The administrator proceeds down the curving path toward a stand of trees. His erect posture and his unhurried pace make him seem taller than he is. The other citizens are sitting distributed in isolation there in front of him, positioned so that none can see any of the others, each one a private knot of tension against the oceanic prospect of countless empty windows across the river. Each an identical, polished mirror, reradiating the blue of the day, the river, the park, swept by metered waves of actinic light. The day will never end. There is more than enough time for him to make his assessment.

Curved arcs of dazzling light, propagated outward from some source behind the man on the bench, loom overhead, roll massively past him, cross the river without catching on any of the little triangular waves that rise and fall with the current, and dash themselves against the glass towers opposite, shivering apart and collecting in seared lines. Watery green and purple squares float and scan inside the man’s trembling eyelids. There is movement there that he can’t see. He must watch for the least sign of activity in any of those million windows.

Once he saw a scrap of something falling. It drifted between himself and the windows; a rag, or scrap of paper, charred black, stiff. He wanted to say it was something like a bird—at least, like a dead bird—but he didn’t dare mention anything like a bird. There were no birds here. He never heard or saw any. This could mean many things, but—alongside the possibility that birds were, for some inconceivable reason, banned from the park, from the city—nothing else mattered, and there was no reason to mention a bird. Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to know what birds were, or perhaps he was supposed to have forgotten, but it seemed very likely that, whether either of these were truly the case, it made no sense to mention birds, or anything else for that matter, needlessly. Whether you did or didn’t know what a bird was most likely did not matter as much as acting as if birds were nothing to you, one way or another. The administrator wants a report, not conversation—that is the key. Conversations are for equals. Administrators and administratees do not have conversations. The former instruct and correct the latter. The latter report to the former. The former return to the sending institution.

The man knows that the administrator will come back. “Until later,” that’s what he said. Later, in this ceaseless noontime, is any time, any number of times.