AND IT SPREAD. IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN TO ANYONE WHO DIDN’T grow up in the time before the internet how impossible this actually was, and for it to even reach me at that time meant that it was probably five times as prevalent as what I was hearing on the news or reading in the papers. This was not like a few years after that summer, when the whole chain of events was featured on Unsolved Mysteries and Hard Copy and 20/20 and before it was mentioned on Saturday Night Live, where it turned out that Harrison Ford was putting up the posters, though he blamed it on a one-armed man, and before the TV movie The Edge: The Story of the Coalfield Panic or the twenty-seven-song concept album by the Flaming Lips called Gold-Seekers in the Shantytown. This was before the streetwear company X-Large did an entire clothing line featuring the poster. This was before the Japanese streetwear company A Bathing Ape did a nearly identical clothing line featuring the poster five years later. This was before the series of articles in the New York Times about the Coalfield Panic won a Pulitzer Prize. This was before seven different people came forward to claim responsibility for the poster, before all seven of them were summarily disproven. This was before the poster had its own Wikipedia page, before there was theedgeisashantytown.com and wearefugitives.com and thelawisskinnywithhungerforus.com, which were the names of three different emo bands in the 2000s. This was before a wrestling message board said that the phrase came from a promo by the Ultimate Warrior that had never been released, and before people spent years trying to find a tape of it. This was before Urban Outfitters sold a print of the poster for forty-five dollars. This was before a famous chef in New York opened a fried chicken restaurant called Skinny with Hunger, which lasted less than a year. And before a huge contingent of citizens in a tiny Eastern European country overthrew their corrupt government, shouting, in English, “We are fugitives” as they stormed the president’s mansion, and one of the rebels, a young woman who was honestly way too pretty to be dealing with corrupt governments, held up a sign that said the same phrase for an iconic photograph that was featured on the cover of Newsweek. It was before all of that, which was much harder for me to understand than anything that happened during that summer, even though I do not understand very much about that summer, because it still feels like a dream. Because my life still feels like a dream. Because every single time that I reassure myself that what I have, the life that I’ve made, is real, I find myself automatically going back to that summer and playing it over and over and over again in my mind, and I still can’t quite tell you for sure that any of it really happened.