“Reality has no audience—wait, tilt back, get more of the sky.”

“I’ve got the sky. How much sky would you like?”

“I want him framed.”

“He’s framed. Fleet of foot and bearing his caduceus, he juts, chiseled limbs bursting from the façade, veiled in shifts of tattered steam, god of speed framed in blue.”

“Okay. Just keep rolling.” Jim started over. He could feel the flicker, the fortune in the cookie from lunch: Travel will bring you luck. Fuck, oh—“Reality has no audience, the world no eye. We are the warp and woof, the quanta of its waves, the thing itself: deep surface . . . Deep surface. We are the wave . . . Surface. Wave. Wave, surface.” He exhaled sharply. “How’s that sound?”

“I’m not the writer,” Remy said, running the camera.

Jim turned and looked down the glowing red-eyed stream of fleeing UberATs. “Christ, I hope she says yes.”

“You’re going to pay her, right?”

“Yeah, sure. All artists fucking care about. Worse than Wall Street. You still rolling?”

“Yeah,” Remy said.

“Nexus of roads, speed and space. Only in space do we become substantial, only in time do our lives take on meaning. Can you see yourself seeing? Can you look inside your eye?”

“Are you asking me?”

“No, keep rolling. Can you look inside the eye? Reality has no audience.” Jim turned again and squatted on the sidewalk. Foot traffic split around the two, the click and slap of heel and sole, nowhere stares plugged into screens catching the blaze of towers burning down the West. “How was that? I just made that up. I just riffed off what I was thinking.”

“I’m not the writer. Ask Suzie.”

“She’d say it’s pretentious. She’d say it’s pretentious and what do I know from space and time.”

“Is Carol coming?”

“Carol left ten days ago. Left a half carton of Silk.”

“Oh, Jim. I’m sorry, I—”

“Fuck that. Been a long time coming. Some people can’t fucking roll with the punches, y’know? Can’t fucking adapt, adapt to change. Like fucking monkeys, adapt or die. She wants the old James, the golden days, but it’s all space and time now.”

“That’s nice with the sun going down.”

“You don’t think it’s too baroque?”

“It’s all in the editing. Right now it looks pretty sublime.”

“Sublime,” Jim repeated, tasting it on his tongue. “I want medieval . . . You see that documentary about the bears?”

“Which one?”

“Fucking bears. It’s just adaptation. These fucking polar bears are all gonna die because they have to swim all the fucking way out in the water to eat fish or baby seals or whatever and it’s too far and all the ice is melting. The polar ice cap is melting. Imagine whiteness for miles, collapsing into encroaching black seas. So they have a choice, right, adapt or die, and they’re gonna die because they’re fucking bears. But that’s the difference, see. We’re not bears. We’re like fucking not evolve maybe but whatever, pick up a stick, you know, duh duh duh. Ascend. Go west.”

A bearded wreck swaddled in layers of sweatpant and plastic bag spun off the sidewalk into traffic shaking his paper cup, strips of foil glittering on his newsprint shawl like antimissile chaff. An UberAT swerved, honking, missed by inches. Jim watched, not quite tense but interested, wondering if he’d catch the whack and slam of body and street, hobo skull rebounding off yellow lines, the empty car’s collision sirens keening. He thought to tell Remy to film it but no, wrong beginning. Wrong end. Why they do that, he half thought, on purpose? Or they so far gone past what’s purpose, it isn’t real? Everything meant but barely conscious, rationality of pure instinct. Sure, but which is more human, then, the wreck or the robot car? All secret agents of the brighter hive. Deep surface, Jim thought. That’s good.

The man made it across the street and disappeared into the crowd. Another day, another failure to adapt. The smell of ash, charred flesh, and electrical, stone looming over shadowed warrens filled with particulate smoke. History’s drone: a year is as a day.

“Good,” Remy said, looking up from his crouch. “Shall we go?”

“Sure,” Jim said.

Remy shut off the camera and disassembled the setup, unhooking the unit from its tripod mount, unplugging mikes, bagging gear.

“You want a drink?” Jim asked.

“Are you meeting Suzie?”

“Down in the East Village, one of those holdout trash bars from the nineties.”

“I should drop the gear off.”

“Well, if you’re around.”