On Saturday we went to Brooklyn to visit Lis and Jake and their baby who looks just like Formula One World Champion Kimi Raikonnen. We ate at a Moroccan restaurant with fancy drinks they invented yesterday and a freshly renovated interior that used to be an old Pakistani liquor store. Only the wall on one side was original, the man said, and there it was, unfinished, cracked and a bit mottled from decades of who knows what.

Later we were turned away at the Clinton-Washington subway stop. The lady in the booth patiently outlined to us our alternatives at precisely the time that an express train tore through, out of reach, making its callous, fuck-you racket. I watched her mouth move in the din. It occurred to me that the Plexiglas insulated her from the roar and so she had no idea we couldn't hear her. Her lips formed words deliberately and emphatically, and she punctuated them with little nods and all the other cues. The beating of the eyes. I watched her as time distended and the clamorous procession behind me seemed to have no end, like a hundred-car freight train in the Mojave desert. I tried to appear to be listening because that's what she expected of me. Finally, the train passed, and she stopped.

"Excuse me?" I asked.