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that Soviet architecture? Brutalist? The place seemed big enough to hide a mining operation. The light turned green and he went right, dropping down into a neighborhood sprung full from a salesman’s case. A dry-cleaner, a dog boutique, a sandwich shop, and an optician were the only businesses along one block. In front of the dog boutique, a FedEx truck chugged at idle, its hazard lights bleating carmine auras into the morning mist. He ghosted over silky new pavement through an empty public square that featured a sunken, dry fountain and pebbly planters full of exotic grasses and reeds. On four sides rose new apartment buildings, the kind with exposed structural elements and balconies at dramatic angles and valuable parking and panoptical security systems. These were condominiums for the creative class, or for any taxpaying and easily policed types of citizens: potentate drifters, wealthy retirees, and leisure merchants. But the whole thing was about a minute old, and only a few souls had moved in.
    Leo’s preschool, Brand-New Day, was on the far side of all of this new development, but he had never tried to bike through it. The way around wasn’t much longer, it had a wide bike lane, and it took him past a favorite coffee shop.
    But a late arrival to work today would put him in even hotter water than he was in already with his fake-smiling supervisor, Sharon. Just yesterday, she had tried to impress upon him that it would be a Brand-New Day for him employment-wise if he didn’t start attending to the areas that she had earlier mentioned were areas he might want to look into improving around.
    “I think that, instead of lateness, you could be aiming for on-time-ness” was one of her points.
    And Leo, who more and more these days was overcoming his natural restraint, had said, “Or punctuality. I could aim for that instead of on-time-ness.”
    A route through the pretend neighborhood could save him the five minutes he needed. The danger was dead-ending against a freeway sound wall and having to circle back. He briefly considered the stakes, then cycled deeper down the quiet streets of terra condominia.
    Yeah. Too quiet, thought Leo. In a year or two, the facades of these buildings would no longer enjoy that blush of blank beauty. Soon each window would instead emit its own signal—here, probably the flaccid ficus trees and stereos of the urban professional, exercise machines and transfixed house cats—semaphoring to passersby some information about the lives stacked up behind the glass. But maybe one day, thought Leo, these buildings would be re-tasked—laundry might be hanging from those balconies, Caracas-style, or more buildings could be warrened atop these, like in Hong Kong. For that matter, the sunken civic Zen patch back there could become a Byzantine souk, tent-poled haphazardly and covered in rugs looted from the surrounding design stores. Maybe we’ll all be living a lot closer together in the future, in a sort of pleasant, Burning Man–ish kind of way, Leo thought. Or maybe in a totally un pleasant, refugee-camp sort of way, with viruses we haven’t seen the speck of yet, viruses that make your face fall straight off, and our drinking water brought in by tanker trucks. If it were like tha—
    There was no one even near Leo when he flew from his bike. His mind cast about for a culprit, for someone to blame other than himself. The bike just ceased its forward motion and he did not. How surprising, how nifty physics was. And as he trebucheted toward a four-inch curb, aware at once that his meeting with it would be physically calamitous, he remembered that he was wearing no helmet, and his surprise turned to fear. A month ago, at a party to which his friend Louis had brought him, Leo had heard (well, overheard) the host claiming that he wasn’t afraid of death. That particular claim seemed to Leo to be demonstrably false. So, costumed as Jesus (for this was a Halloween party), Leo had decided to explore the