Queens is a borough of New York containing the building Luces Tenues (“Dim Lights”), a looping apartment, a plaza that is the borough’s only lit one on the day of the blackout, and an Italian pizza shop.
| Resident | Mr. Olimpo |
| Spanish entry | Queens |
Luces Tenues
Olimpo lives in Luces Tenues. Chalk outlines “of at least three murders had appeared” on its floor; who died, and why the outlines appeared, is not recorded. The apartment “is a special place… a kind of loop, or had reflections of a spatial loop.” A whole company stayed there a week. It smells of cheese: “fetid, but also pleasant once you got used to the cheese.”
The plaza of the six spores
Six “spores that light up places” are the plaza’s only light, and on the day of blackouts it is the only lit plaza in Queens. Its pizzeria (“the cart is neon”) is “a free pizzeria for everyone”, working when everything else goes dark.
The Italian shop
An Italian pizza shop elsewhere held a container of ice cream that “was going to be the cakes for the quinceañera celebration”, a party that never happened.
Investment
One record reads: “maybe 150 years pass, we go to Queens because he invested well.” Whether the figure concerns tenure, length of stay or something else is not fixed.
Open questions
- What the spores are, who planted them, what feeds them in a blackout.
- Whether the loop repeats space, time or both, and whether it can be left.
- Whether the neon pizzeria and the Italian shop are one place; whether Luces Tenues, Olimpo’s house and the loop are one building.
- Something said of the ice cream “of the antipresent” is marked unclear.
- Whether spores, pizzeria and loop share a cause.