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“Maybe it’s how she grapples with and overcomes a fear of death.”
    â€œMaybe it’s how she grapples with the threat of voicelessness.”
    A passing ambulance threw red lights against us. “Or takes pleasure in making you confront the pleasure you take in those threats.”
    â€œThe flood of oxygen upon release.” We descended underground.
    â€œA match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed,” I quoted, but it was lost in the noise of the approaching train.
    â€œStand clear of the closing doors, please.”
    â€œWe helped edit a film on bonobos for the BBC; they’re our closest relative and have no concept of sexual exclusivity.”
    â€œThey say monogamy is an effect of agriculture. Paternity only started to matter with the transmission of property.”
    â€œGet tested for HIV today,” said the poster on the D.
    â€œBut they do eat the young of other primate species.”
    â€œSo why did you get married if you don’t want kids?” We emerged onto the Manhattan Bridge; almost everyone checked e-mail, texts.
    â€œYou left without saying goodbye,” Alex’s said.
    â€œShine bright like a diamond,” Rihanna sang through the earbuds of the girl beside me, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
    We were seated at a restaurant in Crown Heights, the penny-tile floor glowing in the candlelight. “I believe in promises. I believe in publicity.”
    â€œI promise to pass through a series of worlds with you,” I remembered from her vows. I’d told the waiter I was only having wine, but ate half the spinach gnocchi off her plate, then paid for everything.
    â€œShe’s going to get tired of you soon,” Jon said. He was lying on the couch streaming The Wire on his laptop with two pink tissues issuing from his nostrils like a villain’s mustache in an elementary school play. The coffee table was littered with used tea bags and copies of Film Quarterly . I rummaged in their kitchen but could only find warm gin.
    â€œWhy did you set us up, then?”
    â€œShe’s smart and beautiful and nice and claims to like your poetry.”
    I walked home through the park. “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees,” I said to the mist. Because the park is on the flight path, the city corrals and euthanizes geese. Which mate for life, I confirmed on Wikipedia. The glow of the screen seemed to come off on my hand. I looked up and saw the clouds as craquelure.
    I poured myself a large glass of water that I forgot to bring to bed. “The little shower of embers,” I texted Alena, then regretted it.
    *   *   *
    Out of Dr. Andrews’s climate-controlled office on the Upper East Side, I walked into the unseasonably warm December afternoon, turned on my phone, and checked my e-mail to find a message from Natali, a mentor and literary hero of mine, about her husband, Bernard, for me an equally important figure:
    B fell in NYC and broke a vertebra in his neck. He had an operation and it went fine, and he is now out of immediate danger. But recovery is slow and I haven’t been told when he might be able to be transferred back to Providence. Starting tonight I am staying at a hotel close to Mt. Sinai Hospital with uncertain Internet access. Below is my cell phone number but I am not quite competent in receiving messages. Some seem to vanish. Love, N.
    As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display. So much of the most important personal news I’d received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially, the major events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln