Sunday Road Trip Part 2: The Rock Garden in Springfield OH

This was my first thought, as we walked timidly behind the very normal looking bungalow house in the very normal looking neighborhood of bungalow houses and into...this. It hit me immediately, like a shock I thought, "I am never going to create anything like this, I am never going to care that much about just one thing to do something like this." And maybe that's cause I don't ever want to stay in one spot that long. Like, this guy lived here forever. 60 years. I can't even begin to conceive of that span of time, I'm practically a baby compared to that. But also maybe it's because that's a lot of little rocks.

I get it. Creation is hard. There's so many things just like this rock garden, built up by tiny little detailed pieces, a novel, a relationship, a body of work, a life. If I can't imagine creating something like this, then how can I even begin to think about those other things? At least this work of art is simply explained, it's one rock after another, it's a simple long process, rote. Those other things? You can't even draw blueprints for them. You just have to keep plugging away in the darkness, not knowing where it's going, try to create a lighted path just by visualizing it ethereal brick by brick. Year after year, over and over. Where the fuck am I going to be when I'm 40? Imagining that is like trying to conceptualize the entertainment industry in 100 years, insane and fictional and inherently wrong. The entire universe's timeline seems contained in my lifetime, and it's moving just as slow. It's an abyss I'm standing on, looking over, 40. I like abysses, a lot, they are super cool, but like, I'm not ready to just fall in. I want a rope or something. This guy, he made this rock garden his rope.

This day was a good brick though. I guess I feel that way about most days, so I guess something's being built whether or not I know what exactly it's shaping up to be. There was a point this day where we stopped at a bar to get food, and it was a pub in Urbana, OH on a Sunday, meaning no liquor and cash only, and the waitress got the chicken fingers from the back freezer in ziploc bags to throw them in the fryer. We drank beers and ate chicken fingers, watched Nascar and listened to Roy Orbison. Then we got back on the road and drove through Ohio listening to Drake.

 The problem is instead of seeing myself working on building other things, instead I'm just always working on building myself. Don't tell me that's okay. That's not okay. I want to be focused on something else, something permanent and inorganic and real in a way I can actually handle and give to someone. Instead I'm traipsing around in cars, doing and seeing weird things anywhere I can, and I'm a pretty solid product but also I'm a human being and it's sort of illegal to try and get someone to buy me. I guess metaphorically, it's okay. But I want actual cash.

(Has the term Laser Punk been used yet? As the next steampunk? I need more of an education in labels. Like, are we just using Modernist across the board now, or is there a secret new term for the art scene now that only art students and I guess people who actually read criticism know? And Dystopian, that terms been spittled to death. I don't want to be steampunk or dystopian, I want to be Laser Punk. Since we totally have lasers already, and we've had punk for way too long, in my head Laser Punk looks like a kid who works at his dad's used tire store and listens to dance music, only he's about 2 years behind Europe. He has a haircut that looks like a domesticated Yu-gi-oh. He likes painting on super large canvasses. He and his friends used to have a Queen cover band in high school, and he played bass. He has opinions about copywright and internet law.

 He probably lives somewhere in Marysville. He should move to Baltimore with me. Laser Punk Boyfriend.)

I wanted to write something beautiful and fun about this place, maybe about villagers shrunk by the evil church,  or avenging soldiers that came to life after dark. While we were there, I said I should write a children's book about a mouse living in this place. These are things I should do. But instead it turns out this place just makes me aware of how old I am. So very very old. And young. Both at the same time - the fear of old and the ineffectiveness of young. It's like I'm a top someone just set off spinning. Seriously though, how do I build something like this?

February Made Me Shiver

So they came upon a field of empty trees, stark and witchlike against the country winter sky. The ground was dirty, muddy, the patches of frozen ( then thawed then frozen then thawed still tenaciously clinging to it's green) grass, now petrified in a permanent taxidermy of an orchard. The gnarled and burned branches lay broken haphazardly underneath the victims. He pulled over, and she got out to take pictures, but the farm dog tied up to the distant barn heard them and sounded the alarm. So they drove further down the empty road, and found a more inconspicuous spot for her to pretend to be a photographer. He stayed in the car.

 "What do you think they are?"

"I think they are monsters."
 "I think they are trees. Probably apple trees."
"I think you are wrong. They are monsters."
 "Well if they are not apple trees, they are too sad to be monsters."
 "Don't you think monsters are sad? I think monsters must be the saddest of all animals. They are all alone. There are very few of any one kind, they are all different and alone and have no one to relate to their own particular monstrosity."
 "But all these trees, they aren't alone. They are just dead together. They must have been alive together at some point too."
 "What if it's not just lots of monsters, but only one monster, buried under the ground, with lots of arms sticking up and out, all connected by tentacle roots, and they all look dead together because only one huge massive thing underneath our feet is dead?"
 "You are a weird funny girl"
 "It's not weird or funny. It's tragic and sad. You only think I'm funny cause you feel like somewhere deep in your chest I might be right. And that's why you put up with me."
"I put up with you because you are brilliant and beautiful."
"That isn't the point. The point is I am right. In some world, these are not trees, this is the brittle rotting skeleton of a creature we might only see in our dreams, something low and long and buried and slow like a glacier or like that giant fungus that is basically the whole state of Washington. That makes much more sense than individual lifeforms that grow up uniformly despite being separate creatures, then die every winter and come back every Spring and just magically give us stuff to eat."
"So that would make sap blood."
 "Yes, and apples would be..."
"...fingernails..."
 "...or warts...."
"something that falls off."
 "right, falls off a living creature, and then we eat it."
 "gross."

Suppose that each black and wizened broken trunk was broken open, that you drove your car straight into the field and mowed them down like kindling. Then as you get out of your Cadillac in the middle of the orchard, looking at the path of dead tree devastion behind you, your radiator starting to smoke, the ground around you starts to sparkle. Slight at first, then stronger, building momentum and light. Gathering like fireflies, only it's daytime though a dark daytime, and yet you can see them clearer and clearer. A thousand pricks of light, little diamonds rising out of the organic wreckage and war, floating hovering through their own pulsing a few feet above their former prisons.

 And every single one is a wish someone made before winter began, something that grew shimmering from a bit of dirt or bark or glass that got lodged one day in your chest, that was coated layer by layer over time with hopes you had for what might happen next year. Then the new year came and went, and February's winds stole all these pearls while we were sleeping, sucked them out of our mouths like cats sucking souls, blew them out of the houses and apartments and into the outlying forests and farms and jesus we're all hidden out there, our real selves and the prettiest part of ourselves, stuck cursed little summer souls in cold dark lifeless magic trees.

 So obviously, you have to knock them all down and free them.

 "But wait, what if our wishes need to hibernate and sleep through the winter like the trees, or they won't bloom when it gets warmers? What if I let them all out and then a frost kills them?"

 You're right, of course. But she doesn't like that conclusion, because it smacks of sentimentality, and spirituality, and purpose. And she'd rather have everything made of conflict.

 The little sparks from the crunching wreckage are now milling about, gusts of wind making them eddy and flow like Northern Lights. They haven't got anywhere to go, and so they blend and bleed with each other until it's a shimmering indistinct fog, diluting with the mud and asphalt of the road as it drifts up and over and into other fields.

January in Cleveland

There is, or there was, or there will be a full moon, I can't keep track, but the moon has been huge and sitting heavy on the clouds. The lake tides have been unnaturally high all week. That's not actual, that's a metaphor. People have been tapping on the glass. Also a metaphor.

So of course we tapped back, and they tapped back, and it became a game, and then a code, and then we all went outside. I'm not good with codes. I need things spelled out, in black and white large clear font, with footnotes. I have just started wandering around blissfully self involved, ignoring the tapping, letting others figure it all out. There are all sorts of emotions swimming behind my eyes, and I don't give a crap. I spend my mornings wishing for bread to dip into tea, that's how weird things have been lately. It's probably because I've started reading again, it makes me a weirdo.

In celebration, January became a month of sobriety and sunshine. It's not January I'm worried about, it's all those other months waiting in the wings. February. March. They are using January to soften us up. We melted like margarine at first but I want to be wrapped up and protected now, I want to sleep in warm places, with warm things. This weather sets off sprinkled pricklings in my spine of storms to come. It is beautiful and calm and threatening. How unprepared I am, to be put away for winter.

Between the sunshine and the deadlines and the full moon, I feel like this year is going to take forever and a week. We were all quiet that day, and I think we were all tired.

Gary Indiana Part 2: Blood and Magnets

It's so important to feel safely enclosed when you are expressing private thoughts. Isn't that why we all want our own bedrooms? Our own offices and cars too. Maybe our aversion to communal living and this insecurity, that people around us might read our thoughts if they can see our face, is what led to capitalism? It's almost certainly what led to churches, right? Rather than ceremonies in open fields. A church is simultaneously the least private and most private place you can go. It exudes this very specific feeling of personal awe, the design of it's rooms and alcoves is meant to calm the eyes with the sedative of respect.

While we're talking about Gary hate (oh Gary least beloved of all and subjected to the kind of bullying and intimidation that even Cleveland has trouble conceiving of), Gary just got a new mayor. And there's lots of talk, very resigned and condescending talk, about how it's a hopeless cause, Gary the city. That may be true. Gary may never again be a viable and healthy city. It may have just lost too much, bled out, and there's not enough left to support any kind of growth. So why does it have to grow? Why can't it just shrink? Who says it's required that you somehow maintain the same importance always? Nothing can maintain a peak forever, and so maybe Gary should shrink to a village, a township, a suburb. Sadly, this new mayor will probably knock this church down, since it's right in the middle of downtown. She should, I suppose. What, you ask me, would you want them to do with it? Well, I don't know. I guess if it was an ideal world and everyone had large civic budgets and unlimited land use, I would say turn these places into parks. Clean them up, knock down the dangerous sections, and make it a public place people could wander through, maybe sit down at a table and hang out.

Driving back home, Amanda said something to me about how it used to be a human body started decaying 3-4 days after dying, but now thanks to all the preservatives we eat, our bodies start decaying somewhere around Day 100. I have no idea if that's true and I don't feel like googling it to find out, I'll leave that to you Internet, to fact check that before you start throwing it around willie nillie. But for buildings, the opposite has been true, they decay faster and faster now. So maybe we eat too many preservatives and it causes us to feel a squirrelly cracked out need to tear down and build new new new things. We itch with the desire for change. I guess what I'm saying is we live too long and so things around us die quicker.

We don't always need to be cities ourselves. Sometimes we have to admit defeat and build ourselves up again as villages. If we do it right, then someday we might be small cities again, medium cities, the places in between coasts. If we're really smart, we might even be able to peak again, and people will write about our comebacks. But the important thing is recognizing exactly what size we are capable of being at this moment.

Blood is on my mind. I'm going to tell you right now, this is gross what I'm going to say here. But it's true and it sticks in my gullet. Periods are of course very important to all girls, they are a very spiritual thing, even if you only believe in your own spirit. So I have this cat who goes nuts for the smell of my blood. That sounds creepier than it is, probably cause actually it's pretty creepy. Anytime I am on my period, this cat tries to get at my used pads in the trash. This is also the cat who earlier this year wanted to eat the peeled skin from my sunburn. I promise she is a very sweet animal, but it's true, we are living with tiny little monsters who would eat us if only they had ended up being the larger creatures. We try so hard to forget that, feeding them dry nuggets of cereal and turning them into surrogate children, but the truth remains, they have teeth and claws and they like the smell of blood. So then the question is, what kind of creature does that make us, the owners and masters of these millions of little monsters, but also the people who built churches?

Perhaps my cat is trying to ingest me in order to get some power back from me, an ancient predator magic? We used to do that, eat lion hearts ect. I guess then we built churches and started only symbolically eating the flesh of the unknown.

 This place reminded me very much of my cat's blood thirst, and of my own. I wanted to eat meat immediately after being here. I wanted to bleed and ingest and fuck and kill and love, all in a very quiet calm determined way. We weren't even here that long, it was too cold and the light was fading fast into the lake. But the emotional jolt still hit me like a powerful drug.  I can feel it even more looking at the photos. I guess in the end if we made a park of this place, it might be dangerous. A lot of people prayed against evil things here.

 What was it Jere said once, about how totemic caves were to women? Women and churches are caves. They provide shelter and mystery and darkness and emergence.

There is a certain guy who every time I see him, my period starts. This is entirely coincidental, just timing. It's a funny thing to think about though, that my body might recognize a powerful hormonal want, and respond accordingly. But I wonder also if maybe this place did it to me. To test this theory, I would need someone to pay for me to travel around the world, visiting all the most powerful holy places, temples and caves and ley line convergences. If we did this right, I might bleed forever, my body in shock from the deluge of universal energy, the Body and the Blood of the Magnet.

Gary, Indiana Part 1: Good Lord, Why Would You Go There?

Gary, Indiana is unloved. I couldn't find anyone who wanted to go with me, even photographers who had never been. I made plans with three different people, they all canceled on me, and in the end my generous sister went out in the cold with me, because the number one rule is never ever ever go in someplace alone. It was especially nice of her, because she had been the one with me the first time I went to Gary, two years ago. And because she doesn't give a shit about this sort of stuff.

I have never felt more like my hobby was weird. In Cleveland, it's almost passe to take pictures of urban decay. They are hanging in every coffeeshop. When I tell people I like to go urban exploring, it's almost like admitting I take pictures of graffiti for art class. In Chicago though, it was more like telling people I masturbated to feet. Their reaction was mostly "well okay sure I know this exists, after all I know everything  that exists, but really you ought to keep that shit to yourself and not ask people to participate."

Like every enthusiast ever, it boggles my mind that it's so hard to find people who don't care about walking in mud and rotted carpeting in the freezing cold.

"But Gary's so EASY," I would tell them, "You just WALK in, and its is beautiful!"
"I'm going to go to SAIC instead."
"I'm too hungover, let's get brunch instead"
"Gary smells."
"Nobody should ever go to Gary."

Carey made a good point about asking Chicago people to ogle Gary's decay. She said people from Cleveland, these ruins were all around us, it was part of our daily landscape and therefore belonged to us. But these Chicago kids, they didn't live around ruin. They lived around little one way streets with old money town houses, H&M ads, and starbucks on every corner. Most of them came from solidly middle class families, with solidly middle class money. Gary was the poor side of Chicago, and if you came from the upper middle class predominantly white North side, it must feel very much like coming down from the tower to see how the poor people live. The sense of white privilege must hurt them like an inconvenient bee sting.

I don't really think that's why my friends wouldn't come, but it's a good point. Also, maybe it's true. I'm probably one of 5 people in the world that sincerely loves Gary, Indiana, for all it's parts. I like the ugly old convention center, and the fact that the KFC is the place to be downtown, that the highway exit is right at the entrance to the steel mill because there's no reason to go anywhere else. If cities were cats, I would be the girl who takes in every three legged one eyed stray that comes her way. These places, the church, the train station, the abandoned water front and the punched in brick tenement houses, these are places of history, actual touristy ruins, but we don't keep ruins in America, we let them fall and then bury them. We will never have permanent Coliseums, only certain periods when you could maybe see an old Church before they knocked it down for condos, so take pictures while you can because everyone will forget it ever existed in 10 years. Gary is about as Italian countryside as you can get in this country, in that no one ever knocks anything down because no one has the money for it and people have more pressing issues.  Also, though, I guess in the same way, there are dorks who go to visit the Coliseum and then the rest of the people who would rather go  hang out in the rest of the city with pretty people.

I'm sentimental about this right now because I just drove by the White Elephant building on W. 65th by the K-Mart, and it was knocked down.

The other point Carey made was that I couldn't force people to have a good time doing what I like, especially when it's peculiar.  I feel like I collect bugs now. Really large awesome bugs. I guess both hobbies celebrate death and preservation, huh?

Cinema Park

The other day, some boys and I went to the batting cages on the far east side. We go to that one, even though it's a drive, because the high school boys who work the counter don't care when we show up in civvies, and hog the cages, then duck out to the bar for a bit, and come back. Also, I always get a free token from the guy. You can tell he does not really care about his job, except that it's an easy after school job where he just has to pass helmets and bats, and spend the rest of the time watching sports. I was wearing a sequin dress, and a sweater that was cut low on my shoulders which always stretches out the more hours I wear it, and by the time we got there it was pretty much falling off. I must have looked a little bit like a mess, and this time there was a little girls' little league practicing on the courts next to the cages. All the preteens were hanging out in front of the softball cage, which is the one I use because I don't like blisters, and they stared at me hitting balls for 30 minutes, stopping after every throw to hitch my sweater up so my boobs didn't fall out. I'm pretty sure their parents were less than pleased. Messy thirty year old women showing up with hipster boys in t-shirts, playing around, with bad stances.

Afterwards, we went to Fairmount to eat burgers, and on the tv was 60 Minutes. We sipped mildly fancy drinks. My dad used to watch that show religiously growing up, and because of the nostalgia factor I still enjoy it, but it's very old now. The story that came on was about the foreclosure crisis, the one big claim to fame Cleveland has now in the national news, and they interviewed people in a neighborhood who were refusing to give up their houses, despite being really underwater on the values. They showed footage from a place called Cinema Park, which was a housing development started and then abandoned when the company went bankrupt. The pictures were stark, half finished houses and acres of gas line caps. We immediately decided to go the next day. Later we went to our friends house, where an American Apparel employee christmas party was happening. All the people were incredibly weirdly thin and small, and wearing very nice clothes. We left there and went to the hipster bar, to watch Japanese skate videos and I bought 23 yr old girls shots for someone's birthday ( I was all about being the role model that day), and tried to parse out the correct french terms for military tactics used by Napoleon and then later in the Civil War. It turned out, later on FB, that everyone else had seen that foreclosure segment too, which is sort of nice, that people still watch 60 Minutes.

The next day though, we did go, found the place on google maps and went in the middle of the afternoon. This is the kind of stuff you do in Cleveland. You listen to Drake and drive around spying for things the news told you about in the place where you live. The land used to be a drive in theater, thus the name. There were a dozen houses, and people living in six of them, and the rest all empty plots. It was very gray and cold, and the sky looked like a down comforter spinning in an industrial dryer. One woman called out to us from her bedroom window, in a pink bathrobe. I could only catch half of what she was saying, but it made me feel weird, being there only to take photos of how tragic her street looked like. She was fine with it, presumably having dealt with reporters already for a while. Just don't break into any of them, she said. No problem. We understood each other, that this was just a reality of living in this city. They were boarded up tight anyways, Playmobil houses that just weren't ready to be shipped yet. The sidewalks started and ended in odd places, and there were several missing driveways. At the end of the street was a very nice large park with lots of benches, more benches than there were actual people living there. It was a park with expectations.

Malls are useless for everything, especially apocalypses and zombie attacks

It's hard sometimes, I know, to understand how anyone could be against Christmas. It's so sparkly and lit up, with bows and shiny paper and pretty dresses. Everyone goes around telling people how much they love them. Even if you don't believe in god or America, how can you be against people having a good time, right?

But listen, Randall Park Mall is how. This is the dark aftermath of Christmas, like the morning after a coke binge where even though you haven't slept at all, something in your brain clears and you wake up and realize you can't feel anything in the middle of your face but you feel the rest of your body with intensity, and you have no cigarettes left, and check out time in this hotel is in 5 minutes so you don't even have time to take a very hot shower and try to rehydrate the channels of dried snot in your sinuses. This is what consumerism has done to us, left us hollowed out wrecks of past booms sitting in the nonexistent sun, the Ohio December afternoon gloom.

Also, and I can't stress this enough, malls are the worst places to go if there is a zombie attack. There are too many entrances to defend.

Of course, the other annoying thing is if you are a white middle aged girl named Bridget, every stranger you talk to assumes you are a christian with their constant Merry Christmases, and it just reminds you over and over how racist we all are, how if you were a Turkish girl, or an Indian Girl no one would feel comfortably making that assumption. Then they ask you if you have kids, and there's a whole nother stereotype/expectation/disappointment to slam against, rubbing like onion skin against your already raw "I don't believe in god thanks" nerves.

Usually this rolls off my back like water, but this year I've had two customers at work so far get audibly mad at me for saying Happy Holidays to them instead of Merry Christmas, and seriously, fuck off then. As John Stewart said, if you want a War on Christmas, fine, it's War. You've planted the seed of bitterness in my chest, and the roots push up into my eyes every time someone says anything Christmas related to me now.

I wonder if people who aren't white but are christian get upset because people assume they can't say Merry Christmas to them?

I know if I was more militant about it to my own friends, if I actively railed against it to them, they would try to remember and keep it non-christian. But I love them more than strangers, so I forgive them their trespasses.

The Mayans came up a lot yesterday. There was some half truth internet based story about a pyramid in Georgia being identified as Mayan. It probably wasn't. But it probably is a pyramid, or something. It is lodged against the side of hill, a 1000 yr old pile of broken rubble underneath centuries of earth. Or course, it came out right around the pre-anniversary of the expected date of the end of the world, which is 12/21/2012. I feel like they could have done better with the symmetry of that number. 12/20/2012 for instance, or if you want to keep it simple, 12/12/12. Mayans are the new Y2K, or the new Leprechauns, the new Bigfoots. Someday we will hear rumours about hidden leftover Mayan tribes, somewhere in the wilds of Montana, with the secret to everlasting life hidden in a cave.  Not that the Mayans didn't actually exist at some point, but not these Mayans. These Mayans are citizens of Atlantis. They invented the telephone. They could turn dirt to gold. Their women were better at head. They were the first punk rockers. And now they are coming to destroy us all, out of revenge. Or because God told them to.

If I allow the side of me inclined to spiritual belief, the side that used to be obsessed with how Saints died, and who knew all the astrological personalities my particular Sign should have sex with, then here is what I think about the Mayan Calendar, bearing in mind no actual knowledge about the calendar other than what I've gleaned from numerous New Age crap over the past 20 years (the calendar, like the pyramid, does exist, but only as a scientific object, a relic, like an abacus or macbook). If the world resets on that date, then it will be a metaphorically End of the World, because it will be the Beginning of a New One, only in the sense that how time is measured will be different. If the very thing that creates our structured universe is how we quantify that imaginary force Time, then the end of the known calendar will be a New Universe. I like that idea, mostly because I think we could all use being reminded of the arbitrary nature of our laws every few hundred years.

Of course, if you all want to live like the world is going to burn in one year, I really encourage that. Do it. I want to see what happens. I think even if the End of the World was a government sanctioned event, verified and plotted and expected by the entire population as a thing as real as the Superbowl, I suspect most people would do nothing different. I suspect, in fact and for real, most people are already living like they assume it doesn't matter. They are still ringing up bills they can't pay for pleasures same day, and they still sleep with people they shouldn't. We tell ourselves all the time how much we are holding back because of convention, but frankly, I don't think you are. Humans are selfish and hedonistic, and inclined to getting what we want regardless. But we are also cowards, afraid of things touching our very fragile skins. So I think modern society has basically balanced out our desire versus our fear to exactly what limit we are willing to take our irresponsibilities. Which, the world is really really fucked up, right? Don't we talk about that all the time, how fucked up everything is? So why are we so loathe to believe we are at rock bottom now? We cling to the idea there is still time to stop the train before it gets there.  Some people see that as "still time to save us", but  with my perspective, it's more like "only way to go is up". Both ways are wrong. There is no more time left to save us, and there are plenty of other directions to go in that aren't up. Some of those directions are more fun than others though.

Which is pretty much how you can tell the people who are really into New Years.

Everything You Look At is Unfinished

She had a Little Sister the first generation they came out. Everyone who was cool had one. It kept your numbers and your pictures and told you how to get places. When she asked Little Sister a question, it gave you the simplest most factual answer possible. Where should I go for lunch Little Sister, she would speak to it. "This is the closest Mexican place." "This is the closest Cambodian place." "This is the most popular place among your social network." "This is the place your ex boyfriend is most likely to be based on charted dating habits from the last six months." "You should wear the red."

She woke up coughing blood. It was thick and dark, like it had dried and been rehydrated by the sheer exertion of coughing it up. Her head was also thick and dark, her hair felt heavy with lead and her skin glowed with raw material sweat. She had dreamed that night of being back in Phoenix, in the heat that lay on your skin like a sick and dying matted cat, and the lightning up above her in the common pool, sitting in the tepid water watching the apartment complex lights blink on and off and waiting for the lightning to hit her and set everything on fire in a short sustained chain reaction that incinerated her and all the water and all the weeds and gravel and every other identical colony of under employed over educated 21 yr olds populating that horrible dry desert outpost. When she woke up, cold and sweating underneath winter blankets, she was dying.

"Little Sister, what should I do, am I sick?"

"Your symptoms suggest the best course of action is to seek immediate treatment."

So Little Sister gave her directions to the hospital. But her car was broken, someone had stolen her alternator, wires running everywhere, and the buses never came, though she waited and Little Sister gave her the bus schedule. She tried to call a taxi, but the phone lines were dead. She went outside and looked around weakly, but there was no one on the street. She started walking. It was colder than it should have been for November, or perhaps she just always forgot what cold was like in winter.

"Little Sister, where are all the people?"

"Population of Cleveland is currently 245, 371"

"But where is everybody?"

And she coughed, and a little bit of blood landed on Little Sister, who scanned it immediately and efficiently for all known toxins, agents, poisons, bacteria, viruses, pregnancy, STDS, antibiotics, contagions.

"Big Sister, you should go to the hospital."

"I am at the hospital Little Sister, there is no one here. There are no lights on."

"You should go to the other hospital."

"Where is the other hospital, Little Sister?"

"Next closest healthcare facility is Mercy Riverside of Toledo, 116 miles, estimated travel time 1 hour, 56 minutes."

There were no dogs in the road, but she wished at that moment she had thought to get one earlier, and trained it to love and protect her.

Clarion: The Scrap Heap at the End of the Universe

It's possible we imagined it, in a mass hallucination brought on by fumes from the oil refinery. The fact that all the streets were named the same as the ones back home, and that they all looked the same, Broadway leading you into industrial areas always rusty old heaps of factories and corner stores, the rest of them named after the great tribes of the Lakes who had traded their existence to the French for beads and guns. Never assume they are going to give you the good guns. Why would they want you to have better guns than them? I'm sorry the exploration of the New World happened before mass communication, if there had been the internet maybe you all would still be alive. Maybe not.

So it's possible at some point on our drive there, the long autumn colored mid morning light falling across the highway and the corn fields, air rushing past our slightly cracked windows, it's possible that at some point we fell asleep in the sunlight and died. It's possible we were kidnapped, fed hallucinogens, reset, and released. I've often thought that a lot more of us are actually stuck in laboratories than we want to admit. Not all us. But probably a fair number. At least 30. I keep waiting for my life to turn into a story where numbers really matter, where the same set of significant amounts keep showing up again and again, a sign that there's an overriding narrative. Like, maybe there are 32 of us in sense dep tanks, and maybe we are all dreaming we are ourselves 32, and some research student somewhere picked that number because his apartment number was 32, the one he lived in with his now-ex, and the place he wishes more than anything to be back at. Whatever the reason, the city was beautiful that day, not gray and dirty as we had anticipated, but clean and bright and diversified. Poor sure, but not as poor. It wasn't a bad place, and we fell under the city's spell. Each city having a particular and unique spell, created out of rocks and raw earth from where it was born, designed by snowflake and fingerprint population mixes. Cities are playgrounds, they are boiling pots and scrap heaps and collages. They collect everything washing up in the gullies of the country, reservoirs of our lowest points and greatest activity. Marshes.

When we found the building, I drove into the wrong driveway three times, and finally just jumped a curb to park the car somewhere inconspicuous. We climbed carefully over the broken glass sticking out of window frames, and through the soon to be overgrown pool, into the dimmed recessed hallways of offices and kitchens, through the mirrored lobby and pitch black lounges. A series of conference rooms named after presidents held every bit of furniture scavenged; desks, mattresses, light poles, pastel prints of cottages, racks of white porcelain coffee cups. He found a corner stocked with blankets, saltines and mayonnaise laid out across stacked chairs, the vapid smiles of a Barely Legal laying open. I wonder sometimes if my male friends understand what alien places our individual fears come from, how girls naturally have a completely different reaction to the possibility there is a strange man hiding in the shadows of rooms, and frankly I have no idea what kind of fear hides in my friends chest. He is 9 ft tall, I wonder sometimes how he fears anything. Then again, being of a strange shape myself, I know how that alone can make you feel vulnerable over time.

The ground floor was the most interesting, full of objects and surprises. As we went further and further up, the rooms themselves were very similar. There was usually only one point of interest in each room, a pool of water, a conflagration of curtains, a spare bible. We got careless, he would wander ahead, I would lag behind in a room, we lost eye contact. Normally when that happens, I get nervous, I call out just to be sure, but it didn't seem to matter. We were lulled by the repeating pattern of the hallways and doorways, the sameness of every room. The warmth and sunniness of October's Indian Summer drifted into us from beyond the shadows.

And then suddenly, a door slammed in the stairway several floors below us.

Neither of us said anything about it, but we walked up a couple more floors and stopped. He picked up a large plastic pipe from inside one of the bathrooms and carried it with him. We walked down to the next staircase and up again. I stopped and looked down the dark shaft of the stairs, looked down just a minute, just to be sure. I felt that he had stopped above me, in sync as we were after all this time. So we stood there, together, separate, each looking for a long stare. Just as that spell was about to be broken, I saw it, a glint in one of the shadows of something moving reflective. It was 2 floors down, and could be barely made out from the bend of the stairs. I waited for it to happen again, but I felt him moving above me, and so I went too, quickly but not too quickly, into the next door the next empty hallway looking exactly the same as all the rest, where he carefully shut the door behind us and then quickly into another room, where we waited in silence, peeking through the peephole at the still quiet hallway. Minutes passed. We started to feel silly, making faces at each other, and just as I started breathing again, we heard the stairway door open. A creak like the building was cracking its knuckle in a movie theater.

It came slowly down the hallway, but it didn't stop to look in any rooms, giving each doorway only a cursory glance, as if it had assumed we had switched staircases again. We watched it walking down the hallway away from us. The thing was in the shape of man, and had the smooth practiced gait of one, but it had been living in the rot so long, patches of the fleshy shell had worn away, been eaten by moss or rusted by rain. You could see where once it had skin and clothes, and then the gleam of a lighting fixture it had used to replace a forearm, or the innards of a poached air conditioner sewn into it back. A metal scrap man. Junk Man. A walking trash bin. The rags it was wearing looked like they used to be a blue uniform, a polyester pants suit, a waiter maybe or a cook. It was a relic from a time we were both too young to remember, when mechanical men had been legal, which meant it had been a fugitive for at least 60 years, twice as long as either of us had been alive. In it's left hand, it carried a wrench. My panicked frozen mind saved itself by thinking "robots can be left handed?" and crunch crack we were both on track again, our muscles bursting into motion as soon as the Wreck went into the furthest staircase.


We ran up the rest of the stairs to the 12th floor, and from there to the roof, where we shut the trap door as securely as we could. Technically I guess, the roof was the 13th floor, the non-existent floor. We waited for it to find us and start banging on the door, braced ourselves for confrontation, but it never came. We stood there in the sky, as time ticked by, and waited. The light was warm and bright, the air crisp and cold. The colors of the trees far below us became vivid with the rich afternoon sun, and the city lay on the horizon so far away, on the other side of the forest, shining like silver, emerald and quartz.