Danny Hillis says: "The future is shrinking all the time."

At the writers' office, they talk about pricing. They talk about what things are worth. Such as their time, in dollars in cents. Their value, translated into currency. I sit in the "library," which has one book in it. The space is dominated by faux-wood tables and the kind of chairs you see at community centers.

Children don't read anymore. Some do — rich, lucky ones. Their parents work at the university. Ten years ago, I would have already written a story about the man parked on 40th Street outside the BART station, loading his things into the trunk with a small dog bouncing on the leash in his hands. I was struck then, by the dying light around the edges of the city that peeked through the overpass horizon line, cluttered with cars. An aura seemed to glisten around the piles of earth heaped out of the way by construction workers erecting a parking structure. From the top, you can see where you're going: San Francisco, Bay Point maybe. The heaps of dirt, some covered by plastic, sat below street level at the base, but rose to the height of one-storied buildings. They shadow under the treeline, under the roofline, under the glowing neon cross of the baptist church and just an edge of the moon.

I haven't done anything with my life yet, not that story or any other. The preparatory work untied from its goals and left me casting out wildly. The pile of books by the bed grew steadily, then lost its urgency. I tacked a map of the New York subway to my wall, for exoticism's sake.