A city is an aggregate, a statistical ensemble, it does not matter how random I am, there is a graph of how we shop, of when our lights go on. The traffic pulses, orderly, like the signals on a wire, and you stand across from me at the intersection, there, through the gaps between the cars—if they passed at thirty-two gaps per second, I could say you were in a film.

We pass each other ten thousand times a day and learn to never dwell. Next to you on the plane, I fantasized that it would crash, at least that we would think so. I imagined our introductions, your name, telling you I take pictures. If I had my camera out, I would take some then, honest shots the impact would obliterate.

This city burned to the ground. Maybe today the bomb goes off, it has been waiting in a skyscraper’s utility penthouse and the light from it is like ten thousand suns. Our shadows, all our shadows, look like chalk stains flaring out from the intersection where you and I are standing, we are in the fireball, it has caught the air itself on fire, evaporated the city core, sucked glowing embers high into the clouds and turned the two of us invisible.

The radioactive dust begins to settle, it lands on your arms and shoulders and on your head, and it is like the two of us have risen from it, a new species. We make a skin of ash, rubbing it in like charcoal sketches of ourselves.

We are mute, now, but then we always were, and as we wander the landscape after this apocalypse, there is always dust to trace in. You write that our stories are told with light and I write back, what I always wanted, most of all, was to hear you laugh.

I’m not sure wars end so easily. But maybe if every soldier (or every politician) had to kill his own pet first, then wars wouldn’t begin.

Is it possible to deliver justice from the bay doors of a bomber? Have you ever had a dream that was at the same time gruesome and calm?