New York City, March 18, 2014

★★★ The plastic sheeting over the upper middle floors of the rising tower showed sharp wrinkle lines in the sun, like unpressed linen. Only a little haze downriver discolored the blue. A squarish piece of clear airborne litter danced with its reflection, rocking and flipping and flashing, up the side of the mirrored glass apartment building next to the construction site. It floated out of sight. The bare new apartment was cold, with nothing to do in it. Gleaming cement mixers came and went on the avenue below, and the furniture truck did not. It was cold even with a parka on. It was cold with the heater on, once the heater controls had been figured out. Rebar cast longer and longer shadows across the newly poured top slab of the tower, right there across the way. Workers, dressed warmly, smoothed it out. It was cold lying on top of the heater cabinet, wearing the parka, with the parka hood balled up as a pillow, level with the bottom of the window. The black netting sticking out from the construction site caught the wind and billowed up, one section at a time, then subsided. The river was blinding in the descending sun, along an only slightly unfamiliar sightline. Still no furniture. Back across the street, amid cardboard boxes and stacks of flat cardboard boxes-to-be, amber light poured through those glass walls, floor to ceiling, the admittedly and unsustainably extravagant expanse of glass.