New York City, July 7, 2013

★★ Contrails stuck to the otherwise empty morning sky, each in a different stage of diffusion. The heat was solid and indisputable, the streets eerily vacant. A pack of bicycle-borne billboards sat idle, advertising vitamins to nobody. One might have been the denizen of some ghost city, if not for the drops of sunscreen-laced sweat rolling over the upper lip. Cumulus clouds gathered in the afternoon, then went away again. After dinner, out on Pier I, a band sat in the shade of a temporary stage with a pitcher of ice water. The trombonist and mandolin player were barefoot. The Hudson heaved gently; a cormorant, riding low on the water, took flight. The toddler stopped and stared at an immense pit bull that lay in the middle of the pier, placidly destroying a water bottle with its heavy pink jaws, and then he burst out crying. “Wa-wa!” he wailed, eventually, through his tears: he was thirsty. Far off to the south was a single great curving vertical mass of cumulus, a scoop catching the pink light. By the time the older boy was out of the bath, a flat blue pile of cloud had appeared over New Jersey. One crisp white grease-pencil rendering of a lightning bolt appeared against it, and then came flashes and flickers inside the cloud, fleeting moments of three-dimensionality. The dark blue spread east like ink in water till its progress was lost in the twilight. The building creaked in a gust of wind. And then nothing happened at all.