You know, if it were possible to annotate the future and the past, my one true wish.

Once Sid left for L.A., his business partners fired Jewel due to numerous complaints about her throwing away dog parents’ meat-based food products. I missed her sometimes.

Ready to enter the aquatic realm, I waited for the train and got on a car with a raspberry-pink interior. After seven stops, I exited and walked up the subway steps in Williamsburg and waltzed past jewelry stands, where antique pocket watches ticked away. Visitors from far away were safe inside gauzy expectations. They did not notice the towers of empty mirrored condos watching over us.

I turned toward the shock of color on a bus shelter. For once, all the wires of the universe were connecting. I’d known that R was a model for Vines, the sorta-sustainable store that sold “basics.” However, I had never encountered her likeness on the street before.

There she was, taking up the entire side of the bus stop, creamier (whiter?) than she looked spread over her bed, blindfolded, pussy smelling of damp sawdust. In the ad, she was a pure object wearing a plain dandelion-yellow dress in a field of unnatural flowers with curling stems and squiggly leaves. They’d naturalized her strange moods, the times when she went vacant or exuberant. I felt protective, not in a patriarchal way, I hope, but as someone who had seen her unkempt, stung by a bee, yelling at her mother on the phone, trying to paint her own nails, picking up a book and then throwing it down a moment later because it reminded her of something more interesting.

A regular dude in a Brooklyn hoodie waited for the bus at the edge of the bus shelter. I wondered if he thought I was checking him out. Since I was a short, well-dressed, soft-spoken man, no one could help but assume I was gay. I wanted him to know the inside scoop, that I was actually checking out my babely sex partner on the wall, but the tech had not come out yet that would allow me to present the truth to him in hologram form.

And I was still working on the whole verbalizing-my-thoughts thing.

Dude entered the clay-brick-red bus without a glance back at me. It was about time for senior swim to change into adult swim, and I kept walking down Bedford Avenue.

The Metropolitan Pool was built in 1922, the same year its architect, Henry Bacon, designed the Lincoln Memorial, an epoch when cities cared more about the public and less about foreign investors buying up property. In the lobby, I placed my finger on the scanner and got beeped into the natatorium. I no longer worried about someone noticing my lack of thick schlong. Men were so at home in this habitat that they didn’t scrutinize. On this first day after the full Worm Moon, a few middle-aged men with no bellies lounged on the benches. I took off pants, shirt, and underwear, let my dick have a second out in the air.