Fizz

Fizz’s lemonade stand sits right at the entrance to Thirst Street, exactly where the city still can’t decide between heading home sensibly and getting up to no good. He’s the one who picked the spot, freckles and all: you need an airlock, he used to say, you can’t dive into the glamorous night without a decompression stop. He started out with three syrups and a chrome seltzer siphon inherited from a carnival-worker uncle. The siphon got famous. He followed close behind.

You stop by Fizz’s on the way in, stop by again on the way out, and in between you tell him everything. He runs his counter like a king: regulars get their glass marked, newcomers get the full show — a burst of cheerful machine-gun chatter, a squirt of seltzer drawn like a gun in a Western, a nickname handed out on the spot, for life. Secrets fizz right along with everything else, and every so often, in the flow of passers-by, he sniffs out a really big fish and nudges it gently toward the right Marquee. A well-placed bubble always rises to the top.

Playfulness, all the time, everywhere: Fizz doesn’t work, he plays at working, which is exactly why he never burns out. His pranks are logged, dated, sometimes even insured. But behind the siphon, the eye is dead serious: he watches the whole of the city’s youth pass by, and he knows before anyone else who’s got the spark and who’s only got the thirst. The Houses send envoys to ask his opinion; he sells it for a good laugh, which is his official exchange rate. He has no downtime: he’s replaced it with dress rehearsals.