She wore a suit the color of brightmorning rivertop and on it a ruby brooch like a dragon’s eye, which watched him in the mirror, though she herself did not look at him. Her eyes swept from phone to window and back while she spoke. She was saying to him that it had to be taken as normal now, all of it. By “normal,” she meant real, forever-forward real but also always having been real, no matter what might have been taken for ‘real’ before. Each morning she woke to a new universe: in today’s universe for example there was no 91st Street, and snow in September was not unusual, and so 91st Street and snowless Septembers were not just no longer normal; they were no longer real, and there was no point in thinking of them as things which had ever been real at all. “Stop fooling yourself,” she said. “This is the new normal. The sooner you get that, the happier you’ll be.”

He having not said anything to her besides “Good morning” knew that she didn’t mean that he specifically was fooling himself, nor was she concerned with his own particular happiness; she herself, despite the accusatory dragoneye stare of her brooch, had hardly noticed him. Likely her advice about the nature of reality she pressed with similar vehemence upon anyone near her. All the same, he was willing to believe that he might indeed be fooling himself; it was something he frequently suspected to be the case.

“Here,” she said at 90th Street, interrupting herself mid-monologue, and he pulled to the icebound curb. The card reader beeped, and she swung herself out of the back without offering any tip or further advice, and he watched her totter in thick boots through the snow without an overcoat toward a gap in the big bedrock tongues where 91st Street had been in another universe which had never existed, her bag squeezed under an arm.

All conditioned things, he knew, had the nature of vanishing—such with 91st Street; such with snowless Septembers; such with his customers and so their fares and so his returns and so his livelihood. There wasn’t another fare until the evening. Yellow Cab 4M71, which was an expression useful to describe a certain ever-shifting set of constituent parts and scents and sounds and obligations, took up knocking again in the afternoon, and he suspected that he ought to have the engine bearings replaced, which meant new configurations both parts-wise and obligations-wise. And he did not suppose, really, that it would be the birth of a new universe when there were fresh engine bearings for 4M71 and he was three thousand dollars poorer and further underwater on his medallion loan. He did not believe the universe so brittle that any change would end it; to the contrary, it seemed to him that the universe would end only when it ceased to change.

ॐ मणि पद्मे हुँ, he said to himself.