The sidewalk behind the H.A.P (Happy) Electronics store is just as exciting as it always is. There’s a dumpster back here for cardboard and styrofoam and stuff. A couple cans have also been thrown in and around it for flavor. I’m a couple minutes earlier than the directions say. They seem to just be a .txt file that I can access like a perfect memory. A poem I know by heart. At least, I really really hope that’s all it is. What sort of idiot risks permanent brain damage for a job? Couldn’t be me. Couldn’t be me.
   I’m having some fun studying fire escapes when the time comes for me to start staring at the Chrysler Building. Its sharp mast is poking out from above the brick buildings.
   Did you know that for 11 months after it was built, the Chrysler Building was the tallest building in the world? For 11 perfect months, a brick building was still the best we could do. Now it’s dwarfed by its younger brothers up there. Mistaken for the Empire State constantly. Undermined by each new impossibly thin, impossibly empty apartment building over Central Park. But it’s still to this day the best we could do with brick. It’s got a prestige to it- a certainty. Not the loudest, but solid and elegant where the others are not.
   There’s a thing that knows what it’s about. Knows what it’s worth. Knows, when its brothers are constantly one-upping themselves in extravagance and modernity, when to throw in the towel and take home your winnings. 11 perfect months, raise the glass, winning smile, fade into the skyline. Sheesh.

   A car blows past me. I stumble back, not having realized I was so close to the street. Watching it catch a sharp turn, I see my coworker with short black hair driving. The 3-D glasses guy is in the passenger’s seat. We make eye contact. There’s a shape in the back of the car- a body? They vanish down the street.
   I look where they came from, expecting to see what they were being chased by.
   Nothing.
   A body in the back seat? Did I just participate in a murder somehow?
   I dismiss the thought as some weird eye trick.
   I check my watch and see that an hour has already passed. Job over.