Sitting at a small table looking through our reflection in the window onto Flatbush Avenue, I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plura

tonight even parasitic insects will appear to me as a bad form of collectivity that can stand as a figure of its possibility, circulating blood from host to host. Like a joke cycle, like a prosody.

The small flame in a gas lamp on Saint Mark’s will flicker across genres.

It and everything else I hear tonight will sound like Whitman, the similitudes of the past, and those of the future, corresponding.

The fireworks celebrating the completion of the bridge exploded above us in 1883, spidering out across the page.

What I mean is that our faceless presences were flickering, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme. I’m quoting now, like John Gillespie Magee.

A steady current of people attired in the usual costumes was entering the walkway onto the bridge and there was a strange energy crackling among us; part parade, part flight, part protest. Each woman I imagined as pregnant, then I imagined all of us were dead, flowing over London Bridge.

I’d heard cabs could pick up multiple fares as a result of the storm, fares from multiple worlds, but it didn’t stop for us.

Later we would learn it was Goldman Sachs, see photographs in which one of the few illuminated buildings in the skyline was the investment banking firm, an image I’d use for the cover of my book—not the one I was contracted to write about fraudulence, but the one I’ve written in its place for you, to you, on the very edge of fiction.