The fitness center I go to in New York is thirty blocks from my apartment, and I was walking home from it one autumn afternoon when I came upon a woman who was attempting to carry a cabinet. It was waist-high and maybe five feet long—a metal frame with eight canvas drawers. I watched as she lifted it, took a few steps, and then set it back down with an expression that read as both How badly do I really need this? and Why can’t we temporarily shrink things when getting them from place to place?

The woman had silver hair that was cut short. She was lean and had no makeup on.

“Hello,” I said. “Can I help you with that?”

I guessed correctly that she’d found this cabinet on the curb, just as I had found my current desk chair and countless pieces of furniture in the past. I’d got my kitchen table in Chicago the same way. When I moved to London, my first table was used as well, but that one wasn’t found on the street. Rather, it came from an Indian restaurant I’d gone to with a friend who was visiting from Arizona.

“Anything else?” our waiter had asked at the end of the meal.

“Yes,” I’d said. “Can I have this table? It’s the perfect size for my kitchen.”

The man asked if we could wait for a moment. Then he made a phone call and returned saying he could let it go for twenty pounds.

“Sold!” I said. “Now, what about our napkins and the metal bowl my saag paneer was served in?”

With my friend’s help, the table, the napkins, and the bowl weren’t difficult to get home. Unlike the cabinet. The thing wasn’t heavy so much as cumbersome. I thought it might be easier for me to carry on my own, but the woman wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re too old,” she said. “I can’t let you hurt yourself on account of me.”

You want to talk old? I thought, looking at her age-spotted hands and at the slight wattle beneath her chin. You’ve got to have a good . . . eight months on me.

It was her find, though, so we did it her way—me on one side and her on the other, the two of us facing each other and separated by a distance of eighteen inches, the bottom of the cabinet bashing our shins with every step. “Can we just stop and . . . rest for a minute?” she panted in the middle and at the end of every block. I was in a hurry to get home because I had a show that night. I needed to take a bath and iron my clothes. I also needed to figure out my program—what I would read and in what order.

“Are you coming from work?” I asked the woman, suspecting that she was retired but wanting to hear it from her own mouth.

“Oh, I stopped all that a few years ago,” she said. “I’m on my way home from pickleball. Do you play?”

I’d heard of this game, but I tend to tune out when the topic turns to sports. Thus, I had no idea what it actually was. Tennis with pickles would have been my first guess, but if that were the case I’d likely have smelled vinegar on the woman’s clothing.

“It’s a great way to meet people,” she continued. “I had colleagues at my job, but they weren’t exactly friends, if you know what I mean.”

She told me that she was born in San Juan but moved to New York as a child.

“This city is nothing like it used to be,” she said, frowning at a high-rise apartment building that had recently gone up. “My neighbors now, they’ll see someone bleeding on the street and walk right by. That would never happen back where I’m from. In Puerto Rico, if someone’s hungry, you feed them—end of story.”

I thought of all the people who’d passed this woman as she’d tried to carry the cabinet by herself. Some, undoubtedly, were elderly or had children with them, but what of the others? I know my brother Paul would have stopped to help, and my friend Mark. But would Amy? I wondered. Would Hugh?

“New York is just for the rich now,” the woman complained. “They run the show. It’s all about them.”

I wanted to ask what she meant by “rich” because, of course, it’s subjective. Would I have qualified, or was she talking about people with billions? In the paper earlier that week, I’d learned that Elon Musk was on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. I think that if you have that much money you should at least be forced to sit down and count it all. From what I read online a few hours later, dressed for my show and riding the elevator from my apartment to my building’s lobby, if Musk recited a number every second, it would take him more than thirty-one thousand years to reach a trillion. A regular lifetime wouldn’t put a dent in a figure like his. One of his children would have to take over when he died, followed by one of their children, and on for a thousand generations. By that time, a trillion might get you a chicken wing and a bucket of house paint. A nonillionaire is what you’ll want to be in the future. That’s one followed by thirty zeros. I looked up how long it would take to count that high and was presented with a math equation.

Counting my money, by contrast, would take around five hundred days. After a week, would I say, “That’s enough! I’ll forfeit the rest. My freedom is more important than sitting in this chair,” or would I picture something I really wanted to buy—a gorilla on five acres of land, maybe—and keep going? At what point, if any, would I decide that I had enough?

This question was on my mind as I waved good night to my doorman and started walking downtown, in the direction of my first New York apartment, which was in the West Village. It wasn’t mine, technically—rather, I was the roommate of a guy named Rusty, who’d had the lease for thirteen years. We both smoked a lot, but he liked to keep the windows shut, which left the place smelling sad and stale. When the outside temperature dipped below seventy, he’d turn up the heat as high as it would go, the way they do in nursing homes and in tanks where bearded dragons live. My half of the stabilized rent was three hundred and fifty dollars, an astronomical sum to me in 1990. The first time I was late giving Rusty his money, he said firmly but not unkindly, “This can never happen again. Do you understand?”

Back then, it would have taken me all of two minutes to count my money. That’s normal for a seven-year-old, but I was thirty-four, and, by most measures, a failure. No job, no prospects. A single pair of shoes. I’d go to the A.T.M. and curse it for not dispensing singles. A broken pay phone near my apartment spat six dollars in change at me one afternoon, and, scooping it up with both hands, I tasted what it felt like to be rich. In those days, I could either buy a newspaper or a cup of coffee, so I would dig the Times or the Village Voice out of a trash can and go to Chock Full o’ Nuts to read the help-wanted ads.

Looking at the available positions, I’d kick myself for never developing a skill. Yes, I was writing every day, but only with one finger, and it was hardly the sort of writing that would have landed me any of the jobs I saw advertised—the one, for instance, at Little Golden Books. They were looking for someone to produce a short educational manuscript about outer space, and were willing to pay five thousand dollars—a fortune. After reading the ad, I got a library card and started doing research. Little Golden Books were for children, and that, I thought, would make it easier. “Can you imagine life without gravity?” I wrote on my first page. “WHOOPEE!” This was followed sometime later by “How does a weightless astronaut use the toilet? Let’s find out!”

I wrote about Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey who was one of the first two American animals to launch into space and return safely. Her fellow-passenger, also a monkey, but a rhesus, named Miss Able, died four days after their rocket was recovered, in the Atlantic Ocean. Miss Baker, though, lived to be twenty-seven and died of kidney failure. “Why were the first two astronaut monkeys unmarried?” I wrote. “Do you think husbands would have distracted them from the duties at hand?” It was, I thought, something a kid might wonder about.

When my sample chapters were rejected, I was devastated. All that work, all that research, for nothing. To make it worse, in my head I’d already spent the five thousand dollars. First, I figured I’d find an apartment of my own. They were hard to come by, so maybe Rusty could die in a quick, painless way and the landlord would decide that since I had already settled in he could just turn the lease over to me. I’d get a nice desk, a bed rather than a futon. I would paint the nicotine-stained walls and then buy a second pair of shoes.

The day I learned I would not be writing “The Little Golden Book of Space,” I was forced to consider what I had been pushing out of my mind since arriving in New York. It was the worst thing imaginable: moving back to Chicago. I’d had a nice life there and lots of good friends. I could get my old job back just by asking, but I’d seen what that looked like—the person who returns with his tail between his legs, the one overheard at parties saying, “The thing is that New York is completely overrated. I was paying a fortune for a shoebox there, a prison cell, while here I’ve got five rooms and can practically see Lake Michigan from my roof.”

That was evading the point, though. Unlike Chicago or Raleigh or any of the other cities I’d spent time in, New York was about everyone who’d ever lived there, or at least everyone in the arts, people who’d arrived just as I had, audaciously and with nothing. It was a test, your final exam, but what you needed to pass, on top of any talent you might possess, was luck. It was the sort of thing that might come anyone’s way, yet it couldn’t be arranged. Nor could it be bought, and that put everyone on the same playing field, the person with a graduate degree from Yale and the one who’d taken five writing classes, one of them at the Y. Luck could be waiting for you at the public library, but it was just as likely at the grocery store or on a traffic island. It wasn’t that someone might tap you on the shoulder and say, “I’m with Little, Brown and Company. Do you by any chance have a manuscript we can publish?” But you might see something or hear something you could write about, something that would knock an idea loose or strike a chord. Even being robbed or hit by a car could prove fruitful. So what are you doing reading a magazine in your bedroom, a towel under the door to blot out the sound of your roommate’s TV? Get out there where luck can find you!

The Puerto Rican woman and I carried the cabinet downtown for a good six blocks and had just reached her street when a stout man in coveralls walked up to a van that was parked on the corner. “Hey,” she called to him before breaking into rapid Spanish. I understood the words “help,” “apartment,” and “stairs,” along with the phrase “I’ll pay you.”

An exact sum was not proposed, but still the man agreed. When he offered to carry the cabinet on his own, the woman didn’t argue; rather, she gave him an address in the center of the block. “So what’s your name?” she asked me as the guy took some gloves out of his pocket and fitted his plump, paint-spattered hands into them.

“David,” I told her.

And she said, “Oh, just like my son.”

We waved goodbye then and parted, saying we’d maybe see each other in the neighborhood. As I hurried downtown, a man sitting on the ground outside a liquor store held out an empty cup. “Help the homeless?”

It irritates me when, by “the homeless,” people mean themselves.

It should be “Help one of the homeless,” I wanted to tell him. Otherwise it sounds like you’re going to take whatever you collect and distribute it to other people in need.

The man saw all this playing out on my face and barked, quite unfairly, in my opinion, “I hope you burn in Hell.”

Which, of course, is another reason to live in New York—every day delivers a kick, and always in a different spot. There are times when being condemned to Hell really gets under my skin. Am I a terrible person? I’ll ask myself. Am I crueller than most? Am I thoughtless? If I’m cursed by a mentally ill person, I’ll really dig in and claw at myself. I’ve always seen them as prophets, and hold my breath as I pass, afraid of the truth they might reveal. Early in my time in New York, not long after the Little Golden Book episode, a woman dressed in rags in the Staten Island Ferry terminal looked me in the eye and told me I was going to die before I reached fifty. Thousands of people moving about like ants, yet I was the one she singled out. Her voice was clear and authoritative, like an oracle’s. Our brief encounter really lit a fire under me. I’ve got only sixteen years to make a splash, I thought, knowing that time would pass a lot faster than I’d want it to. When I didn’t die at age fifty—when I woke up in Paris, as alive as I’d been the day before—I was shocked but also greatly relieved, for my life was good by then, and I didn’t want it taken away from me.

This time, though, I walked on by. Burn in Hell, indeed, I thought. First off, the guy on the sidewalk outside the liquor store was a drunk, not an oracle. Second, I had just helped a stranger carry a cabinet down York Avenue for what felt to me, and probably to her, too, like an eternity. And a person gets points for things like that. ♦