Through his sleepiness, all Alfonzo could muster was a vague “we’re so fucked” feeling. When the train got to the Ozone Park stop, Alfonzo shook his back and brightened his face in preparation. He wanted to keep things positive for his father’s benefit.

Ozone was where both Alfonzo and Mitchell had grown up, and where all their relatives still resided. It was vestigial. A dewclaw neighborhood. An inert leg hanging off the body of Queens. An indefinite somewhere with yards and parking spots where golden pollen swirled down from the many privately owned trees like yellow snow in a snow globe.

The neighborhood was a speck of foam within the bubble of New York. In his dissertation, Alfonzo had written at length about a theory of urban bubbles. For a bubble to be, it must have interior, skin, and some atmosphere or substance called the outside. The form requires tension. The inner substance presses out, while the outside substance presses in, but they remain distinct because of the membrane. In and out yearn to touch and blend, but the skin prevents it, at least until all the tension proves too great.

Bubbles are economic and metaphoric; they are made with saliva or rubber, soap or blood. Bubbles multiply, merge, burst, and form afresh. Life would be impossible without this structure. Earth is a bubble of rock and water spinning within its own fluid, gaseous, clinging film of an atmosphere. Bodies are themselves bubbles made of different-sized bubble-like organs, cells, and other wiggly globules. Alfonzo had barely passed high school biology, so maybe a real scientist would protest his imagery, but he thought this theory poetically true. So what if technical terms refused to stay in his head? The universe was bubbles all the way down.

It was common knowledge that an invisible medium—like psychic oxygen—flowed through the city. It was an effervescent, intoxicating substance. In Manhattan, the center, the air was so abundant it changed animals’ behavior. It made them buoyant and prone to hysteria. It gave them outsized confidence and naïve optimism. The animals at the far edges, however, suffered from a lack of clean air. They moved slower and wheezed heavier. If Manhattan was a nested series of hollow spheres, then Alfonzo had grown up in one of the outer layers.