Upstairs in my tiny apartment, I pull a small bag of cocaine from the freezer and cut out a line, then suck the powder up my nostrils. The drugs lace into my blood. I lean back on my cheap blue sofa and stare at the white ceiling. For a moment, just a moment, the man on fire is gone and there is nothing in my mind at all. For a moment, I am cold, still, a cadaver on a silver autopsy table.

But out here, out west, there are endless hours of commuting, constant emails and notifications, top secret projects, impossible deadlines. Whether you’re a Believer or not, the very pressure of the atmosphere in San Francisco changes you, molds you, shapes you into a new breed of worker. It has changed me.

Outside, the fog is heavy, dark, thick. I still haven’t gotten used to it. The mist makes the streets look eerie, haunted, unreal.

I pull out my phone and press a few buttons. Two minutes later, a black car with tinted windows pulls up. I slide into the back seat, and the driver navigates the steep hills of the city. The black hole hangs above the seat beside me.

But the train jolts forward, shattering the sensation. We snake past: junkyards full of busted metal, worn-down bamboo gardens, abandoned car lots, the grinning strip mall teeth of the suburbs, the doors of coffee shops and gas stations opening for the day, capitalism in slow morning bloom.

I moved the big vacuum in small patterns over the beige carpet in the living room. I did it just how she taught me. The black hole watched over me from above.

Outside, the other children emerged from their homes to play in the sprinklers that shot sparkling arcs of water into the air. It was, I realized, summer.

“Keep cleaning,” my mother said.

She appears in the mirror next to me: younger, blond hair, bright blue eyes, glowing tan, the next generation of tech, the embodiment of the Valley, radiating probiotics and spirulina. Her name is Cat or Julie or Jennifer or Lindsay. I can never keep the new girls from Sales straight.

Today I write a report on how to capture and keep people’s attention online: how to leverage techniques first used on gamblers and how to appeal to our human love of games to encourage a user to click the buy button for increased gratification and keep them coming back again and again and again. I write about the colors of buttons, the optimal utilization of text, where the eye tends to land on a screen, how to subtly scam the human into being tracked, into the sales funnel, as if through a chute, like a cow on the way to slaughter, to the right place, to the right action, at the right time.

“Cassie?” she says in a soft tone, her accent making my name sound more beautiful than it is.

My shoulders tense. I can’t have a single moment of peace in this office, no place is safe.

The door swings shut behind her. A wave of nausea hits me. I’d spent weeks on the project. The work was good, I know it was. But for an instant, my reality wavers: maybe I am terrible, maybe I don’t deserve to be here, maybe I am a nothing.

Above us, the very galaxies rotate and collide. Stars are born and die. The whole of the universe breathes and expands. Suddenly I can see the disparity so clearly—the men bathing in the river, and me in the bathroom, holding a porcelain plate, always failing.