The hibachi chefs were performing their ancient and sacred duties—which is to say, they were flipping shrimp tails into the air with the solemnity of jugglers at a funeral, while strange music played from speakers that had seen better days, possibly in a different restaurant, possibly in a different decade.

Opening credits would begin here, if this were that kind of story. But it isn't, so they don't.

Henry—a man of mid-thirties vintage, possessing the kind of face that could disappear in any crowd and often did—sat at a table talking to his roommate Cordell, who happened to be black, though this was New York and nobody much cared except when they did, which was more often than anyone liked to admit but less often than in previous centuries, which counted as progress.

Henry had been going on about the menu, how he'd researched it beforehand on Yelp and various food blogs, cross-referencing reviews and checking for health code violations, as one does in the modern age when spontaneity has been replaced by the terror of making an uninformed decision.

Henry's face registered this information while simultaneously not registering it, his attention having already drifted to the glowing rectangle in his hand—that universal object of modern devotion, more reliable than any deity, more demanding than any spouse.

He fired off a tweet: "Birthday hibachi with my main man. #LivingTheDream #Shrimp #TurningTableIntoGrill" Twenty-three characters left. He'd gotten efficient.

It was a good story, unique in its way, revealing in its particulars the strange social dynamics of modern office life. Henry heard perhaps forty percent of it, his fingers engaged in the sacred ritual of checking, scrolling, tapping.

The phone buzzed. A text from his mother: "Happy birthday sweetie! Are you eating well? Your father says hello." He favorited a tweet about the government shutdown. He liked a photo of someone's cat.

The chef started flinging pieces of shrimp at the diners' mouths like a carnival game operator who'd been trained in Japan. Most of the table missed. One woman got hit in the forehead and laughed the laugh of someone who'd paid good money to be humiliated by seafood.

Without looking up, operating on some primitive reflex that predated civilization, Henry's mouth opened and caught it. He chewed, still typing. The table erupted in applause, that peculiar modern applause that's half-genuine and half-ironic, celebrating and mocking in equal measure.

Outside, Brooklyn spread itself out under the night sky like a blanket made of lights and broken dreams. The city was always playing music, always selling you something, always reminding you that you could be having more fun somewhere else.

They walked together but separately, the way people do, Henry trying to convince Cordell to come to this place around the corner, just one drink, just one more hour of not going home to his thoughts.

Cordell demurred with the practiced ease of a man who'd been saying no to things his whole life. But Henry was persistent, and persistence in America is a virtue, and eventually Cordell shrugged the shrug of the defeated and followed.

The bar was called something like "The Bedford" or "The Brooklyn Social" or "Haberdash"—one of those names designed to evoke a past that never existed, when men wore hats and knew how to tie knots and possessed secrets about living that had been lost to history.

Inside, the music was louder, the crowd younger and more attractive than had any right to be, all of them performing the great Brooklyn ritual of looking like they weren't trying while trying very hard indeed.

Henry immediately pulled out his phone and checked in on Foursquare, claiming his digital territory, marking his presence in the permanent record of the internet, which would outlive him and his children and possibly human civilization itself.

From across the bar, he heard it: "Yeah, I'm the mayor here, check Foursquare." Some asshole saying it to his friends, all of them laughing. The mayor. His mayoralty. His seventeen check-ins, reduced to a joke.

He stood up, pocketed his phone, and walked toward the bar with the determination of a man who has made a very bad decision and intends to see it through. He bumped into the ringleader—hard, deliberate—knocking the beer from his hand.

The first shove came from the left. Henry shoved back. A bottle broke somewhere. And then it spread, the way violence does in confined spaces with too much alcohol and too little meaning—everyone suddenly having permission to release everything they'd been holding in.

The whole bar erupted. People fighting other people who they'd never met about things that had nothing to do with anything. Pure, purposeless chaos, the kind that feels good in the moment.

Someone's fist, intended for someone else, caught him square in the temple. The lights went out like someone had flipped a switch. The last thing he saw was his phone, skittering across the floor toward the bathroom, taking with it his entire digital life.

Henry felt the wound on his forehead, fingered the stitches that held his head together. He opened the drawer by his bed and there it was—his phone, recovered from the bar somehow, returned to him like a lost child.

Henry hung up. Deleted the messages without listening to the rest—all eighteen of them gone into the digital void, where all deleted things go to dream.

Manhattan in autumn looks like God trying too hard—all those colors, all that light slanting between buildings like grace. Henry walked down the street, his head still throbbing, watching people rush past him with purpose and coffee and the conviction that they were going somewhere that mattered.

And then he saw it: a rally in the park. Occupy Wall Street—those words on signs and banners and the lips of young people who believed that something could still change if enough people stood together and shouted about it.

Henry raised his hand in the air and pressed an invisible button—Like—then realized he'd just pantomimed a Facebook gesture in real life, and felt the particular shame of the extremely online.

There was a line of protesters facing a line of police officers. They were shouting at each other, the eternal dance, push and pull, order and chaos.

They jumped on him—three officers at once. And that's when the protesters surged forward, because nothing unites a crowd like seeing someone get taken down by authority.

Then Henry's world became nothing but pain and tears and the particular agony of pepper spray, which the Geneva Convention prohibits in warfare but allows for domestic crowd control, because we live in reasonable times.

Henry woke up behind bars, which was not where he'd imagined his birthday week ending, though perhaps it was fitting.

Before Henry could ask what things, a guard called the neighbor's name. He stood up, brushed off his pants like he was going to a job interview, and left behind a small white pill on the bench.

Inside, his apartment felt smaller than he remembered. Mail had piled up—bills, mostly, and flyers for Chinese food and a postcard from his mother in Florida.

Another email caught his eye: "DO YOU NEED A JOB? MY COUSIN'S ROOMMATE'S FRIEND GETS $4324 A WEEK WORKING FROM HOME."

He hit send, shut the computer, and felt better than he had in days.

Three days later, Henry found himself in an office park in Queens, the kind of place where dreams go to get processed and filed. Black and white cubicles stretched to infinity. Fluorescent lights hummed the song of corporate America.

Questions came in through chat windows, one after another, an endless stream of human confusion seeking help from other humans who were equally confused but had access to Google.

He stood up, looked around the office. Everyone was typing, staring at screens, living in little boxes within bigger boxes. He sat back down. Unplugged his computer. The screens went dark.

He kept walking.

The gamine girl—and she was gamine in that particular way that makes men write poems they'll never show anyone—stepped out of a black town car looking annoyed and broke, which is to say she looked like she belonged in New York.

She was gone—vanished into the New York crowd like smoke, like she'd never been there at all.

And then Henry started picking food out of the hot bar. Started eating it right there, standing at the counter, like he was sampling at Costco. One piece became two became a handful. People began to stare.

The cashier started shouting in a language Henry didn't speak but understood perfectly. People pulled out their phones, started recording, because if it's not documented online did it even happen?

She opened the door. The cop hadn't locked it, assuming Henry wasn't stupid enough to run. But Henry was exactly that stupid, or brave, or desperate—the line between them being thinner than most people think.

On the roof, Susan led him to a rusty toolbox and some random cuts of wood. "This is where I keep my tools," she said. "I make things. Picture frames, mostly. And I smoke up here."

Guitar music drifted up from somewhere below. She worked on the handcuffs, tongue between her teeth in concentration. They talked—short bursts, stories exchanged like currency, the breathless kind of conversation that happens when two people realize they might be each other's rescue.

Seasons changed the way they do in montages and real life—gradually, then all at once. It was colder now, nighttime, the city blocks of Queens stretching out under winter's approach.

The mall was quiet this late. He'd gotten this job—night security guard—because he could pass a background check (barely) and was willing to work hours nobody else wanted.

A rattling at the door. Susan appeared, waving through the glass. He let her in. She had a bottle of something amber and promising.

Eventually she left with promises that he'd be okay. He ended up on a display bed, phone buzzing with her text: "I'm home."

Then he saw them—two white guys moving through another department, too purposeful to be lost, too quiet to be legitimate. Everything faded to black, the way it does.

She sat at a table with two coffees, opened Facebook. Then a new picture popped up: Henry taking a selfie in what was clearly a jail setting. The caption read: "They're taking myphone now"

Susan stared at the screen, coffee getting cold, trying to decide if this was funny or sad or both.

The jail building was tall and grim. It was snowing—the first snow of the year, because even despair deserves a pretty backdrop.

They did an awkward dance—should we hug? Should we not? They settled on a hug that lasted just slightly too long to be casual.

She grabbed his hand. They walked away together, neither one sure where they were going but both committed to getting there.

She put her phone down and climbed up next to him, close enough that he could feel her breath, which might have been a ghost or might have been real. Hard to tell the difference anymore.

He posted it. Walked to the bathroom. Came back to find the comments section filling up like a wound.

Henry's Twitter notifications went red: 2,843

The club was dark and space-themed in that way that Brooklyn clubs were often themed—commitment to aesthetic even when the budget was minimal. Cardboard planets hung from the ceiling. Stars were projected on the walls. It was beautiful in its ridiculousness.

And then Susan began to sing. Her voice was beautiful—the kind of beautiful that makes you forget where you are, makes you believe in things you've stopped believing in.

Then Officer Sparks walked in with two other cops, and the music kept playing but everything else stopped.

They met backstage. She grabbed his hand, pulled him into a closet that smelled like cleaning supplies and old costumes. They stood there silent, barely breathing, listening to heavy footsteps pass by.

When it was clear, they slipped out the back door into an alley. Henry deleted his Twitter account—all those tweets, all that wit, gone into the void.

They walked down the road, side by side, two people who'd found each other in the wreckage of modern life, heading toward whatever came next with the confidence of people who'd already survived the worst.

Or so they thought.