5: Connecticut

C had been reading your stories every week. “I like the flow of this last one,” he said, “but I think I’ve figured out my problem with them.”

“Yeah?” you asked. “What’s that?” You were sitting in his studio in Killingworth, listening to his remix of the latest Yoko Ono track. The music did some interesting screeching thing.

“It’s like you’re writing these anti-elitist everyman stories, where the characters are all ‘regular guys’ and ‘everyday girls’ from state X, and I’m no populist.”

You were quiet for a moment, thinking. He tinkered with his homemade robots, Alice and Gertrude. T poked his head in the door. “It’s time for milking,” he said.

You followed them outside, to the pasture by the beehives. C led Archipelago over, while T set up the pail and stand. They had just sat down when their neighbor’s biodiesel BMW pulled up.

“Hey guys,” R called out the window. “I've got some fresh kombucha I want you to try.”

“Cool,” said C. “Come on over later.”


You were all standing on the deck, drinking kombucha and absinthe cocktails and eating T’s fresh bread with C’s homemade goat cheese. Your breath escaped in nebulae, rising and converging. All the stars were out. “Leo is at 100%” T said.

“Cool,” said C. “Hit the button, or whatever.”

T flicked a switch and the silo opened up. The laser began to print an almost aleatoric pattern onto the surface of the moon.

“This goat cheese is delicious, you guys,” R said.

“We saw this awful movie at Sundance,” said C, “both as a joke and a kind of self-punishment. Three skiers get stuck on a chairlift. Eventually two of them are eaten by wolves. It takes place in ‘Massachusetts.’ Oh my god was it bad.”

“I’m writing the MA story next week,” you said. “I’ll make sure I put wolves in that one.”

4: Georgia

I work for the United States Census Bureau. Not collecting surveys, though – that part hasn’t even started yet – I just drive this crazy van around.

B calls it the “Censusmobile.” He’s the other driver – one stupid motherfucker. It’s just the two of us, so we trade off: one person driving, the other talking to HQ or updating the blog. They call us “regional road tour staff members.” B calls us the “C-Mob.”

“Yo nigger,” he said the first morning we met in the parking lot outside the regional office, “what up?”

“What the fuck did you just call me?” I said.


Today we’re in Atlanta, our “home base.” We should’ve been here last week for the MLK parade, but National was, so we got sent to Florida.

“Can you believe that shit?” B said when the schedule was announced. “They are fucking committed to keeping the Black Man down.”

“They” can mean a lot of things, but I’m the black “man” B is talking about.

It could be worse. Bitch. Dyke. I get those a lot. At least B hasn’t tried to rape me yet.


“Fucking bitch!” B yells as some car cuts us off. He guns the engine, tries to ride its tail. I close my eyes and count 1, 2, 3.  “Let me drive,” I say.

B hadn’t wanted me behind the wheel at first, but he got used to it real quick. “You’re not my boss,” I told him, “and I’m not your little Miss Daisy.”

This time he turns the radio on; punches preset one. It’s some sports game – 2nd or 3rd quarter, 56 to 78. The speakers blare the station break. “Radio 790,” it goes, “The Sports Zone.” I can still hear it even when I put my headphones on.

It could be worse. At least it isn’t Sweet Home Alabama or Georgia on my Mind.


B’s fresh out of the Army, and “they” must have thought it was a great idea to have a veteran on the “team.” But it turns out cruising to Birmingham is a little different from driving through Baghdad.

He freaked the fuck out the first morning, swerving to avoid some harmless piece of trash. Now he mostly tries to hide how scared he is by shouting his head off.

He’s only told me one story from Iraq. Someone had ordered a crate of soccer balls to give to the local kids, but the thing they needed to inflate them never showed.

“They” said to give them out anyway, so B dumped them during the next patrol, watched the kids sort of kicking the prune-shaped things in the dirt as his truck rolled away. When B drove back through that evening, the kids threw rocks.


B and I fooled around a little the first weekend. Hooked-up, or whatever. We were drunk and staying at a shitty motel in Waycross, Georgia – where 1, 23, 4, 520, 38, 82, and 84 all come together. The sort of place with skanky girls hanging out in the lobby; with dingy rooms and plastic wrapped around the beds.

B hasn’t really talked much in the van since then; just puts the radio on. “Cincinnati 14, New York 24,” it goes. “Dallas 34, Philadelphia 14.” Just a lot of numbers I don’t give a damn about.

It could be worse. At least we didn’t really fuck, so it didn’t count, he said.


The more I think about it, politics is only a team sport in a facile sense. Ultimately it’s one state against all the others, and keep score is what the USCB does.

Sometimes for fun the other “teams” make up new slogans and send them out in email blasts. “The Census: Where everybody counts!” and “We all add up to something!” They eat that shit up. Not us.
   
“Can you believe this shit?” B said on the second day, when we were setting up outside a shopping mall around three o’clock. “It’s like they decided to advertise for fucking taxes.”



Matt and Jennifer are the worst – the National team driving “Mail it Back,” a fancy trailer towed by a pick-up truck. All-American, blond and blue – B calls them douchebots 1 and 2.

“Great to meet you!” Jen said at the launch. Matt smiled and shook my hand, then tried to do some kind of man hug to B. That ended poorly.

Matt was on the floor, holding his nose. One drop of blood fell, then two, then it all just started to come out in a rush. Rob, the director, looked over from his photo-shoot, posed next this racecar, number 16, sponsored by 3M and Census 2010.

I grabbed B’s arm. “Come on B, Let’s get out of here.”

“Fucking cunts,” B said, “both of ‘em,”


B says firing him would be a PR disaster, and maybe he’s right for once. We’re supposed to be observers and nothing else – to be “refs,” to continue the metaphor. The last thing “they” want is to call attention to the census-takers, to give away the game qua game, as such.

Our van is called “Representation.” Anyone can look it up online, but our names aren’t listed. Anyone can look through the pictures in the “Portrait of America,” but they won’t see us.

It’s snowing again. I got used to it at college – in Connecticut, before I left – but it still looks wrong down here. AJ parks us outside of Fi0360 just as school is letting out. A pack of kidergartners toddles by, a noisy blur of jackets, hats, and mittens. 1 2 3 4 5. 

3: New Jersey

The room was full of portraits – photographs – hanging on the walls. It was a bedroom in a condo where I was staying for a couple days, out on one of the New Jersey Transit lines.

I took the 7:25 out of Secaucus Junction. The train stopped at Plauderville and I got off. I dialed my cell phone and listened to the ringer buzz. “All quiet in Pleasantville,” I said to no one.

“What?” said Lily. Mike shouted something. “It’s Jean,” she yelled.

“Pleasureville,” I said, “or whatever.”


Lily was at the table waiting for us when Mike and I strolled in. She started to say something, but Mike walked past her and I sat down. “What were you doing in New York today?” she asked eventually.

“Yeah,” said Mike from the kitchen door, “business or pleasure?” He had a plate in one hand and a couple bottles in the other.

“Pleasure is my business,” I said.

Mike laughed and Lily sighed. “Grow up,” she said.


That night after I went to bed I could hear them having sex. Their room was just across the hall. If I stared hard enough at my wall, I could peer straight through it and see their climax coming, rising like a skyline.

Secaucus was almost empty the next morning. A Chinese couple peered from sign to sign, moving in sad eccentric circles, the listless residents of northern New Jersey; the unwanted neighbors of New York.

The man stopped and called a kid over in some language I didn’t understand. The boy walked up to me and smiled. “Hello,” he said, “my name is Jun. Can you tell us how to get to Penn Station?”

“Sure.” I pointed. “Newark is that way.” The man thanked me and the lady pulled the boy away. “My pleasure,” I said to nobody.


Mike didn’t come to pick me up that night. He and Lily were already eating when I got home. “Hey Mike,” I said as I sat down, “I think your phone’s busted. I called a couple times.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It must be.”

“Mike,” Lily said, “don’t you have something to say to Jean?” He didn’t, but she did. “We want our bedroom back.” She took his hand in hers. “You can’t stay here anymore.”

“We?” I said. “Ours? This place isn’t yours; it’s his. He wrote me. He said . . .”

Lily smiled. “It’s over,” she said.


I heard them leave for work the next morning, heading for the office together – copywriter and copy-editor. I got up and the portraits glinted. I leaned, looked at one closely. I moved from frame to frame. The subject was always alone. The faces were all the same. The room is full of portraits. They are all of me.


A minute passes. I look at the still-ticking clock. I had expected everything to be over after that, wrapped up neatly, like a story, but here I am, waiting for nothing.

Secaucus is ghostly, like a dream. Vague figures flit along the edges of my vision. The departure boards are empty. The floor stretches to nowhere. [What about the giant metal sculpture? – Ed]

I look up and see a metal marsh plant sprouting from the floor. Is there one? I’ve never been. The signboard behind it fills, numbers swirling from the center like drops of blood in a glass of water.


I walk into my house and Mike and Lily are having dinner. [Again? – Ed] This is the Raymond Carver part. She grabs her knife, holds it up and yells. Who the hell do you think you are?

Come on, Lisa, shouldn’t you be hiding behind your parentheses? I sit down and she steps forward. [They’re brackets – Ed] Whatever. Her knife is poised like a finger over the delete key, about to edit me out of this story forever, as though she even could. [Misogynist] You shut up.

“Shut up!” I yell. Suddenly I’m standing. The walls buckle and recede as Lily screams: “Do you even know what day it is? What year? Do you have any idea how long you’ve been here?”

“Max and I have known each other for a long time.”

“My name is Mike,” Mike says, and turns to me. “This is not about you. This is about us.” Who wrote that? [I did] “Who said that?” I look wildly around.

“What are you talking about?” said M.

“You have to end this now,” said L.

You said this never should have begun.

What the hell is going on?


There is only white space. It is a junction, a point of connection, of intersection. It’s hard to see the whole of it from here, caught up in it, existing only in it, through it. So what about you (John or Jane, or whatever your name is)? Where do you think we’re going? What do you want to happen next?

2: Pennsylvania

It was D came up with the idea, halfway through your second pitcher. “What we need,” he said, setting his glass down on the bar, “is a new Constitution.”

“What you need,” said Jack, once you and George and Bill had settled down, “is a couple-two-three more drinks in ya before ya say anything really retarded.” He waved at the bartender. “Hey kid,” he said. “Give us anothern.”

“Yeahsure.” said the bartender, then went back to fiddling with his phone, or camera, or something.

“Gimme more of them napkins, too,” D added, taking a carpenter’s pencil from his shirt pocket. “How’d that last one go? ‘Us People of the United States . . .’”

George shook his head. “Aw, D. Why you gotta go and break something that ain’t needs fixed?”

“The hippy’s right,” Bill said. “Least leave the other states out of this.”

“Shit, fine.” D crumpled the first napkin up and started again. “Us the People of the United State of Pennsevania.”

“It’s a commonwealth,” you said.

D balled up the second napkin, wound up like old Dock Ellis, and fired it at the bartender. It missed his head by a couple inches, and the kid pressed a few more buttons without looking up.  “Hey,” D said, “ya gonna pour us s’more lager, or are ya callin’ Pottsville to make sure it’s alright with them first.”

“Maybe he thinks ya wanted a pitcher of it,” Jack said, nodding toward whatever the kid had in his hands. “Ya know, just for lookin at.”

“Hold on, boys, I’ll get it,” Ronda said. She stood and put her waitress apron on. “You stay here, baby,” she told her daughter, who was sitting with her feet dangling off the bar, smiling like there was no place in the world she’d rather be.

“Thanks, Ron,” said George, and winked at the girl, who giggled. “Anyway, ya needa be more specific. Maybe just the greater Pittsburgh area, or sumthin.”

“Ah, hell.” D said. “How ‘bout just this bar? These napkin’s already got its damn name on ‘em.” He took another from the pile and wrote “Constitution” right below where it said “The Grand Stand.”

To tell the truth, none of you liked this bar all that much, but it had got a lot better once the economy tanked, the crowds at the mall dried up, and the hotel next door closed down. Most of the staff quit when their wages dropped, so now it was just the Negro kid behind the bar, some Mexican in the kitchen, and George’s cousin Ron. They still left most of the TVs on, though, and the beer was pretty cheap – it was a place to watch a game, at least. Nowadays, coming here was sorta like being in that old horror movie, the one where everybody in Monroeville up and dies. The lights were still on somehow, but who knew if anybody was still alive outside.

“Well, that’s really sumthin’ special,” Jack said. “Ya wanna tack on an intro, or just leave it like that?”

“Na, we kin just make it a list.” D drew a line and wrote above it: “What We Want.”

“Aright, then,” Bill said, and shrugged. “Well. Whadda yinz want anymore?”

“Lager,” said Jack, just as Ronda set the new pitcher down. “And there it is. Shit, D. Maybe yer onto something with this.”

“What else?” D asked. “Hope and change and all that crap?”

George shrugged. “How ‘bout happiness?”

“Dammit, George,” said Bill. “Don’t be such a queer.”

The bartender coughed and muttered “Respect.”

“Hey, I think I just saw our boys nuts drop up under there.” Jack said, tipping his cap. “We got a full grown man awner hands.”

The boy’s face turned a little darker, and he went back to playing with his thing. “Shaddup kid,” D said, but wrote it down anyways.

“A better job,” said the Mexican – José, you think – who’d wandered out of the kitchen.

“Or any job,” you said.

“Money!” said Ronda, bouncing her little girl in her lap.

“Mommy!” Ron’s little girl said. D smiled and wrote that down, too.

You’d been going at it a little while when these three women came in. They were on the downhill side of middle age, and had dressed up for something – Rotary Club, maybe, or Daughters of the American Revolution. They sat around a table and Ronda set her kid down and walked over. “What can I get you girls?” she said.

“There’s a pitcher in it for ‘em if they want to join us over here,” D called.

They whispered to each other for minute, Ronda too. “What do you want from us?” the middle one asked.

“Well,” you said, “we’ve got ourselves a nice little country started, but we could use a well-regulated militia like yourselves.”

“Long as we get a say,” the woman said. She walked over and picked up the napkins, the other two looking over her shoulders, and started reading them to herself. “It doesn’t say here who’s in charge,” she said. “You don’t have any president or anything?”

“Now, why in the hell would we want one a them?” D picked up another napkin and wrote: “Things We Don’t Want,” then “politicians” under it.

The woman nodded. “I’ll drink to that.”

They joined you at the bar, and José went back into the kitchen to throw together a little grub on the house. You were just tucking into it when the man in the suit showed up. He stood in the doorway for a minute, looking around like he was waiting to be seated, or for his eyes to adjust to the light, standing there half-shadowed, his skin all blue-gray and zombie-like.

“C’mon over,” said D, giving him a wave. “Jeet yet?”

“Excuse me?” the man replied, but George was already calling back over his shoulder: “Hey Pedro, you wanna make our friend here a sammitch?”

The man walked over slowly and put his briefcase down. “What is this,” he asked, “some kind of convention?”

Jack laughed. “You could say that.”

José came back with another plate, and you all watched as the man lifted the top of the sandwich and picked the French fries off one at a time.

“You ain’t from around here,” Bill said.

“I live just up in Pittsburgh, actually,” the man said, “though I was born in Providence. Sam Adams, please.” The bartender, who’d been real quiet since the stranger came in, nodded and started pouring another Yuengling from the tap. “My client owns most of the property around here.”

“That so?” asked D. “Well, you might want to tell him this fine establishment just declared its independence.” He pointed to the napkins. “We even got a constitution.”

“Yer welcome to join in,” said George. “We got room for lawyers too.”

The man shook his head. “I don’t think the bar association would approve. And if my client heard that I abetted a rebellion on his property, I’d be out of a job.”

“Yeah?” you said. “Join the club.”

The man looked at the napkins – all scribbled-on and splayed across the bar – these simple lists of all the things you wanted and didn’t want. “Here,” he said at last, pulling a pen from his briefcase and pointing to the little square all twelve of you had signed. “Let me see that.”

1: Delaware

There’s a story about this old courthouse and a twelve-mile circle, but I forget it. I’ve been staring at it since the plant let me go, but it’s completely slipped my mind.

You know that feeling? Like someone’s sprayed your brain with Teflon? How the wrong words start spilling like Freon from your mouth?

The wind rustles my Nylon jacket. The Tyvek grass crinkles beneath my Neoprene behind. I lie back and wait for the Mylar moon to rise across an expanding Spandex sky.

Part One: Prediction

Welcome to Census, a short story project in three parts. During part one, I will be writing 52 stories—one for every state in the U.S. (plus DC and Puerto Rico); one per week for a year—using parameters determined by currently available (estimated) demographic data from the United States Census Bureau. The fundamental metrics I’ll be using for each story are as follows:

• The number of characters (people) in a story will be equal to that state’s population divided by 1,000,000. The narrative point of view (first-, second-, or third-person) will be determined by the two places after the decimal point of the quotient, with the range .00 to .33 indicating third-person, .34 to .66 indicating second, and so on. For example: Massachusetts has a population of 6497967, so its story would have 6 characters plus a second-person narrator.
• The number of paragraphs in a story will be equal to the number of households in its respective state, divided by 100,000.
• The number of pages in a story will be equal to the land area of its respective state, divided by 10,000. (Note: due to the limitations on formatting of online publishing, this parameter will not become a factor until part three of this project.)
• The number of characters (letters) in a story will be equal to the number of housing units in its respective state, divided by 1,000.

The order of stories will be based upon the date of their respective states’ entrance into the Union, and for now those states’ names will serve as the stories' only titles. These stories are not intended to be mere descriptions, summations, or cross-sections of life in a given state, however. Rather, they are intended to be imaginative texts—with a connection to their source material that ranges from intrinsic to tangential to coincidental—that will be linked thematically, if not explicitly.

These stories should be thought of as drafts—approximations of their final form—as the subtitle of this part of the project suggests. The Census Bureau is charged with delivering an accurate and updated count of the U.S. population to the president at the end of this coming year, and subsequent parts of this project will involve rewriting these stories in accordance with the results of the 2010 Census, as well revising them for quality.

This space will primarily be devoted to publishing these stories, and the only other posts here will be updates (like this one) outlining the different parts of the project itself. I’ve started a facebook group for more informal communication (and would invite anyone interested to join), and will be reading and responding to the comments section on this site when I can. If you want to contact me directly about this project, I can be reached via email at census.stories(at)gmail(dot)com.

Thanks for reading. Happy new year.