Outside, the police are interviewing neighbors and the old woman is wandering around the yard in a nightgown. With the window open, the room fills with bleating sirens and neighborhood chatter, but above it all, I hear the old woman wailing. Big, airless sobs that stop Akila as she is coming back down the stairs. She goes over to the window and watches with a knowing reverence. She has mentioned in passing the things that were lost in the storm, that one of these things was a dog. No doubt Rebecca is thinking of this as she steers Akila away from the window and into the car. We are late, and the drive into the city is already looking bad. Eric slings his shield over his shoulder and opens the route on his phone; it is red all the way to Thirty-Fourth Street. When we pile into the car, a police officer is two houses down, talking with the neighbor who, for the entirety of my stay, has never said hello. Rebecca waves to the police on our way out and the officer looks up at her, at the mallet between her knees, and slowly waves back.

* * *

On the road, everyone gets a turn with the aux cord. Eric’s French house and his eyes in the mirror seeking recognition for deep cuts, Akila’s dreary Japanese ska, and Rebecca’s mystifying choice of talk radio instead of the music she ostensibly likes, though folkloric thrash is hardly needed when you are on the New Jersey Turnpike in the sideways rain. Akila hands me the aux cord and I go through my phone and try to find something suitable, but all my playlists seem inappropriate—the one I exercise to, the one that is mostly sample-heavy trip-hop I would theoretically have sex to, though most of the time I just end up getting high and looking at unsubtle dystopian memes about how social media is changing the length of the human neck. I flirt briefly with making a statement through my song selection, but I am too old. However, when I see I somehow have half of Phil Collins’s Face Value downloaded to my phone, it turns out I am not. I put on “In the Air Tonight” and savor the studious readjustments that happen in the car, Akila pointedly turning to her phone, Eric’s posture high and rigid as the E-ZPass scans and we cruise through the toll. Of course Rebecca is less obvious, but as we enter the city, she turns to look out of the window and smiles. But after three minutes and fifteen seconds have elapsed, I regret playing the song. It reminds me of how alien their house felt, how quickly it began to feel like mine.

* * *

In the city, there is a smell. Hell’s Kitchen, a rotting, fungal fruit. Midtown, smelling of mildew and old pecorino. In the two months I’ve been gone, I forgot that this is what happens in New York when it rains, all the animal and human excretions made into a piping soup. I open the window a little bit and immediately there is a glaze on my face. I have missed it so much, the way the city tilts for all its events. The Puerto Rican Day Parade and the airborne brass of an approaching float. The West Indian Parade and Eastern Parkway’s glitter dunes. SantaCon. But today it is Comic Con, and as we approach the convention center, the founders of social awkwardness are climbing from hot fifteen-dollar double-decker buses, towing cases of hardware down Ninth, coming out of the Skylight Diner in their goggles and crinoline skirts, excited to hear about the processes behind their respective cosplays. A man saunters down Tenth in a ball of tinsel and raw cotton, and half of a Final Fantasy VII party is cheering him on. Akila rolls her window down and takes it all in with big eyes. She adjusts her costume and pins on her Command Division badge, and when we stop at a red light, there is a black girl in the car next to us cosplaying as Geordi La Forge. When she sees us, she lowers her visor, leans out of the window, and reaches for Akila’s hand. But the light turns green and the car turns onto a side street, her frantic scream of Live long and prosper! blunted by city noise.

* * *

We have some trouble finding parking. All the garages are full of black SUVs, double-, triple-parked, valets with shiny upper lips coming out with chipped “at capacity” signs, Rebecca navigating the big back end of her truck through midtown with one hand as Eric campaigns for one of three mythic parking spots that were always open between the years of 2002 and 2008. We go to one of the spots and there is a fire hydrant there. Akila leans in between them, her hair already high and wild, and says the first panel starts in ten minutes. Rebecca pulls up to the convention center and tells us to get out, and that she will find a parking spot and catch up later, and I have this feeling, which is 78 percent nausea but 22 percent the dark city ozone opening up to let in a single frond of sun, as Rebecca beckons me over and adjusts the top of my iron bikini, which has been hanging on one hook. She presses her hand into the center of my back and says, There, and when I look back at her, she has already turned back to the wheel, already begun hunting for a spot farther uptown as Eric, Akila, and I head into the Comic Con holding pen, a one-hundred-yard tunnel to the Javits Center where a Gundam is Juuling and two pink Power Rangers are pulling cigarettes out of their boots.

* * *

At my height, the holding pen is principally a parade of armpits and old CO2, every mage in sight regretting their cape, the city’s moisture pooling into these few dank square feet, everyone rouged and slathered in unicorn spit, a Mario and Luigi arguing about something that happened in Paris and someone’s damp scapula pressing against my cheek. You get the feeling that the crowd has become so large and intertwined that the physics are intricate and deeply interior, as if a single load-bearing Darth Maul is holding the whole thing upright. Inside the convention center, the humidity changes form, becomes more human, that specific feeling of smelling a new friend’s house quadrupled and condensed, attendees moving to the walls to peel off their ponchos and snap jeweled bracers and web-shooters to their wrists, everywhere you turn someone putting on stockings and rifling through bags full of swag.

* * *

It is Saturday. Some hard-core, purple-badged fans have been here since Thursday, and a pair of such fans carve through the crowd with ease, their faces not sleepy so much as smoothed by some profound pleasure that we, as one-to three-day pass holders, see and take as an indication to move aside. There are also babies. A toddler is held above the crowd, Simba-like, and he yawns and pulls at what I assume are noise-canceling headphones. Then he is gone, and as I am trying to find him, for no reason but to see that Space Ghost onesie again, Eric lifts me off my feet and turns me around so that I am facing him, and while this is annoying, I’m also going to miss this when I’m gone, how he used to do this when we were out and about and I wasn’t paying enough attention to him—a more rude iteration of snapping one’s fingers, forgivable only for the initial jolt, when I am just there in midair. He brings out a Ziploc bag and tells me he is going on a trip. He asks if I want to join, and I decline. He shrugs and eats the gold caps when Akila’s back is turned, and then she leads us to the first panel on her schedule. We join hands and move through the crowd as a single, unbalanced chain, Akila at the front, Eric at the back, chewing and holding his shield above his head.

Halfway there, everything is pudding and hands keep coming out of the dark. Because Eric is Captain America. Kids want to take pictures with him, and saying no feels very against the spirit of the thing. He lifts someone’s child into his arms, and in the moment before the flash, the kid looks at him and seems uncertain, aware of the pretend, that the eyes behind the mask belong to an archivist from New Jersey. Akila stands off to the side and looks at her watch, which she borrowed from Rebecca specifically for this day. Against the polyester of her Starfleet uniform, the watch is conspicuous, a grown-up piece of jewelry that makes her seem younger, but also like she has the right to be managing us, though Eric is enjoying the attention too much to care. When we get to the panel, we are fifteen minutes late. We stand in the back as an exclusive clip is coming to a close, and Akila pulls one of her eyelashes out. I want to tell her it’s okay, but I don’t know how to interact with her at this level of frenzy. I thought I had gotten the gist of it the previous week, after someone left an unkind review of her fan fiction regarding some point of canon she’d gotten wrong, and she was, for two days, too depressed to eat, but within this unique environment, her fandom is so violent it feels combustible.

* * *