census

52: Washington, DC

2010-12-26T22:43:00.002-05:00

51: Puerto Rico

2010-12-20T00:02:00.000-05:00

“Bienvenidos Puerto Rico!” went the note on my desk. Something seemed wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I looked out the window. I’d just moved to this city to supervise the U.S. Census. I knew no one.

“Perdon,” whispered this timid voice through the open door. “Un momento.”

I looked up, flustered. “I’m sorry?”

“Como?” Enricuo replied, smiling.

Months went by. Enricuo’s English got no better; mine got worse. I lost one phoneme first, then the second … soon whole words, whole sentences were gone. I tried to stutter through it, but one morning my tongue fell completely silent.

“Es Ingles,” Enricuo told me. “Borinquen resiste. Lee este.” He set some book on the desk. “Un mes. Espero que mejore.”

“One month!?” I scribbled on the cover.

He shrugged. “O dos.”

Terrified, I went to the doctor. “De donde es usted?” the nurse inquired.

“The U.S.,” I wrote, holding my notebook out to her. The doctor looked me over one or two minutes longer before he spoke: “Por que?” then, seeing my confusion: “Why? Why did you come here, to Puerto Rico?”

“For the longest time, I felt something missing,” I wrote. “There’s this hole in my life, this … void.” I stopped, pencil hovering, wishing I could find some word we both could use.

"Un hueco," he whispered to himself, then he pointed to the door. “You should go home.”

But it’s not so simple. I sit with my pencils splintering the moment they touch my notebook, my thoughts coming unmoored the moment they occur, then drifting off, gone … somehow I keep getting to point B only to discover it's the point of no return. I flip through once more from the beginning; count down to the closing line. There were only twenty-five letters left—how could it just end like this?

50: Hawaii

2010-12-13T00:17:00.000-05:00

Aloha, Aloha Oe
(to the tune of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” as played by Cliff Edwards; sweetly, with Slothropian ennui)
by King Kainoa Dotcom

Well, “Aloha,” aloha oe.
Sail away on the trash-strewn sea.
‘Cause the springs would be sweeter here
If we said farewell to thee.

Like the sun in a vog-free sky,
It’s as clear as a thing can be
That there’d be fewer tourists here
If we said farewell to thee.

Akahai Lokahi  
Oluolu Haahaa Ahonui.
Revive the cause
Of Queen Liliuokalani.

So, “Aloha,” aloha oe.
You’re to blame for 1893.
A-and we wouldn’t be Americans
If we said farewell to thee.

(kazoo solo)

(repeat from bridge)

49: Alaska

2010-12-06T00:20:00.000-05:00

These are dark days in Unalaska, a slog. Rain and snow fall almost sideways; even the sun’s scared to stay for long.

My Goose’s over at DUT. I’ll be down at Amelia’s if anybody’s looking, watching the north wind whip up whitecaps in the harbor, drag clouds across the sky; waiting for the moon to show above the mountains where the sun may rise.

48: Arizona

2010-11-29T00:49:00.000-05:00

Start
You lean in to blow on the fire, gently coaxing the flames from tinder to twigs to branches, then sit back on your heels to watch.

The desert is pink and purple in the sunset. In the distance, the dark green wooded mountaintops of the Sierra Madre float like islands, rising up from the ocean of the plains.

You take the letter from your backpack and read it again. “Tucson High School class of 1980 30-year reunion,” it says across the top, “November 24, 2010.”

Well, why the hell not. You climb into the dirt-brown Chinook and pat Rusty on the head. His tail gives a halfhearted, sleepy wag.

Spit in your hand and brush back your hair, check your face for stubble in the mirror, sniff your armpits and smell your breath. Nothing. You smile.

It’s been 30 years; you could tell them anything … so which story do you want to tell?

For denial, go to 1
For anger, go to 2
For bargaining, go to 3
For despair, go to 4
For acceptance, go to 5

1.
“Everything went great at 3M after my big invention,” you tell Rob, whose fat, sagging face you barely recognize. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

You wait for the obvious question but he’s busy drinking, so you take a sip of scotch then go on. “Anyway, that’s around when I finally married my sweetheart Shelly and bought our house on Lake Superior. It’s beautiful up there.”

2.
“Actually, Larry, the whole story about how I invented Post-it Notes is a joke, and I never liked that bitch.” You wink and clap him on the arm. “Truth is, I’m an assassin.”

Larry laughs. You toss back your scotch and reach inside your jacket. “You think that’s funny?” you ask. “Say you prayers, asshole.”

3.
“It wasn’t fair!” You’re talking to this girl you had a crush on all through 10th grade, you’re pretty sure. “Shelly got pregnant and I had to marry her. She’s been holding it over my head ever since.”

You finish off one scotch and hoist the other. “I’ve made a killing,” you continue, “but it’s all gone to her … for another house, another car, you name it.” You lean in for a kiss. “But if I could turn back time, I’d trade it all for you,” you glance down at her breasts and nametag, “Brenda.”

4.
You’re six or seven scotches in when Shelly finds you slumped over at a table in the corner. “What are you doing here?” you ask, the words slurring together, like somebody tried to scrub them out with an off-brand eraser.

“I heard about that dirty movie you made of us, you pig,” she says. “Now you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

5.
“I live in a van out in the hills by I-10,” you shout from your perch atop the DJ table. “I lost my job at 3M last year. The bank took my home, my wife left me; my kids won’t answer my calls. I’ve lost everything,” You look at the glass of scotch shaking in your hand, and put it down, “but I’ve found myself.”

The DJ, Scott something-or-other, is nodding his head, either in agreement or to the music. “I wanna rock with you,” the speakers sing, “all night.” Everybody keeps dancing.

End
You open your eyes and stare out the windshield. Another stupidly beautiful sunset is just ending. Beside you, Rusty barks and wags his tail.

You fold the letter up and put it back in its envelope, get out of the van, and toss it into the fire. The ashes and embers rise like moths, the invitation going up in smoke, like a dream.

47: New Mexico

2010-11-22T00:15:00.000-05:00

It’s a player’s house, I know it; there’s magic and XP everywhere in this bitch.

I start searching the crates, the barrels … the medicine cabinet is the fucking motherload: more bottles than I can count, pills in every color of the rainbow – ambien, benzedrine, codeine, diazepam – “Are you a believer in miracles,” I sing to myself. “Da-doo una time some-thing miracles.”

I’m popping them into my mouth like skittles when the old man comes in, a huge chrome revolver in a holster on his hip. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouts.

I give him the signal, slapping two fingers on my arm. He pulls his gun and drops into a crouch. Time for plan B, I think. “Can I get a couple of extra-large chalupas?” I ask, “And an orange coke?”

A metallic click echoes off the bathroom tile as he cocks the hammer back. “Sorry, I thought this was a Taco Bell.”

He shakes his head. “Son, do you think this is a game?” He asks. “Shit,” He stands up and looks at the gun in his hands. “What kind of world are we living in?”

“The World of Reality,” I say, but he ain’t listening.

46: Oklahoma

2010-11-15T01:38:00.000-05:00

Dust rising from distant horizon. Pickup truck streaking along perpendicular gravel roads. Route 66 stretching south, southwest.

Cement road running through ruins. Houses falling into their foundations. Ghost towns returning to prairie.

Smoke rising from faraway refineries. Rusting oil derricks pecking at barren cornfield. Fat crows chasing the worm.

Rows of parallel lines intersecting. Some solitary farmer plowing rows of stones. This dry landscape, ever changing. His straw hat shading faded gray overalls. A scarecrow harvesting bumper crops of nothing.

White clouds turning gray, coalescing. Raindrops kicking up footstep puffs of dust. Dark sky spiraling down, funneling. Dirty road turning muddy in the mirror. A tornado slashing unmarred plains like calligraphy.

Country giving way to city. Buffalo retreating from the roadside. Trees turning back into houses.

Round red barn crouching, windowless. Glowing soda bottle reaching 66 feet high. Giant metal crucifix standing empty.

Turning south into Oklahoma City. Golden sunlight falling on buildings, reflecting pools. Countless chairs lying in rows.

Red traffic lights turning green. All-glass building complex reflecting all the others. Elevated walkway spanning the street. Skyscraper shadows standing as still as scarecrows. Sundials marking movement of space and time.

City limits decaying into suburbs. Telephone poles and wires springing up alongside. Passing Will Rogers World Airport. Predator drone floating in the cornflower sky. Listless guard watching the horizon for tornadoes.

Driving along route 66 again. A lonely highway chasing the setting sun. A hitchhiker looking westward, squinting.

Following a route on GoogleMaps. The Great Plains forming an upturned palm. Oklahoma’s finger pointing the way.

Driving an unmarked black sedan. Cameras automatically snapping nine frames at once. Making panoramas of the states.

45: Utah

2010-11-08T01:25:00.000-05:00

In the other room Bryce is crying. I rub my eyes, waiting for the Oxy to kick in. “God, just shut up,” I whisper. Why isn’t John home yet? He knows I’ve got a reading to finish. The words have all run together. Where the hell was I?

… and while recent studies have shown the popularity of online pornography in Utah (Edelman 2009), the topic of sexuality has been of interest there from even before the states conception, as can be seen in this early proto-Harlequin:

“Message for you from Deseret, Miss Smith.” She took the piece of paper from the telegraph operator:

“Take off your petticoat stop now ride me like the transcontinental railroad.”

“Oh John,” she swooned. The Western Union man stepped forward to catch her as a wave of pleasure spread outwards from her sacred wound.

What is captured in this scene is both the tension between spirituality and sexuality, between technology and distance peculiar to the Utah Mormon experience …

Bryce starts crying again. I lean back in the chair and rub my swelling belly. John still isn’t home. “Who do I need to massacre to get a bottle of gin and an abortion in this town?”

44: Wyoming

2010-11-01T00:18:00.000-04:00

That body tied to a buck fence, beaten, bloody: a roadside scarecrow.

Scared, cowed; nobody asked and you never told. Now dress for the day. Put your camouflage on. Look in the mirror: Are you a victim or an actor? Is that a costume or a uniform? What are you fighting for? Who are you hiding from?

43: Idaho

2010-10-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

“I just had the best idea.”

“Well, remember when I told you the Amish were coming?”

“On account of I read about it in the paper. Anyway, I got to thinking: sure they might find a little farmland here and there today, but what they really need is a home they can take west on the Oregon Trail tomorrow. That way when the evils of the modern world and the coyotes come a-calling they can just pick up and move on.”

“Not just any mobile homes; log cabins. Just like our Founding Fathers, and like the settlers of old. This is bigger than you and me and Boise. This is the American Dream all over again. This is Manifest Destiny.”

“Look it up. Anyway, we’ll worry about all the details later. The slogan is the best part. Just listen to this: Horsepower Houses – As Green As Grass.”

42: Washington

2010-10-18T00:41:00.000-04:00

Jay kicks the back of your chair again. “Dyke,” he whispers, just loud enough for you to hear.

You keep doodling without looking up. It’s hard being a vampire, you think, for like the zillionth time this year.

A spitball flies by and lands on the floor. Monique giggles and you hiss at her.

The problem isn’t that no one understands you, it’s that they think they do. You’ve known you were destined for immortality since you read Anne Rice when you were 10, but since then your subculture has been totally co-opted, your own identity subsumed under a trend that you’re outside of.

It started with those stupid movies, the ones where the vampires all have dramatic hairdos and preppy clothes, and their pale skin sparkles like they shower in that stupid glitter from Claire’s. Since then instead of being a freak, you’ve become a vampire fashion victim.

The wall clock ticks one minute closer to 7:30. You tap your pointed pewter rings on your desk, rolling them – clickclickclick – like claws on linoleum. In the corner of your eye, Craig is wadding up another spitball. You sneer and put your pen to paper.

The bell dies away. “We have a new member of our class today,” Mrs. Schreiber says, after everyone has more or less settled down. “I’d like you all to say hello to your new teaching assistant, Mr., um …” She glances at a piece of paper. “Collins.”

“Cullen,” a man’s voice says, softly, but in a way that cuts through the classroom chatter. You look toward the door. An impossibly handsome man is standing there, auburn-haired and dressed like a cloudy sky, with pale white skin and piercing blue eyes. He looks at you and smiles. “Call me Edward,” he says. Your blood runs hot in your veins.

He takes a seat by Mrs. Schreiber’s desk, and class continues more or less like normal, except every time you look, he’s watching.

Or, rather, every time he looks up, you’re the one watching him.

The bell rings, followed by the shuffling cacophony of a classfull of students fleeing their desks as quickly as possible. By the time you’ve finished the last sentence and closed your notebook, even Mrs. Schreiber has vanished.

You reach down for your backpack, and when you look up Edward is watching you again. He meets your gaze for a moment, before dropping his eyes to the leather-bound book in his hands. You stand and walk toward him. “What are you reading?” you ask.

“The Götzen-Dämmerung.” he says. “It’s about hammering,” he adds, smirking.

“Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” you say, rolling your eyes.

He laughs and you sit on the corner of his desk. “So what’s an interesting girl like you doing in BHS?” he asks.

“Wishing I could get the hell out of here.”

“Everything ends eventually.”

“Does it?” You glare at him pointedly.

He coughs and looks down at his book again. “Anyway,” he says, “aren’t you a little young to be reading Nietzsche?”

“Aren’t you a little old to be a TA?”

He looks up just like you wanted. You lean in and kiss him, biting down on his lip, letting the littlest trickle of his blood flow into your mouth. You can see the cracks in his ice blue eyes. You see yourself reflected in them.

After what seems like an eternity, he breaks away. “I should go,” he says, standing hurriedly. “I’ve got to call Bel… um, my friend.”

You follow him to the classroom door and watch him walk down the hall. “This isn’t over,” you say.

41: Montana

2010-10-11T00:39:00.000-04:00

The wolf is dead by the time I reach it, its eyes already going glassy, its tongue lolling out. The bullet hole is a spot of lichen, spreading. A thin red line runs down from its mouth like a riverbed.

I breathe in, deep. There’s a chill on the mountain air, sweet to the tongue and clear.

I sling my rifle and kneel down, run my fingers through the matted fur. I taste the blood that coats my hand, rust red.

I throw up on the rocks beside the body, then sit down and watch the clouds. The world spins. Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?

40: South Dakota

2010-10-04T00:58:00.000-04:00

To the whiteman standing by the Coffee Corner in Regent Sunday morning.

I saw you watching, just like I saw the unpainted metal silos rising over the buttes and grasses, like I saw the low hangers and fenced-in lots at the edge of town, the concrete wall with its painted sunset over pitch-black plains.

I’m through with two-state solutions: I’d erase the lines and start again. Hit me back if you want in. This land could be our land.

39: North Dakota

2010-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00

You hear the Indian Chief thundering down the enchanted highway, heading south, long before you see it at the edge of town.

She tears down Main Street, deep red and gleaming chrome, dragging a giant metal head. White sparks weep from its painted face where it strikes the ground.

A red light catches her by 2nd. She turns to look at you, revs her engine, and then she’s off again.

38: Colorado

2010-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

Another morning at the campus in the mountains. I push a button for another cup of coffee. A light turns on, a cup drops, a stream of tepid brown liquid trickles down.

I open the manila folder again and look at the blurry photo paper-clipped to the front flap, a short, skinny, dark-haired man in a blue tracksuit, leaning over a table, caught in action.

Age: 38

Birthplace: Shanghai, China

Grip: Shake Hand

I’ve only been working as a tech here for a couple months, so I got stuck in the final group, picked last like in grade school gym class, working on this middle-aged guy who probably wouldn’t even have a shot at the games again.

The idea of one country against another doesn’t seem to apply anymore, since Team U.S.A. is mostly Asian at this point, half-Chinese. The lobby is empty again. I shake his hand, thinking: You’ll show me, will you?

The equipment manager takes him off to get suited up. I tinker with the sensors, run the system test another time.

“Man, I’d totally bone that Natalie chick,” one of them says, a trainer, says.

“Dude,” the physician replies, “she’s like, fourteen.”

“Nah, bro, she’s just Asian.”

The Chinese guy starts to stretch his arms, does a quick Tai Chi like warm-up, followed by a couple of test swings while I calibrate the sensors. I turn the difficulty up, increase the speed, and watch his arms move even faster, a blur. The balls were smaller back then, faster.

We break for lunch. The Chinese guy hits the showers while I shut down the robot and run the data-processing algorithms. “Bro,” says the physician. “Mr. Miyake. This is, like, some total Karate Kid shit.”

The equipment manager brings the Chinese guy back, dressed in his tracksuit again, then they all head out the door together. I’ve got a salad in the fridge, so I don’t mind staying behind to analyze this morning’s data, recalibrating TOPR, preparing the table for this afternoon’s training, starting to draft our group’s report.

The athletes all come in to the OTC in the morning, then go out and party at night. Team U.S.A. may not have taken home any medals in 2008, but they totally owned the competition during the after-parties, playing champagne-pong. There’s always another game, another season.

The Chinese guy has been nice enough, and I can see why they keep him on the team. The data is pretty interesting, actually. The changes in speed and spin, the variance with different coefficients of friction, the effect of hardness and softness of rubber and sponge.

Word has a special AutoSummarize feature. No one is going to read the short version either.

37: Nebraska

2010-09-13T00:04:00.000-04:00

I was standing in a field with Dusty when Anne called to wish us a happy belated something. “Was it a holiday yesterday?” I asked. “I must’ve forgot.”

Dusty wandered off to relieve himself. Anne said something about an international day of morning. “Yep, I had one of them once,” I said, “over in Ogallala, at IHOP.”

I zoned out for a bit after that. Anne tends to ramble; always has. Anyway, I must’ve been thinking of Denny’s.

Next I knew, she was talking about this mosque, how it was a slap in the face; that there ought to be a law.

“Shucks, sis, do you even know how big a block in New York City is?” I asked. “You probably can’t even see one from the other. And I know you can’t from Kenesaw.”

Anne cussed and hung up, and I walked back to my truck with Dusty, looking at my phone, waiting to get that wasted hour back. “You agree with me, don’t you, Dusty?” I asked. He just shook his head.

“Ah, what do you know?” I said, and spat in the grass. “You’re a cow.”

36: Nevada

2010-09-06T00:49:00.000-04:00

“Get your claws off me, you fruit-faced iguanodont! Not in a million years!” You try to upend the table but it’s too heavy. Plan B: grab the rake and send the chips skittering like beetles around the wheel. “And that’s Dr. RD to you!”

The croupier takes your card. “Typographer, Lexicographer, Lotus-Eater, Astrologer, Numerologist, Freelance Writer,” she reads. “Well, aren’t you just a jerk-of-all-trades.”

Out at Red Rock Canyon, gray burros watch you through oversized black eyes. The prostitute mutters something from the trunk. She was more comfortable back there, she said, with the drugs.

You take a swig of Jack. Machineguns fire across the ridge. The road signs are shot to hell. You know how the people of Nevada feel. Las Vegas is Area 52. The aliens are among us.

Nearing Black Rock City, you see it. A figure with arms outstretched, burning up like Touchdown Jesus, red on black.

First the satellite images and now this: A crescent moon inside a pentagon. A beastly number somebody miscounted. A warning sign everybody missed.

One of the guards looks uncomfortably familiar. Black bug-eye shades block half of her red duck-billed face. She smiles, says: “What are the odds?”

You drive like you’re trying to set the land speed record, salt and dirt and dust kicking up to the big black empty TV-screen sky, gone.

35: West Virginia

2010-08-30T00:03:00.001-04:00

Since the accident I’ve felt like half a person, or less. If anybody asks, I tell them that the problem is I haven’t got a leg to stand on. What I mean is that outside of complaining I can’t do anything for myself.

Useless. Fucking useless.

When we talked about posthumanism in college it seemed like a good thing, sort of. We would all become better as post-people, perhaps. Fitter. Happier. Something else.

So where have you gone, Giorgio Agamben? Do you have a theory for this? How one stupid thing changes everything—a piece of coal falling from a truck, a car tumbling into some abyss. Is this bare life? Is this what letting be looks like? Is this what indifference is?

The worst is that I thought I was done with Appalachia, but here I am: back in my old bedroom, all tucked in and waiting for dad to bring me dinner, a child again.

I wonder what he thinks about it, my father. Whether he ever wanted me to leave. Whether this is better. Whether it matters to him that I’m the last man in our family, or was.

Do I need to tell him this is it? That we’re living at the end of history?

34: Kansas

2010-08-23T00:03:00.000-04:00

The house is at the end of a long, cracked asphalt road, fenced in. The field around it has gone to seed. I peer in through yellowed, ruffled curtains. An old television in the den is on, but I don’t see anyone.

I return to the front door and ring the bell. There is no name on the mailbox, no address, just the words “20th Century Castles.”

The chimes decay into a humming sound, a rumbling. The plate glass vibrates against my cheek. Inside, a man and woman appear, walking toward the door.

I step back as they open it. They’re wearing matching gray coveralls. The man is balding and the woman has a beehive. They’re blinking like they haven’t seen the sun in years.

Louis Armstrong is singing softly in the background. “What are you doing here?” the man asks after a long time. He draws his wife closer to his side. “How did you find us?”

“I work for the United States Census,” I say. “This is the last household on my list.”

“We’re not on anybody’s list,” he says.

I blink, and he grabs the notebook from my hand. I watch him leaf through its yellowed pages, shake it. Blank forms flutter to the ground. He closes it and looks me up and down, taking in my tangled hair, my stubbled cheeks.

I look at my feet. My soles are worn to paper. My satchel is stuffed with leaves. My pen is out of ink. My pin says “Census 2000.”

The door closes. The man and woman watch me through the glass. “How many people are living in this home?” I ask. I press my hand against the window. “Is there room for another one?”

33: Oregon

2010-08-17T00:18:00.000-04:00

“So,” Zil said, “Marge will lead the main group along the official route while the black bloc splits off and does direct action?”

B nodded sharply, or seemed to, his chin half-buried in a black bandana.

We all looked at the map, a red-sharpied route drawn arbitrarily through a mass of green. It had been my idea to stage a city-style protest in Deschutes National Forest, a huge parade chanting “Whose trees? Our trees!” past a line of riot police poised uncomfortably in a patch of wildflowers. Now we’d been planning this thing for days, or plotting I guess, and I couldn’t help but feel like the absurdity of it was getting away from us.

Marge was already in the middle of a new sentence. “And we need to keep the non-arrestables separate,” she was saying. “Maybe that’s something for the street medics?”

“You mean tree medics?” I asked.

“What?” I shrugged and Marge started talking again.

My gaze slid over to the window, over the parking lot of the Bend Super 8, a semi-derelict strip mall, the highway. Suddenly everything seemed to come apart before my eyes, exploding into component parts and processes, multi-dimensional schematics of materials and labor stretching back through history.

In another time and place it might have been a religious experience, struck me as a divine plan, but here and now it just seemed incredible that so much effort could go into something so banal, that this was the world we all agreed upon.

“The chants need to be inclusive,” Marge was saying. “I feel like no one should feel like their voice is being silenced.”

Zil nodded. “Maybe we should schedule another meeting to come up with ideas?”

B shook his black-hooded head. “Fuck more meetings,” he said.

“Did we ever agree on a plan of action?” I asked.

“Oh for Goddess’ sake,” said Marge. “I propose we follow Zil’s.”

“Seconded.”

“Major objections?” Zil asked. “Minor objections? Friendly amendments?” We all looked around silently.

“Consensus.”

32: Minnesota

2010-08-10T00:19:00.001-04:00

“I have cancer,” she says.

“Oh Jeez,” he says, “I’m so sorry.” He stands there a little longer then wanders off. The two women turn back to each other.

“You know, Bess,” Deb says, “you could break it to them a little easier.”

Bess chews her pierogi slowly and takes a swig of beer. “Do you mean less quickly,” she asks, “or less glibly?”

“Well, it’s a bit of a conversation-killer, any way you slice it, but you could be a little nicer about it, you know.”

Deb leaves, but Bess is still drinking, thinking again about how she doesn’t want her life to be one of those stories where the afflicted wife wastes away while looking out the window at the prairie, or wherever, feeling some combination of dread, anger, despair, philosophicality, and, finally, acceptance.

Or where it’s the husband playing out the remaining time God gives him on this good Earth, getting right with himself and going out and helping the homeless, or fishing with his son, or something.

Or where it’s some solitary person, and the story takes on a metaphorical quality, something about sickness and society.

Or where it’s just beside the point, whatever that may be.

In reality, it’s been a year since Bob died, and it still seems entirely out of character, how he went from being a big old pink-cheeked lummox to nothing in no time flat.

It had been his idea to refer to his tumors as “The Vikings,” because they’d showed up one day without warning and whatever they didn’t rape or enslave they burned. It had ended badly, but for a month or two they’d both laughed whenever the evening sportscast started, or the words “cancer” and “ravaged” were used together.

She takes his picture out of her wallet. In it, he’s showing off the purple and yellow logo he had tattooed on his cancer-ravaged chest. She laughs because it was so stupid and so perfect.

She orders another beer and turns back to the TV.

By last call Bess is crying and sends a text to Pam. “I’m watching SportsCenter reruns,” she writes, “and I’m drunk.”

“Bess?” Pam replies. “It’s two in the morning.”

She gets in her car and drives, full of the kind of grief where you go the wrong way down the street for no reason, where you end up at the lakeshore with your headlights off, nose of the car dipping toward the water.

“Goddamn it,” she says, because she’s one of those characters after all, staring out over Lake Wobegone and trying to remember a time when driving in didn’t seem like the only reasonable thing to do.

She can imagine Garrison Keillor narrating this on MPR. “It was cancer,” he intones, sad and tongue-in-cheek, and then you hear the sound of Foley-work oars and whistles across the water as The Vikings come.

She chuckles and turns the car radio on, throws the shifter into reverse. The end will come soon enough, but she isn’t done laughing yet.

31: California

2010-08-02T02:44:00.000-04:00

I was born under the sign of Serpentarius.

I was raised by snake handlers, healers. I left my family behind.

I abandoned the land of my birth, my ancestral home. Now the world is open like an abyss before me, but not silent and not empty.

I am come to muster my forces, to begin a battle, to end a war. I have donned my armor, sloughed off my scales.

I am changing.

“Okay, what do we get from this so far? Who exactly is doing the ‘talking.’ Is the main character narrating all of the scenes to himself? Is this supposed to be a dramatic monologue? Is there a point to it? A plot, maybe? What relationship, if any, does it have to what we see happening on screen?”

I watch the bullets fly through the air, striking the wall behind me as the music begins, all pounding drum and soaring horns.

I draw my dual 1911A1s and dive sideways, squeezing the triggers, letting the bullets fly, counting rounds as the leave the barrels: eleven, twelve, thirteen.

I duck behind a pillar and drop the magazines. The music is gone again. I hear my heart beating, my blood circulating, my nervous system working. A dull thud. A low hum. A high whine. A kind of silence that reminds me of more harmonious times.

“Well, the reification of the narrative, its refiguration in text – both as speech and thus again as subtitles – is pretty clearly a way of providing a kind of subtext, or a meta-text, if you will; of making it more complex by restatement, of distancing the action both from the speaker and from us. It almost calls into question the legitimacy of visual experience on a conceptual level even as it reaffirms it on the level of content. I think we really ‘see’ the difference between the violence of action and the violence of description, the creative versus the destructive, in a way.”

I am young. The bombs are falling in the muffled distance. Somewhere sirens sing. I huddle in the shelter with my father and mother, waiting for the fourth line to change, for it to be aligned with everything.

I wait, but the way out is obstructed.

I am tired. The dim lights flicker. The bombs fall closer now, but barely louder. The walls shake in fright. The heat from our bodies oppresses me.

I can feel my parents’ eyes on me, their hopes in me, like I hold some secret power, like I am their future, an illumination rising from the darkness like the sun.

I stare into the darkness before me. I feel the earth cool against my back.

I eat what my mother feeds me. I eat until I am full.

I am full of fire.

“This part actually reminds me … Apparently the state stone of California is this rock called serpentine. Sounds a little like the first line of this movie, right? Anyway, the goddamn rock is full of fucking asbestos! Pardon my French, professor. But, I mean, if any state had an official stone that caused cancer, it would be this one. The damn thing even looks like a bloated serpent, if you kind of squint at it hard enough. See? Eureka is the eye, Sacramento is the brain, and there’s La Paz at the ass end. We talk about being the golden state, but this place is one long natural catastrophe. We think we’re so goddamned lucky, but all of us got snakebit and stuck here. It’s like we’re living in a goddamn prison colony full of con artists, snake-oil salesmen, and plastic surgery disasters. There’s a goddamn lobby fighting to keep serpentine instated for Christ’s sake. We need to escape from LA for real. We need to rejoin the goddamn human race.”

“Interesting. So, what I’m hearing is that this is all allegorical? I think that there’s a possible interpretation there, but we need to work it out a little better. Make it clear. This is pretty dense material. Were you talking about the relationship of the snake to the figure of the healer? Or the poison to the cure? I’m not sure if I follow you. Maybe if we start by diagramming out the relationships between the characters. Anyone? Do we know who the main character is … or ‘are’?”

I snap back to the present as the magazines hit the floor. The slides flick forward. They are waiting for me at the rally point. I dive out again, guns blazing.

I arrive as they are about to extinguish their small campfire, to douse it with water from the cooking pot. I ask the cook to stay his hand, to let me eat a little first.

I am one and they are 12. They have eaten and are eager to break camp and go. The general is waiting for us. The cook ignores me.

I close my eyes as the fire goes out. Everything is dark. I am 33 years old. I am 5 years old again.

I wonder if this is my family now.

I listen. In the silence shells are falling. It is 1945. It is 1917. This is the end and the beginning.

I am flying gracefully. The air is full of heat and sound. The ground is above me, the sky below. Dark and light. High and low. Hot and cold. Through contemplation of existing forms it becomes possible to change the world.

I wake who knows how long later in a ditch. The others are all dead I think. The buildings are all rubble. The pieces of reality come back together slowly, imbricated. I am not dead. I am delivered.

“Okay. There’s a father, a mother, a general, the group of twelve soldiers, and a few unseen characters – whoever was doing the shooting, for example – and the narrator, who seems pretty clearly to be aligned with the voice of the son in the first section.”

“That’s a pretty comprehensive list. Let’s take a look at it. It’s interesting that you said ‘son’ there, to start. We can certainly assume that this character is male, given the historically gendered nature of the military. But is that ever stated? Is it implied? Are we reading too much into the lines about the ‘sun’ rising?”

“Wow. Yeah, I totally didn’t get that the first time.”

I squint as we exit the bunker. Our house, our neighborhood, our city, destroyed.

I hold out my hands to my mother, my father, my teachers.

I am 18 when I let them go at last.

I roam what remains of Europe. I witness the work of old masters. I see will triumph over intuition. I watch order rise to power.

I see beauty between numbers too, opportunity in crisis, truth in multiplicity. I know that spring is coming.

I tremble like a leaf of grass.

I meet M in Seattle. It is 1938. We are accompanist and dancer. I watch his body, lithe, lissome, sinuous, serpentine. I go home to my wife and dream of handling him.

I watch him moving to my music, changing as the rhythm changes, a mixture of physical arithmetic and arbitrary limitations.

I am twinned with him, sublime.

I move east with my wife because I must. Chicago is an empty promise. Marriage is not a prison, but a cage. It follows me like luggage as I am drawn to New York and M.

I practice with him endlessly, long after the others have departed. He dances as I hammer out pieces for percussion. The innocent moment comes. A lingering touch, a kiss.

I feel a phase shifting, a life unbalancing.

I am changing.

“Here we see how the issue of gender gets a bit more complicated, not to mention time, several decades of which have been either collapsed or elided.”

“Yeah, at this point I was a little confused as to ‘where’ the story was happening, too. Like, it seems like World War I and II, and ze talks about being in Europe, but then ze is in America again.”

“I don’t know. The way I see it, it’s, like, a commentary on capitalism, you know? The uniformity of industrial nations, the dehumanizing effects of mechanization. So, like, both Europe and America are the same. History is flat. The economy is imaginary everywhere, you know?”

“Interesting. What do you mean?”

“Well, like, it’s just made up, right? And on a kind of, um, meta level, movies are part of the story we’re telling about ourselves, the world we’re, like, making in the image of us, sort of like, um. I don’t know. Sorry, I forgot what I was about to say.”

I return to camp barefoot. The sun is rising as I reach the gate. The guard shields his eyes and lets me in. I am returning from the desert. It is the year 30 AD.

I proceed to the banquet table. I take bread, break it, and sit down to eat. My comrades drift around me, wraithlike. I wonder if the general is waiting. I wonder when my last supper will be.

I go to see her later, the general, my wife. She calls me and I go to her like one hypnotized. She comforts me, convinces me to lay my arms aside.

I rest. It is a time when heaven seems to be on Earth, when this desert landscape seems like a second paradise.

I drink deep of dreams and remember nothing. I draw sustenance from inexhaustible subconscious springs. I sleep until I am well again.

I awake. As I rub the sleep away the scales fall from my eyes.

I know now she is on another side, or I am. We stand apart, opposed. She has fallen, gone over to the order. She plotted this all along, to break my spirit, to betray me.

I must move slowly, quietly mass my forces. I struggle to stand.

I was weak but now am strong; was blind but now I see.

I am only strong because of M.

I find her in the garden. I greet her. I take her by the hand. I whisper to her in the semi-silence. I lead her to a half-secluded place. I dance with her to the incidental music of the world. I make love to her. I take her as my own. My one and only, my thirteenth disciple.

“Now things are really getting tricky. We’ve got a third – and completely different – time period going on. Was anybody expecting this? Did we see this change coming? What do we make of it?”

“There seems like there’s a lot of overlap going on.”

“Go on.”

“Well, there’s still a man and wife and an M. There’s a group of soldiers in one and disciples in the other. The general is also the wife, which is a little weird … and M is a woman in this one. And I don’t think I really get the desert bit at all.”

“At this point, it may be fruitful to go outside of the text and investigate a few other primary sources. If you’ll look at your first handout, you’ll notice it’s essentially a list of calculations. ‘Serpentarius is the 13th sign of the zodiac. California is the 31st state. 31 backwards is 13. L-A-C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A is 13. Hollywoodland has 13 letters. The sign was installed on July 13, 1923, 20 years after the neighborhood was founded, 1 plus 9 plus 0 plus 3, or 23 minus 10 years after JC.”

“JC?”

“Oh shit. I remember that from fucking high school English class. Doesn’t that pretty much always mean Jesus Christ?”

“Perhaps. Who else has those initials? How many other characters could this be?”

I feel time flex as the flux flows through us. There is a moment of immense power coming.

I am on the cross my blood is flowing.

I am in Japan and the bomb is dropping.

“I am in film class and the film is boring.”

“All right, very funny. I wasn’t going to bring this up until later, but let’s talk about the idea of boredom. First, why don’t we examine our terms? Do we think of ‘boringness’ as an intrinsic quality? Is it objective or subjective? Can we say, for example, that this film ‘is boring’? Or is it that we are bored by it? And if the latter, what does that say about us? Let’s go around the room. Just say the first thing that comes to mind.”

“Each time the perspective shifts, I feel more, um, distanciated from the character Like, I can’t really relate to him.”

“Yeah, it just feels totally random.”

“It was boring to me at first, but then I started thinking about it like poetry. It has a weird dream logic to it, I think.”

“Like counting sheep, you mean? That’s what it felt like to me.”

“Me too. Like a hypnotist saying ‘you are getting sleepy’ over and over in that really droney voice.”

“Yeah, but different, you know. Because that’s not the movie’s message, right? Even if it is sort of about the power of suggestion.”

“The cinematography is pretty good. It kept me interested.”

“Was the person who made this autistic? I mean none of the characters have names or faces.”

“Whoa, yeah. Now that she mentions it, I’m like, totally getting an ‘outsider art’ vibe from this.”

“That is totally offensive. This whole thing is. I mean, aside from Jesus Christ, dragging the A-bomb and the Orient into this? What was ze thinking?”

“It reminds me a lot of a short film I made, actually. The main dude was this total Christ-figure, too, but it took place in the present day California. The way I handled it was to have him read passages from the bible to the camera, and then the narrative action totally mirrored them. Like this one scene where he reads the crucifixion right before his fucking Nazi father kicks him out of the house and tells him to go back to school or get a job you know? As if that shit was even fucking possible. Pardon my French. Anyway, I thought my method worked pretty well.”

“Sorry, what was the question?

I am a composer of aleatoric processes. I am removing myself from my work even as I am speaking through it. I am creating structure and subverting it. I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.

I gather my friends. Together we make happenings, frame sound and silence, not music or noise, there is no useful distinction between these two ideas.

I am overcome with wonder at the world but

I do not tremble at the fragility of this moment as it decreases.

I do not care how one is followed by another. Everything always falls in its proper place. Everything always changes.

I am one and many, multiple. M and me and them, 12 plus (1 plus 1) is 13. There is no useful distinction between one and two, between I and us. I am one and we with M.

I (and he) read to them from the book of changes while he (and I) dances. Penetration produces gradual and inconspicuous effects. It should be effected not by an act of violation but by influence that never lapses.

I am a modest, balanced, and entwined, fixed and temperate but not unchanging. M says the same to me, a vow.

I watch the sun go down and we do not wait for it to rise. I do not need to tie the one to the other. We are not tied, not tethered, incoherent to each other and ourselves.

I know that all that is visible rises beyond itself, extends into the invisible world, where it becomes, at last, clear, consecrated, ordered by us.

I do not believe that it should or must, but that it does. This is the structure in which all change occurs, in which all chance exists.

I heed the gentle, penetrating whisper of the wind as it shifts, sibilant, coiling itself around me.

I adapt to it.

“Well, I think that last segment speaks for itself. Any thoughts or questions?

“So, basically that was like The Matrix meets Passion of the Christ plus a little bit of Adaptation.”

“Whoa, yeah. He’s right. They totally should have cast Nic Cage in that.”

“That would’ve been pretty awesome. Does he have 13 letters in his name, though?”

“No, I don’t think so, but he was in that movie Snake Eyes, so I think that counts.”

“And I think he has a star on the walk of fame, so that might affect his astronomical calculations.”

“Seriously, though, Professor. What the hell was that?”

“Yeah, I feel like we all just wasted two hours of our lives.”

“Well, I won’t answer that question directly, but there are a few different literary models it may be useful to consider. Like the memoir, for example, the allegory (as was mentioned earlier), and the work of historical fiction.”

“So it’s just some kind of mash-up?”

“Not exactly. If I told you that this script was written using chance techniques, would you believe me? And how would that affect the way we appreciate it? Is the method used to generate a text important if it isn’t represented in its content?”

“Do you mean the author was just calling out plot twists based on heads or tails, flipping coins like fucking Rosencrantz?”

“You mean Guildenstern?”

“Dude, it doesn’t matter. The point is the author is fucking dead to us.”

“It was the I-Ching, wasn’t it, Professor?”

“Perhaps. Now we’re running out of time, so there’s a saying that I want to tell you that I think will both tie in to one of our earlier discussions and give us a starting point to write about this work in a larger context, which is part of your assignment for the week. It goes like this: 'In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all, but very interesting.’”

“But that was already at least like, 120 minutes. How many more times do we have to watch it?”

“Very funny. Class dismissed. I’ll see you all next week.”

30: Wisconsin

2010-07-26T00:25:00.000-04:00

This story is so incredible you want to cry.

It’s about a man named Jerry who everybody loves. One day he gets shot by robbers. The doctors think he’s going to die for sure. But he tells a joke to get them laughing, and says that he’s choosing to be alive. He survives.

“Wow!!” you type, “Can you believe it?!” You enter Andrew and Jessie’s addresses and press send. Hopefully your kids will get this one.

You close your email and try to read the AOL, but you get halfway through one article and then it changes for another. You don’t know how to make it stop.

Maybe if you had one of those Ipads it would be easier … then you could check your email while you were shopping, too. Steve might buy you one. You email him to ask.

Speaking of shopping, you should have gone an hour ago. Now it’s too late to make it to Pick n’ Save and back before he gets home.

There’s a little brick cheese in the fridge … frozen peas and carrots … a case or so of Schlitz … maybe you could throw a beer cheese soup together.

Still, it would have been nice to have made a real dinner … bratwurst and potatoes … sweet corn … cheddar bread and butter … apple kuchen … instead of wasting the day on the computer.

Oh, if only you were a better wife, a better mother to your kids. They never call you anymore, and barely ever reply to your emails. You don’t even know what Andrew’s job is. You only heard about Jessie’s new boyfriend through The Facebook.

“Honey,” Steve calls from the other room, “I’m home.” The front door closes with a click.

“Hi Snookums,” you call back to him, dabbing your eyes. “How was work?”

“Good.” His reflection appears in the computer screen, wearing his “Bob & Bob for Presidents” t-shirt and propping his dry-erase placard against the wall. “What did you do today?” he asks.

“Oh, nothing much.” You check your AOL again. “Did you get my email?”

“No, dear,” he says. “I’ve been on the picket lines.”

“Oh, you must be so tired!” You turn toward him and start to cry again. “Oh, Honey, I’m so sorry. I just got wrapped up in this story … and then I was surfing the web … and I didn’t remember dinner or where you were striking … No wonder the kids never tell me anything.”

“Aw, Angel Cakes,” he puts his hand on your shoulder, “don’t cry. Look,” he points at the screen. “There’s an email from Andrew now.”

You wipe your eyes and there it is, an email with the subject line: “Re: Fwd: Fwd: The power of positive thinking - AN AMAZING STOREY!!!”

“Dear Mom,” it begins, “I was thinking about killing myself today. Then I got your email and everything changed. It was like a light turned on in my mind. I knew I didn’t have to be sad any longer. That I could be as happy as I want to be.”

“So I called up my boss and told him that I quit. I called my girlfriend and asked her to marry me. I erased all of my depressing music. I deleted my angsty poetry. I’m going to dedicate my life to helping others like you helped me. I love you, Mom. And Dad. I love both of you.”

Your heart feels like it’s about to burst, it’s so full of relief and joy. “Thank you, Jesus,” you whisper. “Oh, thank you.”

That such a little thing could make such a difference … it’s like a miracle.

29: Iowa

2010-07-19T00:44:00.001-04:00

She is on a mission to homogenize America.

She colors swing states on a map, plots politics on a graph, determines what drives candidates toward the center over time.

She thinks, as her plane descends – the cornfields of Iowa rising to meet her in perfect squares – how this is the land of standardized tests, respected writing centers, influential caucuses and mediocre presidents.

It is the perfect place to foment a quiet insurgency, to construct a newer and more moral majority, here in the heart of the country.

He wrote a story about a woman on a mission to homogenize America.

He assigned it to a student in the workshop, told her to revise it in the style of a reading comprehension question, to have the plot climax at a caucus.

He thought, as he drove east from the city – the white sun perfectly centered in his rearview mirror – how Iowa was where coastal writers came to be reborn, refined, and suburbanized.

It was the perfect place to solve the crisis of national identity, to heal a divided and subdivided society, here in the heart of the heart of the country.

She had written a show about a man who wrote a story about a woman on a mission to homogenize America.

She had set it in West Branch, cast a professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, recruited a new student, and let the plot transform from Iowa Exam narrative to Iowa Caucus conspiracy.

She had thought, as the unmarked car took her west along the Herbert Hoover Highway – the rectangular houses, square grass patches, and uniform rows of corn plodding past – how this was where fiction came to become reality, how it had been the perfect place.

28: Texas

2010-07-12T00:00:00.001-04:00

“Hello,” the caller said. “Anthony?” It was an old man’s voice, ornery and a little confused.

“Sorry,” John replied. “I think you have the wrong number.”

“Is this Anthony?” the caller asked.

“Sorry,” John said again, and hung up.

He was in the kitchenette later, getting a beer, when he heard the phone vibrating against the surface of the desk again. He sprinted the four steps back into his bedroom and picked it up, hoping it would be Gabe this time.

“Hello?” he said.

“My name is Sal Esposito,” the man said. “I’m calling for my son Anthony.”

John closed his eyes. “Wrong number,” he said.

“Please,” the man said, choking up. “I just want to talk to my son.”

After he hung up this time, John flipped through his phone’s settings looking for a “block” feature. He couldn’t find one, so he saved the number to his contacts instead, under “Wrong Number.” When it came up on the caller ID five minutes later, he hit “Ignore” and put the phone back down.

Five beers and two voicemails later it was almost 2300 hours, and John’s shift was coming up. He’d listened to the first voicemail, which started with “Hello? Anthony? Hello?” and sort of trailed off. He deleted the second one without listening to it. Gabe had never called. He got into the shower, turned it on, and gasped as the first burst of cold water hit his skin, then closed his eyes and started jerking off.

Specialist Packard was waiting for him at the guardhouse. “Sergeant Davis is lookin’ for you,” he said in that retarded West Texas drawl.

“Shit,” John said as he signed into the log: 0012 hours. Late again.

John’s phone rang again the next afternoon while he was sleeping. “Motherfucker,” he said as he flipped it open. “Hello?” he mumbled.

“Late shift again, huh bro?” Hank laughed. “You got to get yourself a cushy government job like mine. Forget that Army shit.”

“One year,” John said, “four months, three weeks, two days, and a wake-up.”

“But who’s counting, right?” His brother laughed again. “Look, I gotta go. You should come over for dinner tonight. And bring a fucking girlfriend this time.”

Hank hung up. John put the phone down and went back to sleep.

He woke some time later to the phone buzzing again. He picked it up and stared groggily at the screen but couldn’t make the number out. “Who is this?” he asked.

“What, you don’t know my number by now?” Gabe asked.

“C’mon,” John said, “I told you I can’t put it in my phone.”

Gabe snorted. “Yeah, sure. You coming out tonight, or what?”

“Definitely.” John looked at his bedside clock. “I mean, I agreed to have dinner at my brother’s, but I can probably meet you after that.”

“Well, don’t go out of your fucking way.”

“Hey,” John started, but Gabe had already hung up. “What a bitch,” he muttered, and rolled out of bed, feeling his naked skin peeling off the sweat-soaked sheets.

It was around 1730 hours when John pulled into Homestead Meadows, a loose collection of prefab buildings in the middle of nowhere. His brother was in the driveway working on his red Camaro, leaning over the engine, fat ass sticking up into the air.

“Hey bro,” Hank said, as John started toward him. “Grab a beer and get in,” he gestured to a cooler next to the car. “I need you to pump the gas for a second.”

John took a bottle, popped it open, and took a long drink, then settled into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine sputtered to life just as his phone started vibrating in his pocket. He dug it out. “Wrong Number,” it read. The next thing he knew, Hank was shouting and trying to wave the clouds of smoke away from his face. John shook his head and put his phone away.

They ate in front of the TV, Hank and his wife Amber on their recliners; John next to their three boys on the couch. A UFC match was on. “Hank tells me you’re looking to get a job like his,” Amber said during a commercial break.

“I’d like to,” John said, “I just gotta get my discharge first.”

“Bro, you shoulda told me that was the problem,” Hank called from the kitchen. He walked back into the living room with a couple more bottles of beer in his hands. “I know plenty of girls could help with that.”

“Cut it out, Travis. Ricky.” Amber said, talking to the two older boys wresting on the floor.

“I was thinking that I should shoot for an assignment up in Vermont,” John said. “I read about this town there where the border runs right down the center of the street, cuts through a couple houses, even a library. It must be crazy there, a lot of international disputes over late fees, or people smuggling paperbacks from one side to the other.”

“Hell yeah,” said Hank. “That would be some Super Troopers shit.” He took a swig of beer. “But hey, come out on patrol with me tomorrow. I’ll show you how much fun Texas can be.”

“Yeah, sure.” John looked at his watch. 2115 hours. “Oh shit, I gotta go.”

“Not staying for dessert?” Amber asked. “I made Jello.”

Gabe was waiting across the bar, a white tank-top and faded cut-offs clinging to his body, the light melting on his amber skin. He was by the jukebox, dancing. It was just like the first time John saw him.

“Where you been, amigo?” Gabe asked when John walked over, not looking up. “I haven’t seen you in, like, forever.”

“Working,” John said. “You know.” He crossed his arms, then dropped them back to his sides.

“This is my favorite,” Gabe said as a new song started, “’Amor Prohibido,’ by Selena.” He paused, then added dramatically: “the slain Tejano superstar.” He looked at John at last. “So, you gonna dance with me, or what?” he asked.

They fucked in the men’s room like always, Gabe smiling and unbuckling John’s belt; John bending Gabe over and thrusting, sweating, gasping, swearing under his breath. He ran his hands up from Gabe’s hips, along his sides, his neck, into his deep black hair. Afterwards they sat at the bar, drinking. Gabe had one hand on John’s leg, stroking it absently.

“C’mon Gabe, watch it, will ya?” John muttered, without looking down.

“I thought you said nobody from your unit came here,” Gabe said, leaning in, “that it was strictly off-limits.” He smiled and dug his fingers into John’s front pocket, rubbing them slowly up and down. “Or maybe there’s somebody else you don’t want to see.”

He withdrew his hand quickly with John’s phone in it, and flipped it open before John could grab it away. “Ay, carajo,” he said. “’Wrong Number’? Who the fuck is that?”

John reached out for the phone again, but Gabe danced away. “Back off, maricón,” he said over his shoulder as he headed back to the jukebox. John sat back down and watched him feed the machine a dollar and select another Selena song.

John drove straight from the bar to Fort Bliss, and got to the gate just as his shift was starting. Sergeant Davis was waiting for him.

“The CO wants to see you in his office at 0800 tomorrow,” he said, and looked John up and down. “Now unfuck yourself and get your damn uniform on.”

The Captain chewed him out in the morning, John standing at attention in his office, trying not to fall asleep. He could barely pay attention to anything. “Yes sir,” he repeated, again and again.

Afterwards, he drove out to Homestead Meadows. The sun was high above the mountains, the light bending through the waves of heat coming off the car, the road, and the dirt. He squinted and rubbed his eyes. His brother was in the driveway waiting for him.

“I told my partner you’d fill in for him today,” Hank said. “I got you a spare uniform.”

John changed in the backseat on the way to the border, where they both got out and looked around. A long stretch of steel mesh and vertical bars, maybe 20 feet tall, stretched off into the desert for miles. “We find a coupla wetbacks out here every week,” Hank said, as they were climbing back into the car, “so let me know if you see anything brown that’s still alive.”

They spotted them just after noon, a huddle of bodies crouched down on the wrong side of the wall. Hank gunned it and three of them took off running. “Watch those two,” he said, and John jumped out. The SUV tore across the dusty ground.

John walked over to the two Mexicans, a teenager sitting against the fence, an older woman holding him in her arms. It looked like his leg was broken. Nobody moved or said anything. A couple minutes later they heard gunshots.

Hank returned in the SUV eventually, the three runners in the back. “Shit, Hank. You didn’t shoot ‘em, did you?” John asked.

“Nah, just at ‘em.” Hank laughed, and John shook his head. “What’s your problem, bro?” he asked.

The sun was almost setting by the time John got back to his apartment. He’d had to wait while his brother took the Mexicans in for processing, then again while he filled out his paperwork. It felt like there was a layer of sand building up behind his eyes that he couldn’t rub away.

He tried calling Gabe at the last number he called from, but the phone just rang and rang. When the machine finally picked up, it turned out to be a bar.

“Fuck,” John said, flopping down onto his bed. All he wanted to do was fuck someone or kill himself.

Ciudad Juarez was off-limits too, supposedly, but the Mexican guard just waved him through. He parked and started walking – down side streets, into back alleys – until he found the place.

The bartender had just slapped his change from the first shot down on the counter and John was already ordering another. He couldn’t tell if the music was actually familiar or just loud. He looked around.

A young guy was sitting in the corner, slick black hair, a tight button-down shirt open at the cuffs and collar. John slammed his tequila and ordered another.

They were in the bathroom when it happened. John had his pants around his ankles; the boy had John’s cock in his mouth. John half-saw, half-felt a blinding flash of light, then everything went dark.

John called his brother from the border in the morning, and waited in a holding area while he came to pick him up. All Hank said as they drove back into El Paso was that John was fucking lucky to be alive. John wasn’t sure about that.

He picked up a spare key to his apartment from the manager. He dug out his old cell phone from his desk and turned it on, then rummaged around for paperwork from his bank, his car insurance, and his credit cards.

The phone buzzed against the desktop – five missed calls; five new messages. The last four were what he expected: Specialist Packard a little after 0015, then two from Sergeant Davis, then one from the CO. The first message was from Gabe.

“John,” he started, “answer your phone, you fucking puta. I just want you to know…”

The phone beeped, cutting off Gabe’s voice for a second. John lowered it and looked at the screen. “Wrong Number,” it said.

He stared at the phone for a long time, Gabe’s voice buzzing from the speaker, the ringer beeping. He wanted to throw it out the window, to crush it in his hand. Finally, he flipped the phone open. “What the hell do you want?” he asked.

“Hi, I’m calling for Anthony,” a man said, “Anthony Esposito.” It was a young man’s voice, clipped and professional.

“Sorry,” John said. “You have the wrong number.”

“Do you know where I could reach him?” the man asked. “It’s about his father.”

John was lying in bed listening to the phone ring. He couldn’t bring himself to pick it up, to look at it, to think about it. He didn’t want to think about anything.

But he couldn’t help it.

If he never answered again, would it be a tragedy? If he never spoke, would it be a shame? He couldn’t decide whether it was worse that no one would ever ask him, or that there was no one he could tell who would understand.

27: Florida

2010-07-05T00:01:00.002-04:00

“Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“It’s a graph, sir.”

“Who am I, Laurel and Hardy? I can see that.”

“Abbot and Costello, sir.”

“Which one?”

“One, sir?”

“The first or second?”

“Who was first?”

“Don’t start with me. Davis!”

Davis snaps his head up from his notepad, where he’s been doodling furiously, drawing either a giant flaccid penis or the State of Florida. “Yes, sir?” He asks.

“This looks like the chart of my last heart attack. What does it mean?”

“It’s the numbers from last week, sir.”

“Christ. Dora!” he yells in the direction of the door. “Get me BP on the line.”

“Yes sir,” comes a voice through the intercom.

Davis resumes doodling. The other three men in pastel polo shirts squirm slightly in their chairs. The man holding up the chart – Cooper – begins to put it down, then the phone on the desk rings, and he leaps back to attention. The director picks the receiver up. “You smarmy British son of a bitch!” he yells. “We need another twenty-five million.”

The voice coming through the receiver is muffled. The men pretend not to pay attention, looking out the plate glass windows onto downtown Tallahassee or rereading the motivational posters on the walls. The director makes an obscene gesture with his free hand. A tiny green lizard runs across the outside of the window. An orange flash of lightning lights up the horizon. The tinny voice is still talking, without pause.

“Look,” the director says, interrupting, “it’s embarrassing, emasculating. We have to put this little box up on our website with all this bullshit about black balls and deep whatevers. Look at that exclamation point! It’s pink, for Christ’s sake. And the charts!” He points at Cooper, who stands up stiffer. “They’re limper than Prince Charles’s prick. We’re getting fewer tourists than Kansas. You owe us big time.”

Lightning flashes again as the storm clouds swirl in. Thunder covers some more incomprehensible dialogue. The director shouts again: “Is that the best you can do, you lily-livered limey bastard? Well, I suggest you get that queen mother of yours over here and tell her to suck it.” He slams the phone back onto its cradle. Davis jumps up and looks around. The rain starts more or less on schedule.

“All right people,” the director gazes around the table, “rally caps. It’s the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the bases loaded. It’s first and goal with 5 seconds remaining. We’re at half-court and the shot clock is running down. It’s some sort of, um, last minute soccer situation. But we can turn this thing around.” He stands and pounds on the table with his fists. “This doesn’t have to be the Gulf Oil Crisis – it can be the Gulf Oil Opportunity!”

“Like in Chinese, sir?” The man seated next to Davis asks.

“Gomez, have you seen me out working in the rice paddies? Wearing one of those pointy hats? Building a giant wall to keep the Mongols out? Did my skin turn yellow while I wasn’t looking? Am I being inscrutable? Mysterious? Exotic? Oriental?”

“No, sir.”

The director pounds the table again. “You’re damn right I’m not! And if you say I am again I’ll have you and your family sent to the goddamn labor camps. We’ll see who’s a Maoist then, you pinko. Why, if this was thirty years ago I’d take you out back and shoot you myself.” He sits back down and looks around the table. Now, what the hell were we talking about?”

“The Gulf Oil Opportunity, sir,” the man seated next to Cooper by the window says.

“I like it!” The director snaps his fingers. “Good thinking, what’s-your-name. Give yourself a kiss on the ass.”

“A pat on the back, sir?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” The director looks at him more closely. “What is your name anyway?”

“Wang, sir.”

“Wang?” He stares incredulously. “What the hell kind of a name is that?”

“Chinese, sir.”

“Chinese? Well, I don’t like it.”

“Should I change it, sir?”

“Change it!” He snaps his fingers again. “That’s it! You’re on fire, what’s-your-name. Give yourself that pat on the ass after all. Dora!” He yells at the door, “get me someone in Design – tell him we need the biggest map he can find. Gomez, convene us a focus group.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gomez leaves. A designer arrives a few minutes later, dressed all in black, carrying a silver laptop under one tattooed arm. He sets it on the table facing the director, launches a web browser, and stands back as a map of Florida loads, pushing black frame glasses up his pierced nose. No one says anything, so he shrugs his shoulders at the room in general, and leaves. The director grabs a Sharpie from the table and scrawls “Gulf of Florida” on the screen, then steps back to admire his handiwork. The wind howls dully through the plate-glass windows. The rain rakes across the glass. Palm trees cartwheel down the streets like tumbleweeds. Gomez enters with the janitor. “Sorry, sir,” he says, “he was the only one I could find.”

“What about me?” comes the voice from the intercom.

The director looks around. “Did someone say something?”

Cooper and Wang both shake their heads. Davis is busy doodling. “It was just the wind, sir,” Gomez says.

“Dora!” the director yells, “close the damn door!” He turns the laptop toward the janitor. “Okay, José, what do you see?”

The janitor glances at it for a second, then back at the director. “The Golfo de México, señor.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” the director bellows. The janitor cringes and crosses himself. A swarm of cockroaches skitters up the wall. “Okay,” the director says, “I say we write the whole Panhandle off. Maybe lease it to Mexico until this all blows over. José, give your people a call. I’m prepared to make concessions: a chupacabra in every pot, all the pesos you can eat, and free siestas for everyone.” The janitor says nothing. “Not mañana, you lazy Mexican,” the director shouts. “Now! Make it happen!”

The janitor nods. “Si, señor.” Water spills across the carpet as he opens the door, soaking it, coating it in a thin glimmering film. His footsteps slosh down the hallway. A couple of small fish swim in.

“Sir, aren’t there a few other states in the way?” Wang asks, pointing at the screen.

“Fuck ‘em,” the director says. “Hell, maybe they’d even want in. I mean what the hell kind of tourist goes to Texas or Alabama? Gomez, get our focus group back here – we’ll ask him. Dora, get me Alabama on the line.”

The intercom is silent. The lights flicker and the air conditioning sputters off. Outside, José floats in a yellow bucket, using a mop to pole himself away. A family of five is huddled together atop an overturned mobile home. A couple of lifeguards paddle a surfboard past a half-submerged elderly woman wearing a clear plastic rain bonnet and holding a transparent umbrella aloft. Two men in suits prepare to dive from different windows of an office building. One jumps, and then – after flowcharting his potential best-practice action items going forward, leveraging the most up-to-date metrics of rational self-interest and goal-oriented excellence, and synergizing real-time big picture data analysis – the other operationalizes a proactive paradigm shift as well. Inside Visit Florida, the dark liquid rises above the ankles of the five men in the conference room. The director looks down, grabs Davis’s water glass, scoops some of the liquid up, and puts the glass back on the table. The liquid sloshes back and forth, and when it settles a thick, black-brown-red-orange layer forms across the top.

“Tell me what I’m looking at.”

“It’s oil, sir.”

“Oil!” He slams his hand down. Oily water flies everywhere. “It’s profit! Here’s the idea: We open the beaches and charge a flat fee for people to come and take as much as they want to carry away. ‘Winter’s coming in Minnesota,’ we tell them. ‘The next increase in gas prices is just around the corner. Heat your home, fuel your car, etc.’ If BP can turn a profit on this, why can’t we?”

“Is that legal, sir?” Wang asks.

“What do we care? It’s business! Hell, invite the foodies, too. They love oil!” He leans over, grabs one of the gasping fish that’s flopping in the shallow water on the floor, and smacks it on the tabletop until it dies. It lies there, glistening. “We’ll sell ‘em our seafood as pre-oiled. Pre-seasoned, even! Organic and all-natural, fresh from the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Florida, sir.”

“Shut up, Gomez. We can even get some celebrities on board. Rachel Ray, if she’s still cheap. Or that guy who says ‘bam’ all the time.”

“Bigelow, sir?”

“No, Bourdain. That asshole will eat anything.”

“What about FDA approval, sir?” Wang asks.

“Approval? What happened to the free market? What happened to life, liberty, and the pursuit of business? What the hell country is this?”

“America, sir.”

“America! Don’t talk to me about America, you namby-pamby East Coast Ivy League liberal puke. I spent 10 years eating gooks in Indo-China for breakfast and for what? America! Listen up: America is an obese toddler crying for his mama at the Fourth of July fireworks because his deep fried ice cream just fell into the dirt. America is a 40-year-old bleach-blond bimbo in daisy dukes draped across the hood of a red Camaro. America is Mr. John Doe working every day to buy a second home in a state so sunny that the Mexicans pay for the pleasure of cutting the goddamn grass. America is little Janey and Jimmy settling in the suburbs, where its designer chinos, appletinis, plastic picket fences, and a vacation home in Florida where the sand is always whiter than the population of Bumfuck, Wisconsin and the rain is as regular as me after a bran muffin. America is your goddamn balanced breakfast, made in China. Get me?”

“Yessir.”

Lightning flashes. Outside, the water is on fire. The lights inside go out. The room glows blue-green a moment longer, before the battery in the computer dies, and then everything is dim and orange.

The director leans back in his chair and looks around the table. Oily water pours from his shoe as he crosses one leg over the other. “All right. Let’s hear some slogans for next year.”

“This one is for the thrill-seekers,” Davis says, selecting a mock-up from his sodden portfolio. He flicks a few cockroaches off and holds it up. Gomez leans over and lights the glass of water on fire. “Florida,” the placard reads in a jaunty font, orange on green, “Rock you like a Hurricane.”

“Christ,” the director says, and looks out the window. The burning water is halfway up the spiderwebbing glass. A manatee drifts by forlornly. An alligator swims after it, glancing into the office and yawning like a bored tourist at SeaWorld. The director fans himself with a stack of brochures. “It’s too hot today,” he says.

26: Michigan

2010-06-28T01:01:00.002-04:00

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

2010-06-21T00:45:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-14T00:04:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-07T00:54:00.002-04:00

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.

22: Alabama

2010-05-31T09:14:00.000-04:00

If I spoke at my Grandmother’s funeral, I would read from the Book of Numbers. As everyone there bowed his or her head in silence, I would begin:

“And the Lord spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, ‘Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls; From twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel: thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies. And with you there shall be a man of every tribe; every one head of the house of his fathers. And these are the names of the men that shall stand with you:’”

And then I would list the long-dead names one by one.

And when I said: “According to the number that ye shall prepare, so shall ye do to every one according to their number,” I would mean: These are the rituals by which we remember.

And when I said: “May the Lord bless you, and keep you. May the Lord let his face shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord show you his face and bring you peace,” what I meant would be obvious.

My mother, sister, and brothers would be there at the funeral, and who knows what they would say, what they would think of this.

My Grandmother lived for nearly nine decades, her life spread across two centuries and six generations, through several states. I was going to visit her this weekend but she died on Wednesday of last week, so instead I’m going to her wake.

For the sake of structure, say it happened in Alabama. Say she was born and raised there, and expired in her bed at night, alone.

Say she lived in a small town called Antrim, a once-fine, now half-deserted place up in the Appalachians, with one foot in grave and the other in the wilderness, its population almost too low to be counted, too small to map, too insignificant to list.

But I know that there is no such thing.

The Book of Numbers begins as a census taken in a desert - but that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. It is a record of a people, at a place and in a time. And while I don’t believe in any god or bible, I do believe in this:

Eternal life as a series of letters and numbers, characters pressed into paper, etched onto brass, carved into stone, endlessly reread and rewrote and respoken.

As long as we keep count, the dead are not gone and not forgotten.

Everyone can live forever.

Nobody dies alone.

If I told her story it would be a census.

If I wrote a book of numbers, it would look like this.

21: Illinois

2010-05-24T06:46:00.001-04:00

Good morning, Chicago – this is your mayor speaking. It’s another fine day in the Windy City. It’s good to be the mayor. It’s good to be the mayor here today.

The Windy City that is. The Willis City. Bruce and Wesley and the old Sears Tower.

Make Big Plans the city says. I Will Work Like The City That Works I Will. Was that the motto? This is the motto now: What I Will, is.

Riding the city bus. I ride the city bus. Transfer to the transit bus. Take the subway underground.

This is the way I get around town, get around ‘round, I get around.

“Good day, Mr. Mayor,” says the man on the corner. I tip my cap and continue on. A freckle-faced boy gives me a lucky quarter. A Medusa-headed woman smiles as well, clicking teeth in time like Chronos, like Kronos, mouth open and face clouded over, like Saturn devouring the sun.

I alone avert my eyes, but everything is steel and stone. Everyone is statues.

Monuments. Memorials. All these frozen-faced people looking down-and-out, water-worn and blown-about, a downtown full of layabouts in a city sung to the tune of Powerhouse, all lit up like Metropolis, an owner’s paradise and a worker slaughterhouse. This city ain’t been the same since the Century of Progress, no sir.

Up South Wells Street, past West Marble Place, West Monroe, West Wacker, West Calhoun. I double back and go to Walgreens. Overhead the El rolls by, clackety-clack, clackety-clack, clackety-clack.

The pharmacist is a new girl. “Call me Mr. Mayor,” I tell her, holding out my hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” she says, and leans forward to show me her breasts.

“Who do you think I am?” I say.

She covers up and apologizes, offers to be one of my future wives. I decline and she gets upset, she upends the television set. It shatters on the floor.

She won’t be quiet so I start talking louder. Eventually the police arrive.

“Don’t talk back to the Mayor,” the policeman says. “This way, sir.” He dusts me off and escorts me out. The El is coming down the tracks, don’t-talk-back, don’t-talk-back, don’t-talk-back.

So I run for it, climbing out of the underworld like Orpheus, like Theseus leaving a street-side labyrinth, flying up like Perseus and Pegasus, Icarus or Daedalus, alone on the platform with Mirrorface who says we must rise above and save ourselves, while all the people down below are dead to us.

The Orange Line arrives. The conductor smiles when he sees me, slows the train. I get on and Mirrorface stays behind. For a little while I just ride the ring around the city center, a mayor on his kingly progress, changing lines and switching directions, clockwise on the Orange and counter on the Brown.

Quincy, Washington, Clark, State, Randolph, Madison, Adams, then back to Library and LaSalle. I watch the city out the window and it speaks to me, repeats.

The intercom drones and dings. The buildings flit by, black keys against the white sky, like accidentals on a massive scale, like blue notes but square.

Got to dress it up, jazz it up. Got to decorate the city, doll it up in time for Decoration Day. Got to save Chicago’s soul by the very very very end of the merry merry month of May.

Gonna tinsellate the Willis Tower. Gonna tessellate the city streets. Gonna top the trees in foil. Gonna sweep the city clean. Gonna collect all of the garbage in Millennium Park and assemble another throne. Gonna take all of Chicago’s trash and make it gold.

But how should I begin?

There was a song once. It went like that, like this.

I take out my marker and make a list. The wall is my paper. The city my canvas.

The Orange line train completes a circuit, switch to Brown.

First I’ll need the precious metals, woven in fleeces and cast in medals, eagle-headed and zephyr-tailed. I tally them up: One for me, Two million eight-hundred thousand for them. Second:

The center of town, past the park at Madison. At the next stop I’ll get off.

Look out the door, make sure Medusa isn’t waiting.

The Minotaur is standing guard by the stairs.

I step back and the train doors close again.

The circle continues unbroken. The building numbers are going up. Every clock is counting down. I lost the thread a while back.

If I could fly like Superman it would be easy. It was easy once upon a time, when I whipped ass and rode the sky.

Mirrorface is reflected in the window behind me. His face is polished smooth and flat. Maybe I could use it as a shield and beat Medusa back.

So I take it upon myself, exorcise it like a preacher, seize it like a city exercising eminent domain. Glasses shatter. Blood is on my hands. I lick it off them like ketchup from a crumpled yellow paper wrapper, salty, sweet, and thick like thieves or family.

Was it the Masons, the Mansons, the Mason-Dixons? Make you fortune in Mini-Mansions old McDonald said, before he served his billionth Chinaman. Pearly Gates or Golden Arches – what you want is what you get. I’m loving it. I’m loving it.

When I said I was the Mayor of Chicago, I was lying. I’ve been lying about a lot of things. The thing is, I’m like the President, but better. The guy on TV is a phony. The Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, FEMA, the CDC, CNN and CBS, they all know it’s a cover-up. I’m his higher-up. I was the mayor of Chicago, but I’m the emperor. They destroyed my birth certificate but I can prove it. I know where their files are. The secret must come out. This story must be told. My people have a right to know.

The El rolls to a stop at Quincy/Wells. The door slides open. I lunge out and shield myself because Medusa may be there, arms outstretched like the woman on the poster, snake-hair hissing as she tramples on the Earth

No time for exposition, explanation. I hear someone scream and I run faster. Footsteps behind me as I descend the stairs.

On the street the public waves, and I wave back. The wind blowing down the streets and alleys of the windy city blowing the greetings from their mouths and the smiles from their faces, combing their white and black hair back.

In the lobby the policeman greets me. “Good evening Mr. Mayor.”

We both know none of that is true.

From the Sky Deck looking down and out and over, this city my city my home. My Roman empire. My mortal lover. My prodigal son. My siren song. Once more from the top.

No B section this time, though no repeats.

No intros, no outros, no missing beats. No loops no fades no edits.

Now how would WW end this?

Rock over London; rock on, Chicago.

Good to the last drop.

20: Mississippi

2010-05-17T01:58:00.000-04:00

I took a job as a census taker ‘cuz they were hiring. They’d hire every body in the Delta if they could.

They need extra help here in Issaquena County, ‘cuz less than a quarter of us filled out that form, and getting all our numbers is important to them.

I live here with B and our baby Sarah. We like it ‘cuz it’s spread out. We can keep to ourselves. “Keep it like a secret,” is what B always says.

So when the second census form came in, I didn’t say nothing. I hid it in a drawer. She found it a few days later, though, ‘cuz I hide everything there.

“Hypocrite,” B said, waving it around. I laughed – ‘cuz it was true – and tried to grab it back.

She laughed too, ‘cuz my job is a joke between her and me. She counts out loud in the morning while I put my skirt and hat and official satchel on: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi.”

It’s a game, all right, and I know which side we’re on, going extra slow ‘cuz it pays me better in the long run and gives the folks what want it time to disappear, to go to ground.

I can’t blame them for hiding, ‘cuz what has the government ever had to say about Mississippi, beside that we’re the poorest state, the least educated, and the fattest?

To tell the truth, we still haven’t turned in our second census form, and I crossed our names off my list too, ‘cuz we don’t want to be those numbers, either; ‘cuz there wasn’t a box big enough to fit the three of us.

Me and B and Sarah, we’re a family, no matter what they say. And we’re gonna live happily here in the bottomlands, ‘cuz that’s the last thing anybody expects.

19: Indiana

2010-05-10T00:18:00.000-04:00

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ISNA Home > News & Politics > NYC bombing suspect apprehended

Mod Mohamed (05.04.2010)
(Plainfield, IN) – The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) joins the Muslim American community and the rest of our fellow citizens in expressing its appreciation of the outstanding work done by the various law enforcement agencies in investigating and apprehending the alleged perpetrator(s) of the botched attack on New York and its residents.

Read the full statement here.

Sharia1 (05.05.2010)
Mohamed, your group of Muslim “community leaders” barely waited for this attempted bombing to hit the newsstands before you started mouthing the usual platitudes. You assume the alleged perpetrator is guilty, too - just like the mainstream American news - but even if that is the case, have you asked yourselves why?

Have you considered whether the preemptive war the US launched on Iraq was a factor? What about the unlawful war against Afghanistan? Or the undeclared war on Pakistan? The killing of innocents is, as you claim, haram, but who should we really be condemning here?

Mod Mohamed (05.05.2010)
Sharia1, I appreciate your anger. The ongoing war against our brothers and sisters around the world is something ISNA opposes as well. We hope that by working with the government of the United States – like the Muslim from Senegal who foiled this alleged plot – we can gain their trust, share with them the guidance of The Prophet (pbuh) and turn their swords away from us.

Angry AmeriCAN (05.06.2010)
All you terrorists need to get the hell out of My Country! Go back to the Middle East, and take you’re friend INsane HUssain with you!! Once barry’s gone we break out the nukes! Time for some Shock n Awe over Pakistan!!!

Jihad4eva (05.06.2010)
pakistan /= the middle east

fail.

Sharia1 (05.08.2010)
Reuters reports today that Pakistanis in New York are pretending to be Indians.

Not like the “Americans” can even tell the difference.

Angry AmeriCAN (05.08.2010)
Better than you Paki morans can tell the difference between explosive and unexplosive fertilizer!

Sharia1 (05.08.2010)
Mohamed, these are the people you want to work with?

Jihad4eva (05.08.2010)
lol

mhmd. c u @ metropolis l8r?

Mod Mohamed (05.08.2010)
Please keep the discussion on-topic, or this thread will be closed.

Angry AmeriCAN, only through open discourse can our supposed differences be reconciled. I welcome you to our forum, and hope that you will see that we are also Americans, Alhamdulillah.

Sajid, I will meet you outside the Hot Topic. At the usual time?

Fatima the resplendent (05.08.2010)
Sunni Muslim parent seeks correspondence for slim, fair 26 year old US born daughter slim, good-looking hijabi, presently professionally employed, from an educated, religious professional of Pakistani origin, age 27-35.

Jihad4eva (05.08.2010)
gtfo n00b. u r in the wrong forum

Mod Mohamed (05.08.2010)
Asalamu alaikum, Fatima. Please try ISNA Matrimonials. You will find what you seek there, InshAllah.

Fatima the resplendent (05.08.2010)
Shukran, ya Mohamed. Many thanks! May Allah (SWT) bless your wisdom and kindness! Truly, you deserve to share the name of The Prophet (peace be upon him)!

Angry AmeriCAN (05.08.2010)
Peas be upon him. Please pee upon him.

Allahu Snackbar (05.10.2010)
God is Grape.

18: Louisiana

2010-05-03T01:29:00.000-04:00

Your family had always lived in New Orleans. Daddy was a long-gone bluesman; Mama worked the kitchen at Antoine’s.

Mama said the Mississippi was your blood, that the Big Easy would always be your home.

That was before you got sent upriver to Angola, before the flood took everything.

Mama called it “The Farm,” and she wasn’t kidding. Every day you plant corn or pick cotton, just like slave times.

Coming over the Tunica Hills in the morning, you can see the sun hit the Mississippi. You can feel the dark water creeping closer as you work the fields, circling you on the far side of the levees.

You want it to come. Let the waters rise. Let the parishes flood. Let the earth wash its hands of all of us.

You were visiting Delilah when Katrina struck, and you couldn’t get back through the barricades to get her out. “Mama,” you shouted over the rising wind, but you were herded onto a bus and sent to the Superdome.

You were locked down there for days. No light, no power, just a little food and water. When you heard more buses were coming in the morning, you escaped.

The business district was dark and quiet aside from a few sirens in the distance, the drone of helicopter blades. A single building was in flames.

You headed east on Girod, left on Carondelet and onto Bourbon. Cars were strewn across the streets like trash, stray dogs snarled from underneath them as you hurried past.

You turned onto Burgundy as the sun was rising. A house had come loose and settled in the center of the avenue, a black X spray-painted on its side.

Mama’s house was still where it belonged, but crumpled. Inside, it looked like God had picked the whole house up and shaken it. Gray mud covered everything.

You found her in the bedroom. You wiped her face and held her in your hands.

That’s when you heard the sound behind you, footsteps in the mud. You laid Mama’s body down and drew your gun.

You got a new cellmate two years ago, after Gustav hit.

He was in for looting, he said. Breaking into ruined houses, taking what he needed to stay alive.

You looked at him and thought about how easy it was to pull the trigger. How for a moment there hadn’t been any doubts, any questions – just a flash of light that filled that fleeting second between “What am I doing?” and “What have I done?”

17: Ohio

2010-04-26T00:43:00.000-04:00

You weren’t even through with the first year of middle school yet, but you hated it. You knew you always would.

It wasn’t just its tweeniness, its in-betweenness. It was its teeniness, its pettiness, where all the prissy little girls gossiped about who was the prettiest.

It didn’t help that you were younger than they were, and smaller. Flatter-chested, too. Even the other ugly girls picked on you.

W was your only friend. He was new in town, but would have been an outcast anyway, since he was almost six feet tall already and overweight. The fact that his last name was Wiener didn’t help at all.

“Is it pronounced Weiner or Whiner?” Mrs. Malstrom had asked, as he stood awkwardly at the front of your homeroom class.

“It’s Veener,” he said, but everybody else was already laughing too hard to hear.

They all called him the obvious nicknames after that. He seemed pretty used to it.

You didn’t talk to him until the PeaceBuilders breakfast last month, where you two were the only kids whose parents didn’t come. Your mother had the early shift at Krogers. You weren’t sure what his deal was.

He was sitting at a corner table by himself, eating strawberry yogurt and drawing in his notebook. You snagged some Sunny D from the buffet table and walked over.

“Hey Veneer,” you said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.” He slammed his notebook closed.

You shrugged and sat down across from him without asking, took the last issue of Kick-Ass from your bag, and started reading, knowing that W was watching you.

The vice principal recited the Peacebuilder’s Pledge. Last month you were supposed to notice hurts and make amends. March’s focus was righting wrongs.

W pointed to your comic book. “That’s my favorite,” he said.

You met at the old Indian Mound that evening. It was the highest point in Norwood, and from there you could see the water towers, and just make out the middle school.

W was wearing a cape with a big picture of Spider-Man. It had crinkled edges that stretched when it billowed out in the wind.

“Are you wearing a sheet?” you asked.

“I brought you one,” he said.

After that you spent every afternoon together. School let out and you’d find each other on the grass by the front door.

When the bell rang, kids streamed in from both sides – the middle school on one and the high school on the other.

You and W picked a spot by the parking lot. There were some trees there to climb or sit under, and a guardrail to jump off. You’d decided to call your group The PeaceMakers, because W said it was like the PeaceBuilders, but tougher. You didn’t have superhero names. You hadn’t figured out who your nemesis was yet.

“Craig Brown?” W asked, as he tied his cape around his neck. It was a Monday, and you’d both just gotten out of math class, where Craig sat in the seat directly behind him.

You shook your head. “Kelly Thomas,” you said.

“I don’t know,” W said. “She’s not so bad.”

“You’re just saying that because you like her!” You pretended to gag.

He whirled around and started punching an army of imaginary Craigs coming from the other direction. The back of his neck was red. “Am not,” he said.

You were both quiet for a couple of minutes. “Sorry,” you said.

W smiled. “I call this one the Put Down Destroyer,” he said, grabbing an invisible enemy and spinning him around.

A couple teenagers were walking past to their car, and laughed. “Smooth moves, fatty,” the taller one said, and the shorter one gave W a shove.

In a flash, W grabbed him, twisted him, and threw him down. “This isn’t fat,” he said as the tall kid ran and the short kid lay dazed on the ground. “This is potential energy.”

The next day W got called down to the office during homeroom. He didn’t show up in class afterwards, and wasn’t waiting for you outside that afternoon. When Wednesday came and his desk was still empty, you decided to go looking for him.

You’d never been to his house before, though – he’d only pointed to it from the top of the Indian Mound. You couldn’t come over because his parents were “too allergic,” he’d said.

You tried asking the secretary for his address before lunch, but she told you it was “confidential.” You considered your options as you ate your tacos by yourself.

In math class last period, when Mr. Lewis was passing out homework, you raised your hand. “I can take Wiener’s,” you said. Behind the empty desk beside you, Craig snickered.

You took the homework and put it in your bag, and after the bell you went to the office again, and told the secretary that Mr. Lewis needed W’s homework sent home.

You pretended to be texting someone while she took a manila envelope and wrote out his address, and instead took a picture with your phone. “Can I help you with anything else?” the secretary asked.

The numbers were a little blurry, but you could make the street name out. You slipped the phone into your pocket and smiled. “No thank you,” you said.

The sky clouded over as you walked across town, and by the time you got to W’s street it was dark as dusk, like a cloud of dust had swallowed the sun up.

You stopped by a caved-in metal mailbox with W’s last name on it. There was a rusting car in the driveway. The yard was covered in a blanket of rotting leaves.

You wrapped your cape around you and crept up to the window. A man was sitting on a couch watching baseball on TV. You snuck around the back, looking for W’s room.

You knew you’d found it when you saw the Spider-Man sheets. They moved a little when you knocked on the window. He poked his head out when you knocked a second time.

Something was wrong. W’s lips were cracked and puffy. He had a dark purple circle around one of his eyes. He didn’t seem to see you, so you knocked again.

W shook his head and started mouthing something. He gestured frantically with his hands, then his door flew open and the TV-watching man stepped in. His eyes locked on yours. You ran.

When you got home your mother was making dinner. “Guess what, Katy,” she said as you closed the door. “I just bought our tickets to the Mother-Daughter Tea at the Flower Show! It’s this Sunday, and I have the day off,” she turned around as you walked into the kitchen, shivering but not sniveling. W was in trouble. You knew who your nemesis was.

16: Tennessee

2010-04-19T00:18:00.001-04:00

Fluorescent lights illuminate a dingy kitchen. Tom is sitting at a folding table, typing on an old PC with his back to the foyer. The doorway abutting the table is boarded up. Cigarette butts spill from a Bakelite ashtray onto the tabletop, next to a bottle of bourbon and a single glass.

TOM. (Typing) … like a carnival magician, it seems real, but it isn’t. (Pause) It appears to be true, but. Uh. Shit. (He deletes his last sentence and starts again) Like an illusionist, who … (A door closes softly and Francis walks in dressed in an Arby’s uniform)

FRANCIS. (Coughs) You smoke too much.

TOM. Who are you, my mother? (He resumes typing, muttering too softly to be heard. Francis passes behind him into another room)

TOM. My play is really coming along. Thanks for asking. (He lights a cigarette and stares at the screen)

The muffled sound of a slamming door comes through the boarded-up doorway, followed by the tumbling of children running to meet their mother. She speaks with them for a few minutes before they run outside and the door slams again.

FRANCIS. (Returning to the kitchen in casual dress) Much better. Now, what do you want for dinner?

TOM. I don’t care.

FRANCIS. I know.

Francis opens the fridge, removes a couple Styrofoam takeout containers, spoons some leftover food onto a plate, and puts the plate into the microwave. It whirs for a few minutes, then beeps. Francis takes the plate out, sits down next to Tom, and starts to eat.

TOM. That smells like garbage. (He takes a drink)

FRANCIS. Oh? Did you want some?

TOM. Fuck you.

FRANCIS. Fascinating. Where ever did you learn the art of conversation?

Francis continues eating in silence. Tom pours himself another drink and lights another cigarette. Somewhere, music is playing. A woman’s voice begins to sing along.

TOM. Listen to her. Singing that goddamn song again. Dolling herself up for another goddamn gentleman caller.

FRANCIS. (Resting a hand on Tom’s shoulder) Tom, he’s her fiancé. (Running the other hand through his hair) You need to let Laura go.

TOM. Don’t touch me. (He stands suddenly and pushes Francis backward. The chair clatters to the floor) You freak. You mutant. Don’t you fucking touch me. (He raises his fist and steps forward) I left my job at the lab to be a writer, Laura left me for that asshole, and I can’t write worth a damn. Every day I hear my kids come home, but I can’t see them. Now all I have is you. And look what kind of woman you turned out to be.

FRANCIS. You never wanted me, Tom. (Standing slowly) You just wanted to get back at her. And you knew what you were getting into. (Francis turns to go) Now you don’t have anyone.

Francis walks to the door and opens it. In the driveway two young boys are playing, their laughter rings about the kitchen for a moment, then the door closes and they recede into the background again.

TOM. (Staring at the boarded-up doorway) We had it, Laura and me. The American Dream. The Nuclear Family. Now look what happened. What good is half a house in Oak Ridge? What’s left after you split an atom? Ashes. (He sits down). Ashes. Shadows on a wall.

The music starts up again in the other room. Laura begins to sing, and Tom puts his head in his hands. Smoke drifts up from the end of his cigarette, dappled by the last light of the golden hour passing through the curtains.

15: Kentucky

2010-04-12T00:39:00.002-04:00

At the Creation Museum, the Third-Person Omniscient Narrator stood and watched. Plastic dinosaurs walked before His eyes.

He would have sat but He was non-corporeal. Also, there were no benches. Even the Cave Girl looked uncomfortable.

He stood, so to speak, in contemplation. If He hadn’t created chairs, did that mean they were the devil’s work? He’d seen some in the lobby by the gift shop.

There were no branches in the Creation Museum, so He retraced His steps. An iguanodon paced the Garden of Eden, but Adam was ignoring it.

In the lobby, the Palm Café proffered coffee and tacos. The Dragon Hall Bookstore demonstrated that dinosaurs and dragons were the same.

In the theater, “Men in White” explained how the “whole enchilada” was created. The light came before the sun. The universe sprang from a white hole. The world was formed in 6 days, 6,000 years ago.

The 60,000-square-foot Creation Museum was beautifully and intelligently designed. Its animatronic displays were constructed by Universal Studios.

Its message was that believing in an older Earth had led to abortion and Internet pornography. To illustrate, there was a wrecking ball labeled “Millions of Years.”

Many of the museum’s mannequins were modeled on the actor who played Adam in a movie that had since been banished from the program, due to his appearance in Internet pornography.

He knew this because He was omniscient. Also, Google and Wikipedia.

All cosmic irony aside, He literarily wept to see some white Christ crucified on three flat-screen televisions. It was comforting to think that everything happened for a reason.

In the Biblical Authority Room, the signs proclaimed “God’s Word is True,” and to prove it there were several prophet statues.

One of the statues looked like Count Leo Tolstoy. The towering weightiness of his scrolls. The moral authority of his bushy brows.

He was overcome, and changed the other two to look like Tolstoy, too.

On a lonely telephone-pole-lined road, across from some empty Kentucky scrubland, stegosaurus-topped brick walls mark the golden gates of the Creation Museum.

The Third-Person Omniscient Narrator was tired, but the museum was open until 6 on Sundays, so He drifted toward the topiary gardens. Maybe He could create something believable there.

14: Vermont

2010-04-05T00:39:00.000-04:00

You called yourself a Rastafarian. You smoked pot every morning, grew your hair out and didn’t shower, put a big poster of Bob Marley on your dorm room wall.

That was so last semester. Now you’re into the activist scene. You grew a mohawk and bought thrift store clothing, covered your L.L. Bean bag in punk rock patches and sharpied slogans. Fuck the Police. Anarchy Forever.

13: Rhode Island

2010-03-29T00:44:00.000-04:00

They called themselves possibilitarians. They squatted in warehouses in Providence. They constructed houseboats out of trash and moored them off the docks.

They rode skateboards down abandoned off-ramps. They organized noise and folk shows in co-op basements. They screen-printed posters. They ate from dumpsters. They loved each other.

They recreated pronouns. They imagined communities. They spoke in slogans. They formed multiplicities.

They said another world was possible. Anything is possible. Everything is possible.

12: North Carolina

2010-03-22T03:02:00.001-04:00

“A is for Apple,” D said, “a juicy sensation. They’re grown by NC’s Apple Association.”

Baby George frowned. The book’s black lines and white spaces were drawn over, obscured by each of the brothers and sisters that came before baby George.

Crayon-scrawl in all colors covered a nonsensical picture, a fat man with a flowing cape and leaves for hair, holding some shiny thing and flying through the air.

“Daddy, no apple,” he shook his head as D tousled his hair. “No apple, Daddy.”

“Each apple is a toothsome treat,” D said, singsong, “that every eager eater eats!”

Flipping further through the flimsy pages, yellowed and crumpled, they came to the color-by-numbers for the North Carolina Beef Council. In the foreground a cow drank from a trough, while behind it a black-eyed sun rose over fence, field and forest, smiling like a lion, all furrowed brow, fur, and fangs, poised to devour the cow, and George, and the world. Forgetting his father, he started to cry.

“Go to bed, Georgie,” M said from the doorway. “Dear, don’t show him that cow.” She took the picture book from him. “That picture’s too scary – he won’t be able to get to sleep now.”

“He’s got to hear about cattle someday,” said D. “Beef is a huge part of agricultural industry.”

“I know that, dear, believe me, I do. But isn’t it clear that he’s too tired for you?”

Just then Fanny and Clara came running. “Help Mommy, Help Daddy, you have to save us! Basil and Desmond are playing slaughterhouse.”

“Kids,” M called, “keep quiet. Hush all that noise.” She shooed them out of the room. “Go turn your lights out and I’ll deal with the boys.”

Later on in the evening, after the last little one was tucked in and the last light was dimmed, M and D lay down together in bed.

M patted her stomach and D smiled. Outside the flowers were blooming. March was for merry-making, early planting, daylight savings. Springtime was time for reproduction.

Nine members of their household, two adults and seven children, a new one every two years, staggered according to a careful plan for husbandry, sow in summer and reap in spring.

Other people thought their lifestyle odd, so they withdrew their kids from school and taught them on their own, crafting a curriculum from the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Produce was both D’s business and his pleasure, and in 1995 it had brought him and his blushing bride together. She looked so pretty as she pranced across the stage. The pictures of her performance perched on the mantel, placed below the plaque he had won, the “Best in the Nation” award from the National Agricultural Marketing Association.

Quite a lot had changed since then. Nobody wanted to know where there food came from – they’d developed this queer idea that it just materialized in the grocery store freezer. Just a few short years after his triumph, his play was forgotten, his pamphlets replaced, his graphs and graphics redacted, and he quit in disgrace.

Really, the problem was far-reaching, but D took it personally, retreated to writing and recommitted himself to reading his own farming literature to his family.

She helped produce the books – his wife – out of pages he had illustrated. After Amy was born she’d given up on the stage and helping him with his rhyming. He called her Mother Goose with her gaggle of goslings, and she called him her Dr. Seuss sometimes.

They resigned from the PTA when their children left school, and after his departure the AG department stopped answering his calls. It was like they weren’t wanted, that nobody thought they counted. And for the past few years that was true.

Until yesterday, that is, when an envelope arrived from the Census Bureau.

Very slowly, very carefully, M read the instructions aloud, “Count all people, including babies, who live and sleep here most of the time.” She patted her stomach.

When he was born she’d return the form, she was waiting until she could fill it out completely.

X already marked the spot on under Person 10 for the baby they expected, maybe this week and maybe next. She’d already written in his name and selected his sex. When he was born, M would fill in the last empty birthday box and mail it back.

Yesterday evening at bedtime she read the form aloud in the boys’ room, after tucking Desmond and Ernest in, and explained that the baby was already one of them. “It’s sort of like a videogame,” Desmond said, “an extra life. Sometime you get those from hitting blocks.”

“Zelda is better than government forms,” Basil said, unimpressed. “Let me know when they make Census for the XBOX.”

One day later their baby brother would be born.

Two weeks later he would be taken from them.

Three months later they’d submit their census form.

Four years later they’d still be missing number ten.

Five decades later the family would still gather once a week, D would ask everyone to bow their heads and thank NC for its bounty, for all the beautiful animals, fruits, and vegetables it produced and it took away. “Goodness grows in North Carolina,” he would say.

11: New York

2010-03-15T00:06:00.002-04:00

This is not a story about New York City. You left that town for good.

Upstate is a big place, it turns out, but then it does pretty much start the moment you cross the Tappan Zee, buildings and people replaced by fields and streams.

For lack of a better idea, you followed the Hudson, swimming upstream like a salmon, and here you are: “The All America City,” Albany.

Your office is on the outskirts of the city, the suburbs. It still feels weird having to say that word.

Your second day here you walked from one end to the other. You got lost looking for a bodega and wound up in a supermarket. You hadn’t seen the inside of one of those in years.

The people around here smile more, and the politicians are more honest about being liars. Nobody reads the New Yorker. There isn’t a decent Chinese place for miles.

It’s been a month now. You have a few clients, a few cases. Domestic stuff, not much.

It’s boring here, but better – you’d been doing the hard-bitten thing for too long. The City had chewed you to bits, and you figured it was better to be spit out than swallowed up.

Everything went wrong a month and a half ago, the night something happened to the moon. The pattern was pale, so faint you almost swore it wasn’t there, but it was.

That’s when the Chinese women started disappearing, though nobody noticed that either, not at first. “Missing persons,” is what Escobar called them, like maybe they’d all just turn up in some municipal lost and found, like it wasn’t a case of somebodies becoming nobodies – they’d all been nobody all along.

You were still in the city at the time, holed up in your office above Wu’s noodle shop, but it wasn’t any of your business, not until your secretary went missing, not until she walked in.

“The Woman in White.” That was the first thing you thought. Well, the second, after you thought about how the hell she got into your office. Though, to be honest, you weren’t really clear on how you’d gotten to be there, yourself.

You were still wearing yesterday’s suit, you noticed, as you lifted your head off your desk. You dragged your hand down over your stubbly cheeks, breathing out, checking for cheap booze on your breath.

“I’m looking for a woman,” she said. She was beautiful, but you’d read the stories. Beautiful women are always trouble. Always.

“Is it my secretary?” you asked. “Because I was wondering about her, too.” You pressed the button for the intercom and heard the buzzer in the other room.

“It is not a person of this place.” She parted her deep red lips in a waxing crescent smile. Her eyes were black, a void reflected back.

“So they’re from Jersey?” You reached discreetly into your jacket pocket for your gun. It’s best to have your finger on the trigger when you sense a bout of crazy coming on.

She took a picture from her pocket, slid it across the desk. “I am looking for her,” she said.

You picked it up. It was a woman, all right, though the photo was grainy, taken who knows how long ago, when the whole world was black-and-white.

“I don’t suppose you can give me anything else,” you said. “Your name, maybe? Hers?”

You looked at the picture again. The woman in it and the woman in your office looked exactly the same.

She handed you an envelope, red as blood. “Happy new year,” she said.

You look around your office in Albany, at the piles of brown cardboard boxes. The only files you’ve dug out are the Woman in White’s. You haven’t hired a new secretary yet.

She’d given you ten thousand dollars, cash, and walked out before you could turn her down. You never did get her name. You never saw her again.

You call Escobar to see if he’s heard anything, but his partner answers, says something stupid about using the official channels. You never liked that kid.

You had a partner, once. Back when you were still on the force, when you were still looking to save the world.

He was a decent guy – a little burned-out and counting down the days. You’d expected something dramatic, like the movies, but in the end he just retired to California.

Life was like that. Anti-climactic. You stare out your window at the skyline. The buildings are gray against a washed-out sky, dull.

You hum a few bars of Charlie’s favorite song. This is the town that’s right for you.

It was around the time that the Woman in White showed up that the weather went crazy, a blizzard blanketing the entire country, snow falling like dust bunnies drifting down from the moon.

You spent even more time at Wu’s than usual, looking for patterns in your lucky numbers, staring at all the soon-to-be missing faces in the mystifying columns of cheap Chinese newspapers.

The new waitress kept the fortune cookies coming. You didn’t know her name. “I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China,” you sang.

“Sorry?” She said, confusing her Ls and Rs. She didn’t speak English too well.

“Gimme the number 14. Extra MSG.”

“That stuff will kill you, you know,” Charlie said, sidling over, beer in hand.

“Not fast enough.” You cracked another cookie open. “’If you shoot for the stars and hit the moon, it's OK. But you've got to shoot for something,’ Confucius says.”

Charlie snorted. “I think what that’s supposed to say,” she said, “is that if your want to shoot the moon, you better be counting cards.”

She was a pedicab driver. The fastest one in the city, she said. Her name wasn’t really Charlie, but you had to call her something.

“For as long as I can remember,” you said, “there were four women at that table, playing mahjong like it was going out of style.” You pointed to the corner. “And this week they disappeared one by one, falling like dominoes.”

Wu was out of the kitchen for once, talking to the waitress in the back. Mandarin, maybe Cantonese. “What are they saying?” you asked.

Charlie was bobbing her head to some disco song playing on the chintzy jukebox. She didn’t answer, so you asked again. “Forget it, Jack,” she said. “It’s Funkytown.”

She got up to leave, flicked the brim of her cycling cap down. “I love you,” you whispered as she walked away. She didn’t hear you. They never do.

You opened up another fortune cookie. Confucius said: “When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines his finger.” What did he mean by that?

You have two calendars on your office wall in Albany, turned to March and February, 15 black Xs on the one and 14 red Xs on the other.

14 women in two weeks, then it ended just as suddenly as it began.

Your secretary had been number 7. Before her were Wu’s old waitress, two fashion designers, a masseuse, a couple students at NYU.

Number 8 was a translator for the UN; number 9 ran a blog.

10 through 13 were the mahjong ladies. Not even Wu could tell you anything about them. He had just looked at you curiously, and shook his head. “What women?” he’d said.

Number 14 you left blank. You were still hoping she’d come back.

You add them up again, and there’s still one extra character, an imaginary number that doesn’t fit, a name that doesn’t belong.

“How’s it going Charlie?” you asked. It was late Monday morning, and she was leaning against her pedicab, arms crossed, hat brim turned down over her eyes.

“Excuse me?” The driver looked up, and it wasn’t her. It wasn’t a woman at all.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“Let me guess,” he said, and smirked. “We all look the same to you?”

“Give me a break,” you muttered, and started walking toward Wu’s.

“I saw her last night,” he called after you. “I gave her a ride.”

You stopped and he went on. “She was standing right here, looking up, dressed all in white. It was pretty late, and she asked me for a ride. I asked how far, and she told me ‘as far as you can.’ When we stopped, she handed me a hundred dollar bill and left without a word.”

“I went home to get some sleep, and put the money under my pillow, for luck, and when I woke this morning, I took it out,” he paused, and looked at you inscrutably. “But it was ghost money.”

You walked to Wu’s and tried the door, but it was locked tight. You knocked a few times.

You took a drag from your cigarette and tossed it in the gutter, a little white mixed in with the red and black of last night’s firecrackers. The big red lanterns were still hanging up, the banners swayed in the breeze, folds of crimson covered in Chinese.

You were almost at the bodega when you saw it, wheat-pasted to a wall – a picture of The Woman in White, standing on the moon.

“Shit,” you said. “That fucking bitch.”

You ran back to the shop, footfalls echoing in the empty street. The gunshot echoed, too.

You had the office key in your pocket, but your pistol was in your hand, so you had to shoot at something. When you opened the red envelope the pale ashes swirled out like snowflakes, fluttering like fat moths toward the sky.

It’s colder up here in Albany, quieter. The moon reappeared like usual and nobody said a thing. It was as though nothing had ever happened.

Maybe nothing did. Maybe Escobar was right, for once. Maybe it just didn’t matter. You never knew her in the first place. But who ever really knows anyone?

You’re waiting for your order at another Chinese place, looking at the calendar hanging on the wall. It isn’t a square, but a circle. There are no numbers on it at all.

You peer at it, disoriented. The years spin around and around, rising and setting like the moon and sun.

The files are splayed across your office desk. A quick web search turns up the connection you’ve been looking for. You’d been looking at the wrong calendar all along.

You crack open a fortune cookie. “Ignorance is the night of the mind,” Confucius says, “but a night without moon or star.”

You close the files, put them back in the bottom drawer. You don’t want to read them again. This is not a story about New York City. Not anymore.

10: Virginia

2010-03-08T00:09:00.000-05:00

Dear RW,

I was very pleased to hear of Frank’s success at VMI last semester. It was hard sending him off for the first time, and I’m glad that his training commenced without a hitch.

You should have seen his face when we loaded him onto the bus – he looked so alive. I could see the spark of life in his eyes, like he knew was headed off on some grand voyage of discovery. I almost didn’t want to let him go – I couldn’t believe this was the same boy I’d brought into the world what seemed like only months ago – but I knew the benefits of his labors with you would be inestimable. I did the best I could to mold him in our image, but you’re going to make a real man out of him.

It’s some program you’re running there. I looked over the outline you sent me with Frank’s file. I know you’ve refined your approach since the last time, and while your curriculum is ambitious, to say the least, I’m confident he’s up to it. We share the same vision, you and I.

Things are humming along here on the Potomac, though the recent weather did shut down the lab for a couple of days. I hope to be able to send my next boy off to you this fall, according to schedule. Keep me posted on Frank’s progress until then.

Best of luck in your undertakings,

Victor

Dear RW,

I know what you mean. Of course the SOP had to change after the incident at VPI (it took us almost two years to regroup!), and now that Renegade is POTUS, we’ve all got to play our cards even closer to our chests. Can you believe it’s been over six years since we started this? How quickly the time has passed.

It was easier under 43 – nobody was counting the KIAs as they came in. Now we have this uppity rag from SF poking around at Arlington. We’ve replaced our man there. The numbers are slowing down, though – we’re hoping the new push in SWA will help, but we may have to line up a new source. That’s not your problem, of course, so don’t worry – I’ll keep them coming, one way or another.

I must say time is crawling without Frank around. Maybe it’s all this frost and snow – I hate to think that I’m just being sentimental. But, I have come to think of him as a kind of son. Perhaps that isn’t so unnatural.

Really, though, I think what I’m missing is someone who really shares my enthusiasm for this project. I know OPSEC demands otherwise, but it was easier when we were working on this together, side by side – these emails are a poor substitute for those times.

My hands are trembling as I type this. I marked off the last black day on our OPTEMPO calendar this morning. We’re on the edge of the unknown, the unexplored. We’ve never made it this far before.

How soon will I hear from you again? What kind of news will your next email bring? I won’t wish you luck – we’re beyond that now. I am confident in our success.

Your brother in arms,

Victor

RW,

I was shocked to read about today’s tragedy online. It was awful. All of our work, ruined again. I’ve been taking a lot of fire here. I don’t see how we can recover from this.

I’m writing this note in haste – I’m due to deliver a SITREP to the Pentagon ASAP. Hopefully 44 hasn’t caught wind of our involvement yet.

V

Dear RW,

I thought we were done for, but it looks like last week’s incident had a silver lining after all. The DOD was impressed by Frank’s efficiency, at least, and is willing to stick with the project until the personality kinks are worked out.

I’ve decided to call our new boy “Adam.” The lab approves – Mary is eager to make a fresh start, too. I’m feeling positive about this one.

It’s strange. Just yesterday it seemed like our situation was hopeless, and today the mists have cleared and we’re making rapid progress again. You’re doing a heck of a job down there. Keep it up, and soon it’ll be “mission accomplished.”

This week has been difficult, but when we look back from the future, who knows how we’ll feel about it? Some people may say we’ve played God or created a monster, but I think Adam is destined for greatness. This is the future of warfare. I think history will be sympathetic to us.

Yours,

Victor

9: New Hampshire

2010-03-01T00:11:00.000-05:00

He knew poetry was a problem once he couldn’t pass the plums in the produce section without mouthing: “sweet” and “cold;” when every time he heard: “they taste good,” he would add: “to her.”

He hoped it would be better in Connecticut, but winter came. Soon he shielded his eyes from sun-glinting snow-crusted pines, blocked the bare wind from his ears.

He moved to New Hampshire the next year, after apple picking, after the frost, after the fall. The air was raw, the rough earth frozen, the dark deep lovely woods asleep.

He longs to sleep as well.

But first: unmend the walls, scatter the stones, let skitter mountainsides then amend the poems: break lines, rend words and make an end of metaphor: let the old man lie.

8: South Carolina

2010-02-21T23:53:00.000-05:00

Onetime, binnuh gal name Lacey. Him people frum Spartunbuhg, but w’en dat wah staat ‘e follow’um man down yuh.

“Who was her man, Gramma?” Baby J say. She pretty luk ‘e maamy.

He Tyrone, and ‘e binnuh mighty hansum colluh man. Skin pale luk a bowl’a rice. Smile jus’ as sweet as sweetgrass.

Well, dis’ as dey like to marry, dem Naby binnuh come take him yanduh, to Parrus Ile’n, n’up obuh dat in’igo watuh. So Lacey lean fuh Beefut, out to Sa’leenuh, and stan’ fo him frum dey dey shore, wait til dark and mebbe longuh, but he dun come, no suh.

Munt’ bin pass, n’Lacey study ‘e head til she fine d’ansuh, den’e go n’git all the sweetgrass she can fin’. She webe da’grass like so, obuh n’onduh, till it this big aroun’, den she make annuduh n’tie dey two tugedduh. She culluh in him eyes wid coal, n’use tah fo’um black black hair. Pres’n’ly, bin Sweetgrass Tyrone standin’ dey.

Baby J she worried. “What did she do with it, Gramma? What happened to the real Tyrone?”

We git der suguh, like as dem done. Now, Lacey yeddy she she talk ‘bout dem Naby men, how’um ketch’m culluh gal n’bring’um home, so dat Sat’d’y she dress ST up in khaki n’put dat gol’ stah on, den hire a cah to dribe dey two in.

De buckra ‘kacely see Lacey ‘tal, jus’ salute dat stah n’wabe’m tru. Lacey n’ST git out by de barracks, n’e call: “Tyrone, Tyrone.”

He leap outtuh d’winduh. Dem kiss, n’e take ST back inside. Den dem mek’ace luk Bruh Rabbit, straight’n fuh de boatyaa’d. Dem trow dat boat intuh de watuh, n’e lay down while Lacey row ‘cross the soun’ like as dayclean comin’ on. Gwine home lukkuh Michael tuh dat great great gyaa’d’n, rowin on tawwu’d Gabrull.

Dey heah trumpets in d’mornin, n’aftuhnoon da buckra come. He dun hol’out a picthuh and say: “Ma’am, we’re looking for a fellow went AWOL last night. People say you knew him. Last name Wilson; first name Tyrone.”

But Lacey, she shake her head and say no massuh, no suh. What a mighty handsome whiteman like dat want wit’uh?

“And then what happened?” Baby J smile as you tuck ‘um in. Happy-eyed lukkuh she gran’puh bin. Lawd’a mussy on’um.

Why, Lacey and Tyrone bin stay’uh on Sa’leenuh w’ile de wah happen fah’way. N’soon dey marri’d, man n’lawfully lady, n’dey live forebbuh in d’yuh and aftuh, A’min.

You knees creak down d’stairs, ol’ as houses. Yo baby in de kitch’n, sett’n dey. “Nana Lacey,” she say, “you’re not telling her that old story about Papa again. Everybody and their mama heard that one.”

Hush, chil’. Tie yuh mout.

7: Maryland

2010-02-15T01:06:00.000-05:00

“Does the first trick take it,” your father asks, hand hovering over the card lying facedown in the center of the table, “or the first point trick?”

“First point,” your mother says, and sips her drink. “Like always, dear.”

“Oh.” He withdraws his hand. A pause. “We haven’t played with just three people in a while.”

He lays down the 7 of spades, and your mother follows with the 9. You sigh and play the three. It’s Sunday night and you’re at your parents’ house in Silver Spring. You wish you had anywhere to be but here.

“Didn’t you two have plans this weekend?” Your mother asks, leading with the Jack. “You and Miles?”

“No,” you say, and play the 10.

“That’s too bad,” your father says. “Those Asian guys are really good at counting cards. He’d be cleaning up right now.” He frowns and throws in the five.

“That was Drew, Dad,” you say.

Your mother finishes her drink and sweeps up the trick. “Miles was the black one, dear,” she says. “Fix a couple more, would you?”

He gets up and heads to the kitchen. You hear the freezer door open, the splash of the gin, the slosh of ice being shaken. Your mother holds out her hand, and rests it lightly on yours. “I never liked him, dear,” she says.

You met Miles at a bar in East Baltimore last fall. He said he was studying law at Johns Hopkins, and you fell in love with the way he put his hands on you, like it was natural, that you were his. You were both drunk, and you told him you wanted to go back to his place. Miles said there was a problem with his heater, or something, so you went back to your dorm instead.

Your father returns with two martini glasses, sets them down. “Can I get anything for you, Suz?” he asks.

You shake your head. “I’m fine.”

You don’t remember exactly what happened. You woke up half-naked and Miles was gone, a few of his hairs on your pillow, your creased sheets thick with his smell. You saw him on and off for the next few months, and he was in your dorm when your mother came to pick you up for winter break, so you introduced them.

“There’s no law school at Johns Hopkins,” your mother said. You turned deep red and Miles smiled. He’d lied about everything – his job, his apartment, his age. He didn’t even live in Baltimore, but in Takoma Park, and studied criminal justice at University of Maryland University College.

Your father hesitates, fingers playing along the edges of his cards. “Have hearts been broken?” he asks.

“No,” your mother says. He plays the four of spades and she lays down the two.

You texted him on the car-ride home, but he never texted back. You saw him flirting with some other girl at the same bar in January, but he wouldn’t talk to you.

“Susie,” your mother says. “It’s your turn.”

The queen of spades is in your hand. That cold, black-hearted bitch. You close your eyes. The night is black outside, and cold. The moon is dark and new.

6: Massachusetts

2010-02-08T01:24:00.000-05:00

If M and N are riding their bicycles down Broadway toward M’s apartment in Somerville, with M sprinting the final three-block stretch and N continuing at a leisurely pace of maybe two-thirds M’s speed and squinting at the sunlight glinting off the piles of snow while enjoying the unseasonably pleasant weather of just above zero degrees, then:

If O and P are inside their apartment already sitting on the couch where N sleeps sometimes and watching a movie while lifting bottles of beer from the coffee table to their mouths, O gulping twice as much and P sipping his half as often

If R shouts and S slams on the brakes, wheels locking tires skidding, screeching and speed decreasing, ice melting with the heat of friction

If P and O hear the tires screech first, and N after a fraction of a second

If M can see the car coming

If

If

If M feels sky beneath him

If N screams at a steady pitch, but feels his voice climbing like a siren

If O and P feel the couch drop away while the walls rush past at different rates, the front door contracting exponentially in their direction

If R and S reverse, lurch back to their seats and feel their panic decelerating as they skid back up the street with ice refreezing light retreating and O devouring her shouted words of warning as M leaps up and races backwards toward N

If Q (you) observe everything, measure the v of S and R, find the x and y of P and O, calculate the a of N, and plot the parabolic f of M; and if you watch it let it and make it happen because the solution just feels and looks and sounds so perfect beautiful and tragic, like the saddest word in any language, like the most heartbreaking song in the world, then:

5: Connecticut

2010-01-31T23:51:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-25T01:14:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-18T01:37:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-11T00:39:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-04T00:52:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-01T12:54:00.001-05:00

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.