I’d done a few guest lectures at my old college before, when my doc about an underground gay bar in Barbados made the festival rounds. I can’t say that I gifted the students with a ton of wisdom. I’d overheard some douche professor had bellyached about the film chair even inviting me there to talk about my “smutty fag art.” And, oh man, I almost tattooed that badge of honor on my forearm.

Yusuf hesitated for just a second. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Alright. Where are we going?”

He turned to the group for some hush-hush chattering, and, jesus, if this was how all of our conversations were going to work, this was going to take forever.

“California,” he said, finally.

“Oh,” I sputtered. “Oh.”

I’d seen a few of my other film school dropout friends—the bonkers, perfect weirdos who shoved their uncompromising shit on a world that didn’t ask for it—get snatched up by studios in LA that wanted new talent to liven up their bizarrely mainstream movies. Each time, I threw them parties and popped cheap bubbly for their Big Break, wishing for them all the luck in the world. But maybe next time it’ll be me, was the thought that I held between my teeth because you were never supposed to say it out loud.

“Wait. I don’t have my passport here,” I said.

The Second American Civil War had lasted just over a year and had ended with the secession of California, then Oregon, to join the Union of Pacific States, three years before I was born. I remembered the maps projected onto the boards at school, showing the shifting borders of America shaped by two generations of wars—warring troops, warring truths—without the resources or leadership to anchor what was left of it together. On the map, the borders of Texas and other states shifted and I’d wondered if I’d just been hallucinating—a little too well-done after my wake-and-bake. Before the war, Hawaii had already been an independent nation for going on ten years. Last election, President Whatshisname ran on some platform of mythical reunification, his speeches broadcast to a nearly independent constellation of cities sometimes called the Urban Archipelago of America. With wide patches of unincorporated land and rural, self-governing towns stretching between coasts connected by high-speed mag-trains and shared memory. That reunification hadn’t happened yet and probably never would. My future was now circling the drain because I’d left my passport in Boston and wouldn’t be able to get to California. Wonderful.

“You’re fine,” he said. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”

“Okay.” I tried to iron out the jitters in my voice. “Can you give me a couple of minutes to get my stuff?”

“Just be quick.”

*   *   *