It is different in the city. A place of sight more than anything else. A place where Simon notices the rain, the dusty splock of water rejected by the pavement, jumped into mist that hovers above the ground. A place where certain smells register: exhaust fumes, the muddy mass of the river. But mostly it is visual. The streets of Minneapolis are too wide to box the sounds of urban life, and instead let them escape skyward like released balloons. The palette of smells from restaurants doesn’t hang in the air; the greasy perfumes of pretzel stands and corner pizzerias, or the ground-hugging vapors of garlic and thyme, are absent. The buildings are either too new or too far apart, the inspectors too intent on proper venting and the commissioner of transportation overattentive to garbage, which is tucked carefully at the rear of buildings, and never collects more than a handful of bluebottles and yellow jackets.

These are the things that shield and comfort most city people, that mark the place as different from any other. This skin of noise and smell. Without it they feel exposed, naked in everyone else’s line of sight. Without the apparel of the city to cloak him, Simon follows Vera a block back, hunched inside the army coat no matter the weather, banking on the drab-green martial color to hide him, a fashion craze recently taken up by anemic college students.

In the mornings Simon hurries through the tasks that Dougan sets him to in the belly of the hotel. Strange chores not so much Herculean as Sisyphean: things that have to be redone moments after. With a wire brush he scrapes the rust from outgoing steam pipes though the moisture and heat cake them with oxide again within weeks. Dougan makes him polish the pressure gauges though the dials no longer work. They are stuck and Dougan has long ago pried off the glass plates and wound the hands to the proper pressure. He says he doesn’t need to look at them, says that he has a sixth sense, like Spiderman, that tells him when to vent or stoke. But the building inspectors feel better when they see the shiny dials pointing like compasses to true north, to safety. They, said Dougan smugly, know nothing of the hotel’s temperament. They have not worked there for thirty years. So every day Simon has something else to do. He scrapes the lint from the air vents, mops the dusty cement floor and crawls inside the oil furnace to clean the pilots and jets and change the filters. He does it all quickly, then grabs one of Dougan’s skin magazines, wolfs down lunch in the back of the kitchen and follows Vera.