Audio: Zadie Smith reads.

There is an urge to be good. To be seen to be good. To be seen. Also to be. Badness, invisibility, things as they are in reality as opposed to things as they seem, death itself—these are out of fashion. This is basically what I told Mary. I said, Mary, all these things I just mentioned are not really done anymore, and also, while we’re on the subject, that name of yours is not going to fly, nobody’s called Mary these days, it’s painful for me even to say your name—actually, could you get the hell out of here?

Mary left. Scout came by—a great improvement. Scout is so involved and active. She is on all platforms, and rarely becomes aware of anything much later than, say, the three-hundredth person. By way of comparison, the earliest I’ve ever been aware of anything was that time I was the ten-million-two-hundred-and-sixth person to see that thing. There’s evidently a considerable gulf between Scout and me. But that’s why I am always so appreciative of her coming by and giving me news. Now, according to Scout, the news was (is?) that the past is now also the present. I invited her to pull up a stool at my mid-century-modern breakfast bar and unpack that a little for me. The light that afternoon was beautiful—from my place on the eleventh floor I could see all the way to the Hudson—and it filled me with optimism and an eagerness to be schooled. But Scout was cautious. Believing me incapable of either transhistorical thought or platform mastery, she placed a New York Sports Club tote bag on the counter and pulled out two puppets—homemade, insultingly basic. The first was a recognizably female human, although she had long arms, terribly long, at least three times the length of her body, and no nose. The other was a kind of triangular spindle with a smudgy face painted on both sides, trailing thread from its corners, which I could have sworn I’d seen someplace before. Scout’s demonstration was quite detailed—I don’t want to get into it all here—but the essence of it was: consistency. You’ve got to reach far, far back, she explained, into the past (hence the arms), and you’ve got to make sure that when you reach back thusly you still understand everything back there in the exact manner in which you understand things presently. For if it should turn out that you don’t—that is, if, after some digging, someone finds evidence that present-you is fatally out of step with past-you—well, then, you’ll simply have to find some way to remake the connection, and you’ve got to make it seamless. Not double-faced or double-sided (like this triangle-spindle guy) but seamless, because otherwise you are (and were) in all kinds of trouble. Seamless. Seamless. At which point we both got hungry and paused to order a couple of poké bowls.

“Here’s a question for you re: consistency,” I said, putting my elbows on the counter. “I know this woman who’s a big fancy C.E.O., her name is Natalia Lefkowitz. She’s totally squared the past with the present, is admired by all, and is not only seen to be good but actually does good in the world for many people, providing clean water and equitable job creation and maternity leave and plenty of other inarguable benefits for women here, there, and everywhere. But yesterday she got this message.”

I showed Scout the message, which I had received on my phone from someone called Ben Trainor, apparently an ex-boyfriend of Natalia, whose son—I mean, Natalia’s son—was in my Kafka-and-Kierkegaard class a few years ago. According to this Ben Trainor, Natalia had liked to do things, in the very recent past, that were not consistent with her existence in the present. Stuff like sodomizing Ben Trainor while pretending to be his mother. Also calling him Daddy while he pretended to be holding her as a sex slave in a crawl space underneath her own East Hampton kitchen. At the time, they had both agreed to these oppositional kinks, but when they broke up it occurred to Ben that, although there was no contradiction between his own life and his intimate life (Ben worked as the general manager of a leather bar down on Rivington), there was surely a big old gap between how Natalia morally lorded it around in her professional existence and the weird shit she was into behind closed doors. In Ben’s opinion, these dark desires “went way beyond kink into problematic,” which was the reason he was texting everybody in Natalia’s address book to let them know.

“Scout,” I asked. “Do you think she should be afraid?”

“Do I think she should be afraid? That’s your question?”

“That’s my question.”

Scout packed up her puppets and left, accusing me of flippancy and misjudging the current climate. We never even got to the poké. Sometimes I think I don’t ask the right questions.

In my apartment building, as in many throughout the city, we have this new routine. We stand at our windows, all of us, from the second floor to the seventeenth, and hold aloft large signs with black arrows on them. The arrows point to other apartments. In our case, to the apartments of our colleagues at the university. The only abstainers are the few remaining Marxists (mainly in the history department, though we have a few in English and sociology, too) who like to argue that the whole process is fundamentally Stalinist. Which is like calling a child Mary. Who even uses that kind of language these days? Bendelstein, Eastman, and Waite are pointing at me. (A purely defensive move; I have done nothing wrong and am no one, and they are only trying to distract attention from themselves.) I am pointing at Eastman, in his dank little studio with the paisley carpet. Yes, since my illuminating discussion with Scout I have decided to join the majority of my colleagues in the philosophy department and point at Eastman, because who doesn’t know about Eastman? How Eastman still has a job we really don’t know. Not only does he not believe the past is the present, but he has gone further and argued that the present, in the future, will be just as crazy-looking to us, in the present, as the past is, presently, to us, right now! For Eastman, surely, it’s only a matter of time.