His house is built out of the impossibility of architecture. It towers above him some 30, 40 stories. It shines in the afternoon sun. Birds fly through it, erecting tiered ceilings of song. From the penthouse, you can see the whole city rising out of the East River like something Sumerian. Inland, it comes eye-to-eye with a growing cast of glass giants, nearly as see-through and unlikely. They appear to be ganging up. The hour is late. The mosquitoes keep strange schedules, but the rats are absolutely predictable.

This is the door.

The doorknob is the word silly.

“People think silly, means stupid. But originally, means innocent. Happy.”

Jerzy Sulek tells me this across the red milk crate that forms his only barrier to the world. He knows because he’s got an OED stuffed somewhere in the overflowing moving van quickly returning to earth in the back of his weed-strewn lot. We’ve just met, but already he knows what I want. He picks up one of the picture frames he used to sell at the Chelsea Flea Market and holds it around his shaggy head. He cracks a fool’s knowing grin.

“Don’t come with the frame already ready,” he says.

He is part of the landscape of Franklin Street. Every time I pass the last residential bend of Greenpoint, before it gives way to Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront, there’s his tan torso, sunning itself in the weeds or crouching over his sawhorse table reading an out-of-print hardback. Between 8 and 9 every morning, he wanders the blocks of bakeries and waste transfer stations between the neighborhoods in search of cans. Promptly at 11:30 he walks along the river to the public swimming pool on Bedford Avenue, to take a shower and have some lunch at a nearby soup kitchen.

“I know what you are going to ask me. My financial situation and my age. I am going to lie.”

It’s strange that he uses the word lie, since nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is admittedly fiction. His speech is thickly accented, wildly asyntactic and almost entirely allusive: Diderot, Proust, Capote, Fellini cut lumber for his blocked builder’s mind. But I believe him when he tells me that he taught some architecture classes at Pratt. He has shown me his drawings.