The woman and her sister had been out jogging by the river when they saw the bird fall from the sky. At first, they mistook it for a falling leaf, but the angle and speed of descent suggested a weightier object. They squatted down like children to inspect the body. A pale-green bird with a cream-colored breast, too delicate for a city bird. They saw nothing above them. No trees or obstructions, just a red fog of diffuse and muddled light.

Poor bird. Why would a bird fall out of the sky like that? It was small enough to have balanced on a single blade of straw. They knew almost nothing about the daily lives of birds, save the pigeons who scampered about, pecking at urban detritus. During mating season, the males chased the females up and down the sidewalks, hopping on, hopping off.

If they had seen the dead bird in a state of decay, they would have simply sidestepped it. But because they’d witnessed the moment it struck the ground, they felt somehow responsible, as though it were a piece of trash that had blown out of their hands.

Shouldn’t we at least put it off to the side, the woman wondered aloud.

Don’t do it, her sister warned. You don’t know what it has.

They left the body, casting a few backward glances. The brief stop made it more difficult to continue running, so they walked for a stretch. The path along the Hudson River was almost empty at that hour. A flock of seagulls bobbed on the water, penned in by a rhomboid of lamplight. A crow perched mutely on a wire.

Before the interruption, she had been telling her sister about the artist. You know, the artist. I profiled him in the magazine several years ago, she reminded her sister, when he was working on the windmill installation? Remember, I shadowed him for a week, and then we took that trip to Montauk? Now he’s back in town to install a new show in Chelsea. Some kind of sculpture—a machine.

The woman’s sister was staring at her phone. She frowned at the lit screen, typing rapidly. What is it? the woman asked, waiting. The concentration on her sister’s face made her wonder if everything was all right. What happened? Her sister finally looked up.

Oh, we ordered a mattress online and now it’s arrived.

The screech of wet bicycle brakes. Water slapping against rock. Her sister was saying, Honestly, it took us forever to decide. Weighing the environmental impact of a new foam mattress versus a used one, cost versus expediency and guilt.

A plane roared overhead, lower than normal, heading to LaGuardia, perhaps. The sky was so woolly, she imagined the runway materializing at the last minute, filling up the entire windshield. A plunge of faith before the tires hit tarmac. The pilot must have a way of knowing where the ground is, she thought. Or the plane’s apparatus must know.

What were you saying just now? her sister asked. Oh, yeah, the artist. The artist who’s coming to town. What about him? I can’t believe you’re still talking to that creep.

In a rare confluence of irregular schedules, the woman and her husband were having dinner together at home, discussing the details of his upcoming birthday party. It was an unremarkable middle-age birthday, and he didn’t want to make a fuss. A small gathering at the German beer hall, he finally decided, and friends could drop in as they wished.

So, I’ll tell everyone Wednesday, he said, because Thursday I have class and Friday I’ll be gone.

What’s on Friday? The woman looked up.

I already told you. I’m going to Connecticut with Miriam.

The woman’s phone buzzed on the table. Her sister: I Googled the dead bird.

But I can’t Wednesday, the woman said. I told that artist I’d see his installation.

Apparently migratory birds get confused by high-rises that emanate light. The storm exacerbated things.

Her husband, scraping off the dishes: Come when you’re finished, then. Can’t take that long to—

A muffled notification pinged on his phone, and he reflexively put a wet hand to his back pocket.

The one we saw could’ve been some kind of warbler. Or vireo?

Okay, don’t steal my idea, but listen to this, he said, picking up the spatula again. Office hours, but for dating.

Birds navigate by feeling the pull of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Why keep up this fake pretense that each date is somehow brand-new, virginal? Line them up. Drop-in model. Thank you, next. He was gesticulating wildly for effect.

Are you experiencing such a volume of matches on your app that you’re wishing for a more expedient model of vetting and exploiting people?

The 9/11 memorial endangers thousands of birds every year.

Very funny.

What’s the arrangement you have with Miriam now, after your little incident? I’m not judging; I’m just curious if she requires you to get tested regularly.

The birds fly around the light, unable to extricate themselves.

We said we wouldn’t talk about details.

They waste precious energy and can die of exhaustion.

And I wonder how you’ll explain to everyone why you’re spending your birthday weekend with her, not with me.

I’ll tell them my wife is very principled; she doesn’t believe in the birthday industrial complex. She believes only in radical transparency, and in emotional blackmail when it suits her.

Put homing pigeons in a dark cage, take them out to sea, and spin them around and around until they’re sick. They’ll still find their way home.

Why do you insist on going through with this?

You were the one who wanted this, not me.

I guess if you want something badly enough, you generally find a way. Throat gonorrhea be damned.

Her husband threw the dish towel on the counter and went into the other room. The woman watched him leave, and wondered whether memory had once served as a kind of homing mechanism. Pillars of light. Remembering how things used to be.

Her mother had told her, over and over, Don’t look at your phone in a dark room. It’s terrible for your eyes. If you have to read, turn on the lights. She looked over now at her husband’s sleeping form, his back turned against her. She dimmed the phone’s brightness to the lowest possible setting. She swiped through various screens but could not retain much of what she saw. Tropical storm, six-foot surge, 150 awaiting rescue. Friend struggling into skinny leather pants in a dressing room. Death toll rising. Waterlogged areas. Urgent closing date upcoming. Dear members of the media—please find attacked the early-preview invitation and other press materials. She stared at the typo. Attacked. She chuckled audibly and took a screenshot. This confrontational language slipped out of people unexpectedly, breaching the surface for oxygen. The other day, a friend wrote to say that she would defiantly be at the café—

The restaurant fan on the roof of their building revved to life. The walls shuddered; a coin on their nightstand began vibrating at an irritating frequency.

Are you kidding me? her husband said, smothering his own head with a pillow. At this fucking hour.

So he hadn’t been asleep.

I’m going to throw myself out the window. I swear to fucking God.

Ass me! they typed on accident, and the occasional Go tit! never got old. Sometimes, meaning to type Done! with her hands in the wrong home position, she typed Die! instead. She eagerly opened the email with the press materials, but before it could fully load, she suddenly remembered what she had wanted to read.

Birds and the Urban Environment: Did you know that the Miracle on the Hudson accident, in which Captain Sully had to perform an emergency landing in the Hudson River, was caused by a bird strike? A bird strike happens when one or many birds collide with a plane. Sometimes birds will be ingested into the jet engine and cause catastrophic engine failure.

Another common problem for birds is called fatal light attraction. You might not know this, but the majority of migrating birds travel at night and utilize the moon and stars for navigation. However, these days, migrating at night has become deadly. Light pollution from urban centers can work alongside fog and storms to disorient birds. Imagine being distracted while you’re trying to complete a marathon or an Ironman event! Even worse, birds often crash into reflective windows, perceiving them as a continuation of the sky. This is one reason it will sometimes “rain birds” after a storm.

Help us! Have you seen these birds?

She’d opened up another article, which mentioned the case of a strange tropical bird, with a flat, “lizard shaped” head, that could not leave Times Square. It was most likely an escaped species from a collector’s menagerie. Otherwise it had blown in from somewhere. Tourists pointed and gawked as it slammed helplessly into glass doors and flapped against the panels of glowing screens.

Still up?

Hey! Here finally?

I’m really looking forward to seeing you.

As though on cue, a pink aura—a kind of sparkling rainbow mash—appeared on the borders of her vision. She clicked her screen closed.

You don’t find instant connections easily, an elderly man on the bus had once told her, unsolicited.

Five or six times in a lifetime, that’s all.

The phone glowed again.

Will I see you at the gallery tomorrow?

Yes, of course.

Then nothing. Perhaps he was going through customs, or the reception was weak. She stared at the window expectantly. When the text came through, it was a picture of him with an inflatable travel pillow around his neck.

Was a selfie always an invitation for another selfie? Impossible in the dark, here, in bed. She could send a joke in response. Or the screenshot of the gallery’s typo. She opened her sister’s chat window to work out the text draft there, so he wouldn’t see her typing.

Who are you talking to? Please. I’m begging you. I have to get to campus early, her husband said.

My sister. I’m almost done.

We forgot to do the laundry. Tomorrow, okay?

She sent her screenshot, clicked off the phone, and shoved it under her pillow. She imagined vibrations against her ear but forced herself not to look.

This is a momentary infatuation and it will dissipate soon, she thought. I have nothing to confess.

Sweetie, you’re obsessed with being good, her friend had said once, to tease her. Secret feelings aren’t the same as actions.

In her daily life, nothing that was felt could be acted upon; what could be acted upon followed routines of inertia or necessity. To be an adult was to feel a thing and walk away from it. To feel anxiety and know its baselessness, to feel jealousy and chalk it up to insecurity. To feel the need to run out of the train, screaming, yet remain completely still, unruffled.

Her husband began snoring.

She closed her eyes and put her hand into her underwear.

Before she fell asleep, she thought about the Mandarin duck that had appeared one day in a pond in Central Park. The duck was dazzling, with high-contrast plumage reminiscent of a Peking-opera mask. Its arrival had felt like a very special occasion, like a visit from a prime minister. Now, according to the articles, the duck paddled around with the common mallards, circling idly for crumbs of bread. Visitors flocked to take its photo. Beautiful things want to be replicated, so philosophers say. Was this visitation beautiful? The unfathomable longing of this wayward bird that wakes one day in a man-made pond, alone among strangers.

The woman spent most of the next morning in bed. In the middle of the night, the artist had sent an audio file—no subject, no body, just a recording of himself playing scales on the guitar. Higher, faster, changing keys, breaking off into riffs and climaxes. The file had gone on for 10 minutes. She hadn’t understood his intention, but her gut had kicked so violently that she’d had to take several shits.

After she’d listened to the file, she’d dug around online for his past interviews, trying to summon his actual voice. She’d found a short documentary on public television, but the green of his shirt had put her off. Next, she’d scrolled through Google Image search, looking for new pictures, then the tagged photos on his social-media profile, and had found one of him looking at the camera with a dreamy, postcoital expression. She had masturbated to this and now she was late, speed-walking to the gallery.

She was sweaty in the unseasonable humidity, and her hair was wilting. She could feel the sting of salt in the fresh wound in the corner of her mouth. Getting ready, she’d picked at a patch of dead skin until it bled.

Miriam just picked up the cake! Can’t wait to see you all!

She approached the gallery and saw a block of text pasted on the white wall at the entrance. Underneath was his name in big black lettering.

APORIA
PETER FANG-CAPRA

Inside, workers on ladders with buckets of black paint were brushing an enormous contraption of pneumatic valves and tubes and elbows. She saw him up there, craning his neck and pointing a finger along a ribbed piece that linked to a mechanical lung. The artist looked the way she’d remembered … perhaps more diminutive.

Her voice was lost in the din. Hey, do you guys need some help?

He climbed down from the ladder.

Look who’s here, at the very end of the day.

She stiffened in his embrace.

I thought you would show up earlier. Come. We tried to save some of the work so you could see.

Gripping her forearm, he led her underneath some scaffolding, and they stood before a maze of freshly oiled pieces, on a blue tarp, that had yet to be lifted into the sculpture. He gestured toward a metal chamber. An organ? The apparatus seemed to follow the logic of utility, but if one looked closely, the structure had no observable function. Where things ended or began was impossible to say. Head, tail, mouth, or anus. She took out her phone to take photos.

We’re here by the bathrooms. Got two tables. Taking all bier and wurst orders!

By the way, I’m sorry about that file I sent, he said. Please don’t listen to it. I play scales when I’m nervous, and it helps calm me down.

Too late. I listened to the whole thing on repeat when I went for a run this morning.

I’m so embarrassed.

You’re really good at the guitar.

Abruptly, he grabbed her by the shoulders and leaned in, his lips brushing her ear.

Don’t turn now. My gallerist is walking rapidly toward us with a very determined expression. Pretend we’re invisible. Oh God, she’s looking for me. She’s quite mad. I’ll have to be right back.

She watched as he danced off to intercept a tall, finely dressed woman. They retreated into a back office and closed the door behind them.

The woman looked again at her phone.

dang you dense girl
homeboy turning up the charm so you’ll write a good review
that simple
heard a thing or two about him
be careful kk love

Alone, the woman tried to look preoccupied and circled the machine, as though studying its craftmanship. She had long reached the end of her observations. She took out her phone again, scrolled through her email, and opened up the press materials.

“Is my death possible?” asks Jacques Derrida in Aporias. How can one experience that which is impossible to experience? In this new sculptural work, Fang-Capra asks whether the future itself is aporetic, a pipe dream or a mirage. Materials of modernity comprise this convoluted structure; discourses of biopolitical and emotional disaster are limned by discarded pipes and sheet metal. What would a machine of the impossible look like? The enfolding tensions of late capitalism are shaped into a coherent yet discomfiting whole.

She went outside and walked toward the corner bodega. Once there, she bought a can of seltzer and considered the bodega’s neon display of CBD gummies. An LED sign flashed:

HELLO VAPE WORLD
MILE HIGH CLUB
ITS YOUR YEAR
YEAR TO QUIT

She bought a pack of regular cigarettes and looked for a socially sanctioned place to smoke.

I’m an analog kind of girl too, said a blue-haired woman who was also smoking in the piss-scented alleyway. They exhaled their respective clouds of combustion and pulled their arms more tightly around themselves.

She nodded. We evolved around the communal fire; think about that.

She didn’t like to inhale too deeply anymore.

Hey babe. Ordered u a yummy fleischsalat.

She finished her cigarette and went back inside the gallery. Two other writers she recognized had also come to preview the installation. She waved hello and approached them, catching the last fragments of their conversation.

Dude must have paid a shit ton to ship all this metal. Wonder how he harvested these car parts.

Probably dispatched a crew of interns to a Third World junkyard, then mobilized another crew to receive them in Berlin, where they breathed toxic fumes and shaved off years of their life for vague proximity to art-world fame.

That envy talking? I’m feeling a takedown coming.

A slammed door.

The artist walked out, shouting, Yes, yes, I know. See you at breakfast. Good luck.

The two critics congratulated him, patting him amiably. Thank you, thank you, the artist said, shaking his head. All of you are much too kind.

Everything okay? She asked.

They really need me to get dinner with this Saudi prince. A collector they’re courting.

Don’t you have to go? Big payday, no?

There are so many princes. Can’t keep track of them all.

Hey, you. Aren’t you taking me somewhere? He suddenly prodded her, as though they had been interrupted mid-conversation. Aren’t you taking me out for a drink to talk nuts and bolts and hammered grommets?

Her phone lit up in her palm.

Cake is about to have a meltdown, lol. When u coming????

Only if now’s a good time for you …

No no, she protested, typing fast.

Honey don’t wait for me

She looked up.

Seriously. Do you have somewhere to be?

The cab driver turned north onto the West Side Highway. I can’t stand these screens, the artist said, jabbing at the mounted tablet in front of them. What trash. The touch screen was desensitized with a filmy layer of grease, the cumulative tapping of many dirty hands. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. he said, pressing hard. The sound muted, he settled back into his seat and turned toward her. His hands floated up and down his legs.

Everyone wants your attention, she said. Royalty, technology. How do you manage?

Yes. I do need to get away from it all. He sighed in a melodramatic way. Well, that’s the life of a world-famous artist.

Another one of his jokes. She cracked a smile.

Don’t I manage to give you my undivided attention?

Not really, she said. But I don’t expect it from you.

He mimed a punctured heart and smiled that winning smile.

It might not appear as such, he said, but I’m an insanely jealous person. I am very aware of this flaw in myself. I don’t like to have any distractions.

He pulled her closer.

What have you been thinking about? Ever since you arrived, your mind seems elsewhere.

He was smiling even more broadly now, and she was smiling, and they were both smiling at each other like two dumb dogs. A wide, shit-eating grin is how someone would have described it. Had her mouth ever stretched this wide. Had she ever felt this turned on. Had anything ever been this real.

He licked his lips. She could see a coating of white at the corners of his mouth, the kind of thick saliva that accrues after too many drugs, or too much talking and not enough water. She pulled slightly away but he grabbed her chin and held it fast as he worked his mouth up and down her neck. Eventually he settled on a spot above her collarbone, attaching and sucking, round and full, like a lamprey on aquarium glass.

It hurt a bit; her eyes fluttered open. Behind his head, next to the rear window, was a message for her.

Where are you?

More and more, whenever she sees a flash of blue—a blue sheet of paper, a framed square of sky—she mistakes it for her phone. Electricity jolts through her entire body.

This time, the dangling seat-belt buckle had reflected the blue from the Chelsea Piers sign.

Yesterday, I was reading about birds, she wanted to say. That’s what I was doing. Have you ever thought about how a bird is like a kind of machine?

One clammy hand was already under her shirt, flicking her nipple through her bra. The other hand crawled up her thigh, a thumb pushing against the nub of her clit.

Birds are automatons with a repertoire of preprogrammed behavior. They do everything by instinct. Fly, feed, migrate, mate. An osprey will return to nest in the same place even if it happens to be in the middle of a traffic intersection. A guinea fowl accustomed to flat terrain won’t know to fly over a low mesh fence to get to the other side. It may simply keep running into the barrier, over and over again.

You’re ready for this, he moaned. You’re so ready.

A bird hardly knows what it’s in love with. A baby cuckoo will push the other baby birds out of the nest, and the parents will keep feeding the parasitic chick. Goslings will bond with whatever moving thing they see in their first minutes of life. I once saw a pigeon guard its nest while its dead mate lay nearby.

I’ll be there soon.

I’ll be late.

I’ll be so late I won’t arrive.

Let’s have a drink on the roof at your place, she could say. See the tops of the trees in Central Park. Birds congregate there because there’s little other refuge for miles around, to land, to rest …

Don’t wait up for me.

Imagine the sheer density in that sliver of green.

The driver coughed a few times. She opened her eyes and saw, as they idled at a light, a spectacle of starlings feasting on a fried chicken wing from the garbage. She wanted to look away. Their adaptivity made them repulsive. They could use their intelligence for problem-solving. They could eat anything and live anywhere. They could learn new habits of being.

Midtown was fading in the rearview mirror, a cloud of light rising above Times Square. Dots of pink and white, flashing, scintillating.

Dizzy with desire, she gazed up at the camera flashes, at the neon tickers. She struggled against the car door, her forehead knocking against glass. He was shoving her out of the cab and through the revolving doors of the hotel.

Upstairs, the hotel room was rimmed with glass. She felt the whoosh and boom of being orbited on all sides by a monsoon of light. She approached the window.

Isn’t it curious how people always want to be high up and have a bird’s-eye view of things? As if we can’t see what we’re doing down there every single day.

Looking down, she thought of a woodcock, with its large, depthless eyes that see better behind than ahead. In her mind’s eye, she saw the patch of field by the schoolyard, where pink-and-white clover grew. Decades ago, she had lost herself in them, pinching stems to string into a necklace. She remembered the green grass, the blue sky, the brown mud, her teacher’s face looming suddenly so close to hers, asking, What do you see? She’d pointed. The iridescent blue of a butterfly’s wing. The woodcock lies quietly on the sidewalk, paralyzed, its neck snapped in two. The heels of commuters click busily around it.

But I will learn to adapt, the woman thought. I will be a city bird.

Woe to the American consumer. The price of groceries, gas, housing, and other goods and services jumped 0.5 percent from December to January; the cost of car insurance is up 12 percent year over year and the price of eggs is up 53 percent. “On day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail. That is not happening. Worse, the White House’s early policies are making it more likely that the country’s cost-of-living crisis will endure for years to come.

Voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation delivered the White House to Trump; Americans cited the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as their No. 1 economic concern, and Trump as their preferred candidate to handle it. On his first day in office, Trump ordered the government to deliver “emergency price relief” by figuring out ways to expand the housing supply, streamline the health-care system, eliminate climate rules on home appliances, and expand energy production.

Each of those policies would bring down costs, if enacted, as would Trump’s deregulatory agenda. But as a general point, the White House has fewer ways to quickly temper consumer prices than it does to, say, bolster or lower demand—a problem that bedeviled the Biden administration too. The Federal Reserve controls borrowing rates. The housing and child-care shortages are the products of decades of underinvestment, the former also heavily influenced by municipal policies that Washington has no say in. The trillions of dollars spent by billions of consumers on billions of products generated by millions of firms—the gravitational forces of supply and demand, settled on liquid international markets and affected by government policies only on the margin—are what determine how much people pay at big-box stores and the gas station.

The policies the Trump White House has enacted are likely to make the cost crisis worse. Trump has described the word tariff as “the most beautiful” one to appear in the dictionary. He insists that adding levies to the goods produced by foreign companies will boost national industry and keep American households from getting ripped off. But economists from across the political spectrum agree that tariffs are taxes paid by domestic consumers. They increase prices.

Trump has backed away from the tariffs he proposed on Mexico and Canada in his first weeks in office. Yet he has implemented new levies on Chinese goods, spurring Beijing to retaliate with levies on American natural gas, oil, and farm machinery. This week, Trump also announced new steel and aluminum tariffs, raising costs for American automakers, energy companies, construction firms, and other businesses working in heavy industry. If Trump ends up implementing trade restrictions on Canada and Mexico as originally proposed, or ones of similar scale, the effective tariff rate on American imports would increase from 3 percent to 10 percent—the highest in seven decades.

Studies of the tariffs Trump implemented in his first term demonstrate what will happen. By the end of 2018, Trump’s trade policies were costing Americans an additional $3.2 billion a month at grocery stores and malls, while also reducing the variety of goods American consumers could purchase. And those tariffs were far more limited than the ones he has promised to impose this time.

On top of making imports more expensive, Trump is raising the cost of hiring workers and doing business in the United States by cracking down on the flow of migrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has amped up its raids; Trump is also attempting to end birthright citizenship and close the borders. Fewer undocumented workers will enter the country, and fewer will remain.

Undocumented workers, and immigrants in general, are crucial to millions of American businesses, particularly farms, construction firms, child-care providers, and delivery services. If you get rid of workers, production will go down and prices will spike. One new study found that the increase in deportations during the Obama administration led each average-size county in the country to forgo “the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of additional residential construction”—meaning 1,994 new homes—over three years. As a result, home prices jumped 10 percent.

At the same time, Trump is silencing the country’s contagion-monitoring system during a bird-flu outbreak, meaning farmers might end up culling millions more chickens and dairy cows. (Bird flu is the reason egg prices are up so much to begin with.) He is also rattling the markets, leading companies to pull back on the kind of investments that would increase domestic production—presenting “a compelling case for taking some chips off the table,” as Tiffany Wilding and Andrew Balls of Pimco put it in a note to investors.

All in all, Trump’s policies should add 0.5 percent to consumer costs this year, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics told me, slowing GDP growth by 0.2 percent this year and 0.5 percent next year. He said he did not expect the country’s growth to be “derailed, given the economy’s strong underlying fundamentals and Trump’s willingness and ability to pivot on policy.” But it “will be meaningfully diminished.”

America is lucky that its underlying fundamentals are strong. The stock market is high; unemployment is low; wages are going up; businesses are generating big profits. Still, people are struggling with a dire housing shortage, bruising out-of-pocket medical costs, and a severe undersupply of early-childhood-education options—as well as expensive eggs and unaffordable car and home insurance. Trump has yet to put out a policy agenda that would tackle those problems in the long term, and is backing away from his campaign promise to make America affordable again in the near term too.

He seems to be betting that voters don’t care as much about the economy as they said they did. “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump said after his inauguration. “I said, I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue.” He added: “How many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

President Donald Trump might have campaigned on lowering the prices of groceries, but even as egg prices have become a minor national crisis, he has stayed quiet about the driving cause of America’s egg shortage: bird flu. Trump hasn’t outlined a plan for containing the virus, nor has he spoken about bird flu publicly since the CDC announced last April that the virus had infected a dairy worker. Last week, the CDC, which has ceased most communication with the public since Trump took office, posted data online that suggested humans may be able to spread the virus to cats. The agency quickly deleted the information.

Bird flu has now spread to cow herds across the country, led to the euthanization of tens of millions of domesticated poultry, sickened dozens of people in the United States, and killed one. The virus is not known to spread between humans, which has prevented the outbreak from exploding into the next pandemic. But the silence raises the question: How prepared is Trump’s administration if a widespread bird-flu outbreak does unfold? The administration reportedly plans to name Gerald Parker as the head of the White House’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress and is charged with organizing the responses of the various agencies that deal with infectious diseases. (I reached out to both Parker and the White House; neither replied.)

If the president names him to the post, the appointment might be the least controversial of any of Trump’s health-related picks: Parker is an expert on the interplay between human and animal health who served in the federal government for roughly a decade. But confronting bird flu—or any other pandemic threat—in this administration would require coordinating among a group of people uninterested in using most tools that can limit the spread of infectious disease.

Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, David Weldon, has questioned the safety of vaccines, and Jay Bhattacharya, the administration’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, vehemently opposed COVID shutdowns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who likely will be installed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the coming days, has implied that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have funded attempts to create a bird-flu virus capable of infecting humans, and that past threats of flu pandemics were concocted by federal health officials both to inflate their own importance and to pad the pockets of pharmaceutical companies that produce flu vaccines.

Many of Trump’s health appointees are united in their view that the U.S. overreacted to COVID. They—and plenty of Americans—argue that measures such as masking, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates were unnecessary to respond to COVID, or were kept in place for far too long. Faced with another major outbreak, the Trump administration will almost certainly start from that stance.

One way or another, Trump is likely to face some sort of public-health crisis this term. Most presidents do. Barack Obama, for instance, dealt with multiple major public-health crises, each brutal in its own way. Zika didn’t turn into a pandemic, but it still resulted in more than 300 American children being born with lifelong birth defects. Ebola, in 2014, killed only two people in the U.S., but allowing the virus, the death rate of which can be as high as 90 percent, to freely spread across America would have been catastrophic. In 2009 and 2010, swine flu led to more than 12,000 deaths in the U.S.; roughly 10 percent of the victims were under 18. Even if bird flu does no more than it already has, it’ll still cause a headache for the White House. Bird flu continues to wreak financial havoc for farmers, which is then trickling down to consumers in the form of higher prices, particularly on eggs.

Step by step, the U.S. keeps moving closer to a reality where the bird-flu virus does spread among people. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that cows have now contracted the variant of the virus that was responsible for the recent fatal case in the United States. That means the chances of humans catching that strain are now higher than they were: Many recent human cases have been in dairy farmworkers. As cases of seasonal flu increase too, so does the chance of the bird-flu virus gaining mutations that allow it to spread freely between humans. If both viruses infect the same cell simultaneously, they could swap genetic material, potentially giving the bird-flu virus new abilities for transmission.

Parker clearly understands this danger. Last year, he spoke to USA Today about the potential for the virus to mutate and change the outlook of the current epidemic. He also wrote on X that “federal, state, and private sector leaders need to plan for challenges we may face if H5N1 were to make the fateful leap and become a human pathogen.” How much leeway the Trump administration will give Parker—or whoever does run the pandemic-preparedness office—to keep the U.S. out of calamity is another matter.

Plenty of public-health experts have come to look back at the coronavirus pandemic and regret certain actions. Should bird flu worsen, however, many of the same tools could become the best available options to limit its toll. Parker, for his part, expressed support during the worst parts of the pandemic for masking, social distancing, and vaccinations, and although he said in 2020 that he doesn’t like lockdowns, his social-media posts at the time suggested he understood that some amount of community-level social distancing and isolation might be necessary to stop the disease’s spread. How eager the Trump administration will be to use such tools at all could depend on Parker's ability to convince his colleagues to deploy them.

The White House pandemic-response office was set up to play air-traffic control for the CDC, the NIH, and other agencies that have a role amid any outbreak. But having a job in the White House and a title like director of pandemic preparedness does not guarantee that Parker will be able to win over the crew of pandemic-response skeptics he will be tasked with coordinating. And his job will be only more difficult after Trump sniped at the purpose of the office, telling Time in April that it “sounds good politically, but I think it’s a very expensive solution to something that won’t work.”

Although Trump appears to have thought better of dissolving the entire office, its director can’t really succeed at fulfilling its purpose without the president’s support. The only thing that could make persuading a group of pandemic skeptics to care about an infectious-disease outbreak more difficult is your boss—the president of the United States—undercutting your raison d’être. Parker has some sense of the enormity of the job he’d take on. In 2023, he tweeted, “Pandemic Preparedness, and global health security have to be a priority of the President and Congress to make a difference.” In 2025, or the years that follow, he may see firsthand what happens when the country’s leaders can’t be bothered.