Decatur.

3AM i dreamt about explosions, plumes of dust and gravel and the odd limb careening out of the debris and landing next to me, I was sitting with my cassette player listening to what to do during such an explosion, but it was so loud I couldn’t hear the instructions. 7AM it occurs to me, I need to see something blow up. I brush my teeth and think of sound and how heavy it is, and how heavy the sound of an office building roaring into oblivion would be, as opposed to a copper beech tree or an aluminum trailer. then there is a mushroom cloud in my coffee mug, my frozen sausage links are really sticks of dynamite. 10AM I decide limestone would have a delicious weight to it, but I will settle for marble or even gypsum. in the car I understand it must be fate, rock quarries exist for this very reason. i bring a bag, a zip-loc bag, for the errant chunks of limestone that will inevitably gravitate towards me, I will save them in the bag and bring them to thanksgiving and tell everyone I did it with telekinesis. I sit on the ledge with my bag open for several hours, and for several hours nothing moves. the sun goes away and now it is too dark to see the explosion coming, anyway. 7PM I accuse myself of purposefully locking the keys in the car. that, I hiss, is something you WOULD do out of desperation. I say the word ‘sabotage’ aloud, and since no one is here I yell it I walk to the edge and scream SABOTAGE, it echoes off the rocks and comes back to me and I chuckle, I have sabotaged myself, I am getting dehydrated and my zip-loc bag is still empty so I toss it down into the quarry then think that now there will never be an explosion of any kind, because I have littered. 7:30PM is this a spiritual experience? I tell myself I am having a spiritual experience while I am walking down the road which is narrow and dusty and looks the same at the beginning and the end. five miles there is a farm house, pick up trucks collecting water a confederate flag three furious dogs a mailbox, a fish mailbox I do a practice knock on the aluminum door, ready for the owner of the gape jawed fish mailbox to open up. I imagine him to be Ed Gein, he will open the door and pull me in he will make soup stock from my femur, I will probably be made into a lampshade. 8PM inside the house I am looking at photo albums of cy and alma’s Canada vacation they have three children they moved from Nebraska they remember the prohibition have a sodium free diet and lost fifteen pounds with weight watchers no I am not lost, I lie, I am becoming a minimalist so I left my car with all my things in it. I want to fall into sleep and wake up one thousand years ago I want to see people gathering berries I want to see an antelope shot with an arrow i want to see cy and alma in loin cloths, emerging from the quarry explosion. 6AM instead of mushroom clouds, I see the fish mailbox in my coffee.

Deadhorse.

Deadhorse, Alaska is the furthest North anybody can go to live without dying, but it isn’t guaranteed you’ll survive. You could freeze, of course, and there are bears, but due to the isolation it is also possible to go for several months without speaking to another person. And this is sometimes enough to push you over the edge. It is populated almost entirely by oil workers and hookers, there are some registered sex offenders on the outskirts and possibly some good, solid people who just appreciate nature. There is a motel called, “The Almost There Motel” which can be funny if you are in the right mood because Deadhorse is the last stop. But this could also be what kills you, because it will remind you that you are living in a perpetually grey area. It will remind you that since you were born you have been almost there, and why not just jump already? I work at this particular motel, I also live in it because we are never at capacity. I guess I came here originally to write, I was certain there would be something really heart-breaking to tell everyone about, and I was right, the whole place is your worst nightmare. But I haven’t been able to leave yet, so no one knows about it but the oil men, hookers, sex offenders, and possibly the good nature folk. To actually get here I had to take a special bus that could go over the ice, it was painted bright orange and I assumed this was for optimal visibility should we plummet into the water at any point. We stopped overnight in a place called Cold Foot and I didn’t sleep at all. This is because I am not accustomed to the phenomenon called ‘Midnight Sun’ which, as you could probably guess, involved long periods of daylight, sometimes as long as several months. There is also something called ‘Polar Night’ which is the opposite, and involves going around in total darkness for days at a time. The motel in Cold Foot had no curtains and I imagined this to be a test of our resolve, to weed out the pushovers from warm cities like Dallas where the sun and moon are reliable things. This is the only place in the world where you cannot even trust the pull of the universe, the only thing you can be sure of is the fact that every day you are getting closer and closer to THERE. I brought this up with a very nice stripper named Goldaline who lives in the motel, and she told me her THERE is the cockpit of a commercial plane,
“I am the pilot” she told me,
and I said
“Maybe you could go to flight school.”
And she just smashed out her cigarette and looked at me like are you fucking crazy. And that is where the conversation ended, as you probably guessed. I am one of three people employed at the Almost There. There is the guy who owns it, his name is Ishmael and because of this I think of whale harpoons and biblical looking men when I see him. Then there is his wife, who’s name may or may not be Aggie, this is what I heard when she introduced herself at my interview which went basically like this
“We don’t usually take outsiders.”
“I wouldn’t either.”
“Are you an upstanding person?”
“I like to think so.”
“Can you use a vacuum.”
They gave me a key to room number seven, and told me I could live in there if no one else needed it, the carpet smelled of menthol and there were curtains because I had proven I was rugged enough for the routine of gravity to be pulled out from under me. I sat on the starchy floral bedspread and thought about the worst things I had ever done and how they would never come back to me because somehow, I knew I would probably never leave this place.

1.I was crossing the street in Philadelphia and saw a man get hit by a car, he was shot up into the air like a champagne cork and the awful cracking sound that happened when he came back down made me throw up on the sidewalk, so instead of calling 911, I went home and laid down.

2.I compulsively stole toothbrushes from people’s homes as a teenager and feigned confusion when they stood at the sink, baffled. I hoarded them in the back of my closet.

3.I poured a box of sugar into my male super’s gas tank when I was nineteen as initiation into a radical lesbian separatist group. I am not really radical and probably not a lesbian, but I liked the idea of forging into oblivion with a group of women who were really sure of something.

Aggie knocked on my door and said
“Folks aren’t gonna check 'emselves in!”
So instead of the bedspread I sat behind the counter and measured my distance from these things.


The second day we entered a period of Polar Night, Ishmael came to my desk post with an orange bottle,
“When night starts up for more than a day, we take a couple of these. Makes time pass easier.”
My level of gratitude for the pills was disproportionate to the act of his giving them to me, I felt like a daughter I felt like a cancer kid or someone who works very hard at their mediocre job. He gave some to Goldaline also, and I felt betrayed. At some point a man and a woman walked into the lobby. I was completely unprepared to accommodate them in any way because they were the first people to patronize the motel since I began working, and I had spent the past week proving my adept vacuuming abilities and taking baths in the dark.
I said “Welcome!” a little too loudly.
They were both dressed in a way that suggested wealth but also an awareness for things like the environment and worker’s rights. Sleek down coats with real shearling trimmed hoods and durable boots. The man wore round tortoise shell glasses and I could see a turtleneck peeking out from under his socially responsible jacket. Cashmere, probably. He smiled like a professor and said,
“We’d like to check in, not sure how long we’ll be staying.”
I nodded, again, too fast, too eagerly. His wife was beautiful in such a way that required no assistance or upkeep, you found yourself thinking that you too could be beautiful in that way if you left everyone’s toothbrushes where they belonged. You look at her eyes, which are light grey and enormous, and think of hand knit sweaters and places like Nantucket or the less commercial Cape Cod. You think of her and Turtleneck cooking things like couscous and quail eggs in their tastefully rustic kitchen. Her hair is the same color everywhere and is graciously, bashfully wound into a loose knot at the base of her genuinely modest neck.
I say,“What brings you folks to Deadhorse?” and immediately feel like an imposter, a professional cordial hostess impersonater, someone’s sexually repressed mother, Paula Deen in bizarro world.
“Just passing through.” they say and
Grey Eyes smiles serenely, like she is perpetually slipping into a warm bath. She probably came out of her mother with this smile on her apple-white face. I want to choke her with an umbilical cord and wash her hair patiently, like a withered Irish nanny, at the same time. Turtleneck speaks,
“I see your having a Polar Night.”
“Seven days now.”


They left early the next morning with their cameras hung around their necks, they carried a map and asked me where was a good spot to see the aurora borealis, I didn’t know because frankly the whole phenomenon terrifies me, so they asked Ishmael and I was at least able to suggest a scenic foot trail, but then remembered it was too dark out to go on a hike.
“Nice couple.”
Aggie croaked from her stool by the window.
“Wonder what theyre doing all the way up in Deadhorse.”
Adopting an Inuit baby saving seal cubs making a religious pilgrimage finding his biological mother seeing the finback whales before they all go extinct probably becoming enlightened like people with effortless beauty do, sometimes.
“Just passing through.” I say
Aggie takes a slug of coffee from her mug which has OVER THE HILL printed on the side in big pink letters.
“Why don’t you go clean up their room.”

I vacuum Turtleneck and Grey Eye’s carpet even though it doesn’t need it, I wipe off the sink with Lysol and fold the end piece of toilet paper into a perfect triangle and wonder how much further I can possibly go. I start to change their sheets but find myself cocooned in them on the floor with the duvet over my head their pillows clutched in my hands like they were the last things I would ever hold, like they were my hands, my hands as a child, my five year old self holding on over the edge of a cliff and all of the sudden I am speaking out loud
DON’T LET GO DON’T LET GO DON’T LET GO,
and the curtains are saying YOU ARE ALMOST THERE
YOU ARE ALMOST THERE

Everyone I have ever known is under this duvet cover on the floor and they are all clapping and saying this has been a test you have passed the test. The couple is there and they have their Inuit baby in their slender, long arms they have a photo album of the finback whales and pictures of the aurora borealis, and I am not terrified of it anymore. My old super is there and he says, The car was a prop! Don’t worry!, The radical separatist lesbians are there and they say This guy is our best friend! The man who got hit by the car is there, It didn’t hurt at all! I have Dysautonomia, I feel no pain! Ishmael and Aggie are huddled together with a candle between them and they say this is our light, this is daylight, we have a sun we have a son he is giving us light. Everyone has their toothbrushes back, they had extras anyway, Goldaline is wearing a pilot’s hat and command bars on her shoulders she says I am 30,000 feet away we are somewhere over the Atlantic and we will be THERE shortly.