Maybe, though, I just yearned for something other than what I had. Which was nothing. Maybe I believed a purpose waited for me out there. Or some thread I’d lost would come back to me. Because with the way the world kept cracking open I recognized something delusional in words like “yard sale” or “mortgage.” As if, soon, some words would be extinct.

But I couldn’t shake the memory of the photos of my daughter over the fireplace. Which might still be hung with dusty stockings. In all my repurposing of Shovel Pig, I’d lost my only photos of her. I had begun to find it hard to see her face.

[104]

But I didn’t make it to the house. The jeep ran fine. The world did not. Even stopped short, I would have to become fluent in new languages, discard old ones. Languages of the dead and languages of the new. Curfews and lockdowns took unusual new forms. The National Guard had been called out to deal with an unspecified disaster. There was gridlock and confusion surrounding the city, early that summer. There was, too, old friend, the intensifying green-gray tint to the sky, tinged with gold from the distant glow of uncontrollable fires from a natural gas explosion. Or so they said. A general advisory to use a mask, to avoid breathing unfiltered air. With little explanation.

Even as the rain kept coming. Ever-present and meaningless, like thought.

“Landscape isn’t fragile. It’s what we impose upon it that’s fragile. We must be ruthless about the foreground. We must trust the backdrop. Do you know how to do that? Can we trust in that?”

Funny how even then, as systems failed, flickered out, institutions revealed as paper thin, that so many couldn’t bring themselves to believe in anything. That it helped if you didn’t. Better to observe the rituals, use the catchphrases. Share your concern.

Express enthusiasm for reliquaries that some still held a mirror to, claiming to see breath form.

On a little-known stretch of state road about a hundred miles from the city, I came to a barricade with slogans on banners that canceled one another out. Didn’t hesitate. Gunned the engine and smashed through the wooden fencing, firing from the open window for maximum discouragement. Some people believe in nothing.

Some people just want to kill other people, because they can. Maybe it was a joke or some form of performance art, but I didn’t have the temperament to stop and find out.

I stopped for a deer a mile later, my pulse humming bad in my ears. Too irregular. Almost abandoned the jeep and followed the deer’s silhouette into deep forest.

Continued on. But I knew I wouldn’t make it to the city.

So I tried to find a different homecoming.

[105]