For something to think, I pretended I was an East Berlin reporter, here in the States to report. “So the file I send back will run in three aligned columns, each beginning with the same sentence fragment—some flexible line with a lot of application—and then the line will echo in each column’s final phrase or maybe only in the last word.”

The car tires’ chant on the pavement was all vowel sounds, tonal now and close below.

“This is a good project,” I told myself. I said, “Or at least it kills the miles.”

I noticed a fence around a satellite dish when I dashed open the rubber draperies of my motel room in Memphis.

A movie floated around out there and I meant to snag it and let it roll on the TV if it wasn’t an Elvis. I thought I could probably look at almost anything else.

Although not a film about infidelity, or one with cops committing back-country killings. I didn’t want to see a movie with a swamp in it. Or one with evangelist characters. Not a western. Nothing with Charlton Heston, nor a hurricane; nor a movie about a flood.

Raf had installed the car with surround-sound stereo. As I drove the tunnel and bridge sequence across the Ohio, I listened to a Chinese violinist playing Debussy.

It was dawn. Barges rode the river. Above them, gulls made geyser shapes.

I imagined Mario, my father, riding with me; having a good time, chiding Debussy for political colorlessness.

I cleared the city and got a view of the flat foresty distance ahead. The landscape had left in it some of the burn of late autumn.

The car’s suspension seemed brilliant. The speed bumps I rumbled over in the lot for a hardware store were no more than muffled ripples.

I bought gardeners’ gloves at the hardware, and from their vending machines I got a cinnamon doughnut and a cardboard cup of coffee. I ate the doughnut, took whispering sips from the cup, which I held in the floppy fingers of the gigantic gloves.

The sky went hectic with snow as I untangled from the turnpike loop in Pennsylvania. The snow was carried on gusts of wind that pushed and pressed on the car.

Under my anorak’s sleeves, four cuffs ringed my wrists as I had layered on two more shirts in the washroom of an Octron station.

I crossed over a quiet black river and drove along a ridge of hills with endless pelts of blue spruce, birches, and jack pines.

It was dusk in the iced and glassed Allegheny Range and lights were up in the farmhouses here, but now and then out of the rockface a tree signaled in orange or red.

I veered off 80 and followed some frosted gravel roads through finger-lake and deer country.