“Clean-air vigilantes,” The New York Times called them in one article, also “pedestrian warriors” and “urban bounty hunters,” as if Alec and the others were an elite task force, not a group of guys who’d heard you could make a good chunk of change with a phone camera and a stroke of luck. Out of every $350 fine levied against a trucking company by New York’s Department of Environmental Protection, the vigilante who reported the idling vehicle received a reward of twenty-five percent.

Jorie had paused mid-sip when Alec told her how he made a living. You’re kidding, she said, seriously, this is one of your bits, right?

Jorie’s dating profile said she was an environmental justice master’s student. She had a pierced nose and a big, hard smile, Alec remembered that about her, she was expressive, she really reacted, though the exact cartography of those reactions had gone blurry in the past week. She’d flirted with him in an accusatory, almost bullying way that made her seem younger than she was. Crossing Canal Street now, Alec pictured her mouth frozen against the rim of her glass, her eyes wide, a few white flecks of salt melting into the pink of her tongue.

Alec told Jorie he wasn’t kidding—Was the ozone layer just a joke to her? She laughed, and he flicked his eyes away to avoid breaking. At the next table, a boy and a girl in their early twenties were trading pictures of their parents’ cats; behind Jorie’s head hung a blue sign that read BAVARIAN MEATS, and through the tinny bar speakers a familiar rock song sounded like it was being gnawed on by a large dog. As Jorie’s lips moved, Alec made a mental note to tell her about last year’s anti-idling campaign, the one with Billy Idol. The billboards beside the expressway had featured the singer glowering in a black T-shirt, his arms crossed above the words BILLY NEVER IDLES.

When he snapped back to attention, Jorie was asking how many claims he’d won that year.

A bunch, he said. He arranged his features to look solemn, but he kept a smile behind his face, like music through a closed door. I make more money doing this than I’ve ever made doing anything, including selling my feet.

Jorie asked what size feet he had.

Big. I mean, like, a really solid living, he said, it’s crazy how much money is out there if you know where to find it. But you know that, you’re in grad school. Anyway, it’s better that you don’t know the details. Alec tented his fingertips together. This is all top secret, like I said. Unless your friends are all super lazy or bad at navigating ancient government websites, in which case I don’t care who you tell.

The more people who knew about the Clean Air Complaint Program, Alec explained, the more Vigilantes there would be. More Vigilantes would mean more claims filed, which might mean that instead of burdening multinational corporations like Amazon with a string of obnoxious but ultimately manageable inconveniences, the program might actually start to work, to persuade those corporations to dissuade their truckers from idling. This would be good for the environment but bad for Alec’s income. Unless you were famous, comedy did not exactly pay well. Unless you were famous, comedy did not exactly pay at all.

When Alec’s eyes found Jorie’s again, her smile looked the same, hard and wide, but three parallel wrinkles were scribbled in the broad expanse below her hairline.

I know that probably sounds bad, he said.

Jorie told him it sounded horrible, though she was still smiling.

Alec liked going on dates. He didn’t understand his pals who complained about their bad dates with boring people. At the very least you came away with a little more information about a new kind of person, a welder, say, or an environmental justice master’s student. There was no such thing as a “good” or “bad” source of information, because every source of information was also a source of material. There was only paying attention and not paying attention. Sure, a boring date was a source of boring material, but they were also a captive audience—you could use that boring source to practice your crowdwork, you could ask incredulous follow-up questions like, Your day was good as a result of eggs? and watch the boring person scramble to restore their dignity and complexity in your eyes. So, environmental justice—isn’t it a little late for that? he’d asked Jorie when they sat down.

That is the worst sentence a person in overalls has ever said to me, Jorie replied.

Jorie was a good audience. An engaged audience, that was the word. Even negative feedback was a form of engagement, and all forms of engagement were more desirable than apathy or silence. Silence leveled the walls of the room and turned out all the lights. With no echo, Alec had no location, no proprioception; it felt like the moments just before going under anesthesia, like running in midair down a long, dark well.

Alec walked two blocks up Mercer. He still had a few hours before he was supposed to meet Jorie at the new grocery store by the park for their second date. The Errand Date was an underrated date premise; a shared task lightened the pressure, divided your attention, and usually the task involved moving around, which at the very least contributed to your daily step count. He didn’t mind being fit in, slipped into an existing slot in Jorie’s day before she left on her camping trip or yoga retreat or whatever it was. Everyone in New York was always fitting each other in, yanking their arms through the holes of the day as if its hours had shrunk in the wash.

Alec could feel the low growl of the engine from around the corner. It often started in his chest, as if he himself were producing the sound. He turned right on Spring.

 

The article in the Times had twice compared idling engines to purring cats. Alec hadn’t spent much time with cats—his dad only believed in dogs that could hurt you if they wanted to—but engines he knew.

Throughout Alec’s childhood, his father spent most evenings tinkering with whatever rusted thing he had most recently bought or inherited from a friend of a friend—“took it off his hands,” Merle always said, as if he was doing the guy a favor. The friend of a friend always promised that the car only needed a “few tune-ups,” but a few tune-ups inevitably showed something wrong with the electrical, meaning there was nothing really to be done with the car until Alec’s father took it to a professional, which went against the main reason he’d given for buying the car in the first place: to work on it himself. For this reason, Alec suspected his father didn’t really want to work on cars himself. He didn’t actually enjoy it, not the way the men he’d grown up with were supposed to. He was simply committed to The Bit. You could even say his Bit was commitment, but only in the sense that meant “promise,” not “dedication.” Unlike Alec, Merle had no follow-through. He accumulated objects so he could accumulate obligations to fix them; he liked being a person with lots of things to be done, especially things that could not be done, that would continue to weigh down the corners of his life.

Alec’s mother had threatened to leave his father every day. She really would do it, she said, unless he did a big purge sometime soon. Sometime soon came and went and Merle did not do a big purge, he just traded the Falcon for a camper van and the Golf for a snub-nosed Divco milk delivery truck peppered with fake but convincing bullet holes, and Alec’s mother continued to sneak outside late at night to smoke her daily cigarette by the rusted axle in the flowerbed. Why did she insist on acting like the cigarette was a secret? Alec watched her from the kitchen. She always ashed into the stocky white mug in her hand.

The Bit was more than a shtick. It was something between a mythos and a logic, and everyone got just one in their lifetime, or maybe you spent your one lifetime honing it, sustaining it, skipping around it like a maypole, a spine on which you twined the long elaborate joke that was the self. Alec’s father’s Bit was still firmly planted on his family farm in Iowa, for example, where men with small smiles and straight spines had tuned up tugboat-sized pickups by the barn. He had driven out to California at the end of its tether, and decades later he still ground it between his teeth like a horse.

 

The truck was a white TrueValue semi. Alec could see as he approached that its roll-up door was furled, the body open and the liftgate flat against the asphalt. He watched for a few long seconds. Movement in the side mirror—the driver, most likely, rooting around for something in the cab.

A delicate balance of risk and reward, this watching and waiting. If Alec charged right into the hunt with no intel, he might pick the wrong place to set up camp—in the doorway through which the driver was coming and going, for example—or he might discover that the truck was getting ready to lower or raise its liftgate, in which case idling was legal, voiding the claim. But every second he spent trying to gauge whether the truck was illegally idling risked losing the whole bounty—the truck might pull away or cut the engine just before the requisite three minutes and one second were up, though the video itself had to last at least three minutes and four seconds. Nothing sucked more than losing almost a hundred dollars in the span of a breath. Alec wasn’t much of a gambler; unlike his mom, who only ever seemed to relax with her hand on a slot machine, he lacked the right temperament, the tolerance for passive kinds of hope. Sometimes, though, the truck would pull away just a few seconds after he cut the video. Then he couldn’t help but feel a rush of energy in his chest; it was a ghostly, godlike feeling, as though he had moved through time sideways, squeezed through the space between moments like a closing subway door.

Alec opened an application on his phone and tapped a red button. Then he walked at a brisk pace toward the truck with his phone extended and his headphones in. Hold on, he said to no one, let me find a place to stand for a sec. He walked almost a full three-sixty around the truck. Three-sixties were his safest bet; reviewers disqualified claims without them on the grounds that a refrigeration unit could be hooked up somewhere out of view, which required a running engine.

He completed the circle, retraced a few steps, and paused to lean against a doorjamb near the ass end of the truck, where the camera had a better chance of picking up both the license plate and the shudder of the exhaust pipe. The sound of the engine alone wouldn’t hold up in court. That shudder was the ticket. A dark plume of exhaust was an even better guarantee, but not always available. Without clear evidence of the effort it took to stay still, Alec’s claim was almost certain to fail.

A sticker on the driver’s-side hood read Certified Clean Idle. Some drivers liked to point to that sticker if they caught Alec filming, as if it meant anything. “Clean idle” was like saying “clean coal” or “respectful snuff film.” He couldn’t take credit for that one; he’d heard it from Jay, a retired environmental lawyer who dressed up as a tourist while on duty—cargo shorts, bucket hat, slow swivel of the head, like an owl—and made over two hundred grand per year on claims alone. The binoculars around his neck were a nice touch.

For the remainder of the one hundred and eighty-four seconds Alec needed to capture on video, he pretended to catch up with the pals he’d left in California and, over the years, mostly stopped speaking to. He used these fake conversations to practice his improvisational skills or work on his material. Most comedians tuned up the same material over the course of years, tightening setups, switching out punchlines and adding tags to existing ones. A tag was a supplemental joke tacked onto the real punchline, slipped into its buttonhole. You could ostensibly tag a punchline indefinitely. You could go until the joke was as long and limp as a daisy-chain noose.

Across the street, a Nike check mark protruded from the side of a building like a Post-it from between the pages of a book. Alec framed the shot by fixing the logo in the upper-left-hand corner of his phone screen. Between buildings, the sky was blue. Alec asked his imaginary friend on the phone how their day was going. He felt a brief swell of gratitude for the afternoon’s long shadows; even in winter, he seemed always to have a sunburn draped across the bridge of his nose.

The challenge in comedy was committing to a bit just the right amount, for just the right amount of time. You had to write jokes you liked, but you also had to treat every word as disposable; you had to throw yourself into the material onstage and disown it immediately if it bombed. There was almost nothing sadder than a comedian who kept clinging to material that was not working, just like there was almost nothing more frustrating than a comedian who abandoned a joke too early, called it broken before they screwed in its legs. Almost nothing. The worst of all, the saddest and most frustrating, was a comedian performing material that clearly bored them. Audiences could always tell, and they hated you for it, for exposing the meaninglessness in how they chose to spend their leisure time. Alec would rather revise indefinitely or scrap everything and start from scratch than piss off the audience by boring himself.

Of course, even switching things up to avoid boring yourself looked bad if you did it consistently enough. Alec’s audience was usually composed of the other comedians who haunted the club late at night, and so without meaning to they’d all come to know too much about each other; they could practically recite one another’s material by heart—except Alec’s. He knew what they thought. Funny guy, but jumpy. Flighty. Succeeding would be the only proof that all his revising and rewriting wasn’t hiding fickleness or procrastination. He had been making something perfect, not gambling or second-guessing but simply working hard.

Alec had hit last week on a new opening to his set: rather than building up to the biographical stuff, he would jump right in. I was born with two testicles, he’d say. Listen, isn’t that a great sentence? You hear that sentence and immediately know that one or both of them is not going to make it.

Here he would pause for titters from the audience. He paused now. He kept his face engaged, as though the imaginary friend on the other end of the line were urging him on. Then he continued: It was cancer. Feel bad for laughing yet? (More laughter, he assumed.) My dad is an aloof, depressed Catholic guy from the Midwest, so he has never once said he was proud of me. It’s just not in his vocabulary. But after my ball surgery—by the way, that’s called a “radical orchiectomy,” which sounds like a procedure that implants a communist bird somewhere in your body. Which is probably another reason my father doesn’t know what to do with me: when he heard the word “radical,” I know he was this close to asking the doctors, Can’t you just do a regular one?

Pedestrians walked in front of Alec’s phone camera every so often. One woman stared at Alec through the lens as if she knew his secret, that he too was gazing into the aperture and not communicating with someone far away, and he stuttered out his next sentence: My dad—my dad never said anything to me about getting through treatment and all that. After a while, he even stopped coming to the hospital. He just couldn’t take it. Not the sick people or the strange tubes and fluids, no—we’re talking about a man who’s stuck his own arm so far up a cow’s asshole that he nearly dislocated his shoulder. No, it wasn’t that.

Then Alec planned to go into a bit about how men like his father could not handle learning that testicles are actually like kidneys—you only need one—but the scrimmaging digits on the upper right-hand side of the screen told him that one hundred and eighty-seven seconds had elapsed, now ninety, the digits replacing one another the way they did in the whirlwind carousels of the penny slots his mother loved so much, and he fell abruptly silent, tapped the red button a second time, and crossed the street.

 

Alec had learned from Jay to submit all his claims the same day he recorded them. The substance of daily life built up so quickly, bills and receipts and lists and texts and missed calls, that expelling the buildup felt like any biologically essential process: put it off longer than usual and the body rebelled. At a nearby café, Alec ordered a quad espresso and opened his laptop.

He usually preferred to do his paperwork just before bed, after he was safely locked in his room and nothing more could happen to him. That was the thing about Vigilante justice: if you were outside, you were on the clock. It was like being a superhero, logistically speaking. Walk for long enough and another crime would find you. This was the main reason not everyone could be a superhero: you had to exist in a constant state of vigilance that was also a state of distraction. You had to prefer to exist that way, or at least not to mind it too much, to see yourself not as getting tugged in two different directions but as hurtling forward on two parallel tracks.

There were days when Alec was done by ten in the morning, and then there were days when he struck out until the sky purpled and his plantar fasciitis started to throb, but he always met his quota. Not every claim was successful; the companies often fought the citation in court, and most Vigilantes averaged a success rate of just twenty percent in a good month. But unpredictability was just a problem of scale. At the nanoscopic level, you never knew in what direction a particle would spin, true, but the sun visibly rose each morning, the truckers packed their lips with dip and mounted the onramps to the parkways like silver caterpillars, and Alec left his apartment with his eyes open. The trucks would keep idling. Nothing would change so long as trucks were driven by human people with biological needs like temperature control. This was a principal reason why a truck sometimes idled for an hour or longer: the driver didn’t want his egg salad to spoil, or it was frigid outside and he needed to keep the heat going. The engine was the sun for a trucker. It was their only source of power.

Lou says trucking is going to be fully automated in the next ten years, Alec’s father told him on most of their phone calls. Lou was Merle’s only friend. They’d snagged engineering jobs at the same company just before those jobs became impossible to get without a college degree. Lou was always complaining that some sector of the labor force was about to be eliminated.

It sure is, Alec said. Luckily I’ll be a famous birthday party magician by then.

Your mother wants to say hello, his father said.

Alec compressed and stored the latest video in a laptop folder marked ‘SUBMITTED,’ logged in to the department’s online complaint system, and filed eight claims, including the one on Spring. He updated several fields in a white grid and saved his work. He occasionally found his mind wandering to Jorie. The flash of her tongue on the rim of her glass. Pink, wet. He’d never had a problem finding someone to have sex with, and no one ever seemed crestfallen to have one fewer nads to contend with, but that fleeting gratification was rarely worth the aftermath, the questions or the absence of questions, or the crawling feeling he sometimes got while being touched, a sudden allergy attack to the reminder of his body. Maybe someday he would feel differently, when he was famous. But for now he’d decided not to need it, sex, intimacy, not the way some people—weaker, lazier people—thought they needed it. Ambition meant you had to sever your ballasts, save your energy, stop placating the body like a child wailing louder and louder for a treat. Just in case, however, he mentally confirmed that he had slipped a few condoms into his backpack before leaving the house.

For the next hour, Alec ran a long series of numbers from the ‘IN PROGRESS’ column through another government website, which he kept bookmarked on his browser. To get paid out from a successful claim, you not only had to submit the timestamped video and all the required bits of information about the incident, you also had to request your cut from the city weeks or months later, after the case had been decided. This meant you had to log every summons number you were associated with as the witness, track the status of each case, and, when the website showed that the company had relented, send a specially formatted email to a government address listing the summons and your vendor code. Repeat offender claims paid more, but the department had no system to identify them, so the most committed Vigilantes also tracked license plate numbers and tried to catch the ones that recurred. Alec was one of these. Employing himself as a Vigilante had actually forced him to cultivate several skills that people like Jorie, people who probably never thought about becoming birthday party magicians, would have mentioned on a resumé: initiative, professional email communication, time management, Excel.

Two years ago, deposits arrived just a few weeks after submitting a claim. Lately the department had been bogged down, and claims were taking three, four months to process. But this didn’t really matter—money arrived in Alec’s account every week from claims logged at some indeterminate point in the past, a steady trickle from a great height. The delay was gratifying, like finding cash wadded up in a pants pocket, or like landing a callback after a long tangent, or like standing on the edge of a great purple cliff after shouting a single word into the canyon—shouting and waiting, waiting and getting bored and turning to bite the purple crescent of light on a girl’s soft shoulder as she batted at him, laughing at his impatience, when suddenly his voice roared back at them from the other side of the gorge, almost knocking them back like a fast car, the surprise and clarity of the sound: it was the five-year anniversary of his radical orchiectomy, the date after which he would be officially considered “in remission,” and the word was “BALLS.”

 

I’ve been told I’m really bad at this, Jorie said.

At what?

Grocery shopping. I never make a list and end up having to circle the store like five times.

Jorie was wearing a low-cut blouse with flowy sleeves over a long skirt. Alec walked beside her as she pushed the cart. Her chin was angled towards him, his toward the colorful produce cases that lined the walls and exhaled a veil of mist every minute or so. He counted four different variants of the same leafy green vegetable on the bottom shelf.

The store was the first New York outpost of a popular Southern chain known for something that Alec couldn’t remember—the hugeness of the space? The sheer quantity of things? The way the products were presented, heaped attractively and cozily on tables like they’d just been spilled onto your own kitchen counter? The New York location had been open for just a few weeks, and the aisles were crowded with people holding their phones aloft, some mounted on black batons like video cameras. Jorie paused to let a pack of teenage girls squeeze past her. Their leader wore a white dress and red shoes, and she had her right arm extended, her friends’ chins tilting up toward the lens in her hand.

Alec had seen these short videos going around: the cameraperson touring the viewer through the aisles, picking up various items and gasping, then placing them in the cart or back on the shelf. Alec watched the girls jostle one another toward the fish counter. He was half an aisle ahead before he realized Jorie had fallen behind. When he turned, she did not rush to catch up.

Jorie wasn’t obviously pretty, not when you took her in at a glance, but she was still somehow beautiful, the way a strange-looking actor often seems striking by the end of the movie. Her cheeks looked soft. Dark eyelashes, thin lips, no makeup. The whites of her eyes were especially white. The overall effect disquieted Alec, made him almost angry. When had his brain decided it was attracted to her? In a dream, while he wasn’t looking?

Ma’am, he said, get a move on, or I’m afraid I’ll have to cite you.

She smiled. You are seriously such a narc.

He thought about telling her that the idling ban had in fact been enforced by cops back in the seventies, when idling was still considered a moving violation. They’d changed the ordinance eventually to give parking inspectors the power to ticket. Alec thought that was funny. He sensed a joke nearby, the same way he felt an engine growl in his chest from around a corner. If he lingered long enough, it would find him. Something about idling as a form of motion and, later, of stillness; cars as hummingbirds, vibrating in place, all of us as hummingbirds, hummingbirds dipping their thin straws into the calla lilies that sprouted in the backyard by the milk truck. He’d stolen a cigarette from his mother’s pack once at age ten and smoked it in secret—a real secret, unlike hers—and instead of a coffee mug, he’d tapped the embers into the flower’s long white throat.

When he tuned back in, Jorie was describing the two girls she would be camping with over the weekend. She loved camping. Everyone in her graduate program loved camping exactly the same amount. She abbreviated the name of the program casually, an acronym he could tell everyone in her immediate circle would recognize. She had grown up in California, so she was still getting used to how green everything was here. Not in the city, obviously, but even an hour away you could almost pretend we weren’t exponentially closer every year to a mass extinction event. Everyone in her program had climate depression.

Wait a second, you’re from California?

You are too, she said, I know, we talked about this.

It was a joke.

Oh, Jorie said, okay. She didn’t blink very often. Alec was having trouble reading the textures of her personality; her smile was hard and confrontational, but her skepticism—or was it injury?—was soft and porous. She pushed the cart with her forearms, resting her weight on the handle.

Alec looked around for something to bring them back into alignment. They rounded the corner toward the nonperishables. Jorie was talking now about something called “climate resilience” and “adaptive capacity.” Her program was not very strong in this field, despite the school’s fancy pedigree. She hated how theoretical everything was, how little she and her classmates spoke to real people. She’d spoken to real people every day before quitting her job as a lobbyist to go back to school. Every so often she stopped and picked up an item with reverence, turned it this way and that in her hands, and placed it back on the shelf. They were moving at a snail’s pace; she wanted to look at everything, he realized. Why? She needed to see every option before she acted, she believed in the possibility of purchasing the perfect thing. How distinct could two brands of dried seaweed really be? How would that seaweed change her life? Your day was good as a result of eggs?

Alec’s mind wandered. He’d never gone camping; instead, his dad had taken him on cross-country road trips to antique car shows and swap meets in small towns and flat cities, where they’d bartered weakly for car parts and trinkets Alec knew would make his mother groan and storm into her bedroom. Merle had seemed quietly glad to have Alec there. He introduced his son to the men he recognized, men who were committed to the same Bit, who were similarly beholden, even addicted to it. Some of the men had bought RVs after their divorces and loaded their collections into storage units. Now they lived like voluntary truckers, always on the move.

Did you find any trucks today? Jorie asked him. She was holding a yellow bag in one hand with a picture of what looked like brown goop on it. Lentils.

He told her about the claim on Spring, the easy kill. But complaints are taking forever to go through these days, he said, It’s almost like the whole Department of Environmental Protection is staffed by people like you.

She looked alarmed. What do you mean?

Slow walkers, he said. They’re busting my balls. Well, ball.

Jorie laughed. Just one of them?

I had cancer, he said, in my undercarriage. When I was eighteen. So I only have one.

He was planning to use that word in his set, undercarriage; it made you want to laugh all on its own.

Jorie’s eyebrows shot up to her forehead in Alec’s peripheral vision. He wouldn’t have been able to describe to someone else how she said his name then; there were tinges of reproach and of awe and of doubt, some confusion and a little trepidation, but mostly she looked sorry for him, which knocked him askew. Most people tried very hard to keep their faces neutral.

It’s okay, you can laugh, he said, it’s the funniest possible cancer I could’ve had.

She studied him. He watched her undress him in her mind, reach out a hand to touch him there.

What’s this? he asked, snatching the bag of lentils from her hand. You said you’re going camping? Where are the real snacks? Where’s—he lunged toward a tray nestled by the broth. Where are these? From the tray he extracted a handful of individually wrapped meat sticks and brandished them at Jorie like a bouquet of flowers.

Alec, she said again with the same inflection, the same opacity. That is so much plastic.

They’re high-protein. See? He held the stick close to her face, and she flinched away. That surprised him. The corners of her mouth turned down. I’m a vegetarian, Jorie said.

He ignored her. My dad and I used to take these road trips all the time, he said, I’m kind of an expert in nonperishables. I’ll help you. What you want is food that’s like coal, you want fossil fuel, food that breaks down into tinier and tinier particles, see, but never completely disappears.

He watched Jorie try to think of something witty to say in reply. He had skipped a few steps ahead of her and spun around, and now he was walking backwards without looking behind him. He felt stable again, the incitement in her face familiar, the orientation of the aisles suddenly familiar too, as if he’d been walking them for years.

That’s disgusting, she said. She pushed the cart past him and he trotted to catch up. He could feel the centrifugal force of the moment beginning to tug him towards the edge; one wrench of the wheel would do it.

There was a sick kind of pleasure in bombing. A satisfaction in the inevitability of the fall once people’s skepticism congealed into embarrassment, which bittered immediately into hatred. By the end of a bad set you were always most hated by the people in the room who most identified with you, who had most openly rooted for you at the start; in disappointing them, you debased them for believing in you.

The shelves on either side of the aisle collapsed stiffly outward, revealing the black void behind. All the lights went out except the beam trained on Alec’s face, in his eyes. He knew the darkness wasn’t empty, there were bodies and faces in there, Jorie’s included, but they meant nothing, he would never know them and they would never know him. He could do anything now, he could turn spectacular pirouettes in midair, he could burn holes in his eyes on the sun.

The tiered sign above the aisle read CHIPS, SODA, CANNED FISH, and BOXED MILK. Alec grabbed a canister of Easy Cheese and held it out to Jorie. She shook her head, and he tossed it into the cart. Then two bags of flavored beef jerky (he caught only the words BLUE CHEESE), one extra-large bag of translucent pork cracklins, a box of jalapeño mac n’ cheese, freeze-dried shrimps, loaded-chili-flavored Ruffles, prepackaged brownies with grainy frosting, buffalo cashews. Jorie watched him silently. He looked for products with images of other products on them, bottles of ranch or sriracha or mayo. The hard smile was back. He wanted to stop walking. He wanted to stop talking, or else to apologize, to remove all the plasticky-smelling objects from the cart and say something to bring the two of them back into alignment like wheels, that phrase came to him again, though this time he wondered if they ever had been. He wished he could press pause on the whole scene and tinker in the margins with his dialogue, draw himself a roadmap to the punchline. Something had gone wrong along the way and he’d inverted the order of things, tagging and tagging the setup, like throwing wool coats on the floor. Or maybe it wasn’t a question of how, but a question of what: he was making the wrong substance into material. Nothing that entered his mind and left through his body was made of what it was supposed to be, none of it mattered or accumulated, the cloud dissolved as soon as it hit the light.

Alec’s bag was growing heavy on his right shoulder. How long had they been inside? How long had he been on his feet? He danced them up and down the aisles, talking at Jorie all the while, sapping her, vanquishing her. He felt a profound sense of calm. A thought: maybe idling wasn’t like hummingbird flight after all, like exerting effort to stay still; maybe it was actually just an invisible form of forward motion, railing against an immovable force.

They reached the front of the store. Jorie was still pushing the cart with her elbows. She looked bone-tired, as if from a long laborious harvest. She wouldn’t look him in the eye. The wheels stuck when she turned the corner, squealing as the rubber juddered over the linoleum.

Alec planted himself in line and Jorie slid the cart to a stop behind him. The girls from the produce section were checking out one register over. They had each picked out several plastic containers of prepared food, plus a fleet of beverages in psychedelic-looking bottles and cans. Alec could see over their shoulders that the girl in the red shoes, the leader, was covertly filming the fleet as it sailed down the conveyor belt and across the scanner. She was trying unsuccessfully to keep the cashier out of the shot. She skated her thumbs across the image on the screen, acting as though she were typing a message, never once making contact with the glass.