For a long time Evie had lived in the city, and when the day came that everybody was evicted from their homes—pots and pans and shoes and postcards piled high along the sidewalks, clothing bunched into trash bags, wardrobes and candelabras waiting under the summer rain—she assumed she’d find an alternative. Why not? she thought, her forehead damp with sweat as she hiked the aluminum stairs to her office. The elevators, as if in the spirit of municipal implosion, were not operational. I’m smart, she thought. I have skills. Or, sort of. Maybe. The willingness, at least, to learn them.

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“I need a raise,” she said, finally sitting across from her supervisor in the hollow, exposed-beam building that was her place of work. They were in his office, which was really a small, carpeted area partitioned off by a few Japanese screens he’d found near the bins. She sank in her seat, exhausted.

“A raise? Why?” There was a bag of popcorn on his desk and he did not wait to finish his sentence before he fisted an entire ball of kernels into his face.

“You know why,” Evie said. “I’ve been kicked out. We’re all on the street. I had to empty my apartment this morning.”

She continued, “I need money for a house. I need money for another deposit or a down payment or—” She paused here. “Or else.”

“Evie.” Her supervisor sighed, angling his chair away from her. “Just look,” she said. She brought out her portfolio and nudged it toward him. Evie’s job was in design, which mostly entailed choosing typefaces and superimposing them onto photographs taken by someone else—a luxury sailboat anchored off the white sands of Tahiti, for example; a tattooed ceramicist staring from her studio; a plump, healthy chicken poised for slaughter. It was an easy job; sometimes it felt fake.

Gregory—that was his name—leaned forward and rubbed his chin. “I’ve seen your work,” he said. “You know I’ve seen all this.” “Just peek,” Evie said. She opened it to a few specific pages. “Unh, unh,” he said, nodding. Evie used her index finger to point out the striking contrasts and balances, the alignment and repetition, the various nuances that made the work unmistakably and inescapably hers. “Unh,” he said, smiling politely. He choked a little on his popcorn and pounded his chest, coughing.

“Unh,” he said when it was over.

“Look,” he said, bringing his face up to meet hers and leaning back in his fabric chair. Evie registered dark circles under his eyes. “We can’t give you a raise.”

“Then where am I supposed to live?” she asked.

“Where am I supposed to live?” Gregory responded. He brought his hands up by his head and tugged at his cheeks in frustration. “This isn’t just happening to you. I don’t own either. I’ve got to move too. I had a rent-stabilized apartment. A big, beautiful rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan, Evie. Do you understand how rare that is?”

Evie nodded. She squinted her eyes and bobbed her head—sympathetically, she thought. “Wow,” she said, still nodding.

“And how am I supposed to get a moving van through these streets? “It’s—” Gregory paused, mulling over what it was. “Chaos. Chaos! And I’ve got the dogs to take care of.”

Evie pictured Gregory’s dogs, two skittish spaniels that habitually shat in the office fiddle-leaf figs. He treated them with the kind of loving reverence usually reserved for religious deities, the newly born, or the astoundingly old. She remembered the day he’d first brought them in. They’d been rescued from a bankrupted breeder in Virginia, he’d announced. He’d gathered the dogs—Meryl and Elizabeth—up in his arms and told their short, sad stories with actual tears in his eyes. Then he’d set them down and attempted a classic handshake trick, which Meryl executed with a desperate, almost drunken pleasure while Elizabeth stood back sulkily and licked her crotch. “They aren’t show dogs,” Gregory had said. “But they could be if they tried.”

“Why don’t you give yourself a raise?” Evie asked, trying to get back to the subject.

Gregory rolled his eyes. “That’s not how it works.”

“But you’re the boss.”

“Look,” said Gregory. He closed Evie’s portfolio and kept it shut with his elbow, as if it might snap open at any second, jaws agape, ready to bite. “A little cash for a deposit wouldn’t do us any good. So,” he continued. “In short: No. Just find wherever you can go. Find anything. Accept everything.”

“For how long?”

“How am I supposed to know? Until the mayor is behind bars, I guess. Until this blows over. Two years. Twenty.”

Evie gathered her portfolio and left Gregory’s office. It took a while; she had to unfold the second Japanese screen, lift up the first, shift the third, then wriggle through the slight gap she’d made between them.

Accept anything, she thought, making her way back to her apartment or, rather, the curb below her apartment, upon which sat her bookcase and bed, kitchenware and toiletries. It had been over a year since the mayor, faced with a dwindling budget and a critical lack of both public and private support, had announced the city’s landmark deal with the world’s leading vacation rental company. Eviction restrictions were lifted. Rent regulations were overturned. There were incentives for landlords, grants for restoration, an influx of federal funds.

The actions had all been engineered to seem so gradual, Evie thought, even banal. One subtle slight after another. Nothing shocking, per se. And yet they were here, on the day that the city’s final and most radical amendment had gone into place and everyone was out, on the street, looking up at their soon-to-berenovated apartments and down at their soon-to-be-sanitized streets and feeling tricked. By their landlords. By the city. By their mothers and fathers. By their ancestors. By Aha!: Apartments and Homes Anywhere. By God.

How? Looking back, Evie realized, it had all led up to this exact moment, this tragicomic climax. Evie was intelligent, basically, but not very perceptive. She had never been good at crunching the numbers, anticipating the consequences, drawing a through line between the discrete events of her life and the world at large.

Other people, however, were more prepared; they made quick decisions with resolve, pooled their resources, and acted swiftly, as if they’d known all along. There was her friend whose father had left him a slot of land in Topanga. Over the last five years he’d culled the property and erected a shed. He’d insulated the shed with straw panels and finished it with tadelakt. It had a farmhouse sink and a Jacuzzi out back. Another, an old supervisor, had spent her savings on a car that doubled as a well-appointed efficiency apartment in a pinch. Then there were her two downstairs neighbors who had recently had a baby. Just one month prior they told her they’d found a small place near the river along with six others. They’d all pooled their funds, bought the apartment as Tenants in Common; they’d moved in and now lived there as one big, happy family. Together they’d raise the child. In winter they’d take turns with one pair of mittens. They’d cook with a single frying pan for the nine of them. They’d share one sock.

The vitamin shop downstairs from her former apartment, owned by her landlords, or former landlords, agreed to let Evie store her things in the basement for the day while she figured out where to go. It was a magnanimous gesture, really, that they allowed her to store anything at all. They certainly didn’t have to. Their fierce matriarch, Edita, had owned the building for a couple of decades at least. The family was a medium-sized and aggressively unhappy one.

Edita had two sons, both constitutionally miserable, who spent their days perched on stools out front, listening to the radio. They were the shop’s ambivalent managers, and there was no end to the mistakes they made, nor the nefarious disarray into which they let their daily operations descend, at least according to Edita. The boys, as she called them—though they were adult men—handled the shop’s patrons, bodybuilders and wrestler types, who could often be seen darting in and out of the building as if they had something to hide. Organic Supplements was not doing well. Edita would stop by unannounced to remind them of this, pulling up in her shiny black Escalade, barking orders, and pinching their biceps with a precise and acrylic force that even Evie could feel.

The older brother, Obed, had a beautiful daughter and a beautiful, young ex-wife, both of whom had left him, absconding to the West Coast. Obed had initially tried to follow them, applying to rent an apartment and looking into jobs, although what else he was qualified for was unclear. But his mother, when she got wind of the plans, quickly kiboshed the whole thing. It was her money, it was all her money. How could Obed ever move so far away from his mother, from his mother and all her money? After a month of fighting, most of which was quite public and in front of the store or, even worse, in the interior hallway, it was over; he resigned himself to his station on his stool outside Organic Supplements. Edita won.

As a teen, Obed had been something of an athlete. When Evie had first moved in ten years prior, he still played pickup games at the neighborhood courts in his old varsity jacket. Now he mostly talked quietly with the neighbors, sat on his stool, and intermittently intercepted Evie’s mail.

“So you’ve got a sister,” he might say, clearly having read the return address on the envelope. “Is she as pretty as you? Does she like fat guys?”

“She’s prettier,” Evie would say, “and younger.”

Why did she taunt him? Now that everything she owned had been thrown to the curb and she would, officially, never again sit on the edge of her wide, wood-framed window and watch the smudged sun sink under the skyscrapers in the distance and was relying exclusively on Obed’s grace to keep her personal items safe for the rest of the day, many of the things she’d done began to seem unkind.

Obed helped Evie load her stuff into the basement that afternoon, and they didn’t make much conversation. They worked and lifted for the better part of two hours, moods progressively darkening. When it was over, they stood in the vitamin shop, leaned against the shelves, and panted. Obed flashed her an illlooking smile.

Afterward, Evie walked through the neighborhood and racked her brain. There was no way, she thought, that she was sharing a sock. Was that her only option? It was just past noon and the streets were crawling with people and their precious things. Evie maneuvered around milk crates full of dried fruit and grains, batteries, nail polish, booze.

There would be no lunch. Even the restaurants had been foreclosed, their European espresso machines and industry-grade deep fryers binned and loaded into trucks. Evie couldn’t have afforded lunch anyway. What could she afford? She sat down on the edge of someone’s well-loved mid-century couch and thought some more, about who she might know and how they might help her. Evie’s parents were dead. But this didn’t make Evie and her sister orphans. It wasn’t as if their parents had died in a shipwreck, or even a car wreck. They were simply two people who’d had children on the older side and died on the younger side. None of the facts, separated and distilled, would make one bat an eye. Evie was twenty-four and Elena was eighteen when it happened.

Evie had called with the news of their mother’s passing while Elena was in class. She could just picture it: her sister’s curly dark hair spread across her shoulders as she sat in the back of a grand, wood-paneled lecture hall, learning all about the medieval occult and Émile Durkheim. Her young mind lit from within. Her eyes flitting to the phone as it buzzed across her desk.

Their father went five months later. “It’s not so uncommon,” the doctor had said, kindly touching Evie’s arm and standing, in Evie’s opinion, a little too close to Elena, “for men to go rather quickly after their wives.”

“Why?” Evie had asked, her voice coming out far too earnest and loud. Their father’s body was in the other room. Outside, Evie remembered, a pigeon and a turtledove balanced abreast on the branch of a pear tree. The pigeon spread its wings and launched away, into flight.

He’d flashed a punchable smile and shrugged. “It means they were in love.”

Evie and Elena had left the hospital together, Elena falling silent as Evie grew more agitated. “It means they were in love,” she scoffed, imitating the doctor’s confident baritone.

“Well, they were,” said Elena, circumventing a wide-smiling woman in a wheelchair. The sisters walked quickly, their heads tilted close toward one another. Elena, the taller one, had to stoop. Still, Evie had felt the tangible urge to pat her sister’s head. Evie was the eldest; she set the tone; it was not her job to upset everyone and leave them fearful. It was her job to try to make them happy or at least peaceably, blissfully passive. And yet.

“Yeah, but not because they died a few months apart,” Evie pressed, in spite of herself. “Like that’s how you know. That’s fucking crazy, right?”

Elena said nothing. Evie persevered. “Doctors. They’re all sociopaths or serial killers.”

At this Elena giggled. Then she sniffed, or maybe gagged. “What a crock of shit,” Evie said conclusively.

Evie sat on the arm of the recently evicted couch and wondered to whom, now in the greatest collective crisis she’d experienced in her life and in the absence of the departed Ernestina and Angelo Cavallo, who were resting in peace and, she guessed, still in love, she could turn. It was one of those days when the light couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. The drizzle had stopped. A cloud passed over the sun and everything was bathed in violet. It was like God was blinking.

A man walked up to Evie and paused, lighting a cigarette. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is this—yours?” She gestured to the couch.

“Nope,” he said, smoke pluming out of his mouth. “I work across the street.”

Evie nodded. This should have been obvious. He was wearing the soft, striped pants and comfortable clogs of a chef. Evie looked from his apron to his hairnet to across the street, where the innards of the Italian restaurant—tables, chairs, and a lot of dried pasta—were being placed gently on the curb by a couple of officers in navy. A woman, presumably the restaurant’s owner, was bustling around, arms overflowing with produce, yelling.

As if he could hear Evie’s thoughts, the man untied the strings of his apron, lifted it over his neck, and jammed it into his pants pocket. He placed a black newsboy cap backward on his head, covering the net and completing his transformation.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

“Me neither.”

“Yeah. Well, you’re young.”

Evie nodded, although she didn’t feel particularly young. Or perhaps she felt so young it wasn’t worth mentioning. Or so old that it no longer mattered.

“How long have you known?” she asked him.

“Just since this morning,” he said. “Come on. That’s the point. Spontaneous mass evictions—if we don’t know about it, we’ll keep paying rent until the last possible minute. Which is what we did.” He sat with the cigarette burning dismally between his fingers. “We did.”

Across the street, the woman had dropped a head of lettuce onto the concrete and was now kicking it against the building like a soccer ball. Her head was down, eyes narrowed; she appeared to be thinking very hard. All around them people were thinking very hard. But it was also hard to think with all the noise. Just a block away, a girl left her family’s apartment without retrieving the stash of stale candy she’d hidden carefully under her floorboards. In a row house behind them, a woman said goodbye to the countertop on which she’d first made love with her husband, now deceased. One street over, a man stood at the zenith of his roof and puffed his chest out, lifting his arms to the gray sky: “Ahhh!” he hollered. “What the heck!” he shouted at no one, and precisely no one noticed him.

The cook turned to her. “We don’t live under a rock, right?

We should have seen it coming.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“The Revitalization, I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.” Evie tore her eyes away from the woman kicking the lettuce.

“That’s what they’re calling it. This whole project. The deal, the evictions, the rent-regulation repeals. It’s an umbrella term.”

“I know.”

He nodded. “Look, it’s not that different from what’s happening everywhere else. Everyone is being priced out, from LA to Nashville. Or even San Jose. New York is just making it official.” It was true. The state of housing across the country was a point of national pride or a catastrophic embarrassment, depending on whom you asked. Virtually nobody could afford to own a home. And of that slim number of people who owned, even fewer could afford to move. And those who remained, the elite and rich, America’s demented aristocrats, well, they could afford as many homes as they wanted. In the city it was gaudily evident. Prices went up. Apartments crumbled down. Evie had resigned herself to these conditions. Meanwhile, the unhoused population tripled. Bedbugs invaded. Three people drowned in their basements that winter. No one seemed to understand how, or why, or when to fight it. And who had the time? Who had the money to save money? The mayor had run on the promise of cleaning up. No rats. No roaches. No electrical fires or squatters. Imagine a city, he’d said, in which all the denizens have a vested interest in its flourishing. Can you picture it? Can you? He wanted a city, he said, of owners.

Sometimes Evie imagined the land, the world, the city around her as a cartoon neighborhood, the houses’ edges elastic like balloons, their walls filling up and bloating and then, all at once, popping: ejecting out the riffraff and trash in a huff.

“I just can’t believe they really did it,” the man said absently, as much to Evie as to the wind.

“Well,” Evie said, “tourists are good for business.” She pitched her voice in the mannered manner of a government official. “Let’s Make It a City Worth Visiting,” she said, reciting the slogan overheard again and again on public transit, in the bodegas, through the sewer, between the grates, within the strangled morning birdsong, until it stuck to Evie’s brain like glue.

The man laughed grimly. “‘Revitalization,’ though. That implies that they’re restoring it back to the way it was. From what I can see they’re just building something new.”

“Where will you go?” Evie asked.

“My uncle owns a restaurant in Fresno. It’s not very good, and I don’t want to move to Fresno, but what else am I supposed to do? It’s better than a potato farm.”

“He also has a potato farm?”

“No one has a potato farm. It’s just a turn of phrase.”

“Oh,” she said. “My sister lives in an institution. She’s lived there for almost five years. So she’s safe.”

This was true. Shortly after their father died, Elena had been sent to a facility in Colorado for the criminally insane. This wasn’t what they called it. And it had been a relief to have Elena accepted into this facility, as far as facilities went. A high-security hippie colony that encouraged artistic expression and held compulsory seminars on Hula-Hooping, its staff believed even the most derealized patient could become grounded by checking in with the five senses: you are mentally healthy in the here and now; nothing between or beyond matters.

“Do you think you could go live with her?” the man asked.

Evie laughed. She sank off the arm of the couch and into the seat. “I don’t think so.”

The man lit another cigarette and nodded in sympathy. “So I guess it’s Fresno for all of us. Or Fresno equivalents.”

“I don’t know if I have a Fresno equivalent.”

The man had stopped listening to Evie. He was clearly working out some things in his own mind. “I guess I also have a niece with a duplex in Wisconsin. And my aunt has a ranch in Texas. Near Gulluck.”

Gulluck. The name lodged in Evie’s mind like a funny piece of glass. She said goodbye to the man, though he was already lost within himself, and walked toward the bridge that would take her to the city center. She stepped over a baking sheet and shower caddie that lay prostrate across the sidewalk. She turned down the street that ran parallel to the water’s edge and stopped to sit staring at the skyline. Ferries barreled across the river at terrified speed. She shared a bench with a rat eating out of a shoe full of wet Cheerios.

Evie and her sister didn’t have much in the way of extended family. Both her parents were only children—perhaps this was what had made them love each other, or, rather, die at proximal dates in the year—but her mother did have a cousin in Texas.

Evie did not know the cousin’s name. Nor where she lived nor even if she was alive. But she knew someone who might.

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From Dwelling: A Novel by Emily Hunt Kivel. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Emily Hunt Kivel. All rights reserved.