Level 45 Degrees (p. II)

Walls were merely suggestive. Relics of things that once were walls, but had been transformed into the remnants of buildings. Flattened out and deconstructed into the mode of their efforts, absorbed into its structure, ashen gray sameness. Through the skeleton of the bank lobby, I could see the elderly Cuban woman selling guava and cheese rolls, and half warm coffee, her hair netted. A line of shoppers pretending to see walls. Beyond that there was the laundromat, its machines appearing ten thousand years old, and beyond that makeshift shelves being stocked with dented cans of peas and tuna fish by a group of school children.