Alienation, Friday Night.

Marginal Pinheiros.We drove for an hour to get to the restaurant. Out along Rebouças, south along Marginal, right into the face of the storm that was blowing in from the coast a hundred miles to the east. Thunder made the windows hum and lightning traced the negative space between piers of cloud. A reflected spear of electricity cut the face of an empty office block in two as the first fat spatters of rain thickened to a downpour, turning the crowds at the metro station on the far side of the river underwater green.

At the gaucho grill, the music was too loud and the wind off the lake flapped the tablecloths and made the lamps swing shadows across an exposed reef of tables and chairs. A film of moisture coated the plastic salt shakers and four lanes of traffic droned past outside, their beams picking out the empty play-set, the bored waiters, the garish hoarding through the trees.

At the table next to us, a couple kissed noisily and then another girl arrived and they all started yelling at each other. A young family arrived and looked about self-consciously, the waiter yawned and scratched himself through his trousers and a yawning awareness of alienation opened before us as the illusion of safety, of a contiguous ordered reality, collapsed upon itself like a log in the embers.

If it were possible to take away our identities, I thought as I looked at you, to impoverish us and separate us, leaving only our naked selves, we could spin on and on forever, never finding each other again amid all the millions of lives that multiply and collide like electrons in this sprawling city, this vast country, this other continent on the face of this lonely planet. The mind recoils from a glimpse of alienation so vast and perfect, like trying to understand death or the age of starlight.

Later we get driven down Rua Indianopolis and watch the prostitutes wave and shimmy and haggle prices in the searchlit darkness. At first it’s funny and then it’s not. I don’t know how we’ll sleep tonight.