Shen Fever is a fungal infection, so it’s transmitted by breathing in fungal spores. And it’s not a virus. It rarely spreads from person to person, except perhaps in extreme cases.

I got on my knees and begged like a dog, but I was six then and stupider and I didn’t know anything. I didn’t feel that way anymore.

When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction.

Before the fashion shows moved to Lincoln Center, I would gaze out at the clutter of white tents popping up in the park like umbrellas. The spring collections showed in September. The fall collections showed in February. In this way, five years passed.

Jonathan didn’t work in the nine-to-five sense. He did odd freelance gigs here and there so that he could spend most of his time writing. Divested of most obligations, he lived cheaply, held jobs when he could find them. Once, for a secret Wall Street club, he was hired to slap middle-aged businessmen for a living.

All of this is to say, Bob said, that it takes a long time for a human being to die.

When I returned home, I would go through the images on my camera and upload the good ones to NY Ghost. The ghost was me. Walking around aimlessly, without anywhere to go, anything to do, I was just a specter haunting the scene.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

I decided that I’d just claim I was sick. I looked like I was sick, my eyes clustered with puffiness and dark bags. At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable