I LOOK AT THE FLOOR-TO-CEILING windows of my office and see nothing but my own reflection in the glass. It is already dark outside when I leave my job on Paulista, an avenue lined with financial institutions and the offices of foreign companies. I drive down Consolation Street to meet friends for dinner as well as Teresa, my lover of seven years.

It is summer, and the day has been hot and humid, but when I park my car on a street corner, a cool breeze sways the leaves of a lonely tree, as if a giant fan had been placed at the mouth of the tunnel across the street to blow cold air toward the Round Bar and Restaurant. Familiar sounds fill the evening: horns blow, brakes squeal, and engines hum under the chatting of pedestrians. A succession of buses shake on their way up and down the street, passengers hanging from the doors by scrawny limbs. The wind presses the fabric of their clothes against their skins, revealing forms – buttocks, the curve of a back, and the taut muscles of a shoulder. People rush by on their way home, to evening classes, or to graveyard shifts. The city cannot afford to sleep, so the end of the day merely signals shift changes.

When I arrive at the reserved table by the large glass window, most of my friends are already seated, sipping cold wine, beer or frosty cocktails. We are a jovial group of elegant, professional women in pantsuits, expensive leather shoes, and Apple Watches purchased on shopping trips in Miami. Teresa offers me her cheek with the tedium that clings to longtime relationships like mold on the damp walls of this tropical city. She introduces me to her co-worker, Monica. During our trip to Paris, the subject of Monica being family had come up often. Teresa was enthusiastic because now, not only was there another female lawyer in the office, but possibly a lesbian. Between our visits to museums and stops at coffee shops, Teresa bought Monica gifts at Rue de Rennes. She even sent her a postcard – such an unconventional gesture these days, that I couldn’t tell whether Teresa was being nostalgic, the way she is when she vehemently defends her preference for her Leica over her phone to take pictures, or if she was assigning special status to her officemate. They work at a law firm listed in the U.S. Consulate’s resource guide for American businesses looking to invest here. It’s quite profitable to have the attention of Americans, and combined with my income at the advertisement agency handling accounts for companies such as Coca Cola, Alcoa, the government and now, Mercedes-Benz, Teresa and I can afford a very comfortable life.

Monica is a nervous petite, the kind you think forgets to eat. She offers me her hand when Teresa introduces us, but her grip is limp; the grip of someone who is reluctant to expand her social circle. I refuse to squeeze her hand. Our contact is gelatinous, unwilling, and I feel an immediate hostility toward her.

“Did you bring the pictures from our trip to Paris, dear?” Teresa asks.

A clamour of expectations rises around the table. I don’t bother to dig into my purse, remembering now that I left them in the car. Instead, I search for my wallet, because in Brazil you must always carry your I.D. card; I also grab the car keys. I drop my purse on the chair next to Teresa.

“I will be right back,” I announce, turning on my heels.

As I leave, other friends are coming in, chairs are dragged to accommodate more people, and a table is added to those already lined up.

I had found a parking space less than a block away, which was lucky. The neighbourhood has a bad reputation, not because of crime, but rather because of the people who hang around, gay people and prostitutes of both sexes. Upper class intellectuals are drawn to this place because poverty is admirable when it isn’t your own, I suppose. I walk down the street past the Hilton Hotel, which has seen better days. The porter in his red jacket nods at me and wishes me a good evening. My car, a grey four-door Toyota sedan that cost me eighty thousand dollars thanks to import tariffs and a multitude of tax levies, is the last one on the block. I consider moving it to the parking lot down the block, when I see that cars turning the corner come pretty close to hitting it. As I open the door I feel the hard tubular object against my back.

“Get in the car or I will shoot you,” a male voice says.

As I comply, he gets in the back seat. In the rearview mirror, I see part of his forehead and the unmistakable flat top of his Northeastern skull.

“Don’t look at me,” he says. “Just drive up Consolation Street.”

The accent is also unmistakable. People from the Northeast speak in up-and-down tones, like scribbles on an electroencephalogram chart.

I have trouble getting the car into gear. I’ve spent ten days driving an automatic in France and I have to remind myself to use both feet. I can’t rest my left foot; it must do the hard work. The pressure on the clutch must be firm, decisive.

As I pass the restaurant, I see the waiter at my friends’ table in his starched shirt, scribbling on his notepad. Teresa has her arm stretched over the empty chair next to her, as if to make sure no one takes it while I’m gone. This is the scene I belong to, and my being in the car with a gun to my back is only a temporary anomaly. Seeing them gives me a sense of connection, and as I advance through the green light leaving them behind, I do not feel fear.

Consolation Street crawls up a hill. Marathon runners from all over the world spend their New Year’s Eve going up this incline, so it surprises me how much effort it takes cars to drive up. I could go faster but there is traffic and I hate weaving in and out of it. I drive up slowly and steadily; every so often a red light forces me to stop. Despite the noise outside, this situation makes me feel as if we are in a bubble, isolated from the world. It is very quiet inside the car and I can hear his nervous breathing. On the news, people credit keeping their cool with helping them survive carjacking in this city, so I am determined to follow the script. I rely on the strength I have built dealing with pushy businessmen to remain calm and collected on the surface even though my insides are starting to twirl.

I don’t think he’s wearing a seatbelt. I could crash into a lamppost and he would be ejected. I saw that in a movie. What if my own seatbelt fails? What if he isn’t ejected from the car? What if he realizes I did it on purpose and decides to shoot me? I think the idea foolish, and abandon it.

Though I live in a large metropolis where crime is a part of life, it has always seemed part of someone else’s life. Daily tabloids held by clothes pins on thin nylon ropes tied to the side of aluminum newsstands tell stories of murders, kidnappings, rapes. When I am forced to look at them while I wait for a light to change, I always feel sorry for those miserable souls whose lives land them in the wrong place at the wrong time. Except for a few executives, violent crime seems to touch the lives of those who sleep under the freeway overpasses, those who venture into bad neighbourhoods after dark, or those who lack common sense when choosing their company.

Through skyscraper windows, I see the glare of televisions. I see people talking on the phone, crossing rooms in apartments where shades are pulled up and windows are open.

At a stop light I look to my right, and a cabbie eyes me with curiosity. He must wonder why my passenger is sitting behind me. I ponder if there is a signal I could send the driver, but I don’t fraternize with people like him; the idea feels strange, like I’m trying to fit in a world that is alien to me.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” he says.

I turn away from the cabbie. Northeastern people are thought to be docile, but it may not apply to the one sitting behind me. Thousands of them live in this town, and many more arrive every day looking to strike it rich, but most do the dirty work, the hard work. They are the people who show up when your toilet backs up or when a building gets a roach infestation. My hands on the steering wheel are stiff. I miss the gears when I don’t push on the clutch far enough and the car grinds.

We drive by the stretch of the street that goes along the city’s oldest cemetery. The block is half a mile long; at this hour, you know it’s coming because of the expanse of darkened real estate in a city that sparkles like a Christmas tree. When lights shine on it, marble angels and crosses rise above the graves hidden behind the six-foot wall.

“My grandfather is from the Northeast,” I say.

I am not sure he heard me, but I realize it’s better if he didn’t. I shouldn’t be telling him I have his number. Besides, it is a lie, and if he asks questions, I won’t know what to answer.

“Stay on Consolation,” he says.

I change lanes to the left to avoid the right fork where most of the traffic is headed. At the end of the street, the pavement dips underground. In the tunnel, I feel exposed in the neon lights. The rumble of traffic is chaotic: a bus changes lanes without signaling and a motorist honks, gestures obscenities, and cuts me off to avoid a collision. Graffiti covers the tunnel walls. OsGemeos. The Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., exhibited their work on an entire floor for an entire year. So, now it’s officially art. The city won’t dare paint them over. The people in the pictures have big heads flattened at the top, big starving eyes. Aliens in this city.

The traffic spreads in different directions, and I welcome the return to the surface as I take the artery to the right. The asphalt widens, lanes multiply, cars seem to come from nowhere and merge with the flow. Traffic slows for a moment to adjust to the influx of vehicles then picks up again on the stretch where the road loses its curve, straightens up, and heads to residential neighbourhoods with single family homes. Motorcycles swarm around the cars like ants. I see the blur of street lights racing above us, hanging from posts curved like giant metallic canes. The tires of a bus seem to spin backward when it slows down at a stop, and in the rearview mirror I see the words of its destination lit on its forehead.

Time passes; maybe a half-hour or forty-five minutes, and I wonder if I should lose hope. The more time passes the more trouble one is in. I read about that somewhere. I should be worried, I suppose, but the way he sits there quietly somehow has a calming effect on me. Maybe it is because I am driving from one large avenue to another. On occasion, he picks the street I am to follow, but most of the time I choose where to go. Following the main flow of traffic gives me the illusion that I am in control, if not of my destiny, at least of my destination.

I wonder if my friends will call the police or assume I decided to go home. I imagine them leaving me protesting messages on my home answering machine, after trying my cell, which will ring in the purse on the chair next to Teresa.

I hear him strike a match, and the car is filled with pot smoke.

“Do you mind giving me a few drags?” I ask when we stop at a light.

He smokes in silence.

“It will help me relax,” I say. The light goes green and I lurch forward, giving up.

This is the longest time I have spent with a Northeasterner. These people always strike me as lonely; the way they walk on the streets, lingering and staring into shop windows, killing time. They always respond with a bewildered look when you lock eyes with them, as if you just reminded them that they exist. It makes me feel blessed, for a moment, to have a lover, and I think of her, worried sick back there at the Round Bar and Restaurant. It makes me feel blessed that I have friends, people who worry about me. It makes me feel worthy. If I were to disappear it would have an impact on people’s lives, I am sure.

What about him? Does he have anyone back there in the Northeast, where, for migrants like him it’s so hard to return? They sell everything to get here, then they never make enough to go back to their dry land, with cracks in the scorched dirt; a place no one thinks worth exploring or exploiting any longer.

“Get onto the Ring Road,” he says, when I come to a fork.

The peculiar situation I am in seems to come into focus. The whirling in my guts returns and I realize it is caused by the direction of the road he’s chosen. Had I not taken the Ring Road, I would have stayed in the core of the city, with its populated neighbourhoods and sleepless streets. The road I am forced onto, however, runs along the Tietê River with its dead waters where only anaerobic bacteria live. The river is a black stretch to the left of us and on the right the walls of warehouses, factories and printing plants rise from the edge of the narrow sidewalk or past large parking lots.

Suddenly we are alone in the night. I feel a disturbance prickling my skull, and my pulse is unsteady. I am alone with him in a deserted neighbourhood where bodies are often found.

“Here,” he says. “Don’t turn around, though.”

He thrusts his hand near my cheek, and the trickle of smoke rises before my eyes.

I take the joint. It is rolled tight with the skill of the habitual smoker, and it is wet when I bring it to my lips. I try to get smoke into my lungs holding it without too much pressure where his lips had been. I smoke greedily, happily, but the pot doesn’t immediately relax me. I am holding the wheel with one hand, and with the other I hold the joint and try to shift to a lower gear when I come behind a truck loaded with steel rods. The manoeuvre is difficult and the engine almost stalls. I let go of the accelerator, shift, and the engine coughs and catches, rubbing on my nerves. I pass the joint back to him. I feel the rough tips of his fingers when we touch.

We pass a stretch of the river where yellow Caterpillar machines move under the large spotlights of a construction site. They are digging into the thick dark water, lifting suspicious-looking mud and piling it on the riverbank. A faint stench comes through the air vents and I close them, but it is too late – the air inside has turned foul.

“Turn on the radio.”

I comply, and Mozart’s Requiem fills the car, a fitting score to the scene we are in, but he isn’t amused. “Who listens to this kind of shit?” he says.

I scan for another radio station, find a folk song from his corner of the world, with the cacophony of an accordion and a tambourine. It irritates me like nails on a blackboard; it makes my skin crawl.

“I didn’t tell you to change the station.”

“You didn’t like the other one,” I say.

“That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to change it.”

I turn the dial back to Mozart.

“Eager to please, aren’t you?” he asks.

I go stiff. His tone is dry, short, his syllables crowding each other. People from where he comes from are supposed to speak as if the vowels would never end, stretching them lazily. Maybe I misjudged his origins. If I erred in my guess, it is possible I miscalculated everything about him. Maybe I’m wrong about this feeling that he is just sightseeing, an alien in this city with its complicated web of streets and avenues. Perhaps there is more to his intentions, but instead of fear, I grow angry. Not a good thing when one is in the situation I’m in, at the mercy of unpredictability.

I want to tell him, “Don’t give me orders, you uneducated bastard.” I should get off at the next exit and return to town. See if he finds the guts to stop me. I feel like I have to do something soon because the skyscrapers in my rearview mirror are shrinking, the city lights fading.

“Turn off the radio,” he says.

I do and the music is replaced by the rush of wind, as he opens his window. He passes me a newly rolled joint. The city lights have given way to darkness. I can see stars now. I spot the Seven Sisters, scan the skies for the Southern Cross and find it.

I keep the joint as long as I want and take as many drags as I can. I move to the right lane behind an eighteen-wheeler carrying gasoline, maintaining a steady speed. The smoking and the constancy of the traffic give me the illusion that the yellow shell on the back of the tanker in front of me is going to lead me somewhere sunny. I see white, sandy beaches. I think of coconut water sucked from a straw out of its green shell, its cool sweetness, and I feel calm.

The blare of a horn startles me and my blood goes cold. I grip the steering wheel and see how much time has passed. Twenty-eight minutes. I remember the clock was on 21:11 when I last looked at it; now 21:39, then the 39 changes to 40, and I glance at the road signs. I have followed the loop of the road, over the river and into a spaghetti bowl of overpasses, and as I go around the final curve, the city lies ahead in its lit splendour; skyscrapers after skyscrapers, like domino tiles placed on a tray all around one another. It occurs to me that, strangely in a city this big, there are few streets that dead-end.

A feeling of exhilaration overwhelms me the way it always does when I see these lights flickering as far as the eye can see. I love the extent of this city. I love the fact that, in this place often accused of having a cold, anonymous, and lonely core, I have connections to my lover and to my friends. It’s a much more powerful feeling, I imagine, having connections in a megalopolis of twenty million people than in a little cow town.

He says nothing during the next half hour while the city grows around us, swallows us, and spits us onto the lengthy overpass that rises along the third or fourth floors of buildings. The lives of people rush past. Living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, terraces with flower pots and clotheslines. The traffic behind me forces me to speed up, and the apartments become a quick blur. The overpass ends in a smooth slide. The Round Bar and Restaurant is only a couple of blocks to the left, but I have followed the traffic away from it, across Consolation Street into a tunnel.

“I’m running out of gas,” I say.

“Get into the next station you find,” he says and his accent is clear. There is no doubt where he comes from; he just tries hard to hide it when he speaks.

Out of the tunnel, a few blocks away, I see the green-and-yellow glow of the Brazilian Petroleum logo and enter the station, parking by the full-service pump. I watch the attendant lift the nozzle from its cradle and bring it to the car. He sees the passenger in the back, is startled, and looks over at me, trying to catch my eye in the rearview mirror. He is puzzled and I stare at him, wondering if he will see in my eyes that the guy behind me is not my buddy and is not there with my consent. But he seems to soon forget whatever puzzled him. He is from the Northeast too, and I shrug as if this fact is enough to excuse his inability to connect the dots. As if sheer stupidity rode on the spikes of his crew cut.

I have always been irritated by these people, I realize. Their way of approaching life at a slug pace drives me crazy. They walk slowly, they talk slowly, their reactions are delayed. They aren’t built to live in a place like this; their slow pace gets in the way of everything and everyone. They come to this town for a better life, and it is the futility of their hope that rubs me wrong. I want to tell them – I want to tell him – “Can’t you see it? There is nothing for you here. It’s a dead end.” I wish they would stop dragging their feet on this city’s sidewalks. I wish they would speed up, get away, and get moving. They walk so slowly you’d think they were afraid of passing by their next best friend or their other half if they were to rush by people. I want to tell them, “There is no company for you here. Your other half is back in the dusty town you left. Go back before she leaves too.”

One of my friends sits on the city council. She had a plan to bus these people back to where they came from. It was a good plan, but expensive. It was trimmed down to busing them 100 miles away. It’s far enough that they won’t come back. I think of her at the Round Bar and Restaurant. She will worry about me even before Teresa does because her lover was stabbed to death in an armed robbery.

I watch Mr. Flathead put the nozzle back into the cradle and I see his wedding ring. I’ll be damned! He replaces the cap in slow motion. I am so irritated that I have to fight an impulse to take off at full speed and not pay for the gas. I retrieve my wallet and give him the money when he finally shows up at my window. I refuse to give him a tip when he gives me change. He sucks on a toothpick and waits, but I put the change back in my wallet, looking at him belligerently. If he doesn’t move, I swear, I will just drive over his feet. He hears the engine and backs up, moving with an infuriating lethargy.

Slowly, my irritation is replaced by a sense of superiority. This is my city. I am back in a neighbourhood I am familiar with. The sidewalks are filled with male prostitutes, drag queens, and young hip gay men. If I had a choice between going home and returning to the bar, I would go home instead. I would pour myself a glass of red wine and sip it on the terrace, watching the lights spread out below my penthouse and mapping my connections to this city. To the left of my terrace, there is the Citibank building. During the day it is a common building with walls made of greyish cement, with green panels and glass windows, but during the night it has a glorious glow. Marina works there. She’s a spunky grey-haired woman who went to Harvard Business School.

My friend Eva is the architect in charge of a narrow building under construction in the south corner of my vision, in a space I didn’t think big enough to park more than a few minivans, but there it stands; a tall, narrow cement box wrapped in protective construction cloth to shield passersby from falling debris. During the day, Northeastern men work hanging on ropes and makeshift wood planks like clowns on a trapeze.

I am hungry. This little adventure has forced me to skip dinner. I’m also bored. When will the driving around end? My life isn’t this static; I have many friends. I have a job in the business district of one of the world’s top-ten largest economies, marketing products that no one needs but everyone buys. I am a good marketer, I convince people to buy things, to drink Coca Cola, to buy tickets to Europe on specific airlines, to drive specific cars, to eat double cheeseburgers. All I need is to start talking to him.

“Are you from the Northeast?” I ask directly, since he has ignored my reference to my fictitious Northeastern grandfather hours earlier.

He doesn’t answer, but I am not discouraged. I can’t think of anything we might have in common, but I want to establish a connection with him. I think there lies the hope that all of this will not end in a tragedy. I scan my mind for something to say, but he is the one who speaks next.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“I am all out,” I say. I don’t want to admit I don’t smoke. Rich people used to smoke; now the team at my ad agency working with the Philip Morris account, targets the poor instead.

“Stop at the corner of São João and Aurora. There is a tobacco shop there.”

We aren’t far from it and at the stoplight I try to think which route to take. When the light goes green, I let go of the clutch and the car hums forward. The sidewalks on São João are littered with Northeastern women standing against the walls in scanty clothes and exaggerated make-up. Northeastern men check them out, negotiate. I see the tobacco shop he has mentioned on the corner, a vertical Marlboro sign along the length of the double door to attract pedestrians going by. I double-park in front of it.

“I will be back,” he says. He walks between two parked cars. I don’t see his face then, only the back of his head. His hair comes down around the collar of his green T-shirt. He wears grey sweat pants and tennis shoes. Someone honks behind me and I wave them around. The driver gives me the finger as he goes by, and I smile at him. My life seems to be in a fragile balance, and I don’t want to call more anger upon myself. I keep my eyes on the entry of the tobacco shop, waiting for the man in the green T-shirt to come back, but I don’t see him.

Turning right on Aurora, and going toward Rio Branco would have taken me down to the valley in less than half a mile, to the myriad of avenues away from São João. Even in a car he wouldn’t catch me, let alone on foot. This is the city I was born and grew up in.

A car has now double-parked in front of me. I can’t move forward. I check my rearview mirror, put on my signal and get ready to change lanes, but the onslaught of traffic freed by a green light somewhere behind me has me stuck.

I pick up my car keys and get out of the car. Let it get towed. I will recover it some other time. On the sidewalk, the pressing flesh of hundreds of flatheads sends me into a panic. For the first time in the evening I’m really scared, my heart scraping against my ribcage, my hands sweating. I’m hyperventilating like a fish whose aquarium broke on the asphalt. There are so many of them, and they look at me trying to figure out what I’m doing here. I pass a girl leaning against the wall and peeling an orange. She throws the rind at my face and curses, “Get out of my territory, bitch!”

They have always been here, lurking like cats, waiting for the right moment to pounce and claw the likes of me. In a bar with its accordion door rolled up three-quarters of the way, there is gyro meat turning on a spit, but it doesn’t smell like meat; it’s more like the smell of the scorched sponge when my maid is cleaning the stove and the burner is still hot.

I never get to the corner. The pedestrian light across the street has turned green, and the mass of flatheads cross against me, pushing me back toward the tobacco shop and I’m afraid I might start screaming.

My eyes stinging from the orange peel, I turn and run to the car, as though the mob were gearing up to catch and lynch me.

In the car, still stuck behind the other double-parked car, I grip the steering wheel and try to slow down my breathing. I wipe my eyes with a tissue. In the midst of patrons coming out of the tobacco shop, I see the guy in the green shirt, lighting a cigarette. I notice then how lonely he is; there is something in the way he carries himself, slouched and defeated. He holds the lighter cupped in his hand against the wind, he sucks in smoke and then lets it go; a puff of smoke flashes quickly in front of him and vanishes because the breeze has picked up.

He sees me and seems surprised. I check my face in the rearview mirror; sweat has dampened my hair at the temples, and there is an orange stain on my forehead. He hesitates before coming back toward the car. I see his hollow cheeks in desperate need of a shave. When he is only a foot away I recognize the bulge under his shirt as his gun. I am almost relieved. He has the means to protect me here.

This time, he gets in the passenger seat. His familiarity in taking the front seat unsettles me. I see the length of his dark arm. It is short, and the biceps are swollen. Brick breaker, I think.

I wipe my forehead with my hand then dry it on my pants. He offers me a cigarette, but I don’t take it. I no longer feel a need to show him we have something in common. I don’t smoke. I am trying to understand what made me sit there and wait for him as if I were a fly on a paper trap.

A driver honks behind me and I turn on the car and join the flow of traffic. I’m relieved to see that the direction I’m facing is bound to take us by the place I had parked earlier, the spot where he approached me. Maybe when I drive by we will start this evening all over again, up Consolation Street, along the darkened stretch of the cemetery where many of his people must be climbing the gate now, so that they have a place to sleep.

I’m resigned now, driving with this stranger, because away from the neighbourhood filled with his people, I feel safer. My lot isn’t, after all, worse than his. I have connections in this town. Who is worrying about him right at this moment, really? If he had anyone he wouldn’t be riding around endlessly. I, on the other hand, have friends worrying about me. I run through all the possibilities in my head of everything they might have done because I was not there. I imagine how they delayed ordering food, how they tried to control the waiter’s impatience by ordering expensive drinks. I can imagine them flipping the pages of the menus as if it was their inability to make up their minds about dinner that held them up.

He taps his fingers on the dashboard, but doesn’t tell me where to go. I take off toward Consolation, toward where it all started. By now, my friends must have abandoned their drinks, and called the cops. I expect to drive into a scene where they are huddling together on the sidewalk, consoling each other. The image comforts me. I expect the emergency lights of police cruisers turning around and around in respectful silence, while cops take statements from the porter at the Hilton and the boy who walks up and down the street watching over parked cars in hopes of being tipped. Commotion. That’s what I expect to find at the scene of the crime. I am expecting Teresa to be on a stretcher, paramedics sedating her.

I drive by the Round Bar and Restaurant as if in slow motion. Through the glass, I see my friends on the large table for eleven. They seem at ease, chatting and laughing. On the table, there are empty serving dishes, leftover dessert, demitasse cups with the after-dinner coffee.

Teresa is facing the glass window so I see her very clearly. Her lips are smiling. She leans toward the woman on her right, the way she leans toward me when she wants to tell me secrets in public places. The target of her attention is Monica, her new co-worker. Monica says something, and Teresa laughs. She runs her fingers along her temples, under her hair, and pulls a lock behind her ears. Teresa’s gesture feels to me like an agreement to an indecent proposal, like she’s removing obstacles.

“You can drop me here,” he says. “No need to wait for me this time.”

I look over at him, and though I am driving slowly I don’t stop. The scene in the bar is left behind.

“Or we can keep going,” he shrugs. “The night is young.”

It has started to drizzle. The acid rain comes at this hour of the evening. The heat rising off the pavement has finally met the cool evening clouds somewhere up there, beyond the tops of the skyscrapers.

“Where to?” I ask.

“You are the driver,” he says.

I step on the accelerator. The car starts up Consolation Street, along the darkened cemetery. On the left, past the street divider and the incoming lanes of traffic, through the windows of single-occupancy rooms, I see people going about their lives. A woman hangs underwear on a line stretched along her mini balcony. There is so much solitude in this metropolis, I realize. There is so much loneliness in the world.

“I am Wellington,” he says.

It’s a Northeastern habit to give your kids names that sound foreign with bad spelling. I have seen Ueislei for Wesley, Richermisson for God knows what. His must be Uelinguiton. Two hours ago, I would have laughed at the name. Now I don’t. It is not that I am trying to be polite, I’ve merely lost the desire to mock him. I realize I am curious about him. I am surprised that he has a name that connects him to other people. It connects him, at least, to the people who named him. Connections erase the disposability of people.

“And who are you?” he asks.

I shrug and keep driving.

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