It’s a hoot, economizing, when skyscrapers are built to lift aspirants like us above the rats and roaches already waiting on whatever floor we’re capable of reaching. I wouldn’t ruin a delicate fantasy by realizing it, but we did exactly what we said we’d do, and somehow, the building still feels empty. After the summer my father completed his years-long journey from being the beginning of the Bruce Springsteen song to being the end of the Bruce Springsteen song, there came a long winter, with plenty of time to doubt who was the author, who the hero, or to wonder whether enjoyment is merely the mourning of expectations. I would later take a job reading abuse reports about my classmates in an office of people who wore old fashion like a badge. I would live in a tiny Carpathian village and watch the ladybug carry its death along the blind alleys of a novelty T-shirt. Winter, too, would become a recurring novelty, the unattainable dream of time and a half, the ashes asking, What are ashes to ashes? It doesn’t have to be from cowardice that, between seasons, mere blocks from where my loved ones are barely conscious of awaiting me, the sky hails down in hail, reassuring in its literalness, in the inadequate shelter of the sugar maple. That, too, is a hoot, getting pelted by the world’s consistencies while trying to picture the tree.

Every day, my wishes are interrupted by the realization that I have inherited my father’s grandiosity, that to match nature’s fecundity, I might have to be as symmetrical and constrained. But even a deadbolt can be tenuous. On several nights a month, I realize not that tidal locking means we can only ever see one face of our satellite, where there is no surprise, but that the interaction is mutual, its center calculable, over time, if left for others to find in a forgotten box, like the stack of engraved announcements of my birth that my father had printed on fine paper, never sent to anyone but filed away, or like other distractions, held close to the chest, until the end. I hear them out, knowing they will never know how to live, and realize again that the comfort I have always taken in the smell of a salt marsh is comfort in hypoxia, preserver of ecosystems and bog people, and it all makes sense: there have, indeed, been waves that held me under long enough to make me want, really want, to be alive. I can summon that feeling like Goldberg, remembered, when remembered, as proof of someone else’s superiority, or like the concluding section of the variation, all the dispassionate argument for necessity in tragic times as anyone should ever need. It leaves a mark, like the barnacles my father filed his chest against when he tried to prove his manhood by swimming around the Steel Pier. He only saved himself by hugging a piling, though, in a clinical sense, he really did drown, it just took eighty years, the scars still faintly visible. Just over a century after his grandfather had died of the virus, so did he, and the tissuey papers were filled like lungs with news of replication, replication and its variants, its own kind of music. Love and music are fine, but should the rest of us take a turn for the worse, let it not be because we refused to look up from our electron microscopes long enough to see how, all these years later, the tide still misses the moon.

When my children beg me for a twilight swim, I take them to the sea and call them in only when their little heads become indistinguishable from the swell. Don’t die, I tell them first. May your greatest tragedy be never to know the smell of a newsstand, I say, or either of the two kinds of ambition left to the world: the audacity to be your own champion, the humanity not to want one. It is the same with figurative language and social relations, don’t you think? Mere association, but convincing yourself that it is essential? A kind of error, a kind of stalking? The occasional confirmation that the world is exactly as you thought it was? I warn them that I might have been weak, but I was never that weak. Like the body, like the offensive specificity of my father’s body, it might be unimaginable that this sea is the same sea when the light is gone, but rest assured: the planets and stars now appearing have been there the whole time. And with that, and their fidgeting, and my wishes crashing within me that none of this will ever go, I let almost everything go.