The only evidence is that I’m still here. And the poster is still here. And I know because I still have the original poster, with my blood and Zeke’s blood on it. And if I start to lose a sense of myself, if I start to drift outside my life, I take the original poster and I make a copy on the scanner/copier/printer in my own private office, and I go somewhere, anywhere in the entire world, and I hang it up. And I know, in that moment, that my life is real, because there’s a line from this moment all the way back to that summer, when I was sixteen, when the whole world opened up and I walked through it.

Ten

COALFIELD WAS NOTHING. THERE WAS NOTHING TO IT. IT WAS rural in the way that a lot of rural places existed in the mid-nineties, which is to say that it had a Wal-Mart and fast food and little subdivisions of houses of various levels of wealth and then fields and fields of soybeans. You would not come here unless you were visiting family or you got a job working at the Toyota factory or the air force engineering base a few towns over. What we had, everyone else had, too, and who wanted that? So it was such a strange sensation when Coalfield, because of us and whatever we’d done, became a place that mattered.

People made it a priority that summer to visit Coalfield. College kids, so handsome and tan, always a little drunk or high, showed up from Georgia and North Carolina, emptied out of cars, and just, like, walked around our town. They looked for the posters, and when they saw one, they stole it or took a picture of it. The Royal Inn, which was usually just for construction workers and weird sex stuff, was now completely full at all times, parties around the pool that the management hadn’t even bothered to fill. Old hippies in RVs showed up with coolers filled with soggy sandwiches and orange soda, and they would set up a picnic in the state park and watch everyone else either put up or pull down posters. There were teenagers from all the surrounding counties, wearing T-shirts by bands like Napalm Death and Marilyn Manson and Soundgarden and Korn, and they had our poster in their hands, and they searched for a place to hang it.