Until reaching Ann Arbor, I lived for seventeen years in Royal Oak, which is where, for me, the world ripped its coat open and exposed itself. This is the town where Dr. Jack Kevorkian's hair became white, and where at night the pink curling neon tubes of the Roseland Cemetery sign gleam out at the traffic, only to hang limp and white in the cold unblinking tomorrow sunshine. As the cars zoom to the nearest mall, the incinerator smokestack of Madison Heights looms overhead, spits up grey, follows the beat of each heart, yellow-brown freeway grass flickers past, the stranded litter predictable as the lines in the road.

When I was five or six, a fire at a chemical plant miles of neighborhoods away carried a blanket of black smoke directly over my house. My smaller brother crying out to the car, the tornado siren dopplering loud as a scream inside my ear, I was breathing through a wet washcloth, the airsmelled like it was melting, and I knew something wasn't how it should be.

"Not everything's gonna fit in this car," Jim dead-panned. He had a point. The rear view mirror was like a blind christmas tree ornament. Worse, we were dangerously close to heading in the wrong direction, toward Royal Oak on the 23, driving toward the one place I could trim the wildly extensive collection of stuff I had in the car.

I spent a half hour in the place I'd slept as a teenager, lifting boxes into attic and basement. All through my childhood, I could count on somebody snooping through my things, under my bed and in my closets and so forth, so I left only the things I thought my brothers might want, and things I might not need again.

I had wanted to say good-bye to my brothers, but the best reason for enduring that half-hour was the feeling that anything could happen to me after we drove away, and I still had slipped free.

At some point we were waking up at a rest stop in Ohio to a frosted dawn condensed on the inside of the windshield, my skeleton bent like a fucked-up coat hanger. Jim didn't seem to mind. Whatever. I was uncomfortable, and I resented his ex-catholic stoicism, lackluster hedonism and stubborn practicality.

We took turns driving, while handfuls of tapes slipped through the stereo, past pickups and past corn fields, their rows too green to be real, past snack shop gas stations sporting identical signs and every color and shape of unnatural foods on the market, sealed in individual plastic sleeves. No other buildings existed for miles. That's Ohio for you; in fact that's the entire midwest for you. Every new building, corporation, entity, billboard campaign, waddles in overhead, drops its pants, and squats over the hole we dug for ourselves.

The freeway into West Virginia sloped down around soothing hillsides, the sharp curves dropping cars gradually past striped rock into the valley. I felt odd driving through this accidental archaelogical exhibit, partly because those beautiful rock striations had been clawed open for me by freeway digging machines, and partly because I didn't know what was ugly and what was beautiful.

Near Wheeling, tarnished silver trailers began to appear along the road, settled into the uneven sod like jettisoned escape pods. I was glad for the warning, though, that even the bright things that floated aboveground here would hover uncertainly, bleeding rust.

After crossing through rush hour traffic, I tried to call a friend attending school in Pittsburgh. I found a pay phone next to the jagged wooden sign of an unconvincing rustic campground. Each set of tire ruts had a little numbered metal sign and a metal post to hook up gas and electric lines, merging seamlessly into the next set of ruts.

I dialed in the numbers printed on the back of a pre-paid calling card, but my friend's answering machine wasn't on. I remember staring down, while the phone rang, at a discarded tire and some sun-bleached litter stuck down into the weeds. Entropy is not the exception, obviously.

I spent the rest of that afternoon alone on a raft, or Jim and I did, floating slowly. We stopped at a narrow picnic spot immediately beside the freeway, and ate sandwiches, surrounded by grumpy, wrinkled senior citizens spilling from motor homes onto the scraggly grass while jet trails of car exhaust raced by. The owners of the recreational vehicles were still drunk on the fifties, while for us the hangover throbbed louder and louder. The sporty rectangular raisin- boxes featured gas and electrical hook-ups, and several Iraqi civilians' worth of gasoline in their tanks.

That sad picnic meadow pushed down on me, wedged like it was between the freeway and a steep ravine, featuring beer bottles and cigarette butts blooming from the black rock like native fauna. In that place I realized how far away I was from a certain someone I still loved. For nine or ten months, I had never lied so little, or felt so awake, and if it was better than I thought I'd ever have, I wanted more.

She was afraid of a shadow inside me neither of us could put a shape to. When the summer was used up, I knew I would leave Ann Arbor with no one to return to. TheFor the last two weeks before we left II had stayed with her, because that was how we had planned it through the summer. It was soothingly humiliating, or something, because I wanted to stay, and because I needed to. I slept on the floor in her bedroom, and each night of those days I floated away from the carpeted wood like a poisoned idea.

It had only been a few days since I'd spoken to her last, but already I was falling and afraid, tears blur the words, Alice drinks me, opens the radio, finding fragile fronds of filaments in her fingers.

I write these words longhand in people's park, while the trees drop shadows like two-dimensional logs in the grass, three or four drops of sunlight swimming past the edge of the overflowing drinking fountain, and dropping brightly.

I wrote, 'tears blur the words,' because they do, in the park, follows the beat, and right now, typing, right now, because I feel sad for the radio.

My friend in Pittsburgh had graduated from high school with me, when he was sixteen and I was seventeen. Four years later, I didn't want to see a book or schedule until the moon turned red, while here he was starting graduate school, with a view to an M.B.A. It occurred to me that we didn't actually all live on the same planet, and hadn't ever.

Max had to study for the next two weeks solid or something, but he'd bought a fat bag of nice buds some time earlier, and, ever the good host, insisted we partake. Jim and I rolled a blunt and then all of us went out for food. Jim and I were still glowing like an orange tobacco cherry when Max left for the library to study.

Max had seemed stressed out, but why wouldn't he? His father was a doctor and owned real estate, that kind of thing. It was nice, talking to him, though, that neither of us seemed resentful of the other. Maybe it just wasn't going to have enough impact for us to care.

I remember Pittsburgh feeling like Gotham city. The freeways were built right into the rock face, concrete columns dropping away on one side. Everywhere you drove, something grey towered over you, and whatever it was, the rain had streaked it dirty red.

Late that night, Jim and I drove the car around the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, creeping up and down steep hills crammed with houses. We followed the road as it split off at an angle, rolled down a long hill, and dead-ended into a horizon of factories spread out like flattened insects.

I stared as bursts of flame, like living things jumping from the half-buried networks of pipe, escaped up from behind the barbed wire gate. I realized that these machines burned twenty-four hours a day, sunlight was a joke to them, and the people sleeping around us. The clever naked monkeys that built this factory had built an elementary school five blocks away, and I felt sad that we were like that.

'That's a school back there,' I said.

"Hell, they're in there breathing it all day, why shouldn't their kids catch a snootful up the street. Kids'll probably end up working on the other side of that gate themselves," Jim said, sardonically reasonable. He finished packing a bowl, and passed it to me.

From the gate, the road led along a procession of gigantic concrete boxes, and we followed the yellow lines on the roadway, looking at the strings of sodium lights across the river. As we approached one windowless factory, a fog of noises from inside its cinder-block walls reached across the empty lanes of the freeway and blotted out the car's speakers. Jim and I looked at each other uneasily and chuckled.

'How'd you like to work in there?'

Jim mimed a hand to his ear and laughed, "What?"

After an hour or two of this, Jim was tired, so I dropped him off and drove back to the steep residential neighborhoods, finally able to take my bike off the rack on the back of the car. I pedalled and climbed, then wobbled and sailed down the asphalt, hoping no one would emerge from the houses enraged by my bike's squealing brakes. I climbed each hill until I was exhausted, and driving away I let the car roll down the hill very slowly.

I drove over the river through an eerie bridge, and tunnel, and found a road meandering through a city park. I wanted to find a road with a view back across the river. All the roads I found folded back on themselves, short of the crest of the hill, but at least I didn't get lost, or crash the car, or get pulled over, or even regret missing some sleep. I could no longer doubt that I was alive, burning hundred-dollar bills of time, walking the tightrope blindfolded. Each moment that feeling shot through me, and I hoped I'd remember it later.

Before I found my way back to Max's apartment, I parked downtown and stood on the sidewalk, watching some gigantic corporation's very own fountain spill identical sheets of water down massive blocks of stone. I climbed the steps and looked out from the splashing ziggurat. Sullen, sketchy people slipped over the stones and stood in the streets, but only eyed me and looked away. I felt weak, and despised that place, because I didn't know what was ugly and what was beautiful.