The spread was controversial; if it happened in front of lay judges, there was shock, complaints. More than one highly ranked team had misjudged its judges and been eliminated in early rounds for speaking drivel. Old-timer coaches longed for the days when debate was debate. The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even the adolescents knew this wasn’t true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the ‘fine print’ one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a ‘dropped argument’ in a fast round of debate – you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It’s no excuse that you didn’t have the time. Even before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting ‘spread’ in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.

Then one day in 1926, Comrade Krakovitz, who happened to be an undersecretary in the Department of Residential Accommodations, asked if Pushkin would wait in line for a case of French champagne. When Pushkin succeeded, Comrade Krakovitz was loath to show his appreciation by giving up a bottle; so, instead, with the stroke of a pen he reassigned Pushkin to a generous apartment in the Nikitsky Towers – a brand-new complex on the banks of the Moskva River.

Later that night, when Pushkin got home and explained to Irina what had happened, Irina soberly considered the turn of events. It was a common misconception – or so her thought process unfolded – that Communism guaranteed an identical life for all. What Communism actually guaranteed is that, in place of lineage and luck, the state would determine who should get what after taking careful account of the greater good. From this simple principle, it followed that a comrade who plays a greater role in attaining the greater good for the greater number of people should have greater resources at his own disposal. Just ask Nikolai Bukharin, editor of Pravda and champion of the peasant, who lived in a four-room suite at the Metropol Hotel!

Through this indisputable logic, Irina came to see their improved situation as the natural course of events; and she now often referred to Pushkin as ‘comrade husband’.

But when she reached the corner of Tenth Avenue and 16th Street, she came to a stop. A few strides ahead, a lone woman in shirtsleeves was leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette while a crowd across the street milled in front of a loading-dock door. In a single glance, Irina recognized the people in the crowd. She recognized them from the ruggedness of their clothes and the determination on their faces. The only difference between this assembly and the factory workers in Moscow was that they appeared to come from every corner of the globe. In their number were Africans and Asians, Germans and Italians, Irishmen and Poles. Wondering what she had happened upon, Irina looked up and saw a billboard on the building’s roof displaying a golden disk the size of the sun.

Suddenly, the loading door rolled up with a clatter to reveal a man in suspenders in the company of two armed guards. In unison, every member of the crowd began to shout and wave their hands. For a moment, the foreman looked them over, then he began to point.

‘Him, her. Her, him . . .’

Those whom he singled out were waved inside by the guards – having been bestowed the privilege of doing a hard day’s work – while the rest were left to swallow their disappointment just as they had swallowed their pride.

When the loading door came down with a bang, the woman in shirtsleeves was no longer leaning idly against the wall. Having tossed her cigarette into the street, she began thrusting a piece of paper in the hands of every worker who passed. Some of the workers glanced at the leaflet as they walked away, others stuffed it in a pocket, but most let it fall to the ground. When a gust of winter wind raced down the street, one of the leaflets was swept in the air and dropped at Irina’s feet.

Irina couldn’t read a word on the leaflet, but embedded right in the middle of the text, staring back with an expression at once determined and wise, was none other than Vladimir Ilich Lenin.

The music starts automatically, the ice-cream jingle, ‘Que Sera Sera’ on imitation chimes. Gulls scatter as the truck eases forwards, trundling towards higher ground. The tourists, for the most part, tend to keep to the safety of the dunes, bracketed behind canvas windbreakers, hunkered grimly over sandwiches and picking sand from the spines of overambitious holiday books. Every year, the coastguard finds on average six copies of Anna Karenina abandoned on the flats between April and high summer. The council has plans for a small exhibition.

Wondering whether she ought to stop and scoop up the wrapper, Alice glances at Min, only to find her bunching up her chewing gum in a paper napkin, preparing to throw it out of the window.

‘Oh, don’t,’ Alice says, regretting it almost immediately – the mumsy tone. Min raises an eyebrow at her, though she does withdraw her hand from the open window, throwing the napkin instead in the cupholder beside the gearstick.

‘Fair enough,’ she nods, and while her tone is light Alice feels she can detect the faintest note of mockery. ‘Mustn’t be bitter with my litter.’

It can be like this, sometimes. A sudden quirk of the lip. Alice biting back the wrong words. Sitting together in History, passing notes until Alice writes something stupid or uncool, underlines the wrong thing, and Min crumples the note in her fist.

‘Fair enough’, this stock phrase, its cringing detachment. The sudden removal of camaraderie and Alice clawing after it.

‘Earl Grey and sardine ice cream it is,’ Min replies, and Alice grins despite herself. It is a sleepover game they play, dreaming up the most disgusting of possible flavour combinations: lemon curd and spare ribs, duck and Parma Violets, tinned pilchards and strawberry jam. A strange pretence at early teenhood, despite the fact that they are both nearly eighteen – nights spent sleeping top to tail in Alice’s bedroom and playing stupid games, inking outlines of the constellations on one another’s arms in biro, tweezing eyebrows and talking on and on about kissing, Min’s little moonstone teeth in the dark.

At the serving hatch, Min hooks one bony ankle over the other and Alice wills her to retract her head and wink at her, give some sign that they still share ownership of the joke she has just hurled unthinkingly away from them. But Min remains where she is and the joke sails away over the head of the boy whose fingers now appear on the edge of the hatch.

I’d like you to start by listening to the first track on the A side, ‘Corcovado’. Bird doesn’t play the opening theme. In fact he doesn’t take up the theme until one phrase at the end. The piece starts with Jobim quietly playing that familiar theme alone on the piano. The rhythm section is simply mute. The melody calls to mind a young girl seated at a window, gazing out at the beautiful night view. Most of it is done with single notes, with the occasional no-frills chord added, as if gently tucking a soft cushion under the girl’s shoulders.

And once that performance of the theme by the piano is over, Bird’s alto sax quietly enters, a faint twilight shadow slipping through a gap in the curtain. He’s there before you even realize it. These graceful, disjointed phrases are like lovely memories, their names hidden, slipping into your dreams. Like fine wind patterns you never want to disappear, leaving gentle traces on the sand dunes of your heart . . .

I thumbed through the Charlie Parker section, but the record was nowhere to be found. I was sure I’d returned it to this section yesterday. Thinking it might have got mixed in elsewhere, I rifled through every bin in the jazz section. But as hard as I looked, no luck. Had someone else bought it? I went over to the register and spoke to the middle-aged guy. ‘I’m looking for a jazz record I saw here yesterday.’

‘Which record?’ he asked, eyes never wavering from the New York Times.

‘Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,’ I said.

He laid down his paper, took off his thin, metal-framed reading glasses and slowly turned to face me. ‘I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?’

I did. The man said nothing and took another sip of coffee. He shook his head slightly. ‘There’s no such record.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘If you’d like Perry Como Sings Jimi Hendrix, we have that in stock.’

‘Perry Como Sings –’ I got that far before I realized he was pulling my leg. He was the type who kept a straight face. ‘But I really did see it,’ I insisted. ‘I was sure it was produced as a joke, I mean.’

"I was only thirty-four when I died,’ Bird said to me. ‘Thirty-four!’ At least I think he was saying it to me. Since we were the only two people in the room.

I didn’t know how to respond. It’s hard in dreams to do the right thing. So I stayed silent, waiting for him to go on.

‘Think about it – what it is to die at thirty-four,’ Bird said.

I thought about how I’d feel if I’d died at thirty-four. When I’d only just begun so many things in life.

‘That’s right. I’d only just begun so many things myself,’ Bird said. ‘Only begun to live my life. But then I looked around me and it was all over.’ He silently shook his head. His entire face was still in shadow, so I couldn’t see his expression. His dirty, battered saxophone dangled from the strap around his neck.

‘Death always comes on suddenly,’ Bird said. ‘But it also takes its time. Like the beautiful phrases that come into your head. It lasts an instant, yet they can linger forever. As long as it takes to go from the East Coast to the West Coast – or to infinity, even. The concept of time is lost there. In that sense, I might have been dead even while I lived out my life. But still, actual death is crushing. What’s existed until then suddenly, and completely, vanishes. Returning to nothingness. In my case, that existence was me.’

Gao’s mother pulled over and turned off the engine, the car emitting a few reluctant beeps. Outside the passenger window, I could see the buildings had been erected atop landfill, but where they were interrupted, a cliff of earth fell away, and below that was a rocky wasteland strewn with debris and construction material. At its center stood a lone concrete house. At first glance the house looked as though it might be several floors high, until I realized the earth had been hollowed around it, scooped away from it like the base of a sculpture; the building stood atop stories of packed earth.

It looked like an odd art installation, or an image from a surrealist painting: a city melting into a puddle, a single house floating on its remains.

I asked if anyone actually lived there, and Gao’s mother said yes. ‘It’s called dingzihu,’ she explained. ‘ The government wants to take their land but they won’t move.’