If you do not finish the food, they will put the rest of it in a box, and you take it away with you.

I did not know this was permitted. I had eaten as much as I could and was preparing to apologise for the remainder when the server took the plate away and came back with a box and a small folded bag, and inside the bag she had put a fork. In case.

In case.

You eat it later, at home, standing at the counter, at an hour when nobody is watching, and it is not as good as it was, and that is not the point. The point appears to be that a meal is permitted to continue after the room it began in has closed.

We have no arrangement like this. What is left at a table at home is left at the table.

In the food hall, four times an hour, it rains on the vegetables.

There is no announcement. It starts with a sound like a held breath, and then a fine water comes down over the greens for about twenty seconds, and then it stops. The greens are already cut. They are already going to be eaten. Nobody was watching but me, and I was only in there because I had gone in to be warm.

At home we would call this hodda work. Work done for a thing that has already been pleased.

I do not think it is for the vegetables. I think somebody, once, decided that a person walking past a shelf of wet greens would feel differently about their day than a person walking past a shelf of dry ones. And then they built a machine to do it every fifteen minutes forever. And then they went home.

You may pay a small amount to be pulled through a building.

You stay inside your vehicle. You are not required to do anything. You may not do anything, because the vehicle is on a track and the track decides. For four minutes the world outside becomes water and coloured foam and a noise like being inside a storm from the wrong side, and then it stops, and then there is a wind, and then you are outside again in ordinary daylight with everything the same as before except cleaner.

Nobody I have asked can tell me why it is pleasant. Two people have told me it is not pleasant. I do not believe them, because I was watching their faces.

I have been through nine times. The attendant has begun to wave.

They put frozen water into a drink and then give you the drink. The frozen water is not part of the drink. It is there to make the drink cold, and then it becomes the drink, slowly, while you are still holding it.

Nobody warned me. Nobody thought to.

I have been served this eleven times and each time I have waited to see whether anyone would explain it, and each time nobody has, because there is nothing to explain.

There is a room on Sixth Street that stays open all night and costs money to enter, although nobody guards the door.

Inside are twenty machines and every one of them turns clothing in a circle. For some time I could not tell whether the clothing was being cleaned or being taught something. A woman showed me the correct amount of powder. She was not startled by me, which I have noticed happens more often at night.

I stayed for one full cycle, which is thirty-one minutes. The machines make a sound like weather. Nobody in the room was speaking and nobody appeared troubled that nobody was speaking, and I thought: here is a room where a person is permitted to simply wait. We have no word for this at home. We have four words for waiting and all of them are about what comes afterward.

I put nothing into the machines. I had nothing to wash. I do not believe this was against the rules.