Dayton, Ohio

We were always there, in a fashion, through the rantings scrawled on rest stop bathroom walls, on postcards sent anonymously through the mail, in a hundred empty rooms and the braking of tires on the interstate.

She was the voice that told me it was all right to let go; that there was no more need to hold on for one last Christmas with the family.

And I, in turn, made her run.

The day she left, she said, "You single-handedly made me believe that God couldn't possibly exist."

She wiped at her eyes with the bouquet I had brought her.

"... Fuck you," she said. "Fuck you so fucking hard."



Des Moines, Iowa

I found a Polaroid of her laying in a gutter outside a Dunkin Donuts. It was waterlogged and torn, and it showed her running down a tree-lined road in her bare feet and a ratty red dress, blond hair blowing around her face. I couldn't remember if I had taken the photograph or not.

"I'm looking for a girl," I said later on.

He grinned at me with large, square teeth.

"Hell, we got us all types a' girls. And all'a them just dyin' ta meet 'cha. What'cher into?"

The women in that place all had the same look in their eyes, as if they knew the skin no longer hid the decay underneath, and I loved them despite--or rather, because of it.

"I'm looking for a girl I knew," I said, "a long time ago. I think she may have passed through here. We were friends once."

He made a grunting sort of noise and thumbed his nose. "Well then, she ain't here, son."

"How do you know?"

" 'Cause," he said, smiling and smiling and smiling, "all yer friends are dead. All ya know and love's been carried away on wings a' angels."



Chattanooga, Tennessee

I traded the last of my Valium for a glued-together Walkman from a homeless man who promised me a seat beside his throne in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I played the tape she had made me back when we still breathed at the same pace. The songs had long since faded, and I didn't recognize the voice that replaced them.

Save the rain forest, the tape said, and then sell it to the Jews.

I had dinner at a roadside cafe built from an old train car. The waitress brought me a chicken-fried steak so large that it overlapped the edges of the plate. When I finished it she kissed me on the cheek. She was fat and smelled like baby powder and my mother, and I didn't want to leave.

"You've got to, hon," she said as she hugged me tightly. "She's out there somewhere, waiting for you."

She gave me a few sandwiches bundled up in an old checkered handkerchief. She told me it belonged to her husband, missing now for close to ten years. All they found of him was his truck, abandoned somewhere in Oregon, and she cried as she sent me on my way.


Odessa, Texas

A family of four offered me a room in exchange for some work around the house. Both sons played football for the local high school, and one Friday night we went down to the stadium to watch them play Permian High. There were twenty thousand spectators there, half in black, half in red, and I felt drowned in a parted sea of small lives. The stadium lights were blinding against a pitch-black sky, and the people screamed with the torn-out throats of seraphs in their mouths.

For a moment, I thought I had seen her across the field, in her red dress, but then the buzzer sounded with Odessa down by thirty points, and the two halves of the sea collided.

"I'm looking for someone," I told the desk sergeant at the police station after the game. He had a cut on his lip, and was holding some ice wrapped in a hand towel against it.

"Boy," he said, "this is God's country. There are bigger things than women at stake here. High-school football and the end of the world, for starters."

"There's no such thing as God," I said, and I took out her picture to show the man. He pressed his thumbs into his eyes and waved at me dismissively.

"If she was here, she's gone now. Go on, boy. There's nothing left for you here."

The family I was staying with hadn't come back yet when I returned to the house, so I left a note for them on the kitchen table and followed the first road I came to away from there.



Tulsa, Oklahoma

"Let's make a promise," she said to me a lifetime ago. "If we both haven't found someone by the time we're twenty-five, we'll find our way to each other, okay?"

"And if we can't?"

She smiled, then made a gun from the fingers of her hand and placed it against her temple.


The ghost of the railroad had already seen his best days. His mouth was curled into a frown beneath his mustache.

"West," he said to me in a sad, echoing voice. "I took them west, and they never came back.

"I always knew that they would forget me, but it still hurts."

He stood on the other side of the tracks, staring at his pocket watch, his back to fields of green and gold, and I knew he would be gone after the train had finished passing between us.



Great Salt Lake, Utah

I believe that my old, worn-out suit and tie may have once belonged to a dead man. Whenever I wear it, I can't help but think that there is something more to all of this. I've heard once that the human body renews every last cell over a period of seven years. If that is true, then I am a dead man several times over, and I hope that those parts of me have found some measure of stillness at last, and whatever sins I may have committed then have been washed from me with salt waves.

My companion and I sat by the shore of the lake, sharing a cigarette. He was a traveling magician--a trickster and a showman--as skinny as I was with sun-browned skin, an unruly beard, and long hair tucked beneath a faded cap.

"In the Dead Sea," he said, "the salt content is so high that it's impossible to drown. Shit just floats right to the top."

He dipped his fingers into the water, held it up to his eyes, and frowned. "Not quite there yet. Close, though."

"Is that how you did it? You just floated? Tricked them all?"

"Trade secrets, guy," he said. He held a finger up to his lips and smiled. "You don't want to just be given all the answers now, do you?"

Before he left, he traded me a cassette tape and an ancient Polaroid camera for a few packs of Camels. I waited until he had gone before I placed the tape in the Walkman.

There were no voices this time, but over the sound of the north wind bringing in snow from over the warm water, I thought I could hear her laughing.

I snapped a quick photo of the lake and went to where it was warmer.



Los Angeles, California

My car had broken down on 40, a few miles outside of Flagstaff, and I spent two days on the side of the road with only the bats for company before a trucker finally picked me up. He was headed to LA and popped pills nonstop, his jaw clenched and teeth grinding from the methamphetamine and caffeine. The desert sun washed out the mirrors of his shades. He didn't speak much, and for a while the only voices in the cab came from the radio:

... time to take her home, her dizzy head is conscience-laden ...

... where will you be, friends, when Jesus returns to wipe clean the ...

... and when it's time for leaving, I hope you'll understand that I was born a ramblin' ...

... and what they don't want you to know, is that the liberal media and the homosexuals are working ...

... Candy, Candy, Candy, I can't let you go, all your life you're haunting me, I loved ...

Every once in a while the trucker would shake his head with a start and curse under his breath. "Can't sleep," he would say. "Can't fucking sleep."

We were an hour or so into California when he picked up another hitcher, a scraggly little girl who barely looked to be thirteen. Her hair was shades of pinks and purples and yellow, and her eyes were a mismatched pair of green and vein blue. She told us fairy tales and stories the rest of the way there: the cats that gained intelligence when the moon was full ... the old woman in Scranton who kept Death trapped in a bell jar ... the three sisters who lived in the same house yet never saw each other ... the Chinese mapmaker and the Emperor that loved him ... the man who dreamed he was a butterfly and the butterfly that dreamed it was a man ...

When we came within sight of the ocean, the trucker pulled his rig over to the side of the road. I don't know what it was about that glittering expanse of blue that caused it, but he broke down completely, sobbing like a child. The girl and I watched as he cried inconsolably for the next few minutes, and then she touched my arm and motioned her head toward the city a few miles away.

"What was that about?" I asked her later on as we walked down the flint-strewn roadside, after she had finished telling me a story of how Hell was nothing but other people.

Staring down at her Converses, the girl said, "It reminded him of someone."

"Who do you think it was?"

The girl shrugged and looked off into the distance. She remained quiet for a long time. Finally, she turned to me and said, "You won't find her here. The weather's all wrong for mourning."


I returned to the truck the next day. It was still where we had left it, sitting on the side of the road. The driver was gone. He had left the keys in the ignition and a checkered handkerchief on the seat. I got in and drove north, keeping the ocean in view the entire time, searching for when the sky stopped and the rain began.



Astoria, Oregon

"Going down?" said the young man on the cliffside. He was naked from the waist up, and his chest was deeply tanned, his hair bleached white from the sun.

"Maybe," I said. I looked over the side of the cliff to the coast below. A thick fog had rolled in around the mountain, obscuring everything, but I could still see where white feathers and shattered pieces of wood clustered around obsidian rocks that broke the surface of the water like teeth. "You?"

He shook his head as he strapped a harness of wax wings onto his back. "Other way," he said. "The view is much better."

"I'm looking for a girl," I said. "She used to love me."

He moved to the edge of the precipice and sniffed at the air. "What does she look like?" he said. "Maybe I've seen her. I can see a lot from up there."

I fished her photo from my pocket and handed it to him. He looked at it from several angles before flinging it away. The wind caught the photogragh and carried it out over the water, further and further from me until it was nothing more than a speck of black spiralling in the mist, and soon enough that, too, was gone.

"I have eyes wherever my kin are," he said, backing up a few feet. "I'll let you know if I see her."

The young man took a running start and launched himself over the edge of the cliff, disappearing into the fog.

I sat down on a nearby rock and lit a cigarette, waiting for a splash.


A day or two later I managed to get a ride with another trucker who promised to tell me the secret that the liberals didn't want me to know about, just as long as I wasn't a queer.

I told him that was fine, and we headed east.



Billings, Montana

"One of these days," she told me once when we were both young, "your search is going to take you so far from me that I won't be able to find you again."

I didn't answer, only watched the rapid blur of the countryside as the train throttled past.

"Fuck, you don't even know what you're looking for, do you?"

I said something in reply, but the words were lost against the screeching of the train's whistle.

She shook her head and smiled in amusement and exasperation.

"No fucking clue," she said.


The shopping cart ladies are the oracles and priestesses of cities, I knew. They see every offering made at their altar, witness every boon and sacrifice, hear every whispered prayer. They alone know what it was that had lain behind those areas in the wall where the brick is a newer shade of red than the ones surrounding it.

"Stupid," sighed the old woman as we walked together under a soft drizzle, cats curling around her feet, "looking for something that don't exist."

"I had a picture of her," I said. I felt numb beneath the rain. "But now that's gone, too."

"Aye," she said. "All you know and love will always be carried from you."

"So there's no hope?"

"Of course there's hope, stupid boy. All magic is, is hope."

"There's no such thing as magic," I said. "No such thing as God."

"Perhaps," she said, tilting her head in mock agreement, "or perhaps you're an idiot. No rule saying they're one and the same, now, is there?"

"So what do I do now?"

"No fucking clue," said the old woman.



Witchita, Kansas

I dreamed. Dreamed of being sky, dreamed of being sea.


I woke up in my motel room a split-second before the figure in the corner even spoke.

"I have to say, you don't look like you're doing too well." The voice sounded faint and faraway, like someone whispering through a very long tunnel.

I sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep from my eyes. "Who's there?"

A pause, a beat, a breath.

"Auditory and visual hallucinations, conversing with yourself--with people you created, chasing people that don't exist. Sounds like classic dissociative identity disorder to me."

"It can't be that simple, can it?"

"It never is, unfortunately."

"So what happens now?"

"Now? ... Now you go home knowing that I'll always love you."

And then, of course, she was gone.



Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

What I never realized is that the real citizens of a country aren't its people, but its cities: living things that are born and breathe and love, that grow old and die; cities that rise and fall with the land, children that carry the histories and fables of their mother with them to their graves--and whatever stories we have are merely their dreams.


I took a picture the other day with an old Polaroid camera I could no longer recall acquiring of a young woman, laughing and smiling, blond hair whipping around her face, running barefoot down a quiet tree-lined road with the hem of her red dress in her hands.

The wind picked up and swept the photo from my hands as she blew past, carrying it away from me.  I stood watching as it floated like down on the breeze, higher and further away, and somewhere in the back of my mind I could feel myself already forgetting.