Landis Turnstile walked down Whittle Road, humming Janis Joplin in the style of Scott Joplin. A huge dirt patch to his left stretched away to the distant skyline, where they'd torn down the Flippant Housing Project, scattering poor folk to other dreary corners of the city. Luxury homes and shopping complexes replete with coffee shops and pizza kitchens claiming New York authenticity were springing up in place of the projects. Over there you could get a tan 24 hours a day, besting the sun by 12, give or take, depending on the time of year.

A group of kids had snuck through a hole in the chain link fence, and were playing king of the hill on the perfectly flat dirtscape. Their game of hide and seek had proven even more ineffectual.

The bus routes hadn't been altered since the demolition, and every bus that passed by was empty, taking nobody who didn't live there anymore to or from a nowhere that didn't even exist. Sometimes the nuns from the nearby convent rode the bus, but the liquor store was within walking distance.

Landis approached an area of fresh construction. The sign out front read Future Home of Starbuck's New York Style Brick Oven Pizzeria. A dark figure leaned against the fence, talking to one of the construction workers (a mason, judging by the trowel held loosely in his hand) inside the fence. Seeing the two worlds interact, city and dirt, Landis was struck by their difference, and by their inevitable convergence. The mason was sitting on the beginnings of the retaining wall he was constructing, and wore a NY Rangers baseball cap and blue-tinted Agent Smith sunglasses pushed to the tip of his nose like reading glasses.

The dark figure turned, wisps of black mist eddying with the motion. “Landis!” it called out.

“Death! How the hell are ya'?”

“Well enough. It's been a slow week, but I'm salaried. I'd like you to meet my friend Rommel Busker.”

“Landis Turnstile…good to meet you.”

Rommel looked over the top of his sunglasses, and Landis felt himself sucked into that familiar place: someone else's life. If you see enough sad, miserable little things and take them as a whole there's nothing sad about it. Maybe by virtue of their littleness everything little has to be sad, and only in places with enough little things put together can be found something other than sadness. There was no quantity or combination able to reach happy.

The only word Landis could describe Rommel with was substantive.

Landis reminded Rommel of someone he'd met before, but he'd met too many people.

“I'm sick of this brick-laying shit. Let's get a drink.” Rommel dropped his trowel, picked up a loose brick, and slung it through the front window of the almost finished pizzeria. Looters rose out of the surrounding dirt, quite like zombies, and stole the stove, TVs by the bar, hostess stand (with menus still on the shelf), unopened cases of beer, utensils, straws, tap handles, espresso machine and an 18-volt drill carelessly left behind by one of the contractors. Without the charger, the drill would be useless after just minutes of use.

“You know any Joplin?” asked Rommel as he leaped over the 8-foot fence from a standing position. Death handed him a pitch-black towel to wipe the sweat off, but Rommel wasn't sweating.

“Which one?” asked Landis.

“Both,” said Rommel.

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Next: Ding, went the seatbelt light