26: Michigan

Sometimes when D feels like thinking, she cycles out to the roundabout, tires gripping asphalt as she rides in circles, faster and faster, around and around. This time of night, the glow from Detroit, Lansing, Flint, and Ann Arbor is a pale ring of limestone on the horizon, bleeding up into the granite sky.

Usually there aren’t any cars out this late, but tonight a truck passes, the driver honking and shouting. D can’t hear him, or doesn’t care to. She wishes she could stay here, in motion, forever. She wishes there were nowhere else in the world.

But it’s almost 3am, and her shift starts at four. She makes the inevitable final lap and turns off toward the city. She can make it back by then.


Sometimes when E feels like thinking, he drives up and down Lake Shore Drive, catching glimpses of the bay through a screen of suburban houses and scrub trees, of dark water stretching to the white shores of Sleeping Bear.

He’d come back to Escanaba after college, gotten a job at the family gift shop, selling Waterford crystal, handmade chocolates, Hummel figurines, novelty t-shirts, picture postcards, and Yooper everything.

He’s manager there now. By the time he finished his shift tonight, the city streets were empty. He has to be in again tomorrow morning. He just wants to drive until then.


D gets back to her house a little after noon. Kyle is in the shower – one of Sarah’s old college friends who showed up last night without warning. Some other friend is still asleep on the floor.

She waits by the bathroom door, listening to the running water, waiting to wipe the film of butter and flour from her skin. She closes her eyes and leans back against wall.

“Your toilet is broken,” Kyle says. D snaps out of her doze to see him shirtless, one of her towels wrapped around his waist.

“What are you doing here?” she says.

“Man …” he looks almost wistful. “When I read about this city online, I had to come.” He smiles. “It’s just so fucking crazy here.”

She blinks and shakes her head. “Online?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sarah posted a link to this article on facebook.”

“Fuck.” D closes her eyes and mutters: “Suddenly I feel sorry for any person, place, or thing ever written up by the New York Times.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”


There’s a customer waiting for E to open the shop, her face pressed up against the glass. When he glances at her she knocks on the window. “Are you open?” she mouths.

E sighs and digs the keys out of the drawer. The woman is joined by a large man and a large young boy. They press in closer as he unlocks the door.

“Good morning,” E says, holding the door open. “Can I help you guys?”

“I want candy,” the little boy says.

“Be quiet,” the woman replies.

The man follows. “You got a toilet I could use?” he asks.

The woman is leaning against the counter when E returns. “You got anything that really says ‘Michigan’?” she asks, looking around. “Like a big stuffed wolverine, or something?”

“I want candy!” the boy yells.

“I said ‘shut up,’ Ryan,” she says.

“No!” He picks up a Christmas ornament and throws it to the floor. It bounces, so he picks it up and throws it down again. The woman doesn’t even look at him.

The man comes out of the bathroom. “Excuse me,” E says, nodding to the boy.

“Excuse me!” the woman says. She grabs the boy and drags him away. The man follows them out the door.

“Have a good day,” E says.


Sometimes D feels like she’s living in the post-apocalypse … or the post-post-apocalypse, even. Like this city is a case study in how many times society can break down and be remade, decayed and deformed.

She and Sarah have made a lot of plans over the years. They were going to move into an artist collective. They were going to buy land and start an urban farm. They were going quit their jobs and start a bakery of their own.

The last idea had gotten as far as the quitting stage when Sarah backed out. It was too risky to start a new business, she said, in these “troubled economic times.”

Now, D’s bedroom is plastered over with useless blueprints, her closets filled with silk-screened shirts, her desk stacked with letter-pressed “grand opening” cards, all emblazoned with a clever logo for the bakery that never was.

The problem, she thinks as she picks one up and traces the image with her fingers, isn’t what sort of life you try to build, but who you try to build it with.


Sometimes when E thinks about his life on the U.P., he cycles the verb through all of the tenses: Lived. Has Lived. Lives. Will live. Will have lived. Had lived. He recites them faster and faster as they go around and around. There’s something depressing and poetic about the way the future becomes the past.

The mailman waves through the window as he drops today’s bundle into the slot. Mixed in with the usual stack of bills and fliers is a postcard, made of rough recycled paper. On the front is a design that looks like the state seal, in silver, with a cupcake instead of a shield.

E turns it over. His hands tremble slightly as he reads:

“Dear E, Sometimes when I’m biking through the city I see the People Mover passing by. Do you remember that? ‘The monorail to nowhere,” we called it. “The train of yesterday’s tomorrow, today.” I thought it was a joke back then, but now I think it must be a commentary on Michigan’s motto: “If you seek a pleasant peninsula look, look about you,” like everything looks better as long as you’re going around and around and never stop. I guess it’s terrible here, but I love it … and everybody has to be from someplace. Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice, D.”

25: Arkansas

She was one when diamonds began spilling from her pockets, glittering behind her like a comet’s tail, or a trail of fairy-tale breadcrumbs.

The crows would follow; swoop in to sweep them up before anyone found them out. That was 104 years ago.


“What do you want for breakfast, honey?” mother asked. It was morning.

The white plate was full and round and empty. “Honey,” he said. “Honey. Honey.” He pulled three diamonds from his pocket and arranged them on the countertop: yellow, yellow, brown.

“Oh baby,” her mother said. “Did you get out again?” She tossed the round rocks into the dirt, food for crows.

“Again,” N said, flapping his hands. “Again.” But mother lashed him to the seat of the black car, took him back the cold white place in Little Rock. There were no diamonds then.


For her it is always bedtime. “Good evening, Princess,” I say, bowing low, raven locks brushing against her white bedspread. “Come out to play?”

She giggles and flaps her arms. “Ne No NeNo No No Ne No,” she says.

Together we fly out the window, hand in hand, over shingle and tarpaper roofs, lakes, craters, mountains. Dull stars twinkle in loamy clouds; we cartwheel through them, our outstretched limbs stretching out longer than the horizon. Until the cawping crows come. Until we become a tangle of arms and legs, a tornado tumbling earthward.


Awoken, jumbled, sheet-wrapped, grass-stained. Mother was calling so slowly he rose and followed her floating words, walking through the doorway with diamonds pouring from his pockets, walking like someone in a dream.

24: Missouri

After the incident, I went out to his cabin in the Ozarks. The police hadn’t been there yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time.

It had probably been all over the morning papers, if those still existed. I’d seen it on the TV in the break room, to tell the truth.

The thing was, there was no reason for me to know he did it, but I did. So there I was, knocking on his door on a Monday morning, when I should’ve been at work.

There was no answer, of course.

I hadn’t seen him for some 15 years, when he quit his job in the city without explanation. He sent me letters every now and then.

It was complicated, he said, this thing he was working on, but when I saw it I would understand.

I knew what he meant, I guess, but it’s one of those things that don’t actually have a meaning really, because if you think about things long enough, you can think you understand just about anything.

The key to the cabin was pretty much where I expected.

The things inside were arranged exactly how I thought they’d be.

The desk was predictably free of clutter, aside from a single sheet of paper.

I picked up the page and began to read …

On Compromise

190 years ago, Congress struck a bargain over the balance of free and slave states through the admission of Missouri and Maine. Afterwards, when Hob Cowell said: “A fire has been kindled which all the waters of the ocean can not put out, and which only seas of blood can extinguish,” he was just stating the obvious.

No politician today would dare do the same, or have occasion to. We’ve passed from gold to silver to plastic, from a meritocracy to a mediocrity, a mediated democracy. Medicated by the placebo of the ballot box, we play a bit part in a performance with no content and of no consequence. We are living in a facile age.

The preceding paragraph is a lie, of course, perpetrated and perpetuated by those in power – politicians, corporations, the media, etc. In truth, the problems facing us are still apocalyptic, but we no longer take them seriously.

By seriously, we mean personally. To return to our opening anecdote, the Civil War was many things, but it was not a tragedy; it has been brother against brother since Biblical times. The conflict between the North and South could never have been peacefully reconciled.

It follows that bipartisanship is the problem, because (not despite) of the fact that it does not exist, and never has. The disease afflicting modern discourse is our culture of compromise.

Barack Obama is a prime example of this.

What is required to maintain democracy is conflict, passion, intensity, conviction. Rand Paul would have the right idea, if the Tea Party wasn’t just another fiction, but he serves to fan the flames, at least, to radicalize a docile populace.

The real hero, however, is Ted Kaczynski.

We are likewise inspired by the work of Charles Darwin. Our only qualm is with his title, which succumbs to the myths of origin and conclusion. There was no beginning to which we can return; there will be no end state for us – only the constant, violent process of natural selection, of evolution.

So let every battle be hard-fought. Let each peace be hard-won. Nothing easily gotten is worth having. Nothing freely given is worth anything.

23: Maine

The last sign had said next shelter 12 miles. That was this morning. The boy wasn’t sure how far he’d gone since then.

He unslung his pack, sat down, and took a sip of water. The forest was featureless - all the trees uniform - save for the line of painted white rectangles, trailing off like ellipses.

He’d been following these blazes since Katahdin, days ago. Now they were getting brighter as he walked, but the path was getting wilder, overgrown. The nearest town wasn’t for 50 miles. The boy continued on.

Soon it was dusk and he hadn’t reached a shelter yet. He was out of water, and could hear a periodic thudding, getting louder. The woods were silent otherwise.

The path opened onto a clearing. A dark man was chopping wood. He looked up at the boy and smiled, axe dangling from his white-streaked hands. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.