

I was on Hudson Street. Charles Street was the cross-street up ahead, and after that was Perry Street, where I would take a left, walk a block and a half, and find the brownstone where Thad would be calculating my ETA so he'd know when to decant the wine. As I walked, I heard an acoustic guitar launching chords into the evening, melodic ambassadors to the darkness as night began to throw its weight around more seriously.

Nothing new, really. After all these years, folkies and their Martin guitars still haunted the Village, musical progeny of Dylan, Seeger, Havens, Yarrow, Stookey, Travers, Sebastian, Paxton, and many more. A yellow neon sign at the end of the short block flickered, died, sputtered again, and finally stayed on, braving the night. It said MERCY STREET CAFÉ. Across the intersection was Village Dry Cleaners.

"Mercy Street?" I said aloud. "I'm on the corner of Charles and Hudson."

There was a Mercer Street in the Village, but no thoroughfare named Mercy.

I had no recollection of ever seeing the Mercy Street Café, but clubs came and went-vanity, vanity, all is vanity-and all I wanted was to have a drink and slide into bed, pretending that the blue silk sheets I'd recently bought were waves spreading out from a tugboat plowing through the mysterious East River as it reflected the jeweled lights of Metropolis.

Blissful sleep. Dreams. No Kellie Karp. No Miracle Cup.

Death should always take a backseat when a mattress is available. Besides, I figured evolution had spent a lot of time to produce me – Amy Parisi – and I didn't want to waste millions of years of artistic effort even if my immediate future dealt with ways to support mammary glands.

I stopped at the corner and glanced to my right.

He was sitting on a high stool, playing "Watching the Wheels" on an Ovation guitar. And he was chewing gum, his jaw moving ever so slightly the way it had in video footage from The White Album on. He had always looked so nonchalant, so cool. The café, brick walls on all sides, was dimly lit, with two track-lights aimed at a small stage at the rear of the building. There were no doorways-only three arches granting access from the sidewalk. The café was empty. John Lennon, gunned down in 1980 in front of the Dakota, was playing to an empty house on . . . I glanced up at the blue street sign. It read Mercy Street.

"There isn't any Mercy Street," I said. "This is Charles, for crying out loud."

And then I came to my senses. John Lennon was inside, not more than ten yards away. What the hell was I doing standing on the sidewalk?

Yes, he's dead, I thought, which means this can't be happening. I'm hallucinating. It's the depression. My addled brain is producing this little video inside the confines of my cerebral cortex to make sure I don't wander down to the East River and shuffle off the mortal coil. Got life? No? Too bad. Just create a mental hologram of a Beatle.

In reality, I wasn't in any real danger of offing myself. I'd simply been thinking like an English major, peppering my thoughts with juvenile, angst-ridden rhetoric to match the gloom of November and the reality that I pitched bras for a living.

No, that's John Lennon inside, looking just like he did when he was recording Double Fantasy in the months before he died. He's wearing round, rimless glasses and he's gone from playing "Watching the Wheels" to "Imagine."

Trying to stay grounded, I considered another possibility for the strange appearance of Mr. Lennon.

Maybe he's a look-a-like. Hell, the world is full of Elvis impersonators and tribute bands. If I get close, I'll probably see that this guy is named Bart Whitmore and hails from Schenectady or Peoria or Kansas City. There's no one sitting at the twenty or so tables because he's really bad at this Lennon thing, and he can't hold an audience.

This theory failed to explain the Mercy Street sign. There was only one way to confirm the identity of the man strumming the Ovation, to find out whether he was a genuine icon or a cubic zirconium Beatle.

I walked into the Mercy Street Café and sat near the stage, off to the side.

It was Lennon, not a look-a-like. Undeniably nasal and Liverpudlian. I'd listened to his records since I was fifteen-both solo and Beatle CDs-and the man sitting before me was the legend from Liverpool, one of four men who helped change the cultural landscape of the second half of the twentieth century.

* * *

They were larger than life, all four of the Beatles, having gone from relative obscurity in Liverpool in 1962 to mega-fame by February, 1964, when Ed "Stone-face" Sullivan introduced the group, which launched into McCartney's "All My Lovin'." Not a single crime was committed in New York City that Sunday night while the Beatles performed. Their hit singles had been played on American radio for months – "Please, Please Me," "She Loves You," "From Me to You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand" – but here they were, four magicians who could cause amnesia in an entire country, which would shortly say "Elvis who?"

No one was aware at the time, of course, that the polite "youngsters," as Sullivan referred to them, had recently been four raucous young men playing seedy bars in Hamburg, Germany, while dressed in black leather jackets. They drank and whored and cursed, but these facts wouldn't come to light for many years, and when they finally did, it really didn't matter. It was simply part of the mythos of the super-cool, a sidebar to a much larger story that dealt with the making of gods whose stature transcended their music.

* * *

Lennon glanced at me as he sang, moving his hand up and down the Ovation's neck, and I thought that maybe he'd given me an imperceptible nod, a little "Hi, thanks for stopping in." Or maybe he was just moving his head to accentuate a lyric.

Bags were forming under his eyes, and he looked tired. I remembered reading that he'd done so much coke that a small hole had formed in the septum between his nostrils. But the charisma, the magic, the aura of his fame-it was all still there, just a few feet away.

I clapped when he finished the song, and the sound echoed off the bricks in the small, deserted club. Embarrassment washed over me, and I blushed. My applause – two cold hands thumping like a seal's flippers – was calling attention to the fact that no one else was listening to John Winston Lennon, born October 9, 1940, died December 8, 1980.

"Thanks," Lennon said, putting a capo on the Ovation's neck as he continued to work at the gum.

I inhaled sharply, as if standing in below-zero temperatures. "You're John—"

"Shhh," he said, holding a finger to his lips. "I'm doing a set."

"But you're dead!"

"I think you've got me mixed up with Mr. McCartney," he said, as if handling a heckler. "The rumor was about him, not me." He winked. "Not that I didn't have a little to do with perpetuating it."

"No," I said. "You were shot. You've been dead for twenty-six years."

"You're daft, woman. You're also interrupting my set."

"Look around," I said. "Do you see anyone else here?"

Lennon paused, pushing his granny glasses, first used while filming Richard Lester's How I Won the War, up over the bridge of his aquiline nose. "A bit odd, I'll concede."

"Would a former Beatle be playing to an empty house? This is 2006."

"Lady, did you drop acid today?" He didn't appear angry, but neither was he smiling. He was growing edgy, unaccustomed to an onstage challenge.

* * *

John Lennon had been many things: talented singer and songwriter, clown, political activist, and the world's best-known weirdo. He'd also been an angry, sullen man ruled by his moods and whatever chemicals circulated in his brain on any given day. His acerbic tongue could cut a person with the precision of a scalpel. To confront John was to tread on very thin ice.

* * *

"Acid? No. I've been-"

I stopped cold. I wasn't going to inform John Lennon about my work on the Miracle Cup bra.

"No," I resumed. "No acid, but what's the last thing you remember?"

He strummed a D chord and narrowed his eyes as he readjusted the capo, but he wasn't fooling me. He was having a hard time remembering, and it wasn't because of pot or LSD.

"I just stepped off a train at Grand Central," he said. "Is that good enough for ya?"

"Anything else?"

Lennon was silent. He began doing some riffs and then broke into a smile, the kind he flashed in later years if was genuinely in the mood for playing to the camera, which wasn't very often. "I saw George," he proclaimed proudly. "I believe he was boarding a train for India. There. Gotcha."

"We're in New York, right?"

"Yeah."

"Do you know of any trains that cross the Atlantic Ocean?"

"That's odd, too," he admitted.

"Besides, George died a few years ago. Cancer."

Lennon had long ago renounced the idea of being a Beatle, but the mention of the metaphysical Mr. Harrison going south touched a raw nerve.

The ice was now very thin.

"What are you babbling about, birdie?" he asked indignantly. The scowl on his face was reminiscent of the countenance he exhibited when reporters asked him inane questions during his activist days. "Why don't you fuck off and go home?" He got up and started toward me but stopped. "You heard me," he said, kicking over a chair with a booted foot. "Get out." He returned to his stool, the Ovation once again resting on his knees.

I sobbed like a teenager barred from the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1964. One of my heroes-maybe the most important one of all-was angry at me, a man who had taught the world to think outside the box. Young people born long after his death, including the tattooed, nose-studded generation of the twenty-first century, knew who he was and idolized him. Punk, grunge, and rap all acknowledged his influence.

That's what I call staying power.

"Sorry I bothered you," I said, walking lethargically toward the nearest arch. "There must be some mistake."

I was passing the last table when Lennon had a change of heart. "Wait a second!" he called. "Is George really dead? What about Paul and Ringo? Are they okay? Alive?"

I turned to face the stage. "They're fine, but George died when he was fifty-eight. Throat cancer. It spread and . . . well . . . he's gone now."

Lennon got up, leaned his guitar against the stool, and put his hands in his pockets. "George liked to play the ukulele," he said. "Did you know that?"

"I think I heard it on TV."

Walking around the club, Lennon looked up at the high walls, occasionally touching the bricks gently with his fingertips. "It's a funny thing," he remarked, "but the truth is that I really can't remember anything except getting off a train."

"When?"

"Two or three hours ago. Maybe more. And before that . . . . " He walked toward me. "Before that, I'm not sure. I think a limo drove me home from the studio."

"You were shot outside the Dakota."

"Where's Yoko?"

"She still lives there."

"Sean?"

"He's fine."

"But I'm dead, you say."

I nodded my head slowly.

He ran his hands through his hair. "Maybe I'm the one who dropped acid. I suddenly feel like I've never been born." "'She Said, She Said.' Revolver. Rumor has it you said something like that to Peter Fonda. You were sitting in a Jacuzzi while he said he knew what it was like to be dead."

"Sounds familiar enough."

He looked around the café again. "I guess people should be packed in here pretty tight right now."

"I suppose. After all, you're John Lennon."

He slumped into the nearest chair, right elbow on the table, head resting against the palm of his hand. "Why would somebody shoot me? Was it the fucking FBI? That fag Hoover?"

"The world is still asking the first question, but no, it wasn't the FBI. A demented fan shot you with a handgun."

"The world still thinks about me?"

"Yep. Ever since you were assassinated, you've been regarded as a martyr for peace. Plus everybody still digs your music. A lot."

He lit a cigarette and exhaled a narrow plume of blue smoke. "What's the world like?" he asked, cocking his head slightly. "I mean, did it give peace a chance? Did things get better?"

I shook my head. "Not really. The planet's pretty crapped up. Terrorism, war, famine, global warming."

"What the hell is global warming?"

"Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Pollution. The world is heating up. Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans last year."

"New Orleans," he said, a wistful smile crossing his face. "We played there once in the early days. Saw Fats Domino at our motel. He was wearing the biggest damn diamond ring and watch I'd ever seen. God, but we had fun back then." The brief smile turned into a somber look of defeat. "If the world is worse, then we didn't really make a difference. It was all for nothing."

"Not at all. There are a lot of people out there who remember what counts, people who still talk peace because you and others had the guts to stand up and speak your mind."

"Are there peace rallies? Marches?"

"Unfortunately, no. There were a few big ones before the war in Iraq, but they died out pretty fast."

"Why is anyone fighting Iraq, for Christ's sake?"

"Good question, but long story."

Lennon said nothing for the next five minutes. "I'm pretty knackered, but I'm gonna play some more songs for a while," he said at last.

I stood to go. "Nice meeting you, John."

"What's your name?"

The statement was more of a command than a question.

"Amy. Amy Parisi."

"Come on back some night, Amy Parisi, assuming I'm still here. I think you're the only one who can see me. A few people passed by earlier and looked in, but they kept on walking."

"I will."

"The White Album," he said. "Paul's song."

"Yep."

I stepped outside and looked back. John was starting a quiet version of "In My Life," which seemed quite appropriate under the circumstances: his life, which was over. Curtain down, theater dimmed. Time for the greatest hits CDs.

Or so I thought.

Walking quickly toward my apartment building, I didn't look at the street signs. I was afraid what they might tell me.