Outside the window men in yellow vests are constructing a building. On the third story, the fluorescent pulse of an arc welder flashes with sparks dripping down multiple stories and bouncing off beams and the inner skeleton of the building. A nuthatch tries to make it through the streaky office window. It keeps flitting about and running straight on into the problem it doesn’t recognize to be a problem.

It is possible that bombs will drop soon. Bombs always seem to be dropping, but mostly on combatants and innocent civilians, not an apparatus of an organized, functional state. That possibility has people’s attention. That of-the-moment story will take priority over the concentration camps in which unwashed and unparented brown foreign children languish - that is a phenomenon about which very little will be said. And none of that will touch how much attention we Americans will collectively pay to the various women from which the Bachelor has to choose.

And I am paying attention to the middle writings of a German iconoclast and the too-much-paint portraits of a London ascetic, with intermittent nods to the flashing moments of welded connection that the man across the way is bringing to life. The bird is gone.

The Good Doctor will see you now.