Places like this were mausoleums. Monuments to a past that should be relegated to museums.

Just try convincing my writers of that, he thought bitterly, ducking back as a courier weaved by on the bike lane, almost hitting him. "You prick!" he called out.

The courier threw a middle finger back at him and carried on his merry way.

"I fucking love this city," Qurban said to himself, weaving between idling traffic to the other side of the street.

Despite the shift in consumer desires, his clients invariably wanted cheaply made trade paperbacks and leather-bound hardcovers with glossy dust jackets, perfect-bound covers with French folds and thick, rough pages with deckled edges made from eco-friendly recycled paper.

They all wanted to see their books in the gallery at Argosy and the window display at McNally Jackson. They looked down on digital marketplaces like Amazon and Kobo. The ebook was still the bastard stepchild of the industry.

Or is it redheaded stepchild? Qurban pictured his own children. Aadi was the apple of his eye but he would gladly trade Haaziq for a stepchild—redheaded or otherwise—who might be more respectful. Perhaps one who might follow in his father's footsteps rather than aspiring to be a hippity-hopper like Haaziq apparently wanted to be.

Qurban's client was "fashionably late" by twenty-five minutes, a young wallflower whose blog made headlines during the height of the #MeToo movement for its candid depiction of her own childhood sexual assault. He had no idea how much of it was true, but she was a competent writer and had a large and loyal following on social media, which she had the annoying habit of calling "soshe." She couldn't name a single writer from the photos on the walls, but she knew nearly every actor. Qurban thought she'd do very well in today's market.

He left the restaurant an hour later in a bit of a malaise. He was fifty-three years old, he drove a Porsche, owned a townhome in Murray Hill, had a decent 401K, a lovely wife who probably still loved him and two handsome male heirs. And yet he no longer felt fulfilled.

It could always be worse, he thought on his way back to the car, passing a homeless man sleeping on a splayed-open cardboard box with the jungle-thick hair in his ass crack exposed to passersby. There but for the grace of Allah.

The stinking mouth of an alley wafted out at Qurban like halitosis. He turned instinctively as if to marvel at whatever had made the smell.

It was surprisingly dark, just a narrow space between two buildings, bricks damp and dripping from a burst pipe high up. Empty aside from several trash bins near the far end and a single pigeon, which cooed and pecked at breadcrumbs on the wet concrete.

He shuffled by quickly, troubled for some reason. In the course of most days he walked by a dozen stinking alleys just like it, but something about this one—the look, the smell, the dripping pipe, even the way the pigeon had regarded him with its studious orange eyes—something gave him a cold chill. He pulled up the collar of his coat, walking hurriedly the rest of the way to the car.