At home, David pressed him against the wall of their apartment. “I fucking love you,” he said, and kissed him. Being drunk helped Gabriel’s pain. The fight they’d had was a murky recollection. Instead there was just the post-patched evening spread out like a beautiful film—David dancing, David laughing, David kissing him in public—and Gabriel promised himself that the next time they arrived to the club fresh from a fight, he’d consider climbing into the technician’s chair and letting the neurosurgeons make him as happy as David was.

Fumes choked the railway platform, and Gabriel worried he’d pass out like he’d done last week when running late to work. He’d forgone two air stations before the sky had filled with tiny fireflies and he’d found himself on his back, a passerby’s mask over his mouth.

He mashed alongside the businessmen shoving their way toward the open doors of the train and wedged his elbow in front of an old woman who was using an enormous bag to cut in line. The doors closed behind him, new air blew into the cabin, and Gabriel raised his face to the vents and tasted the compressed air, taking long, deep breaths as he closed his eyes. By the time he opened them again, Beijing was gone. Now only the red-tiled houses and battered fields of Tianjin remained. A rusted crane stretched over an unfinished soccer stadium, useless and dead, and around it, tall buildings rose windowless and half-finished. Metal skeletons of electrical towers stood spread-legged across the landscape, their fists clutching cables as they held guard over New China.

The holograph businesses had arrived here like a plague of locusts, devouring the land, poisoning the drinking water, and leaving behind suburbs with hungry people playing on the outdated gadgets they’d once built for Americans. Here you could get thought-phones aplenty for pennies on the dollar. And there were no cherry trees left, just the horrible super-trees, strung with toilet paper and windswept plastic bags, which blossomed holographic flowers when they were still functioning but now stood broken along the streets. The entire landscape was a mausoleum of failed construction projects. As for the vultures of industry, they’d moved elsewhere—to Nigeria, some said, just as they’d once said Tianjin, just as they’d said Beijing before that.