The only change detected, the only change detected so far, was so minor and negligible and immediately remediable as like to render its quiddity alone of major concern.

Moe had posted all of this online, and to seal it exfiltrated the fulgence of our algys.

It is important to know that there are things that end. Things you can’t change with your mind or even your body or even chemicals. As spring draws near, the building wins the lawsuit. We’re getting evicted, the tenants who have lived here for ten or twenty years, and the subletters like me hiding out in these labyrinthine halls. “The last of the starving artists who colonized Williamsburg two decades ago and began its transformation into the hipster capital of New York could soon find themselves out on the street,” begins the article about it in the Post. It’s headlined, nonsensically, “W’burg has art attack: Hipsters facing boot.” There’s no chance of an appeal. My neighbor makes a banner to hang on the front of the building: ten homes lost! She’s been here since 1994, like most of the residents of the ten lofts. It’s not a machine or a dream or a crypt for her, just her home, made impossible by money. Police cars come, sirens wailing, to remove the banner. There will be condos.

This is one way to quit: wait until the bitter end, when you have done all you can to make the time machine keep working. You have learned its inner systems, improvised workarounds, carted in the water yourself, but it becomes harder to keep it alive than leave it. What they call hitting rock bottom. The final tragic reversal may be slow, boring, and horrible. The time machine has turned into a crypt, but it is not a crypt if you go inside with the body. If you must raise it from the dead again, know the power it has is your own: bend over it like a vampire, fire it up like Dr. Frankenstein. When you are able to stop, there will be a moment when you have to just walk out of the building. It’s not that living will be the opposite of addiction now; there can be more life because you know how to stretch out time, more joy because you have practiced the art of reanimation. You are a professor of transformation; you just need new tools. There is no outside or inside to it, no opposition, no right way to go, just this new way of seeing.

This is the diamond of the mind, this ability. A lot of people know about it, but I didn’t know about it.

From then on when the panic crept in I could just push over the thread-thin edge to the other side, feeling the way to joy.

Joy is the knowledge that the thread is there.

A thread runs through the middle of your life, and if you find it, the second half can be comedy instead.

A place can make you want to die and then you can turn it over into the sweetest thing. You can do this yourself, if you have found the diamond in your mind.

I am less interested in zombie stories, though, than I am in this neighborhood’s particular light. The thing I most want to tell you is how the sunlight is here, but I don’t know how to describe it. It’s obviously the same sun that lights the rest of the city, but there is something different about it. Maybe it’s our lack of trees, or the reflection of the river, or the lowness of most of the buildings, or the supersaturated colors, deep reds and greens, the bright wild complicated graffiti. We don’t have the trees of South Brooklyn, the shady corridors of stoops, the tall stately brownstones of Fort Greene or Park Slope. We don’t have cobblestone streets. What we have is this naked golden light. It’s a thin, big-sky light, kind of Western, cinematic. Since the first day I saw it, it has alternately flustered and comforted me. Today its particular quality will have half the people in the neighborhood drinking in the afternoon. By five or six, some of the couples will already be fighting on the streets, one of them wrangling the drunker, more belligerent one home, because there is always a drunker, more belligerent one, and one who needs to feel like he or she is taking care of someone.

At the moment, though, a really tall guy on roller skates is coasting down the long steep slope of the pedestrian walkway with his legs and arms spread wide and the wind in his fingers. He has the biggest satisfied grin on his face. There are always a few people a day who roll like this, on bikes or boards or even just running, arms wide, falling down the bridge into Williamsburg, in the pretty light.

kept the Master Classman as like director out of mawkishness and torpor