Our kids were in the corner playing their hologame, their eyes transfixed by whatever they were setting fire to, and my father was turned toward my mother, his eyes wet with joy. But Mom was gone. I’d logged her off on my way up from the basement. It was just my father turning toward the empty space, preparing to kiss the air. In the corner of our eyes, a projection of a young Dick Clark was starting the countdown from Times Square. Millions of partiers were beaming from across the nation, singing the first bars of “Auld Lang Syne” as the ball descended in New York. Theo laughed at something his sister said, Nin popped the champagne and kissed the empty air, and we stood there, in the last seconds of the old year, counting down the time together.

BEIJING

The sandstorms had returned from Mongolia, bringing with them a suspension of dust so thick it layered silt against the sides of buildings and swallowed high-rises within yellow clouds. The dust settled amid the strati of plastic fumes which stretched across the apartment, coating Gabriel’s throat with sand and reminding him of that winter, before he’d left for China, when his brother had pushed his face into a snowbank and nearly killed him. He opened his mouth in bed, gasping for oxygen, and had a dreamlike vision of melting animals, their fur singed, their backs arching in blue flame—was certain he would die here alone in Beijing—but then he caught a breath, thin as fishing line, and sipped at the rivulet of clean air. Yes, if he practiced the pranayama he and David had once done together, he could rise from bed and dress.

He tried the switch on the wall again, waited to hear the air tanks whir to life, but there was nothing. Only angry voicemails left at a realty company in Hong Kong, and the company’s reminder that he lived in a good building—an apartment with working oxygen over half the year, a unit that the company could easily evict him from. But, if he breathed slowly and deeply, as he was doing, maybe he could make it from his apartment to the train station. There’d be clean air on the train to Shanghai, and this thought buoyed Gabriel’s spirits.

He’d heard from his brother for the first time in three years. Jake would be visiting Shanghai on business and had asked Gabriel to meet him at his hotel; they needed to talk about their parents, he’d said. Shanghai was a six-hour journey from Beijing, but Jake had hinted that he might be willing to buy Gabriel a ticket back to the United States, and this possibility of escape was enough to help Gabriel make it down the staircase to the front door.