He walked across the street and past the jail, which was really a complex of jails, all built up atop the levee that held in the Trinity. It was a very Dallas sort of thing that the river on which the city had been founded, its core geographic and ecological feature, had been engineered into near invisibility. They had channeled it to try to control it, moving it away from downtown. They had shaped the banks into terraced levees so sharply angled you would have mistaken them for pavement were it not for the neatly mowed grass. They had built a dozen bridges and overpasses so no one would ever have to enter that zone. And then they located all the nastiest land uses along the perimeter. Like the jail.

Most of the jail buildings had been built in the last decade to house people rounded up by the prior regime—some for their politics, some for stealing what they needed in a city that operated on the “eat what you kill” ethos of unregulated competition. But one tower had been there since Donny was a kid. Thirteen stories of red dirt brick with castle slat windows behind chain link and concertina. Donny had visited it many times as a lawyer, and he had also spent a night there as an inmate, the summer after his junior year in high school. His dad had used his connections to get the charges dropped and the arrest expunged from Donny’s record, which came in handy a decade later when Donny was applying for his law license, but the experience had proven useful.

The cell they put him in for those thirty-six hours had a view of the spot where they had busted him, tagging the support columns of the bridges down there in the floodplain while in possession of a felonious quantity of acid. Dallas acid was a special blend, especially back then, a liberatory concoction designed to turn freeway interchanges into paths of astral travel, taking advantage of the city’s love of shine and its surprisingly atemporal way of hiding the past in plain sight to unleash its latent capacity for unicorn sparkle and dimensional distortion. Donny took so much of it that summer that he was pretty sure the residue still kicked in every once in a while, and he was waiting for the day when the portal would open during one of his melancholic twilight saunters and let him step into a more rainbow-based version of the world.