Keto and Kenosis

by Max Lawton

I wasn’t quite clear on how I’d managed to get vanilla yogurt instead of plain or Greek, but by the time I realized what I’d done, it was too late to remedy the issue and all the grocery stores and bodegas in Tribeca were closed. Not that there were that many of them to begin with, but 5pm on a Sunday meant that I’d have to walk to the Village if I wanted groceries. I was hungover as shit and cooped up in my dirty apartment—very spacious and 10k a month, which was a crazy way to spend money, but I also didn’t mind splashing out given recent crypto-successes. And it was dirty because I’d thrown a party for my best friend Matt the night before—a well-attended affair that’d lasted until about 4:30am, later than I’d’ve liked, to be perfectly frank.

The apartment was on the tenth floor and the windows from sitting room looked straight down toward One World Trade Center and the surrounding concrete rectangles perpetually lit up with awful light. Right below the window was Paul’s Casablanca where a girl we knew from school worked the door. It was a kind of game to try to spot her dyed pink hair sitting on bar chair by where crowds of people shunted themselves into fun spot through narrow door. No one had been checking vax cards for a year at least; those days were over now.

I was kitty-corner to the 1-train stop on Canal and the little dioramas on the tiles down by the tracks (which is to say: the way they’d remodeled the station), they were much more unsavory than when a wedge of fallen tile gave way to an arrow of pure black beneath, the arrow then appearing to penetrate neighboring array of white ceramic ornamented by the occasional sticker or illegible tag.

It was better to rot than to remodel.

The apartment came furnished and I’d found it on Streeteasy. The woman renting to me was nervy Euro type, her accent unidentifiable and her name a mere initial: “J.” Like, I had to call her J., which I wasn’t crazy about. She wasn’t working with a realtor, so I just came over on a Sunday morning, having taken a short cab ride from previous pad in East Village––the neighborhood was getting kinda hard to take from Thursday to Sunday and, even though I worked in crypto, that didn’t take away my right to find the young associates from investment banks with their fleece vests and checkered shirts distasteful. The kinda guys who, if they didn’t get lucky with their short blonde dates with perfect hair that ended just past the shoulder (recent college grads living four to an apartment in Crown Heights, their condos were brand-new, but, across from them, you’d find delis that smelled like lunch meat and kitty litter and, at a bodega like that across from Matt’s building, they also sold Russian candies and the Dominican owner spoke a very broken idiom of Russian, exclaiming that “this is America, man! We all love each other’s languages and cultures, man!” when asked where it was he’d picked it up), like, the guys would make a quick and surreptitious Google search regarding call girls in the area, then text number found online, “where is your in-call located?”, then “how much for a hh?”, then “how much for the hour tho,” then sending a selfie, then “sure I’ll be right over,” hoping not to receive a Targeted Communication Deterrence Message (TCDM) from the NYPD, for, verily, the only way to get rid of the supply is to nip demand in the bud.

It wasn’t an issue of disliking capitalism on my end or anything like that as regarded the young finance bros, it was something much more ineffable. Not that I’d ever buy sex, but, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t do an in-call, like, God knows the sorts of rooms at Holiday Inns or in apartment buildings with façades lit up by insanely strong fluorescent light all night those women do business in. But first- or second-year associates didn’t have the option of performing these fleshy transactions in the West Village apartments (“just above Joe’s Pizza,” they were super proud to announce) that they shared with probably three other dudes, and the real question I had was, like, “don’t they get their fleece vests mixed up sometimes?” Still, it was open secret between young bankers that they kinda liked call girls and it came with the lifestyle in the same way that doing tons of Adderall before they spent 16 hours fucking around on Excel until the stimulants got mixed up with the shrooms they’d taken the weekend before so that they were like, “I think I see an angel in D5, dudes” was. And if one of them ever saw an article in the New York Post, their typical newspaper of choice, about a girl who’d been trafficked, then disappeared in New York (MYSTERY OF A SMALL-TOWN FORMER CHEERLEADER WHO FELL VICTIM TO NYC SEX RING), they’d nudge each other and crack jokes, pointing at shlubby coworkers who had least success with fairer sex and were most inclined to key in fatal Google search that led down seedy rabbithole. Anyways, if I were somehow forced to buy call girl’s services, I’d just have her over here and she could marvel at the light beamed up onto One World Trade, not much different from that which illuminated façade of her apartment building in shitty neighborhood and Stanley Kubrick got it exactly right with the prostitute’s room downtown in Eyes Wide Shut, is my suspicion.

But, no, leave the call girls for the bankers along with their coke vials and punched walls and three monitors on desks at home and in the office. They were source enough of demand as far as I was concerned.

Plus there was stuff to steal at my apartment, like, the owner or the previous tenants, I was never clear which, one of them had left behind a plexiglass stand upon which were pills from Damien Hirst installation, anti-seizure medication with a faded red T upon each chipped lozenge, and this right next to window with view onto One World Trade, plus there was a Brillo Box exactly like the ones Warhol had used in his art, but this one hadn’t been used, like, it was a Brillo Box completely and totally indistinguishable from Warhol’s, the only difference being one had had eternal glory conferred upon it by artist’s hand and the other had not. Neither of these items were particularly easy to steal, but they were probably pretty valuable. Otherwise, beyond my gold Tony Soprano Rolex, I wasn’t worried about the overwhelmingly large collection of coffee-table books in the front room. Nor the twin libraries of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction in the apartment’s two bedrooms. Also unclear where these had come from, it was a collection of astonishing variety, but with a certain consistency of canceled maleness. The previous owner or tenant had been a great fan of Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow and, at the party last night, guests examining the library for a laugh, the only book by either of them that hadn’t been uncovered was the massive The Executioner’s Song. There were two copies of American Psycho in different editions (hardcover and paperback), four Bibles, The Princeton Review Complete Book of Colleges in the 2004 and 2005 editions, a single vintage copy of Henry Miller’s Crazy Cock, a lot of well-thumbed books by James Michener, old paperback editions of Don DeLillo’s early work (blegh), all of the Harry Potter books in paperback editions with many folds etched into spine, and, most fascinatingly, two identical hardcover copies of Hannibal with deckle-edged pages shelved right next to one another. I hadn’t noticed the two books before last night, but a girl I’d never met before in short polka-dot dress with caramel-colored legs and air bangs had come up to me, introduced herself with both books under one armpit, shaken my hand with amusing sense of pomp and circumstance, then asked if I was a big Thomas Harris fan. I’d smirked back and said no, the books weren’t mine, then she’d smiled even wider and expressed her enormous disappointment with acute sense of irony.

Her name was Ada, a nice, old-fashioned sort of name and, as Matt informed me after he saw us talking and we slipped into the bathroom for me to watch him doing coke, me cutting the lines for old times’ sake, she was a Balkan girl from Santa Barbara, which, to be honest, I couldn't imagine anything better than that, and Matt sang the The National song “named after her,” he said, which made me worry she was in the bathroom line and would overhear.

The insufflation of powders, the trickle of piss, and my bathroom filled up with Aesop products; I was a neoliberal elite.

My hangover overwhelming, I reflected on how to eat the vanilla yogurt and the berries I’d bought. I wasn’t willing to stray from my keto diet, not even on a day like this one. I pulled out my iPhone and Googled sugar-extraction techniques for dairy products. If cold-extracting the liver-destroying compounds from painkillers was possible, so too should this, I thought.

I’d borrowed a professional speaker from a DJ I knew that I’d then set up on a counter that edged the room and had no purpose. It was connected to my laptop and, for the first several hours of the party, I played Chicago techno at low volume. Hip music for mingling. We’d bought two cakes from Magnolia to celebrate Matt and the frosting was so sweet, it trickled down your throat like sugar-water or diluted nectar. A friend of ours from college who was a social-media personality and chef (or was it the other way around) had just quit smoking weed and donated two ounces to the party, which we’d pre-ground and put into an enormous wooden salad bowl, which made me think of the way these bowls conferred a super bitter taste to the oils of the salads one would toss in them, but, to my tongue at least, it didn’t affect the taste of the weed and people kept picking up the bowl and posing for pics with it, some of them exclaiming “felony amount!” as they did so (which was outdated paradigm).

As the party wore on, guests who were mostly friends from college went over to laptop to play tunes from Spotify or YouTube. Nostalgic for our college years in the 2010s, many songs from Future’s legendary run of albums and mixtapes from 2014-2015 boomed out across the parquetry, the reverberations from the speakers almost certainly reaching the floor below.

Both the Damien Hirst pills and the One World Trade Center stood sentinel at one side of the room and sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I felt like the spotlights at the foot of the new monument to old building that was also new building were keeping me awake––that their light was just too much for me to withstand.

Our stated goal for the night was for Matt to take one of the Damien Hirst pills and it’d be like my family’s neighbor back home who was an interior designer and once, or so he claimed, he’d touched a Monet painting at the Louvre, one of the cliché ones reproduced on dorm posters all too often, and a chip had come right off of it, so, security-footsteps making selves audible at edge of what he was capable of hearing, neighbor had surreptitiously swallowed chip and painting had become part of him––not to mention the noxious chemicals old French masters probably mixed into their paint. I wanted Matt to also incorporate Damien Hirst into his neurological chemistry kit, the trace amounts of the chemical never quite reaching nil, as with the paradox involving Achilles and the tortoise: the anti-seizure medication that would be present in his brain for the rest of his life to be an eternal reminder of the fun we’d had celebrating his birthday, plus whose idea it had been to have bowls of Skittles around the cake-–an awful one, they were so viscously chewy, but I guess he’d have to be reminded of that too.

A little later on, having drunk four martinis mixed as enormous batch in pitcher and the world beginning to fade at the corners of my vision, I sidled up to Ada and friend sitting on windowsill next to Damien Hirst pills. The friend looked like she was from approximately same region as Ada (which was to say Europe as such––not Santa Barbara) and I could tell she didn’t like me that much, giving crooked glance almost totally bereft of warmth or trust. But, Matt also joining us, we told a funny story about when I was doing an MBA at Oxford and we’d made hash lattés (hash cooked in cream with coffee and sugar) before going to a festival in Hackney park the same night as London Bridge attacks, stoned out of our minds and running away from well-publicized crowd, only to find selves on street with very little foot traffic and a smashed car in the middle of it with a single word spray-painted onto its side: CUNT.

You’d loved the story, Ada, and your friend had even smirked a bit, but eventually Matt wandered off with friend and, not sure exactly what time it was, the party beginning to thin out, and you asked me where the identical copies of Hannibal had come from, then suggested you could maybe find more duplicates—you’d also watched the show with Mads Mikkelsen and, yeah, I agreed, he was a good-looking dude, I remembered the video of him smoking cigarettes and drinking soda on a Zoom call that’d gone kinda viral, he’d just looked so fucking cool—, plus you wanted to borrow one of the two duplicate copies of Hannibal with their deckle-edged pages. I said you could have it and keep it, then, after refilling our martinis and rolling a joint, we walked back into the bedroom where, fortunately, I didn’t have two monitors set up on desk—those were in the spare room where the Princeton Review college guides and Harry Potter books also stood—probably where previously tenant’s kid’d slept. A little bit earlier, people had been congregating in my room and I’d told them to put coats on bed––plus how this practice had originated, it didn’t seem terribly intuitive, like, wouldn’t you want to keep your bed cleaner than coats that’d just come in from outside?––but the coats were gone now and the wool carpeting, only slightly marked by the imprints of shoes, was space surreptitiously emptied of people.

First, you scanned the shelves and we put your copy of Hannibal off to the side. What caught your eye after that was the plastic-sleeved first edition of Crazy Cock and, yes, forgot to mention this was fancy copy. You pulled it off of shelf and it was a smooth slide into your hand, the plastic made sure of that. Then you headed over to bed, threw self down, curled up like big cat, and began to read first page. You pushed individual strands of hair back behind your ears and glanced at me every few lines. I joined you and listened. I’d lit the joint and we were passing it back and forth trying not to get ash on bed or book. It took all my effort not to cough; I almost never smoked anymore. Your reading voice didn’t sound like you ever spoke Serbian or Croatian (or Serbo-Croatian, for that matter) at home, but how beautiful it would’ve been if you were truly bilingual, like, almost no one ever is: “A remote and desolate corner of America. Vast mud flats on which no flower, no living thing grows. Fissures radiating in all directions, losing themselves in the immensity of space. Standing on the platform in her heavy cowhide boots, a thick, brass-studded belt about her waist, she puffs nervously at a cigarette. Her long black hair falls like a weight to her shoulders. The whistle blows, the wheels commence their smooth, fateful revolutions. The ground slips away on an endlessly slipping belt.” You sighed and I went in for kiss. This book about a disintegrating marriage and a torrid affair with a French woman the opposite of aphrodisiac as far as more contemporary sexual mores were concerned, but it hadn’t been any impediment here. After first bout of tongue-kissing, I stood up to depress little button by doorknob that made it unturnable, also putting roach in plastic cup with wine-residue at bottom someone’d left behind upon bedside table. Your mouth tasted like clean flesh and liquor. Guests now locked out of here and would have to let them have their way with the apartment outside: the half-finished cakes, the Damien Hirst pills, the Brillo box, the plentiful boxes of unflavored La Croix in the refrigerator… For as long as I was with Ada, I didn’t need any of it.

Extracting the sugar from the yogurt was going to be an awful business. It was 5pm and pitch black. The year’d just gone December and NYC felt like an alien planet over which hung no sun.

Over the course of the long, dark night through which only the footlights around the One World Trade Center cut, we made love four times and usually I couldn’t bring myself to do it more than twice in a session, but this time was different. And, in between routs, we lay upon the sweaty bed and talked about the Netflix shows we were watching. By the third time we fucked, the guests were all gone and, after bringing both of us to orgasm, I walked out across the parquetry barefoot to make sure the front door was locked, my soles picking up the occasional bit of ash or spilled drink. Obviously, no one had managed to deadbolt front door from hallway outside, so did that, then checked on whatever remained of cakes, pinkied up a bit of frosting into my mouth, called out to Ada to see if she wanted a piece and the sugar content of the frosting was such that it wouldn’t spoil all that fast, the cakes at Magnolia were kept in plastic domes, not in refrigerators, but she didn’t and I didn’t bother to put them in fridge. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky was color of ashy milk and I wasn’t allowed to eat until 2pm according to own intermittent-fasting regimen.

The fingerful of frosting wouldn’t kickstart metabolism enough to matter much. Or so I told myself.

There was one pill missing from the Hirst installation, but I didn’t notice.

Once I got back into the bedroom, Ada had pulled a mass-market paperback copy of Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon down from the shelf, a ridiculous picture of the author in a tuxedo on the back cover. She was skimming it in search of something, lying on back with head on pillow and her legs forming a diamond, which would’ve been fantastic stretch for locked hips, but I knew that hers weren’t. I’d never read the book. She declaimed several sentences about sex and one about an avian monster on two legs that was endowed with a sizable member. By the time she got to a description of DP with two dudes and the ghost of an old Hollywood starlet, I was lying next to her and gently removed the book from her hands.

“What? You don’t like it?” she asked with smirk.

“I like it a little too much…”

And we snuggled up, the blinds closed because, in here, you couldn’t see the One World Trade or other assorted skyscrapers—just the windows across way. Frequent glimpses of deshabillé and the occasional act of coitus performed without regard for possible vis-à-vis.

Then, as we drifted off, I imagined what her family home in Santa Barbara looked like now. I was humming the chorus of “Ada,” then asked Alexa to play “Blue Calx” by Aphex Twin. Wondered if Ada had been in Santa Barbara when it’d all burned up and I’d seen a bunch of iPhone videos of people driving through tunnels of flame and weeping, they weren’t sure if they were gonna make it out of ‘em alive, like, that’s a perfect metaphor for life. Weird whips that looked like willow branches or very long, thin tongues lashing down across road and they had to drive right over ‘em.

The dead of night and flames on either side made it completely impossible to make out anything but fire as such. That and the question of whether there were even that many trees around Santa Barbara to be set alight; I remembered it more as a sort of desert oasis nestled among low hillocks. I’d been there once with an ex-girlfriend to visit a college acquaintance, an aspiring Republican politician, to swim in his heated pool. Despite the opulence of his family’s domicile, he’d made a point of the fact that they only had Budweiser and Miller Lite, so that’s what we drank, but not too many, as I had to drive back to where we were staying in LA. And, if I were staying in LA now, I’d stay at the Chateau Marmont, but, back then, it was a nasty little Airbnb in WeHo with a fitted sheet that peeled off of the mattress too easily, revealing giant rust-colored stains on old Zinus rectangle.

The distant ticking of “Blue Calx” lulling Ada as well, we drifted off in each other’s arms as I imagined family pictures being pulled out of home’s charred skeleton and Balkan novels in translation (or not) her secular parents kept as talisman of where they’d come from and the ping-pong table in the backyard totally untouched by the inferno, maybe because yard was such a sizable oval of grass and wasn’t surrounded by trees as most backyards were, but pretty little desert plants in ceramic pots, which outlined approximate perimeter. The firefighters pulling possibly precious things out of wreckage and laying them out in front yard could’ve taken break to play round of ping pong, but that would’ve looked kinda wrong, the firefighters thought. Sitting in cars parked in own driveway and waiting to see what the men would find, Ada’s family could also have played ping-pong, but they were hardly in the mood. Her mother had taken two of her four jewelry boxes with her while evacuating and was waiting with bated breath to see if they’d recover the other two. Her father had every expectation that his woolen suits had been vaporized and I sympathized because, back during initial months of Covid lockdown, I’d left NYC to hang with friend who had house on the Cape and had returned to discover all of my wool clothes dotted with asymmetrical holes. Yes, Ada’s father and I were in the same boat in that regard and I was falling asleep with Tony Soprano watch still on left wrist, which Ada probably found sexy, I thought, even as her shoulder kinda pulled at the gold band in such a way that it also tugged at my wrist-skin, which didn’t feel great.

I’d calibrated Alexa so that whenever I requested a single song from her, she’d play it on repeat: “Blue Calx” to continue all morning, plus it was light now, so the footlights around the One World Trade Center had gone out.

The AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street standing sentinel over the lower section of the island as day dawned, its windowless stone like sand mixed with ash. And the black rectangles at regular increments up and down each of its faces, they were like windows made of black ceramic, porcelain, or even obsidian.

As I said before, we made love four times and I’ve only hinted at three of those couplings, so it came to pass that we were roused by neighbor’s dog at 9 or 10am and, my mouth reeking of burned ketones plus Ada’s no longer redolent of clean flesh alone, we made love for one final time and the pleasure was overwhelming, but I could still detect some degree of fatigue in the operation of my organ, it manifested itself as a kind of chafed feeling, and I wondered if women had the same sensation of overuse alongside pleasure and, if so, what exactly it was.

You had a brunch to go to with girlfriends, Ada, so you put on your bra and thong, then we got up together and brushed teeth, me with brush and you with finger, plus you used a squirt of Aesop face wash and lathered it up, then washed it off with cold water to make your skin less puffy. You had a mirrored circle of foundation in your purse—to cover up the tired circles underneath your eyes.

We hadn’t slept for more than three hours. We exchanged numbers. We kissed for a long time, relieved that our mouths now tasted of toothpaste instead of sleep. You put your short polka-dot dress back on and this was a problem because you didn’t have anything to change into for brunch, plus yesterday’s underwear, so you suggested you might go to Zara. Standing by the front door and making tentative plans, I remembered your copy of Hannibal and ran back into bedroom to grab it, then kissed your hand as I gave it to you. I really liked you already.

After you’d gone, I lay in bed for a while trying to fall back asleep, then told Alexa to play “Blue Calx” and I forgot to mention the Echo Dot was hooked up to a reasonably nice speaker, so it wasn’t just that tinny little pill-shaped thing playing us lullabies as we slept, but something quite a bit more substantial. Coldheart Canyon was still on the bed, so, when I realized sleep wasn’t coming, I flipped back to the DP scene and read through it, feeling my overtired manhood stir very slightly as I did.

Later, listened to episode of Joe Rogan Experience while tidying place up.

Put frozen Trader Joe’s chicken in refrigerator to thaw for dinner, got a smoothie from Juice Generation right nearby, then went to Equinox and did an arm lift, plus like fifteen minutes on a Stairmaster, listening to High Violet the whole time and only queueing up “Ada” during last three minutes of tough climb for motivation.

Stopped at upscale bodega that closed at 5 o’clock on Sundays for berries and yogurt. Completed transaction with Apple Pay, as I’d left my wallet at home by accident and they’d had to look up my membership at Equinox.

Which brought me up to present conundrum: attempting to follow internet instructions for extraction of sugar from yogurt. First, I mixed it with cornstarch and put it through a sieve, then I added a half-cup of water, put it into a big mixing bowl and let it sit for five minutes. Tidied up a bit more, threw away the leftover cake, and the two ounces of weed were less than half-gone. Wasn’t sure what to do with that. Otherwise, would call a maid service tomorrow for mopping the floors and cleaning the piss-drizzled toilet. Walked back over to the yogurt and it looked like a weird watery mess. Put it in freezer for 10. Examined the berries for mold and bugs as I waited, then put chicken salted, spiced, and olive-oiled over into oven at 400 degrees for 30 mins. Phone beeped shrilly and this was an emergency alert, I thought. Took yogurt out of freezer and was supposed to add baking soda (two tablespoons), then mix it around, before adding another half-cup of water and putting it back into the freezer for five more minutes. Phone beeped shrilly again but toggled away from alert to check instructions.

‘What kinda site is this anyways?’ I had little faith in the process.

Five minutes passed with me reading Coldheart Canyon out in sitting room on windowsill next to view onto One World Trade Center. It was the footlights around the building that lit up the words I was reading. My head was still throbbing with mild ache, but it was more like the tick in “Blue Calx” than the boom of last night’s trap music.

Once I’d taken the yogurt out and let it thaw a bit as instructed, the website informed me that it was now sugar-free. Incredulous, I took a bite, but could taste no sugar. I laughed joyfully.

This was a miracle.

I mixed the yogurt with the berries and gobbled it all down. My phone beeped out another emergency alert, but I ignored it. I ate the roasted chicken with a whole bag of spinach on the side. I’d drenched the greens in olive oil, so oil clung to the edges of my lips louchely and it wasn’t a handsome spectacle.

Put phone into pocket, then plate into sink and kinda rinsed it off. Smirked again about the sugarless yogurt and thought about tweeting the link to the recipe. Didn’t. Grabbed Coldheart Canyon, which I was to read in earnest now, then headed toward couch, which J.’d told me had been designed by some famous European artiste, never mind that it was falling apart now. Before plopping down, I gazed cursorily at coffee-table books on shelf.

‘Oh, to see what Ada sees ‘pon shelves such as these…’

Then smiled; I’d spotted another identical copy of Hannibal. A siren rang out over the city, which, I was sure, was a warning regarding flash flooding. It’d been spitting rain all day and flooding had become something of a common occurrence in Lower Manhattan. I pulled Hannibal down off of the shelf and took a selfie with it. Texted it to Ada and wrote, “I found another! wanna come over and see if we can find a 4th?” The siren was coming from an inner room of the AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street, this room even more windowless than all the others. She texted back almost immediately, “sure :) be over in 30?” and I wrote back, “can’t wait.” Another siren joined the first, my phone beeped shrilly, and a CNN push notification imposed itself over the text-message conversation:

NUKES HEADED FOR NYC. PANIC GRIPS MANHATTAN.

A cold feeling came over me and my sphincter tightened. The sound of planes cutting through air. The footlights under One World Trade Center flickering. Bile rising in my throat and the cornstarch making me sick. Ada texted me: “actually in Uber already, see you in more like 15. cant wait for u to see what i got at zara lol” to which I just replied with a smiley face.

But couldn’t shake dark feeling and the footlights under One World Trade Center flickered once more before going out. More planes cutting through air and more sirens. Caught sight of two fighter jets flying way too close to downtown skyscrapers. Walked back into bedroom and told Alexa to play “Rhubarb” by Aphex Twin. Turned up volume all the way––I mean, it was only fair, the neighbor’s dog had woken us up this morning––with third copy of Hannibal clutched in hand, my knuckles gone white.

I didn’t hear it when the nukes hit and Ada and I turned into skeletons straightaway. But I was right, the cornstarch would’ve made me sick if I’d lived for much longer, so that was something of a blessing.

Ada’s Uber was right by the AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street when NYC ceased to exist. Her bones alongside driver’s in crumpled carcass of car. ‘The Santa Barbara wildfire had finally gotten her,’ was something like what God might’ve thought, looking out over what had once been Manhattan, but was now chalk grid with strategically positioned piles of ash at every former intersection: to remind all the archangels of what had only just recently been great city. The piles of ash kicked up by wind plus the vaporized frames of old taxi cabs all combined into a single medium, the particulate matter left behind on ancient granite’s mottled surface then forming a series of fascinating shapes and it was a shame no one was there to look upon them. The Hudson didn’t boil, but the Harlem and the East River both kinda became molten by way of a chemical process I wouldn’t have understood if I’d been there to witness it. They’d never been ideal places to swim or kayak––much as urban adventurers liked to pretend otherwise––but now they’d become far less hospitable. To imagine molten tides and shipping vessels piloted by Charon’s navy, a whole squadron of spirits formed from the ashes of the staff of a US Navy Recruitment headquarters located somewhere in the Bronx. Even in death, their bicep tattoos still attested to their essence, which was, like, so reassuring.

Even in death, New York’s grid remained, a chalk outline etched onto an enormous granite oval between the river that’d survived and the one that’d gone wrong.

Yes, the molten tides of the Harlem River were taking Ada and me to paradise and we were going to be together forever, looking down at the piles of ash strategically placed at every intersection and thinking about all the funny things that’d come to pass during our brief tenures upon the planet’s skin, tales involving drugs and liquor and sex and money––those were the best parts of being a human, after all, they were all we could remember. We’d tell each other stories about other people we’d slept with and expensive dinners we’d had and listen to “Blue Calx” on repeat until the end of time. Or we thought we would. But, after a few hundred years, I’d ask Alexa to change over to that long-ass compilation of Burial EPs ––it felt like flipping from station to station super fast in a video game, the radio dial in the sports car tweaked between thumb and forefinger––a nipple encased in latex. The record would seem appropriate for the view we’d be marveling at––the view we’d been marveling at for so long––but, even so, Alexa would refuse and “Blue Calx” would continue to play. And we’d turn our eternal gazes back to Manhattan, then, for the first time in all those years, we’d see that there was more than just piles of ash strategically placed at each intersection. The windowless building from which the siren had been screaming out to both me and Ada would still be standing tall. And its screaming would never cease.