New York City, July 27, 2016

★★★ The air had thinned out; the body venturing outside braced itself against a crushing blow that didn’t fall. Day campers in their color-coded t-shirts converged on their different camp sites. When morning camp let out, the shade was still pleasant. The full sun was not, but someone was choosing to bake in it, on the rooftop opposite. The occupied portion of the seating around Verdi Square made a map of where the shadows fell. An electric guitarist set up outside the pizza place, even as the late heat began to soak into the shade there. At the children’s bedtime, turning on the air conditioner produced no cold air but caused the lights to brighten and dim erratically. The uncanny brownout—the dishwasher but not the fridge, the lamp at one end of the living room but not the other—persisted through an hour and a half of maintenance work and the installation of a new air conditioning unit, the apartment growing warmer all the while, till finally it could be traced to a master fuse out in the hallway, which had faltered under the strain of the cooling work.