He brushes the gravel out of his palms. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a needle in the gutter, a busted plastic lighter, a shimmering film of cellophane. He shudders, stands, brushes more gravel from the knees of his pants. He’s been thinking of ways to avoid the men and the cops who do nothing. But what he wants most is violence, to take a swing at those big, stupid grins, grind their faces into the ground, a swift kick to each of their guts. But he knows what would happen then: his hands twisted behind his back, the silver cuffs biting into his wrists. The rules are different for him. And it wouldn’t be his first arrest—in the spring he was caught in the parking garage of the old Taj Mahal. They must have thought he was up to something bad, but he was only curious. What it looked like empty of all those cars. It makes him feel better to think it, that they don’t know the half of it—if only they knew how often he is somewhere he isn’t supposed to go. If only they knew how frequently he made himself invisible, how closely he could watch.

As he limps home, he thinks about the way the whole city is dying around anyone who is left; slowly, though, like a large animal falling to its knees. All he can see are the ghosts of the places they used to go when he was a boy. The shop where his grandmother bought meat for the week, the one where his grandfather bought him his first bike. He can still remember when the boardwalk was lined with old hotels, beautiful redbrick and decorations that reminded him of frosting on a cake. His grandfather had brought him to the beach to watch as one of the bigger ones was destroyed. He and his grandfather pressed up against the plastic fence and watched the old hotel slide out from under itself, bloom into a cloud of rubble and dust. Other people around him covered their ears. He felt the crash of brick and walls and roof move up from the ground, through his bones, into his jaw. Five years after that he watched another one get smashed by a giant metal ball, but by then neither of his grandparents were alive to watch with him.