I hear that in San Francisco the term “Glassholes” is already current, but in New York I am a conquering hero. Photograph by Emiliano Granado

On a weekday afternoon in late June, a nondescript forty-year-old man in beige shorts, a blue Penguin sports shirt, and what appears to be a pair of shale-colored architect’s glasses with parts of the frame missing gets on an uptown No. 6 train at Union Square to go see his psychoanalyst, on East Eighty-eighth Street. As the man walks into the frigid subway car, he unexpectedly jerks his head up and down. A pink light comes on above the right lens. He slides his index finger against the right temple of the glasses as if flicking away a fly. The man’s right eyebrow rises and his right eye squints. He appears to be mouthing some words. A lip-reader would come away with the following message: “Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, $22.80. Horoscope: Cooler heads prevail today, helping you strike a compromise in a matter you refused to budge on last week.”

There is a tap on his shoulder. He turns around. An older man, dressed for the office in a blue blazer, says, “Are those them?”

“Yes.”

“My kid wants one.”

“If you give them to your kid, you’ll be able to see everything he sees from your computer. You could follow him around all day.”

The businessman considers this. “Are they foldable?”

The man with the glasses shakes his head. A young college student in a hoodie and Adidas track pants, carrying a Pace University folder, takes out one of his earbuds. “What does it do?”

Everyone on the train is now staring at the man with the glasses.

The man with the glasses jerks his head up and down. The soft pink light is on above his right eye. “O.K., Glass,” the man says. “Take a picture.” The pink light is replaced by a shot of the subway car, the college student with the earbuds, the older man, now immortalized. If they are paying close attention, they can see a microscopic version of themselves and the world around them displayed on the screen above the man’s right eye. “I can also take a video of you,” the man says. “O.K., Glass. Record a video.”

“That is so dope,” the college student says. It appears to the man that the student is thinking over the situation. There’s something else he wants to say. It’s as if the man with the glasses has some form of mastery of the world around him, and maybe even within himself. The man with the glasses remembers the first time he saw something he loved that wasn’t alive. An airplane on a Soviet tarmac, a Tupolev plane. With its sharply angled beak, it so resembled a bird that the child who would become the glasses-wearing man couldn’t believe it existed in the world alongside him.

The college student keeps looking at him.

“You’re lucky,” he finally says.

Outside, the summer is coming together at last and Manhattan is just on the right side of sweltering. The man jerks his head, and slides his finger against the right temple of the glasses, across the so-called touch pad. A pink rectangle above his field of vision, which looks like a twenty-five-inch television screen floating some eight feet away from him, is replaced by another message: “SVO Hav Su flight 150 225pm delayed.” The man has been Googling the N.S.A. leaker Edward Snowden on his computer, and now his glasses, which are synched to his Google Plus account, are informing him of a delay on the next Aeroflot (Su) flight to Havana out of SVO (Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport). Another flick of the index finger, and a different screen clicks into place. Now it would appear that someone named Chris Brown is defending himself on Twitter and that a water bed for cows has been developed. The man has subscribed to all the news sources currently available for his spectacles: the New York Times, CNN, and Elle (hence news of the Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, available at the flick of a finger). The man feels a tingle at the back of his ear, and a voice tells him his friend Christine Lee is ready to do a video call, also called a “hangout.” The image of Christine at her desk beams above the man’s right eye. He can see her and she, in turn, can see everything he sees through his glasses, the quiet green streetscape of East Eighty-eighth Street streaming on her computer screen. He’s going to go to the Guggenheim later and promises her that she will be able to watch the new James Turrell exhibition through his eyes.

“I see that on TV!” A Park Avenue doorman runs after the man. “What it do?”

“I’m taking a picture of you,” the man says.

“Oh, shit!”

“And now I’m recording a video of you.”

“Oh, shit!”

“Technology.”

“Yeah.”

The man with the glasses is lying on the couch at his psychoanalyst’s office. The pink rectangle floats before his eye. The man begins complaining about his glasses. In the first week, he’s supposed to wear them only one hour a day, but he can’t help himself. He’s been wearing them non-stop and now it feels like his right eye is bulging out, and also he feels nauseous and has a throbbing headache somewhere to the right of the bridge of his nose.

“It sounds like you’re suffering from motion sickness,” the psychoanalyst says.

The man discusses a dream he’s had in which his Manhattan neighborhood has been reduced to a series of canals, and he’s been given a kind of flotation device armed with Jet Skis that can skim the top of the water while everyone around him drowns.

The man stops talking about his dream. Psychoanalytic silence ensues. Boredom. The man flicks his finger against the touch pad of his glasses. The Aeroflot flight to Havana is still delayed. There are three places to eat in this neighborhood. The Viennese Café Sabarsky, perfect for a post-analytic snack of Apfelstrudel mit Schlag, is open until 9 P.M. and has a Zagat score of 22. There is too much traffic on Park Avenue and Second Avenue to take a taxi downtown to the Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The man does not remember telling his glasses about enjoying that restaurant, but somehow they know.

“What else can you remember about that dream?” the analyst says. But it’s too late. The man with the glasses is gone.

On February 23, 2013, I entered a Twitter contest run by Google to pick the first batch of Glass Explorers with the following tweet: “#ifihadglass I could dream up new ideas for the TV adaptation of my novel Super Sad True Love Story.” This was not quite as technically precise and inventive as some geek named Noah Zerkin’s entry: “#ifihadglass I’d pair it with biofeedback sensors for self monitoring and uploading telemetry with pictures triggered by spikes in the data.” But, about a month later, @googleglass responded: “@Shteyngart You’re invited to join our #glassexplorers program. Woohoo!” The privilege would cost fifteen hundred dollars plus New York State tax. (The film and television studio that had bought the rights to my novel had agreed to pay for my Glass.)