My eyes landed on the taxi license affixed to the glass: a photograph, poor in quality, of a dark-skinned man against a white background. Beneath the photo, the driver’s name. Clive Richardson.

Could it be? I wanted to do something, say something, but my mind was blank. The taxi idled at the curb. My door was already open, propped ajar by my foot.

What I did next was more instinct than intention. As I climbed out of the taxi, I found myself slipping my phone beneath the driver’s seat and out of view. Then I slammed the door behind me. Within seconds, the taxi rejoined the yellow sea speeding uptown.

We know what to do with death when it’s close to us. Your mom dies, or an old friend, and you grieve. Maybe you’re not good at it, maybe the death fucks you up, but it’s supposed to be hard, it’s supposed to fuck you up. We know what to do with death when it’s far-removed from us, too. A sports star or a celebrity chef dies and you read the obit. You start off your lunch meeting by saying, “Did you hear about…?” You read the hot-take remembrances on social media for a day or two. You move on. But we don’t know what to do with the deaths of people we knew just a little.

I didn’t even know Alison Thomas’s name was Alison Thomas until she went missing. Before then, can I say this? She was the girl my wife kept catching me checking out all week. She was the reason I wanted to dish out a killer serve in the volleyball game, to impress her and to make up for the embarrassment of the stupid fucking swim trunks I was wearing with the pink dolphins on them. She was the reason my wife said this supremely condescending “Almost, honey!” when the ball landed in the net instead. In the mornings, while my wife chipped away at herself in the fitness center, I took these long, ridiculously hot showers and undressed that blithe teenage body in my mind.

I am not some pervert. We see nice bodies, young bodies, we enjoy them. We all do this, okay? It is allowed. But what the hell do you do when the girl you’ve been jacking off to every morning for a week turns up dead?

The night my wife told me she was filing for divorce, she said, “You know when I knew you were a block of ice right down to your soul? When that girl was killed and you never said a word about it. Every time I tried to get you to talk about it, every time I brought her up, because I was reeling, I was just devastated, you shut me down.”

I wonder sometimes if we’d still be married if Alison Thomas hadn’t been murdered. Don’t get me wrong, our love was hardening into a battle of wills long before then. But that trip drove a wedge between us that never went away. I couldn’t give my wife the satisfaction of knowing the number that girl’s death did on me. I couldn’t stand to hear her crying her self-serving dramatic tears over a girl who, let’s be real, she’d viewed as nothing but competition. I would listen to my wife crying, and know that she was waiting for me to wrap my arms around her from behind and deliver some sort of Emotionally Appropriate Response, and when I tried to recall what I’d loved about her and why, in our early years together, I’d felt like the luckiest fucker on earth, I couldn’t come up with anything at all.

ISLANDS

PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LEAVING things behind. Umbrellas. Wallets. Coats. Shopping bags filled with souvenirs: I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirts, snow globes in which replicas of the Statue of Liberty or the Freedom Tower stand suspended in perpetual winter. Sometimes the objects are more uncommon, hinting at the lives of the strangers who have forgotten them. A bouquet of sunflowers, a note attached with twine: Evelyn, forgive me. A Senegalese driver at the garage once had a customer jump out at a red light, abandoning a tank that held a lime-green snake. Years ago, when he was new to this job and the job itself was so much more dangerous than it is now, he found a switchblade wedged between the seats at the end of his shift. He still has it, in the plastic bureau where he keeps his belongings, along with a jumble of other objects acquired over the years. A child’s pink plastic watch. A ring with a translucent white gemstone, which flickers with rainbow flecks when held up to the light. A camera with a finished roll of film inside.

You were supposed to turn these things in at the garage, but it was no secret that Larry and his numbskull son with the gold chains around his pimply neck just kept the items for themselves or sold them. What he’s doing is stealing, too, he supposes, but it doesn’t feel wrong. Just the opposite—he is rescuing these things from the careless people who have forgotten them. Though on some nights, after a few beers or a blunt ashed into a Coke can, he wonders if this notion of the righteousness of his thefts is just a bullshit justification. Lately, it seems to him that he keeps these objects as compensation, pitifully insufficient, for his own lost things.

Today he returns home from his shift with an iPhone, the latest model, in a light-gray case, not something he can keep. Anytime now the phone will ring and he will speak to the person to whom it belongs. Maybe it will be the banker he picked up in midtown, who shouted into his phone the whole drive to La Guardia. Or perhaps it will be the Park Avenue mother in those tight black leggings with SOUL in big letters down the thigh, with the little boy in the blazer and the little girl in the blue jumper; he’d dropped the girl at Brearley, the boy at St. Bernard’s, the mother in front of a cycling studio on Eighty-third. Or it will be a Russian tourist he drove to Chanel, or a sixteen-year-old girl he picked up in Dumbo who probably has no clue how much her phone costs, or a chef bound for Williamsburg, a tattoo of a pig’s butchery cuts on his own fleshy hock. And when he confirms that, yes, they left their phone in the taxi and he has it, has held on to it for safekeeping, they will tell him how grateful they are, and that old feeling will come over him, a feeling that is not so much annoyance or anger as dispassion: You are invisible to them, you are the back of a head, and then suddenly you are indispensable. Suddenly they are, like, super-appreciative. Suddenly you are a lifesaver, boss. When he meets whoever it is this time to return the phone, and they try to hand him five bucks, or fifty (how variable, their sense of the value of what he has done for them), he will shake his head and politely refuse, as if it is pleasure enough just to be of service to them. His refusal will trigger a shift in the way they look at him, and he will know that they are thinking that he is a deeply good person. Probably they will tell this story: the taxi driver who returned their phone and wouldn’t even accept a reward, though surely he could use the money. When they look at him in this approving way, he will simultaneously feel so good and so disgusted with himself for feeling good, for wanting that look, for chasing it, for giving one shit what they think, that he’ll regret not taking the money in the first place. Because they’re not wrong—he could use it.

It is early autumn, the days still mild, the trees just beginning to turn. But already he can detect faint signs of what is to come. Soon dead leaves will cover the sidewalks, revived for brief moments by swells of wind. At night the sky will turn blue-black as the open ocean, with that same tumbling depth and pitiless beauty. Then the cold will come, and with it the snow, and he will spend his shifts grinding through ice and slush, getting slammed by wakes of snow cast off by passing plows, maneuvering through the city in search of some sorry bastard in ruined wing tips trying to make it to Grand Central before the tracks ice over and the trains north shut down.

From the kitchen comes the click, click, click of a burner failing to ignite—his roommate Les reheating takeout on the stove. Through the thin wall that separates his bedroom from the next one, he hears Leon making his nightly call to his wife. Cecil has taken up residence in their small common area, the television blaring one of the reality shows the rest of them can’t stand but Cecil loves, or at least seems to require, for he never exactly appears to be enjoying himself as he watches; rather, the shows seem to be a way of making time pass without feeling the granularity of each moment.