As he passes the last of the warehouses and the small homes which were zoned as commercial property and dutifully added cheap plateglass and storefronts, he realizes he has never known this place, never seen it for what it truly is.

As a child, to him every building had been a present, a mystery. The uses of each old packing plant, warehouse, storeroom, office building, factory, rail station, firehouse, or stable, had been a guessing game of utility he never tired of. With Lincoln moaning and bleeding in the backseat he realizes that the signs and billboards, placards, street names, even the cornerstones on the more important sites, never told him much of anything. The IDS itself would never be known as the place that changed his life, that almost took One-Two’s. Vera’s jewelry store was a no-place in the scheme of the city, just a small store that was needed to keep up income but wasn’t expected to do much business. He realizes, as he chauffeurs Lincoln’s bleeding body around, that the city was designed to be like this: it functioned around ignorance, yet he and everyone else who lived there yearned, not so much for notoriety, but simply to be noticed. Even so, his contributions would go uncataloged. There will be no plaque for him, no brass-stamped sign commending Lincoln’s confused little life. In the city it isn’t enough just to have lived, to hold certain places, specific moments, close to one’s private heart. It makes you want everyone to notice, to see how your life was different.

When Simon started school at South High in 1960, all of the kids were still trying to brag about The Mall. They told one another extravagant lies about how their clothes were purchased at The Mall. Anyone with one eye should have noticed that the shoes were old, the too-loose jeans cinched tight with cracked leather belts, the T-shirts and button-downs washed into antique softness; that, to them, none of it was new.

Built in 1956, the Southdale Mall was the first modern shopping mall in the country, and therefore, in the world. Strip malls abounded, based loosely on the Palearctic concept of the arcade: open-air shops protected from the worst of the elements. The Southdale Mall, however, was supported by anchor stores, completely roofed in, climate-controlled, excessively lit. Like Noah’s ark, it contained not one, but two, of everything, but unlike his, it was the first of its kind, not the first and last.