New York City, November 11, 2016

[No stars] The sight of thick water on the slab of a neighboring balcony confirmed what the dim light and sloshing sounds had warned of. In a lull of the viola and piano came the sound of rain beating against the porthole window of the school’s practice room. It was darker coming out of the morning music lesson than it had been going in. Shining water stretched all the way through the lanes of the subway turnstiles. Down at Union Square, stray sticky-pad messages of political defiance were being trampled into the water on the subway stairs. The rain had become a full downpour; in the space of one block of walking it had soaked through jeans to the skin. The jeans would stay wet well past midday, despite being blotted with paper towels while the rain out the window blew by in pale masses. The rain let up for a while and young marchers—under umbrellas, in raincoats, one shirtless—came chanting down Fifth Avenue. What looked like another break in the afternoon was really a heavy, hard-to-see drizzle. Fallen ginkgo leaves held their shape, resisting the flattening forces around them. A rip formed in the clouds where the far side of the river could be seen, and for a while a clear light came in. Then that faltered, and all that remained was a somewhat brighter drizzle.