At noon on the first of May, an old man, slipping heavily from his dreams, opened his eyes onto a room flooded with sunlight. He was wearing a white suit and lace-up boots. A cat was asleep beside him. The room was nearly bare: a desk without a chair, an unplugged telephone, an empty picture frame, and a yellow fedora, which he put on, adjusting the brim.
Walking out of the former Ice & Fire Assurance Company Building—now known simply as the Flyer Building, after the corporation that owned it—he crossed the street with a firm gait. He entered the old Globe Building, pausing to admire the rotating globe in the lobby, lit turquoise from within, and stepped into an express elevator that whisked him to the top floor. At the end of a deserted corridor, he went through a fire door, into an even narrower corridor that led to a steel door marked NO ENTRY, beyond which was a spiral stairway, thick with dust. He climbed the creaking steps, to a small storage room where the air felt ancient, as if no one had breathed it for years. The only light entered through a dirty skylight.
Stepping over empty crates, he took a rickety stepladder from the corner and placed it on a table beneath the skylight. Surprisingly spry, he clambered up, pushed open the skylight, and pulled himself onto the roof under a brilliant sun. In the strong wind he set his feet wide apart and held on to his hat. He looked out at the canyons of glass skyscrapers swimming with reflections, and the webwork of clotted highways radiating to the horizon, and helicopters that swooped by at enormous speeds, and supersonic jets that streaked above the cirrus clouds, rolling thunderclaps in their wake.
He placed his hands on his hips, and immediately a gust lifted his hat. He let it go—the wind spinning it high into the sky, a gold speck, before it disappeared altogether.
Soon afterward, a young man in a white suit walked out of the Globe Building, looked left and right, brushed the dust from his sleeves, and was swallowed up by the crowd, a stream of shadows and light swirling through the myriad streets, with no beginning and no end.