David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Leo’s preschool, Brand-New Day, was on the far side of all of this new development, but he had never tried to bike through it. The way around wasn’t much longer, it had a wide bike lane, and it took him past a favorite coffee shop.

But a late arrival to work today would put him in even hotter water than he was in already with his fake-smiling supervisor, Sharon. Just yesterday, she had tried to impress upon him that it would be a Brand-New Day for him employment-wise if he didn’t start attending to the areas that she had earlier mentioned were areas he might want to look into improving around.

“I think that, instead of lateness, you could be aiming for on-time-ness” was one of her points.

And Leo, who more and more these days was overcoming his natural restraint, had said, “Or punctuality. I could aim for that instead of on-time-ness.”

A route through the pretend neighborhood could save him the five minutes he needed. The danger was dead-ending against a freeway sound wall and having to circle back. He briefly considered the stakes, then cycled deeper down the quiet streets of terra condominia.

Yeah. Too quiet, thought Leo. In a year or two, the facades of these buildings would no longer enjoy that blush of blank beauty. Soon each window would instead emit its own signal — here, probably the flaccid ficus trees and stereos of the urban professional, exercise machines and transfixed house cats — semaphoring to passersby some information about the lives stacked up behind the glass. But maybe one day, thought Leo, these buildings would be re-tasked — laundry might be hanging from those balconies, Caracas-style, or more buildings could be warrened atop these, like in Hong Kong. For that matter, the sunken civic Zen patch back there could become a Byzantine souk, tent-poled haphazardly and covered in rugs looted from the surrounding design stores. Maybe we’ll all be living a lot closer together in the future, in a sort of pleasant, Burning Man — ish kind of way, Leo thought. Or maybe in a totally un pleasant, refugee-camp sort of way, with viruses we haven’t seen the speck of yet, viruses that make your face fall straight off, and our drinking water brought in by tanker trucks. If it were like tha—

There was no one even near Leo when he flew from his bike. His mind cast about for a culprit, for someone to blame other than himself. The bike just ceased its forward motion and he did not. How surprising, how nifty physics was. And as he trebucheted toward a four-inch curb, aware at once that his meeting with it would be physically calamitous, he remembered that he was wearing no helmet, and his surprise turned to fear. A month ago, at a party to which his friend Louis had brought him, Leo had heard (well, overheard) the host claiming that he wasn’t afraid of death. That particular claim seemed to Leo to be demonstrably false. So, costumed as Jesus (for this was a Halloween party), Leo had decided to explore the man’s reasoning. Not afraid of death, huh? My, that must make you a real psychopath. But he had seen almost immediately that he should not have told the man that he was like a Holocaust denier. “I said like a Holocaust denier. Like, ” he protested lamely when Louis escorted him out of the party and told him to enjoy the bracing walk home, dressed as Jesus.

No, thought Leo, as he landed his right hand, fingertips first, on the cold nubbly of the curb, I am definitely more than a body, but I believe I am less than a soul .

Then, with a fluid agility that hadn’t been his in years, Leo tucked his head and vertical body behind the leading edge of his rounded arm. Some latent muscle memory from five months of jujitsu at the McBurney YMCA on West Sixty-Third Street when he was ten? Leo seemed to recall that this YMCA had in fact served the adventurous class of men described in the song. Now, he felt a point beneath his stomach become the axis of his spinning mass, and he knew to use that dragony breath to take the hit when, after about 120 degrees, his trunk met the sidewalk, hard. Next was his hip and ass, which rolled over not just the concrete but also a busted padlock on the scene by chance. Then came his knees and feet, with a thwack. That was followed by his trailing left arm, which lay down gently, and his gloved palm, which landed and sprang back, the way a conguero lands a hand on the taut hide of his drum.

Leo stood up. He was fine. Just fine. Right as rain.

Leo stood up again, this time more carefully. Okay, maybe fine was an overstatement. But ambulatory and intact. A bit exhilarated, actually.

His bike lay twisted in the street behind him, its front tire still clamped in the groove of the new light-rail system tracks they were laying all over town. Only now did he notice the yellow-and-black warning signs that would have made him aware of the hazard his bike had to cross. The graphics depicted pretty much what had just happened: a bicycle with its front wheel caught in the maw of the track, the blockish pictogram rider hurtling over the handlebars. An honest piece of graphic art; a tiny, two-line picture poem, thought Leo, and he started to upbraid himself for his carelessness and lack of attention.

But wait. On one corner — the direction from which he’d come — the warning sign was there, but it was swathed in black plastic, taped up tight.

The thought came like a revelation: This was no accident. They obscured that sign because they want me eliminated.

Some part of him said, No, don’t be ridiculous . But then why was only one sign shrouded?

The dips and swoops, the rapid-cyclings, had been with him for a while now, but these revelatory thoughts were new. They arrived at the peaks of the swoops. That’s when things really started ringing, when it seemed that he was at the center of things, that the very planet was pulsing with connectivity, and he was one of Tesla’s bulbs.

Was it really so far-fetched? That there would be some agency tasked with keeping tabs on wayward members of the intellectual elite? No, it was actually quite reasonable, Leo thought. Big Data and all. So, yes, it was possible that he was being singled out, being watched, being followed. It was probably connected to his blog, on which he’d lately been considering what exactly a shadow government would look like, how it might work. Maybe he’d been getting too close.

On the dips, he saw that such notions were perhaps paranoid delusions and that he might need psychiatric help. But he was unwilling to submit his mental processes to the purported care of professionals who might have all sorts of limitations and biases and, yes, agendas. And the swoops outnumbered the dips, so why complain? Shimmering on the bright edge of every day was the possibility that he was going to discover a grand unifying theory. That was not a condition to be treated; that was something to hold on to.

He started again toward work, wheeling his injured bicycle beside him. There was no way he could avoid being late. But he hardly cared now. He had been granted grace and had avoided death. Life was not a dense thicket of pain and scrabbling; it was a wild and godly fable in which he figured prominently. This news spread through his body like a flush. He was reconnected with the great river of life that flowed all around us all the time. The sky domed huge and gray-blue, and the trees, shaken by a gust, rattled a tattoo to him.

Brand-New Day was in a building that had once been a genuine warehouse. You could still make out SCHMIDT’S SPOOL AND SPINDLE in huge, ghosty letters across its facade. Five years ago the warehouse had been converted into the offices of a briefly white-hot Internet business that turned out to be a bellwether of the dot-com bust. Brand-New Day had inherited the late-bubble furnishings and appointments of the previous tenants, and so it resembled a start-up run by toddlers. Chop the legs off a couple of poured-concrete conference tables and you get some deluxe arts-and-crafts zones for little Mirós. Why not give every child a cubicle instead of a cubby? (Because children crapped in their cubicles was why not, it turned out.) The skateboard ramp in the foyer was filled with sofa cushions and called the romper zone. Employees sailed across the polished concrete floors on Aeron chairs while their charges crawled over and drooled on and beat with sticks black-leather benches and cubes and sectionals.