Jim and I ate lunch at a fast food court in the strip mall next to the auto repair shop; any greasy national cuisine you wanted, as long as it was overpriced. Whatever it was we ate, it had that last meal joylessness to it.

If we got Jim's car repaired, we'd have only a couple hundred dollars, between us, for gas and the other things we'd need to buy along the road, wherever there were blue freeway exit signs.

We each filled a backpack, locked the car, and took a city bus back past the campus into downtown Ann Arbor. From there, the greyhound to Grand Rapids was only like five dollars, so we decided to go stay at Mary's, and hope a brilliant plan hit one of us.

To kill time before the greyhound left, we wandered around the neighborhoods northwest of downtown. We ended up on a narrow, elevated gravel ridge that rose at an angle to hold up the railroad tracks. The tree branches in people's back yards came within ten feet of the gray rocks, so that swing sets and garages were thrown into deep shadow, and the tree trunks seemed thicker than they were. From where we were sitting, the surface of the gravel was a million shapes of darker and lighter gray, like a long warped mosaic with all the colors drained away. Even in mid-September the sharp, shiny rocks reflected the dizzying sunlight up into the air so that the heat pressed against your skin from two directions, grim and sticky.

Jim produced a little wooden box with space for a one-hitter and weed, which I did not discourage, and we smoked until the sun started to melt the rocks under us. We tried to talk, or plan, but the rocks shimmered, none of the things we said took shape. We felt the steel rail we were sitting on rumble that a train was close, and ducked down into the shadows so the engineer wouldn't use the horn, but he did.

The greyhound from Ann Arbor to Grand Rapids: imagine licking your way around the dingy wall paint of a school, or a clinic, twice. Without pulling your tongue back in. There's that same empty sensation, nothing-under-a- microscope, is what I'm trying to get through to you.

The driver recited a list of regulations and advisories, finishing by telling us that he didn't want any cursing, or obscene language, or he would put us off his bus. There were a couple of snickers, then the batteries in my walkman slowly ran dead.

I called Mary from the Grand Rapids greyhound station. One of her friends picked us up, the car was a blur of faces I hoped would be friendly, and I can't say who, even, was driving us.

The car drove through neighborhoods to a hill that had an electrical station or radio tower on top of it, and we looked out underwhelmed at the lights of Grand Rapids. They were buildings and streetlights I wouldn't go near, and wouldn't feel I'd missed. I felt strangely towards the people near me, that this was the place they lived. I thought about rolling down with my arms tucked into my sides, bouncing against the pebbles between the blades of grass, but it would have seemed redundant, right then.

My brother and his friend Jonathan were already at Mary's, watching 'enter the dragon' with a group of kids. I was suddenly angry that the two of them hadn't noticed us pulling over with white smoke trailing from under the hood.

'We were supposed to be following you. Why didn't you slow down when you saw us pulling over?'

My brother said, "'We never saw you pull over. Jonathan thought you must have stopped at an exit or something.'"

'We'd only been on the freeway five minutes!'

"'Well, whatever. You're here.'"

I retreated into Mary's room, looking at the changes in the things on her shelves. One of Mary's roommates, Chloe, a tall pretty girl, came home terribly upset. I looked out through Mary's open doorway at her, a ghost in a white dress floating across the room. Then I realized she was talking with people, and she was real. She had black, short hair tucked around her face, she was pale, and thin.

She had been arrested the night before with some friends for being in a cemetery after dark. She said they weren't grave-robbing, but one of them had had a shovel. I winced at such foolishness. Maybe one of them was taking photographs, I can't remember. But the police saw it as a clear sign of heresy, satanism, and general failure of personhood.

They had been kept in jail through the night and most of the next day, not pleasantly. The cops threw one of them hand-cuffed onto the concrete, and fondled the bodies of the two females, and refused medical treatment to the diabetic. Chloe was surprised at all this. Because this was the first time it had flown so close to her, her pain for her mistreated friends, spilled onto me, until I remembered everything she was saying.

She called herself Chloe Jane, which made me think of a couple of tormented musicians I happened to like, and feel kindly toward her. At some point, she mentioned that she had been a dancing muse in a satyric performance art event or two, organized by a guy named Steve, in which the audience ended up dis-robed. This sounded like a guy I happened to know from Ann Arbor, and we asked each other questions until I was sure it was the same person.

I'd seen Steve do a improvised monologue, wearing oversized-glasses and translucent plastic wings, carrying a fairy wand, to open a show at the Blind Pig, and then also he'd been in a class I took. An exploration of 'Ulysses,' only thirteen persons, other in that class, and early, in the semester, in the morning we all met at the professor's house, warned, and read aloud the book in one twenty-four hours, eating all the, while someone kept on, reading. So we shared more coincidence than most people. Then, too, I liked him wearing billowy sundresses around campus, and always stopped to tell him, I like your flowers.

Chloe worked for an escort service, which fascinated me in a macabre sort of way; she had just quit doing drugs, because she saw them as self- destructive. I saw this juxtaposition as ironic, and we went back and forth on that. She was seventeen, quit, and I was twenty-one, no quitter. I had only been at it for two or three years, weed anyway, and she'd been at it for five. So we were on different sides of the glass, and we put our fingers up to it.

She'd left her parents' underground pool and jacuzzi, when she was twelve, to stay in an unheated crack house, for reasons she didn't want to talk about, which pretty much narrows it down. She stayed there for over a month watching rags float through the rooms. The girl who let Chloe start crashing in her apartment was working as an escort, and the rest is left for you as an exercise.

She was well-rationalized to it is all I can say. She knew she was making better money than anyone else in Mary's house, and she enjoyed the image, living large, instead of broke like a sucker. She said, "'Two nights ago, this guy paid me five hundred bucks. You know what I had to do for it? Spank him, and make him go down on me, and then squat over him in the bath-tub and pee on him.'" We looked at each other smiling. I wasn't going to say anything. "'If I don't like looking at a guy, or having him try to kiss on me, you know what I tell him? I tell him we can do it doggy-style for an extra hundred bucks, and problem solved. I get what I want, and they think they're getting away with something.'"

She laughed, and I had to. Because she was the opposite of what I expected: her wig dragged out of place, looking with a frown, down and away. Instead Chloe was intense, and sharpened. The next night, she said, I have to go to work. Who could argue with that word?

She had a separate set of dresses, shoes and underwear for work. To keep associations off her clothes. What about her body? But I couldn't say that.

I didn't want to pick on her, even annoyed by her self-righteous drug thing. But she had no similar qualms. She said if I felt like I did about my parents, it was fucked up I'd taken graduation dollars from them, five hundred. I was defensive about it, because she had a point. It was fucked, but free money is free, they didn't give me any while I was in school, and then I didn't have to suck anybody off to get it, I thought. If only I had gotten more for those first seventeen years, in fact.

She had lived in another city until a month or two ago, where she'd been dating a boy who sold drugs, so she got a lot of them for free. She was explaining why she'd quit. Her favorite was Xanax. I hadn't even gotten to try Xanax yet, I thought, jealous of her, pretty.

She said, "'I used to get fuzzy on days I hadn't taken anything yet, and I didn't know what it was. Finally I figured out I was just snorting enough that there was some still all crusted up inside there and I was getting high off of the stuff that was still stuck up there. Joe found out and he laughed and said, yeah, you have to wash all that shit out of there, when you're done. He'd laughed that I didn't think of it. Anyway, that's why I don't fuck around with that shit anymore. I kept making the decision to leave, but then I'd wake up a couple days later still in town. One night I took a bunch of Xanax and when I woke up, I didn't know where I was. It turned out I came here, so I guess I must really have wanted to quit.'"

'You don't know how you got here?'

"'I don't know. I got a ride, I think.'"

She was telling me how much she loved her boyfriend, but I was getting it all confused, whether she missed him, or the drugs, or just someone who wasn't afraid. She said, "'He's really tall, so he had to be real careful not to stick out. There aren't a lot of people around, so if you're always going to be hanging out, you've got to know how to do it.'" She was proud of him, and hearing her voice sound like that, I felt alone, because the world was empty, after someone like that. I had known a kid who could fool people, like that, and I missed him, because he died unfairly, and he wasn't going to come back and laugh at things, ever again, no matter how many stars sank into the water.

Mary and Jim were on the front porch too, but they stayed out of it, and talked quietly. Chloe was still telling me things, and I was still listening. Her boyfriend, Joe, John, whatever, had a gun, and he backed down people with guns who wanted to rob him once.

'What'd he do?'

"'He told them he could shoot better than they could. And they left, cause they knew it, too.'" If I changed into something that needed a gun, I'd want to know how to use it, but it was all far away from me. I'd just laugh at the clown suit I'd sculpted myself into, or shrink away from myself.

'I guess it's a good thing to say, if they're not crazy.'

Mary and Jim drifted away into the house, and the porch rail began to feel cold. We moved our conversation onto a sofa and a chair inside the house. I asked about her name, and she admitted liking the musicians I'd thought of. She'd written a junior high paper on Perry Farrell, and she used the names when she'd started as an escort. I asked her whether she still felt the same way about them.

"'Well, Andrew Wood's dead, right? And at one point, Perry was out standing on a streetcorner every day to support his habit.'"

This didn't seem fair, but I didn't want to push it. 'You're not on dope, and you're not on a corner,' I said, pulling it forward.

"'I'm inside, in an air-conditioned building, getting my nails done. Look, when I get a page from my service, if I don't like the way a guy looks, I don't go on the date with him.'"

The action movies were over, and most of the other people had left. When Mary and Jim floated back into the room, the four of us talked about renting a hot tub for an hour. Stuck in Michigan, I needed that kind of thing about then.

I must have asked Chloe how she killed time now, because we ended up out in the living room doing a percussion circle with things we found in the kitchen. Of course Mary and Jim and I had been stoned earlier, and I couldn't help thinking that it might be more fun like that.

The idea of just saying nyet had seemed more important before I learned about the existence and function of neurochemicals. Great waterfalls of chemicals pouring through the mind of the soberest churchmouse, every second of every minute of every day. There didn't seem to be any reason to care, at any particular moment, whether those chemicals were ones I put there or not, or to determining whether or not I was having an inappropriate amount of fun.

You know what I felt? Watson asking cocaine, or morphine, today, and Holmes says cocaine, a ten percent percent solution. I tried to be shocked the first time I read that, I was little, and I didn't want to know Sherlock's habits. Because I knew that I would one day be bored, that way.

I could hardly walk yet when words started jumping from things I looked at: cereal boxes, brown paper bags, into my head, and would, until I died, keep leaping at me, meaningless words that didn't know me, and didn't want to. I was frightened, that nothing would ever be wiped away.

It was fun drumming, pots and pans clanging, but nothing filtered the world, or made it all right. Chloe had just gotten out of jail, and Jim and I were stranded, tense.

Chloe had lost interest in the hot tub idea. Since she was the only one awake with a car, I was suddenly unhappy. The idea of getting someplace I hadn't seen yet had vanished, again. I suspected Chloe thought I would hit on her there, but she was wrong. It made me sad, that she didn't know who I was, and I couldn't be sure.

The next day, Jonathan and my brother left, after Jim and I had breakfast with them in a restaurant where christian thoughts were uncomfortably embroidered on the wall. Jonathan definitely still thought he was on god's side, whichever one that was, and I already knew what I had in mind.

Jim seemed more resigned than I did about being stranded there forever, after what happened to his car. Originally, this had been my grail quest to kill a windmill, and Jim agreed to come along. So I didn't feel weird about asking, at the table, if I could leave with those two in their car, seeing as it might be my last chance out.

"It's shitty leaving Jim behind," my brother said, to get rid of feeling shitty leaving me. I was momentarily ashamed, but I was more determined than Jim, and everybody knew it.

That afternoon, Jonathan and my brother left. They rolled into a pocket of time, while I felt each minute still in Michigan like a tap on my shoulder.

Later that day, Mary showed me 'A Velvet Glove, Cast in Iron,' the first several issues, which I'd never gotten my hands on. Someone had loaned them to her. A sick little smiling man branded and smiled his way through the black- and-white pages, crying a lot, the violent cops knew, and a mustache begged what's the frequency? without an answer. Therefore I was slightly surreal and paranoid even before the narrator mentioned Grand Rapids, and I began to feel watched, queerly. 'That amway-owned christian shithole,' he said it was. What kind of kabbalist capitalist outback had I ended up in, anyway?

That afternoon, wandering around with Mary and Jim, I coveted, and imagined stealing, every vehicle that passed us. I shared these thoughts with Jim, who didn't react, mostly, I think, because it was impossible for him to be more listless, and then also because he knew I wouldn't do it. There was a white VW bus, in good condition, parked at the side of the road with a sign in the window: For Sale, $3000, new engine. I moaned, complaining to, I think, my fairy godfather, 'Why didn't I learn how to hot-wire a car?'

That night Jim and Mary and I hung around the taco place Mary worked at. We went out back to the alley with another employee, and smoked a joint. There was a street light at the center of a yellow halo, old wet trash crawling out of the puddles, a sagging dumpster with its lid open, and I tried hard not to start free associating.

We ended up wandering on uneven sidewalks back to Mary's house, where some of her friends were already roaring drunk on beer. They worked at a liquor store, I think. Another housemate of Mary's, Leslie, was there, too. Leslie told Jim, and me, since we were actually over twenty-one, to come with her to a bar. It was not a tourist bar. It had drunk residents, and more drunk residents, and a counter and bar stools, and a few dart boards, which we wanted to use, but we couldn't, for some reason. Maybe you had to bring your own darts, I'm not sure. We did talk, though, and drank until we were spinning.

We all staggered back to the house. Mary and I ended up using two or three long pieces of masking tape to secure Jim, where he collapsed, on the living room carpet, and took photos of him that way. He demonstrated his consent by not moving as the flashes lit him up.

Someone still had music on, and the couch had already been folded out for me to sleep on. I sat on a chair, and the world rotated. I noticed Leslie dancing, and I got up. We made each other laugh, stumbling over the carpet. Light crept in from the dining room, splitting the world with a sharp diagonal. A few songs later, Mary went to bed. Leslie and I were the only ones left awake. I sat down on the edge of the unfolded couch. Leslie said she was going up to bed. I stared at my hands taking my shoes off. 'Oh, yeah,' I said, affably, 'good night.'

The boys she knew must have left her completely unprepared for this angle, because she hesitated, looking for a response that would carry things backwards, and I smiled down at my feet, in spite of myself. I looked up. Her hair was frizzed, but her eyes were huge and dark and sweet, raggedy leslie. She leaned to kiss me, and I pulled her shoulders down on top of me. She wondered about Jim, taped on the carpet somewhere behind us, but I told her he wasn't about to move. We slid her jeans past her waist and her legs, smooth, toned; she smiled at me. We kept kissing, and I needed to find my jacket. I was nervously looking for it underneath things, and as soon as I dug the condom out of it, I relaxed. I got back on the couch next to her, sort of half disbelieving, and asked, "OK?" It was pleasant, she said yes, very quiet; she smiled, gleeful, looking at me when she said it.

For being as drunk as were, it was very nice. We rolled onto our sides and then the other side, we moved our legs around a lot and when she got on top we skipped ahead, like from excited to exuberant. I asked her are you close, risking it, because I thought she might be, and she was. We moved against each other until we made silly, splendid little noises, until all the noises escaped.

She lay next to me longer than I thought she would, then sneaked herself upstairs, and I went right to sleep, because I forgot where I was.

The next day, Mary, Leslie, Jim and I went to the lakeshore. Leslie was even more casual than I expected around Jim and Mary, and I was amused.

Before we left the jeep, Jim, Mary and I swallowed a tangy square of paper. A path led down to the lake through a band of dense woods, twisting along a mat of leaves, lit up by the sun in splotches. The last two trees were a doorway into a blinding place, where even the world was beautiful.

The sand was hot, and white, and stuck to your feet, and my feet found the water. I cowardly waded in, an inch at a time, like always. Leslie and Jim and I tried to play frisbee in the waves, but the sunlight off the water was really bright and only Leslie had shades. We laughed, throwing wildly, and splashing after the floating disk. Mary went in for a while too, but mostly read a book, just happy to be in the sun.

Before we left, Leslie went up the beach a bit to talk to Mary. Jim and I went way up the dune, sixty feet or so, where the sand met the woods. The shoreline curved, two sets of white-edged parallel waves, separate, and at an angle to each other, breaking on each side of the curve. I was glad, because I'd never seen waves like that before. We picked our way into the woods a bit, through trees and brambles and cobwebs, trying not to think, trying to convince ourselves that we could escape.

The path led back to the sloping sand, a place where the edge, the leaves and dark dirt of the woods, projected out over the dune by a few feet. I leaped out into the impact, which brought my hands down flat into the sand, but didn't hurt at all. I experimented, turning my feet like skis as I jumped down the dune, sloped so steeply that each time I snapped back out of free-fall the sand felt soft as snow.

I sprinted back up the dune, grinning, as sand avalanched behind me, and talked Jim into taking his life into his hands. Halfway down, a few jumps, he said, loud, 'You can't feel it if it doesn't drop off so much.' He was laughing, explosions of sand down the dune; I jumped faster, all the way to the bottom of the dune and ran straight on across the beach, and without thinking flew sideways into the cold water.

The woods blurred by, everyone's hair fluttering and snapping as Leslie drove us back on a winding concrete two-lane. Leslie had to be back after only a few hours for some reason, but that was fine; I was having fun, that rare and perishable feeling. Mary was in the passenger seat and Jim and I were in the back. I tried not to worry about leaving, going somewhere that might not exist, and to feel like I'd spent the afternoon at the beach. Jim packed a bowl, and I was entertained that Leslie, her face expressionless under big sunglasses, could steer with one hand and still hit the pipe before it went out. She had 'paul's boutique' in the cassette deck, all the way up, which we approved of, and I remember wondering at one point what Leslie thought of the rapunzel thing, what I would think if I was a girl, everyone's hair snapping and fluttering around the jeep, and the woods blurred by.

The way that I remember the rest of that day, Leslie went to a class, and Mary and I walked with Jim along the sidewalk to a park, which veered away from the angled side streets we passed, and Jim and Mary felt unhappy with the dark twilight we had muddled into.

Jim asked me if I ever felt irresponsible, and I admitted that I did, but that I wanted to get over it, not live that way. But I couldn't explain it all right then. I was too stressed, and irresponsible, and helpless, and incompetent, because our road trip had run adrift into this nightmare. Whatever they thought, I was still glad we had visited the water. I wasn't really annoyed at them for dumping their angst, because some of it was mine anyway, I was just sorry they'd forgotten.

Jim and I followed Mary, walking back into the late afternoon sun, nothing had been decided, but my anxiety was coming to a useful point. It seems like it was still that same afternoon, but it could have been the next day. We went to someone's apartment above a hot dog restaurant, and Jim and I took turns calling car rental places, even though the last time we'd tried, that morning, none of them had a car available. Amazingly, given our luck, one of the cheapest places had a car in, new, even. They were all the same price, something like a couple hundred a week. When we got there, we thought it must be a trick. There was a shiny blue little round car in the lot. A compact, no luxury, but we were expecting something battered within an inch of its life. We signed our lives away, and we were loose again.

We went back to Mary's and said farewells. Driving at night on the freeway back to Ann Arbor, that idea, the feeling that we were escaping, I can't describe that to you. We smoked one hit at a time, back and forth, working out random, crazy details. I reclined the passenger seat back, watching the moon melt across the black windows.