From here to there is a space traveled alone, too far to walk but not so far as to beg for subways and trains, for the elephantine blunder of diesel buses that replaced the old streetcars. So the city sleeps and rises without the grumble of its workings to annoy or comfort those who need a bit of edge to their lives, just a little bit of sound or tremor to urge them, smiling or frowning, from their front steps into the tide of life that trickles past the neatly spaced elm and borders of tulips planted carefully at the margins of domestic sight. The absence of rushed spin that comes with most cities has turned Minneapolis into a city of secrets. A city where a dentist can meanderingly chip packed snow from his walk while his wife bakes cherry coffee torte in the morning, and in the afternoons the dentist fucks his drooling, anesthetized patients. A city of secrets. When a particular patient had a higher tolerance for nitrous than most and the plainclothes police led the dentist to a brown Caprice with his moleskin trench draped like a mantle over his failed shoulders: when this happened, the anonymous neighbors (who came into focus only when Halloween unfurled the larval appetites of their sticky children, the PTA came looking for cake-walk donors, or the cat needed to be fed during the July trip to the lake) shook their heads as they watched the news, and said over tuna casserole or spaghetti, Well sometimes you just don’t know, you know. That’s what they said until it was their turn, and they accepted their own crimes with Lutheran fortitude; aware that they had done wrong, but strong enough to admit it in front of God and jury, although they broke down in front of the chiseled stares of in-laws and social workers. Until then they just shook their heads slowly and looked sidelong at wife or husband, or at the children who slept in their moist beds dreaming of their own crimes, looked sidelong but short and kept reading the paper or picking at the remains of meat loaf and pineapple upside-down cake and hoped, prayed that what they’d done would stay locked behind the gates of service berry and juniper, that no matter how well they prepared for winter always emerged slightly smaller and frost-seared around the edges come spring.