New York City, July 25, 2016

★ The stuffy elevator ride led down to streets full of a general and sourceless reek of garbage. Faces were grim and sagging. The four-year-old declared almost immediately that his legs were tired on the walk to camp. On the ledge outside the office window, a fly hunkered down on a thick lump of bird dropping. The afternoon smell clinging to the air on Fifth Avenue was not trash but sweat. Downtown the sky was white with glare and uptown gray was gathering. The gray closed in; people put up umbrellas; thunder boomed. People initially scattered but the storm came on without real cruelty or haste. For a while the sky stayed light, and the sun even broke through. Then darkness settled, with lightning and a long roll of thunder, and a real rain shone on the streets. Pedestrians headed to doorways, not desperately but as if it had just occurred to them to stop there. The rain kept intensifying, building to sodden fury. More lightning and thunder came in a sharp one-two, with the force and clarity of a storm in the open country. The different tints of headlights—yellowish, bluish, purplish—floated in the rain and splash above the pavement. What it had lacked in initial power the storm made up for in stubbornness, forcing the work day to drag on and on, as the big orange and yellow blobs on the phone’s radar map slowly gave way to big dark green blobs. When the rain finally slackened, the subway platform was crowded with people who’d waited out the worst, now trapped in damp miasma together. The daylight returned as an uncanny glow in the west, swelling in lurid yet indefinite colors.