He watched a coast guard dinghy speed past, slapping the choppy water. While he thought about other things, he repeated to himself how silly it was to worry about electricity or when New York would erupt into riots, at least in the way he was doing it. It just made him uneasy that billions of people just flicked the lightswitch on and thought nothing more of it. Derek had a hard time, sometimes, living a life connected to so many wires and pipes. An acre of forest was more complicated and entwined than all the arteries of New York, but though it lined up in a way that Derek could handle without thinking too hard, he didn’t fool himself that a world without the present hand of man would be easy either. It surprised him much more than a general indifference to widespread electricity that so few people seemed to understand how far a modern human mind was from anything that had existed anywhere else that the “modern human mind” knew to exist. He knew how dramatic that sounded and that he didn’t provide a measure of what a modern human mind was, exactly, but even he could see that those details didn’t matter. In proportion to itself, it was true, and to Derek that required an entirely different way of behaving than what actually went on around him. Civilization wasn’t an easy bargain, so he didn’t expect things to go the way they should. He didn’t even believe in a plan that could be drawn up beforehand, but something clearly seemed to be wrong. He wasn’t the most accurate social thermometer with his headaches and visions and crossed wires, but he was certainly not the first to notice something out of balance. All you had to do was watch witnesses to an accident anywhere in Manhattan. Most of them were so used to process and a motorized world that they stood doing nothing for maybe the only time during the day but they could not leave the scene. It was more than voyeurism. Gawkers’ faces always betrayed an ingrained empathy that could not be forgotten, though they usually had no idea what to do with it when it surfaced.    He’d come to the marina by the mall with the huge glass atrium and thought as he walked by the rows of people eating and talking at all the tables under the trees along the walkway.    Life was incredible and ridiculous and it didn’t quite work out, thought even more so, so you wrote books. That much was obvious. The really difficult thing that joined the two rushing currents in his head as he walked along the western edge of Manhattan was the mix of confusion and clarity that remained with him from saddling Claire with an adolescent philosophy full of shortcuts and illusions of linear action from living in the polluted soup of ideas at the end of the twentieth century while she retained an unexamined but active understanding of vital things. It was all so brain vs. heart, and Derek’s internal critic frowned over it, but it seemed to work.    Matthew always brought Derek and his other occasional staff gifts after his buying trips to Europe. The first gift he gave Derek was a fat paperback collection of first-hand accounts of historic events covering most of recorded history. Matthew must have bought it without opening it, because history turned out to be a long series of massacres and genocides that baffled, sickened, and nearly destroyed whoever was left to write about it. But maybe Matthew already knew that. Derek still could not finish the book, but he wouldn’t have been able to start it when he was younger. He had not understood much more since then about why some people killed other people and why some people danced to electronic music and why others got sick at either idea or why someone would build a supermarket and why other people could walk into one without freaking out. New York had renewed the juvenile indignation he’d felt watching people live peaceful lives doing trivial things when others didn’t have the choice, and it had made him envious again of those people by amplifing the aural signals that surrounded his life until he was almost crushed by them like he had almost been crushed by them when he was younger. He had learned a good deal more about how people behaved before he moved to New York, and many of the hows stacked up to become whys. He did at least remember that it was wicked to despise ordinary people for being ordinary. Though the incomplete desires and tolerences that filled their prosperous lives and gave them obscene leisure were part of the same root that peopled the mobs of fascist regimes and looting riots with ordinary citizens, that obscene leisure and prosperity was the practical antithesis of war and what all soldiers in the movies dreamed of returning to. He could not imagine the future to run counter to everything said by the surviors in that book, or by those from many other books, but he was glad that he had taken the time to understand and record some of the very new and soft life that surrounded him. He still believed that humans were the animal most affected by useless things. Maybe if he were a painter he’d paint giant faces and bodies, and maybe they’d be just as unfashionable as his books.