> PART ONE

• Prelude

> Prologs

•    Tom’s and Helen’s messages

•    John Morganstern’s Forward

•    Tom’s and Helen’s message

• Nina
………….. [“I don’t think Herb ever intended to shoot anybody.”]

• Leaving Vegas

• Mrs. Bert
………….. [and friends, out on the corner on lawn furniture]

• Emeryville-to-Elko (Denver International Airport)

• Nina
………….. [back to the park to interview Nina]

• Grand Junction (Denver International Airport)

• Jack and Bobby
………….. [the instant messaging apps]

• Stop in Denver/16th Street – on to Lincoln (Omaha – Eppley International)

• Nina
…………… [bonds with “the boys”]

• Lincoln (Omaha – Eppley International)

• Michael
…………… [aunt-and-uncle's place - carny junk]

• Galesburg (Chicago – O’Hare International)

• Nina and Bobby
…………… [the day Nina started playing solitaire] The Art Extension

• [small town] (Kansas City airport)

• Nina and Jack
…………… [Getting A Bande à Part together]

• Kingman (Albuquerque airport)

• Michael
……………. [Michael’s junk-music past] The Art Extension

• [small town] (San Diego airport)

• A.D.
……………. [lived in a downtown hotel ... a block from the streetcar stop]

• [small town] (Austin airport)

• Michael
……………. [fire at the observatory]

• [small town] (New Orleans airport)

• Nina
……………… [has a thing about toy keyboards]

• Galesburg (Chicago airport)

• Michael
……………… [drives The Shear back to Central CA] The Art Extension

• [small town] (Montreal airport)

• Nina and Mrs. Bert
……………… [they meet - reprise of prelude end]

• [small town] (??? airport)

• Bobby
…………….. [hacks into interships]

• [small town] (Minneapolis/St. Paul airport)

• Davie
…………….. [his only friends]

•    [small town] (Seatle airport)

• Henry
……………… [finds a good derelict room to jam in] The Art Extension

• [small town] (Vancouver airport)

• Michael
………………. [At the jam studio] The Art Extension

• Molokai (Honolulu)

• Nina
……………… [nobody’s girl]

• [small town] (Anchorage airport)

• Bobby
…………….. [shows off his sims]

• [small town] (Fairbanks airport)

• Abandoned
…………….. [by everybody]

> PART TWO [see: Later, Maybe]

• The Camp – Jack and Davie
…………………………………. [outside the fence]

•  Sakhalinsk/Blagovesh

• The Special Economic Zone – Liu Wang
…………………………………. [Morganstern checks in]

• The SEZ – George King
…………………………………. [How he came to be hospitalized]

• The SEZ – Wang and King
…………………………………. [A Summit]

• Heihe

• The SEZ – George King
…………………………………. [“aristocrats”]

• Lake Baikal

• The SEZ – George King
…………………………………. ["You're going back."]

• Central
………………………………… [back in The Golden State]

• The Camp – Jack and Davie
………………………………… [outside the fence]

• Rocklin

• The Mall – [Nina’s friend’s boss]
…………………………………. [Income Opps]

• The Camp
…………………………………. [All inducted]

• The Camp – Nina and Mrs. Bert
…………………………………. [reunion]

• The Camp – Mrs. Bert
…………………………………. [Mrs. Bert's ad hoc monitoring initiative]

• The Camp – A.D. and Nina
…………………………………. [why he never got any older]

• The Camp – Sally
…………………………………. [slow food]

• The Camp – Jack
…………………………………. [jam]

• The Camp – Michael
…………………………………. [post production]

• The Camp – Nina and Bobby
…………………………………. [the “connectors” arrive]

• The SEZ
…………………………………. [Morganstern’s sanitorium]

> Epilog

• Tom
…………………………………. [tracks down everybody up in Sacramento]

I spent two more nights in Denver, only leaving my motel room to eat or get some coffee, trying to reconstitute my notes about the startup of the after-school art extension that Nina, Jack, Bobby and Michael had spent so much time on. I got a lot of writing done on this and some other things. If the art extension had been an assignment for Sac’to Weekly, I would have done legwork on what the officials did to get it off the ground. Instead, I saw it all from the point-of-view of the students who had had their art and music classes canceled, and then I got to see their kind-of happy refugee situation — eventually spending more time at “The X” than they would ever have wanted to spend in art classes. It became a place, more than a curriculum. We’re always reluctant to let kids have a place. This one occurred mostly by devolving, or rather evolving, if looked at subversively.

After the school district people had done their bureaucratic work — arranging for the use of some buildings on the grounds of a former army supply depot, hiring or reassigning staff, setting up transportation — it almost seemed to me to have been left to the three dozen or so students to keep it all going. So I got their side of the story, which was fine with me because it was the lively, happy side. Once The X was going full speed, the kids had to be kicked out every night, when the last staff person wanted to leave. The story of the startup I would have gotten from the school administration would have been predictable enough that I would have had a hard time not just making it up, and yet as I looked back from that point — at a motel near the train station in Lincoln Nebraska — I wasn’t at all inspired to prevaricate.

*   *   *

Garage bands — however much they are an icon in the music world — hardly ever write songs about garages. The reason for this is more subtle than it might seem at first glance. I think it’s about energy. In order for work to get done, you need a place to absorb the energy so that it can turn wheels on its way there. It’s hard for an artist to say anything romantic about that, even in angst. The energy in a guitar player’s head may flow through his or her fingers toward a dead lawn mower half buried under some boxes of things that haven’t made it to the thrift store, along with all the other clutter. But that energy is effectively spent on something that most people would find more interesting, on its way to the junk. The garage is just is a “sink” that draws in the energy like the way the universe somehow soaks up your paycheck. I want to think that a really original musician can give a little credit to the garage stuff, somewhere in there, but you have to dig deep in the world of music to find that kind of thing. Other kinds of artists may be warmer to any opportunity to pay a little notice to what is cluttering up where they work, if they can feel clever about it.

Art schools are like what garages are to garage bands. Art schools also look and feel dull in the same way garages do. Other than the public gallery space at an art school, every room — a large studio, classroom, tech area — tends to look like a well-lit, dusty, semi-abandoned workshop, with nothing to see but piled scraps of material, careworn fixtures and a few tired-looking scruffy people hard at work.

I figured that when I got to Lincoln Nebraska, I would visit the University of Nebraska campus with that in mind, expecting to find the art department an unfortunately peppy and colorful place. It was a short walk from the train station and the ambiance was not too industrial beyond a few blocks.

When I’m in a gallery or a museum I can’t help but misperceive the whole thing. I don’t see the art. I see the market for it. I see all the social/economic infrastructure, instead of what the artists were about, before I settle down to really paying attention to a good piece, and then another and so on.

Some would say that you couldn’t expect much from Nebraska art, but my cynicism would be different: You could expect a lot from the money Nebraska was capable of coming up with for “The Arts,” and that’s exactly what you find there: “world class” pieces that had probably cost the university a lot of money. The campus is littered with big sculpture. Most of it was good stuff, by the standards of the art world as we know it, but I would question what most of it had to do with anybody from Lincoln, in their most intuitive moments. I couldn’t bring myself to trespass on any of the working studios. There were too many doors, all closed.

As you move away from where art actually happens, the situational environment for art looks more and more like places in malls that do business in decorative home furnishings or — in the case of museums — cathedrals to history.

From the very first day that all the students and faculty gathered at the old army supply depot grounds to see the facility where they would be starting the art extension, I expected it to be very different from this kind of university art department. That’s not what I heard.

*   *   *

Michael looked up as Nina came over to where he was sitting. She told me that he had looked sad, but that he was smiling through it. She sat down next to him on his bench. They were facing a large stucco wall, blank other than a thin row of metal-framed windows twenty feet up and a metal door on the left. There were some cheap little bushes along the wall that seemed to have done well enough in their neglect.

“Look inside,” he said. “It’s perfect.”

She did. When she came back to the doorway to get Michael to join her, Bobby was there. Before the three of them went inside together, Bobby motioned toward the mass of people heading for the orientation they were supposed to be attending. This initial semester was a summer session, so it was similar to when a school district consolidates everybody on one school campus, accept that this was a derelict army base and there wouldn’t be any of the usual remedial classes.

Nina said, “That can wait,” and the other two agreed by following her inside the big empty room that Michael had found.

Michael moved some debris around with his toe, looking down while Nina and Bobby were looking up and all around. He said, “Just let everybody wander around for a while at least,” as if he were talking to the school administration people there. In the sweepings piled against a wall, he nudged a couple of dusty clear plastic cups and revealed torn scraps of a crumpled tinselly paper banner. One piece said “Ha” and another said “ew Year.”

Bobby and Nina hatched a plan, then, to get into this room and set up all their stuff by telling the administration people that they wanted to volunteer to clean the place as a crew. Then they went and joined the scheduled event in the auditorium and listened to the bureaucratic addresses for an hour.

The place had seating for hundreds, but there were only the three dozen or so students — a few from each school in the district — who had been accepted into the art extension program. That was the limit of the funding. The optimistic “mission statement” rhetoric echoed around until the question period, when everybody heard how little anybody — students or faculty — had thought about what the whole thing was actually going to be about, other than keeping art and music classes from going totally extinct. That’s what they had spent all their ambition and activism on, naturally enough. Michael spent the entire time with his chin in his hand, his right elbow resting on his left arm across his knees. Every once in a while, Nina whispered something to him about what they had found and he perked up for a moment. She finally took out a pad and did a sketch of the outside wall he had been facing when she found him and made sure he saw it before she tucked it into his backpack.

*   *   *

For two afternoons and into the night, they used the room to jam and run lights and video on the walls. They danced, and sang and recorded everything. Jack had invited some others to bring in performance pieces — part of playing the host.

If there are original people around, Jack will find them and recruit them. He collects them. He can’t resist. The new extension had a bumper crop. Even at an art school, though, not everybody is going to be an original thinker, and most will ultimately balk at anything they think will threaten what looks like a secure path up in the world, when the hard choices come along. Some won’t want to do anything but decorate what they have been told by people with no imagination at all, but Jack has a knack for sizing-up your place on those sliding scales instantly and making the most disaffected feel chosen.

Even people who weren’t used to improvising tried anyway, given everything there to plug into. Some people who would always want to work alone — on painting, sculpture, photography — came by to loiter and/or socialize.

Unfortunately, on the second night, some higher administration people heard about it all and arrived to shut it down.

It took until everything was packed up, loaded and driven away, before everybody milling around outside dispersed. Nina found Michael, sitting on the bench where she had found him the first time. She had wanted to confront the situation right away, but the man who was flipping the circuit breakers said, “My office, tomorrow morning,” as all the power went off on one thing after another and the last people drifted off. Nina could hear Michael’s, “I told you so,” as clearly as if he had spoken.

The next day, the “admin” talked to Nina and Bobby for a few minutes about “rules and regulations” and then led them to a classroom nearby. There was a table at the back of the room, piled with beige boxes and monitors with technology from about five years earlier. He was saying that he had thought they had said they were doing “computer art” and was doing his best to provide for that. Nina had to explain that they use computers for things he would never have seen or heard and that they already have some very nice ones; that what they needed was a large room. Later, Bobby said that the school-people were “looking at some ordinary purpose” for what they were doing. Nina said, “You mean they’re looking for a ‘business model.’ Art that you can shrink-wrap… Hang on the wall and ignore.”

“We don’t provide places for bands to practice,” the admin had said.

Nina said, under her breath, “…unless they have music stands, or tassels on their helmets,” and then out loud, “We’re not a band. This is an art thing; an improvisation with anything that makes music and visuals.”

The admin had no response to this except to look a little puzzled and weary. When he left, Nina said, “What are they thinking? We have computers. We need space and electric outlets. Are these good for anything?”

Bobby said, “Solitaire…” in a way that insinuated that they wouldn’t be good for much more.

He left her alone with them and came back hours later to find that she had set up seven units. He asked, “What have you been doing with this stuff?” — surprised that she had found anything to keep her occupied all that time.

Nina just said, “Playing solitaire.”

Bobby asked her “Which ones do you want to use for storage?” He had brought back some large hard drives.

Nina said, “Just the two you picked out.”

He walked around the table, noticing that all seven setups had a solitaire app booted and looked closely at a couple. He gave her a worried look and asked, “How many games have you played?”

She squinted at the screen in front of her and said, “A hundred and eighty seven.”

Bobby said, “I’m sorry to hear that…” as if she had said she was ill.

Nina responded in kind. “No. I’m fine. Really. If they want us to just vegetate here, this is as good a way as any.”

Michael found her there a few days later with a sketch pad in her lap, but working a mouse. She had collected some audio and video files together on one of the servers, making some room on her laptop. By then she had played several hundred more games of solitaire. When Jack found them both there the next day, Michael too had played a few hundred games. When Bobby found all three of them and Davie there, later that afternoon, they were all playing the game and talking about prefs and scores and ways of keeping track. He disrupted that to show them a couple of things he was setting up and working on. Then he played a few games while he told Nina that none of her keyboards were going to do much on these machines other than control what audio came out of what she could do better on her laptop.

Nina interrupted him. None of this was actually news to her. “Jack says that when you guys first met, you told him that you only played solitaire.”

“What I meant was that I don’t play video games or much of anything like that. Everybody plays solitaire…”

“I see,” said Nina. “What else have you got for us?”

He said, “If I set up one of our desktop machines in here, they won’t notice it. We can run some ethernet over here from the band room and…” He was talking about the large classroom where typical school band rehearsals happened. It would also be used for theory and composition classes. He could see that nobody was reassured. They all agreed silently that a cable acting as a lifeline to their system wouldn’t quite do.

Bobby said, “It will be better than not using our laptops at all.”

Jack said, “We might as well all be at home in our bedrooms sticking loops together.”

Nina said, “Were back in headphones.”

All the while, pixilated playing cards moved around on the screens in front of them.

*   *   *

But within a month or so, they had at least interested the music teachers in working with live-processed keyboard stuff and even got horns and stuff miked for building tracks. From there they got more and more instruments jacked into computers, rather than straight into the sound system. There just wasn’t going to be any video or what went into video content — the full effect — for the time being. They could each bring in digitally notated compositions and the class would rehearse them. They would record that as computer files and recycle the results. In other classrooms, they could draw, paint, dance, make pots, critique poems. That was it.

Months would go by and fiscal languor would set in, before the students could essentially take over on what The X was all about, with the faculty and admins kind of babysitting, much the same way you would have found a typical art class going on — that is to say, without much actual instruction — over the past few decades in public schools. Eventually, there was only enough money to pay the rent and minimal staff — not enough to inspire any institutional ambition — so all the creativity that was left came from the kids. At that point there was potential for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. There would be music on sound systems in all the non-music studios, which then led to one medium accompanying another and then another until all the lines blurred — the faculty always having to admit that plenty of work was getting done.

*   *   *

There was one admin who always showed up to oversee any transaction when somebody actually sold a painting or something, but otherwise never came around. He was well connected to the local art patronage and the local art market, but made it a point to be aloof toward what was going on at The X. His creativity seemed to all go into refining his contempt for everyone, even if they respected his princely status. People who wanted his approval mostly got abuse: “What is this?” He ignored everyone, preemptively, unless somebody stumbled in front of him and he could point out their mistake.

Michael once found himself making noise after everyone else in the room had gone silent. None of his friends were around. He knew without turning around that The Prince had come up behind him.

“Are you a student here?” the man asked Michael, even though he had referred to Michael by name more than once. He had a campaign to make sure no dropouts were able to hang out there.

Michael said, “Mm hmm.”

“What do you do?”

Michael said nothing and started getting ready to leave.

The man walked over and said something quietly and privately to the person who he presumably had been looking for and then noticed that he still had everyone’s attention. “Does anyone in this room have a plan or are we just waiting for a fortuitous accident?”

He predicted that every semester would be the last; that the students would either demand structure or lose interest when the lack of resources made it clear enough that there wouldn’t be any. Enrollment would dwindle and The X would close.

“You,” he said, looking at Michael. “What do you expect from all this?”

Michael said, “You’re still hoping to hear police, fire trucks and ambulances pulling up outside. Enjoy the suspense.”

Then Michael went over to the building they had first staked out. Jack and Nina were editing some video.

“Guess who.” he suggested.

Nina said, “He’ll leave right away. We could go sit by the gate and wave…”

Instead, Michael put down his gear and went for a walk in the opposite direction, past an old fast food building, down to a clump of trees against a fence on the far side of a half acre of brown lawn. There was a plastic café chair. He sat there and played solitaire on a palm-top, listening to some tunes.

I like dozing off for a while at odd times, which is good because I used to have to catch up on lost sleep all the time. There were always things that interupted any kind of sleep routine I might have had, whether it was because of my late-night delivery routine at Sac’to Weekly or adjusting to the daytime operation of the trade show in Las Vegas for that week, or on the train leaving all that and San Francisco behind.

It isn’t just that I have had good reasons to be up and around in the daytime: friends, events, scenery outside the train. It’s that my outlook on things can be entirely different after a short doze, refreshed. It’s worth doing even without having been deprived. Travel makes for lots of these opportunities.

Five days out of the Emeryville train station in the east bay meant that thoughts of San Francisco were almost as far in my past as life in Sacramento. On that morning, leaving Elko Nevada for a train station at Grand Junction near Denver, I figured I would nap when the hustle of boarding was over and the scenery became comfortably monotonous. Stuck with a soft-enough seat and enough lively murmuring around, with things to ponder or with huge natural desolation outside the windows to think through; nobody to get hostile with me about it; with things to lull me away from anything active, I could sleep for a few minutes there too.

I had long since arrived at a way to quell any insomniac anxiety about being the fugitive. I could close my eyes and think, “When I open my eyes, someone will be there to arrest me.” Accounting for it gave me a clean slate to sleep by. If anything like that happened, then I could be excused for having the achey irritability you would normally associate with a disrupted sleep pattern.

When the train-bound monotony came, I tilted my head back and to the side against the headrest and the dull ache from the runaround of boarding and stowing things faded. Then I reconsidered how to do this. I wanted to try it without my sunglasses. It might be interesting to see how hypnotic the changing pattern of light on my eyelids might be, so I took off my sunglasses and put them on the large table in front of me. A minute of this had me thinking it was too bright. I decided that I would want to go back to moderating all the changes in light that I was living with by keeping my shades on whenever I dozed, but I did fall asleep at that point with them off. When I woke up, the sunglasses were gone. This was obviously a drag, but it also put me in the way of some unfriendly locals when I hit Grand Junction.

I would like to think that I can find something good to see anywhere, but walking the mile or so north from the train station to a convenience store to get some cheap shades, the cityscape I saw was lifeless. It was drab little blocks of buildings with just enough half- hearted signage color to keep them from being the really good, easy kind of plain. There was plenty of traffic to keep the walk from having any good and easy quiet.

I found just what I was looking for though: A dusty pair of plain roundish frames that wouldn’t make me look like a malevolent insect the way a pair of more common wraparounds would have. When I happily told the checker how glad I was, she looked directly in my eyes with a totally blank expression and then turned her back on me, attending to some other business, before she said, “Anything else?”

I said, “No,” with curbed enthusiasm.

The checker took my money and gave me my change without facing me or looking up from the counter. While I was waiting, I asked the person in line behind me, “Was it something I said?” He didn’t respond and tried to find something else to pay attention to.

A wirey older guy behind him caught my eye, gave his head a quick tilt up and said, “We get a lot of strangers coming through.”

I let it go at that.

On my walk back to the motel that I had seen halfway there, I tried to imagine what he had in mind. Maybe his image of Grand Junction was as an archetypal small town with some monumental natural wonder at its heart. Maybe his imaginary town had just a few hundred people who all knew each other and they had a small quarry that their forefathers had unearthed that produced bright pink and orange marble that was in great worldwide demand for pet cemetaries. It would have been far enough from the interstate highways and major cities that a kind of pilgrimage had to be made to visit there. The good people of this town would have welcomed these visitors and their spending, as long as they didn’t dawdle more than a night or two and didn’t interfere. These tourists would go away refreshed and happy, yet not knowing what bliss the locals reserved for each other. This was not that town.

Saying, “We get a lot of strangers coming through,” was just the less-direct way of saying, “You’re a stranger,” and made it sound like people there might do their best to try to accomodate the unfamiliar tastes we visitors brought in with us. The truth was more likely that they had a large population who had little intimacy and little to offer each other and no interest in any fertilization from the outside.

It made me miss Nina and her easy way of dealing with mean, suspicious people. It had me missing everybody, and it reminded me of the day they had gone to the mall to check out a carnival in the parking lot for Michael. A few of the rides were ones that he had sold-off from his aunt and uncle’s defunct business. They had had a “ranchette” outside of Sacramento where they had stored the rides for years and had left them to Michael. He and Nina had decided that they could probably use some carny “wild sound,” in movie lingo — the kind of stuff you hear on the soundtrack when there’s no music or dialog — and everybody wanted to see what Michael’s giant-teacup/space-ship meditations might be all about in the real world of a working carnival. Maybe it would be more, there, than it was out in the weeds behind and beside the house — maybe less.

An hour or so into their wandering around at the carnival, Davie came up beside Nina. “There’s a rent-a-cop following us.”

She was already aware. “Yeah. Let’s ignore him and head for an exit.”

They went around and between some game booths.

Davie said, “Now there’s two of them and another guy.” The man with these security guards was in a tired plain suit that didn’t fit well.

Nina tried to reassure Davie. “Yes, we know. Let’s just keep walking, okay?”

The first security guard was a big man in his mid twenties, with soft eyes, light hair and a slightly long beard the same shade, on the center of his chin. Before they had made much progress toward a way out, into what was left of the regular parking lot, the other guard, looking tidy and determined, and the man with him that Davie had mentioned came around a ping-pong-ball-and-fish-bowl game booth in front of them.

The management-type confronted them. “What’s your business here?”

Nina tried to blunt his hostility or at least redirect it. “I don’t think you would actually call it ‘business.’”

“That’s not what I’m asking you. You’ve been here for three quarters of an hour and you haven’t done anything but walk around in circles. What’s your game?”

Jack and Bobby looked around at the booths and rides while Nina continued to give him her most soothing gaze. She smiled, “What’s our game?”

Mocking pride, Jack asserted, “Solitaire,” with a conspiritorial glance around at his friends.

The Manager looked at him, but didn’t ask anything.

Jack pointed at the bumper car ride, which was empty and wasn’t running. “Can I sit in one of those?”

Mr. Manager said, “That ride is down.”

Jack said, “I don’t want to ride. I just want to sit in one of the cars for a minute.”

Bobby asked, “Is the Tilt-A-Whirl going to be down today?”

They were thinking of Michael, laying on his back on the floor of the teacup ride at home, with his feet up on the seat, staring at the night sky.

The second rent-a-cop stepped in. “Can I see some identification?”

Nina turned toward him slowly. “I don’t think so. My name is Nina,” she said, putting out her hand to him. “This is Jack, Bobby, Davie. What’s your name?”

Mr. Manager said, “Hey!” and everybody moved apart. He settled down and said, “This carnival is for paying customers,” at which, Jack took out his wallet and started to offer him a few bills. The man ignored him in a puzzled way. “So, unless you…” He saw one of the guards looking from Jack toward one of the ticket booths and scowled at him. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Nina said, “Not if you don’t want to. Do you like it here?”

“What? This is my place of business.”

Nina asked, “Would you like to be here, if you didn’t have to be?”

“What?” Mr. Manager looked more purplexed.

Nina said, “We like it here and we aren’t even wanted. Do you like being here?”

Bobby let him off the hook. “Do you ever rent this out for parties?”

Mr. Manager was on more familiar ground. “Is that what this is about?”

Nina said, “No. Well, partly. We do things that kind of look and sound like this.”

Jack said, “It’s an art thing.”

Mr. Manager said, “Oh for Christ’s sake…”

“Are you a Christian?” Nina asked, with some enthusiasm. “Cuz…”

Jack laughed and looked around quickly. Probably checking for some iconography he might have missed.

The manager looked at Jack. “Eh…” His face tightened.

The bear-like one of the two security gaurds, a little wide-eyed, said, “I am.”

Nina sidled toward him, happier with this change in direction. The big man looked to his boss for approval, but Mr. Manager was looking at the ground out ahead of him like somebody reviewing a mental list.

Jack tried to snap him out it. He said, “Well?” but actually couldn’t have cared less.

Mr. Manager looked at Jack and followed his gaze toward one of the rides. Nina looked to see if Mr. Manager would offer anything, but the big guy saw this, caught her eye and gave his head a quick little shake after glancing toward Mr. Manager, as if to say, “Don’t count on anything steady about this from him.” Mr. Manager started after Jack and Bobby who had taken a few steps toward the bumper cars. Davie followed, probably with something inappropriately friendly in mind. The other guard moved quickly in front of Jack and Bobby and they turned back.

Nina asked the big rent-a-cop, “Do you read your Bible? Because I’ve been wondering… Do you know John 8? The ‘cast the first stone’ thing?”

“Yeah,” the guard answered hopefully, hesitantly, glancing toward his boss again. “Let he who is without sin…”

“Okay,” said Nina. “What do you suppose Jesus was writing on the ground with that stick? It doesn’t say. It just says they keep asking him about what to do with the adulterous woman and he keeps writing in the dirt, before he comes up with his admonishment.”

The manager was back, looking at the two of them, from one to the other and back again.

The guard said, “Umm. I don’t know.”

Mr. Manager said, “That’s enough. We don’t want to talk to these… people.” Then he said, quietly, to nobody in particular, “Shit disturbers…” He snapped a hard look at the other security guy. “Show them where to leave and make sure they do.”

The store of unspent misapprehension in the the air could have powered one of the rides for the littler kids; clutching non-functional steering wheels; their little unsure smiles moving slowly past the beaming nineteen-year-old mommies and their childless, single girlfriends; some of the toddlers visibly suspicious of this novel kind of fun.

When the Bandies were well away from the part of the parking lot where the carnival was set up, Davie brought up one of the things they were there about. “They didn’t say anything about the microphone.”

Jack laughed, “They didn’t know what it was.”

Nina was carrying a giant ancient movie-making microphone, with a mesh covering meant to make it windproof. She wasn’t hiding it, but there was no boom that could have been used to get it right up to any sound source. It had been stuffed part way into her backpack most of the time.

Davie said, “Yeah. They wouldn’t have liked it.”

Nina acted puzzled. She asked him, “Would they have been any less happy with us?

Bobby chuffed, “They didn’t think it was a bomb.”

Davie said, “They could have made a lot more trouble.”

Nina stopped walking, turned and waited for him to elaborate on this, but Davie didn’t offer anything more, so she said, “How?”

Davie said, “They could have taken it away or called the police.”

Nina waited again. “How would that work?

Davie had no answer.

Bobby said, “Good of you not to announce it.”

Davie said, “Maybe we should have asked if we could record and stuff.”

Nina asked him, “Stuff? What would that have meant to them? What if they had said no?”

Davie asked, “Why would they have said no?”

Nina asked, “Why would they have said yes?”

Davie’s answer was, “We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

Nina waited. She would give him a chance to think this through, as always.

The sun had gone down, behind one of the stores. They shuffled on, further from the rides and lights and blasting carny rock; the microphone still picking up the ride-rumble and diesel generator noise over the music and crowd sounds.

Davie just went on. “Anyway, it’s their place… We should have talked to them and worked something out.”

Nina tried to get him to look at it another way. “If you had said you were coming over here by yourself and Michael had given you the rig to record it for him, what would you have done?”

Davie immediately replied “I would have asked them.”

Bobby asked him, “Who? When?”

Davie was pretty sure of this. “Them. Those guys.”

Bobby demanded, “Who are they? Where would you have found them? How many days ago? Let’s go back and ask them if I can take your picture on one of the rides.”

Davie said, “No. I don’t think…” He stopped and said, “That’s different.”

Everybody looked at him and waited.

Davie said, “We could have told them it was for something…”

Everybody waited.

“For Michael,” Nina suggested flatly.

Davie said, “No…”

Michael knew exactly who they would have had to talk to. Bobby too, and it wasn’t Mr. Manager. A lot of the reason for visiting the carnival that day had been to get back some of what had been lost in the transaction when they had sold the rides, and to maybe get something more that could only come from seeing the rides in their regular operating situation; things that could never have had anything to do with business, accept what was different about a ride that was working for a living — how that compared to languishing in a field just outside of town.

Michael and Bobby had briefly considered operating the remaining rides out in back of the house their own way, but couldn’t imagine how to finance even just the power they would require and didn’t know what kind of certification would be involved if they were open to the public. They had vaguely pondered how they might donate them to a non-profit that would be happy to run them for some needy little kids somewhere.

The neighbors along the road were continually more determined to get the derelict rides cleared off of Michael’s aunt and uncle’s property now that they were gone. Everything stacked up against Michael or the rides being there much longer. The only way to make the house habitable and come up with what was past due on the mortgage and property taxes, was to sell the place. The new owners could install a functional water heater and all that.

When they got back from the mall, they found Michael on the living room sofa; his head back. He would have been looking straight up, if his eyes had been open. He had a science fiction book flattened across one knee, a giant box of nose wipes wedged against his thigh and there was some tea in a fat mug warming in an inch of water in a rice cooker on the coffee table.

“His problems are over,” said Jack.

Michael brought his head up and said, “I’m not dead yet.”

The comedy halted when they saw that Nina wasn’t amused. “Did you kick off the blankets because you felt too hot or because the fever broke?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, but she was close enough then to see that his forehead was glistening, so she straightened the blankets out and draped them over him, up around his neck. He fished out the book and fell over to one side.

Bobby had set up the stuff they recorded to play back through a sound system and when Michael recognized it he propped himself up a little on one elbow and a cushion. A repetitious ponging sound made him smile. They listened to the whole thing straight through, without a word. Sometime before the audio of the authority-fracas came along, Michael had fallen asleep.

The recorded carnival sounds faded, replaced by normal parking lot sounds and they heard Jack say, “We’re from Hollywood. Sign here.”

Bobby had said, “We look like we’re from local news. Don’t we look like publicity?”

Nina had seemed a little stricken. “We look like trouble, and I’m tired of it.”

Davie had smiled, out of synch, and tried to reassure her. “You guys just always make everything a problem.”

Bobby had then gotten into the back seat of the car and had thought he might close the door on Davie for a second and then open it to let him in, but he had thought Davie wouldn’t get it.

That was then, but this is not nostalgia. It’s not actually about looking back, and I needed to start thinking about getting out of Grand Junction and on to Denver. The longer I was there, the more likely I would talk to somebody, and they wouldn’t be happy about it. It’s dangerous to be just about anywhere with nothing to buy into, but that seemed like a particularly bad place to say, “I’m not selling anything,” and want to tell them all about all my elaborate disinterest. It could only make things worse; probably make somebody more than just suspicious; prabably annoy them, accomplishing the exact opposite of what I wanted to find somewhere. It might even get me caught.

I had no illusion that I would stumble on some amazing cohort of gratuitously convivial creatives in Denver. The Idea was to keep stumbling on and improving the odds, hoping for lively scenery, or at least a limited number of commercial interuptions in my little broadcast. In Grand Junction, they were like the worst bottom-feeders on late-night TV and AM radio. Denver promised something dubiuously cosmopolitan. If nothing else, it was someplace else.

—-My initial destination out of the Bay Area was Elko NV.

—-The top end of Nevada is less festively remote than Las Vegas. Where people in Reno or down south would drench the desert to make a nice lush green golf course, people in the patches of town among the scrubby arrid hills of the north, might lay out a six-hole course on the bare ground with most of the tumbleweed, spindly occatillo and furry spined cholla and some of the boulders cleared off the fairways. The “greens” are concrete. The sand traps are solitary dunes that migrate according to the season. There are no water hazards. Or so I was told by a seemingly honest local, while I drank a beer and avoided any temptations that would delay my work any further.

—-The Amtrak “station” at Elko is a set of two glass-walled huts; cubes, twelve feet or so on a side, with two-inch aluminum framing and a few opaque panels. One is a sentry on the westbound side of the tracks and one on the eastbound side. These are attended by a veriety of short staircases and ramps up the few feet to the grade for the rail bed and a parking lot. This Bauhaus tableau has been erected on the first convenient emptiness where the tracks run southeast of town and is surrounded by no other structures. The nearest is one large warehouse, itself being almost a satelite. It was still light when I got there.

—-To get to the motel I had booked at, I didn’t need a cab or a bus or even a street. It was directly north of the “station,” three hundred yards across some industrially abused, but otherwise vacant lanscape. Probably a hundred years of use as a giant outdoor workbench has left the area with all the topsoil, but little of the indigenous vegetation.

—-Across the street from the motel, on the opposite side from the space I trekked to get there, there is actually a green park, which I expected to have a view of while I did my writing. Ultimately, it was a minimal image outside the small picture window in the room, beyond the small mezzanine and rail common to motels. I found an omelet at a pancake house, a couple of beers at a brew-pub/casino, some muffins at an espresso house, filled my thermos with city-fied coffee and spent the next fourteen hours typing and napping, before catching the next day’s California Zephyr for the next leg, to Grand Junction CO.

—-

When the last few days of that trade-show came — the one in Las Vegas that my editors had sent me to, with the tricky financial arrangements — I was prepared to go through with my intention to abscond, using the company credit card. It was just that in the week I had spent there, in the normal routine, I hadn’t given much thought to the idea; much time to formulating a plan. So far, it had only been a matter of flying somewhere other than home — probably to San Francisco.

I went to the “closer” in the lobby of the convention center to have my two complimentary beers. There was no crowd while most of the exhibiters were still packing up. We’re not meant to sit, so they don’t bring in any chairs. Maybe we’re meant to mingle — in a way we can’t all do on the exhibit floor. This was how I found myself talking to a couple of aquaintences who had little interest in my work; who nonetheless pumped me for convenient chat about it, parting with, “Well, good luck with that…” I couldn’t remember talking about anything they wouldn’t have seen as a foregone conclusion. I was working what little conversational grace I had left. Their’s had been a way of saying, “We wish you well, as long as somebody else is doing the well-ness.” The opposite of, “Let’s get together on something.”

I realized that having worked consistently on filing all my reports straight out of the press-room, back in the staging areas of the convention complex, I had given no thought to making any connections; made no anticipations. A lot of people at a trade show probably found that a little creepy. Maybe they could give some thought to accounting for other kinds of plans. Like one where a guy steals the resources from his publisher to do a different kind of journalism. Is anyone that considerate? How difficult can it be to make distinctions between a job and a reason to exist? Obviously too much to ask.

There was no need to go back to the soon-to-be-demolished hotel — a waning dowager of gangster-primal Vegas. Most of my plan was to sling my work-bag over my shoulder and drag my suitcase outside to the free shuttle that would get me to a plane at LAS. I was glad not to have hassled with a cab, because the bus was a better platform for viewing the landscape on the trip out to the airport, though it occured to me that I was at a point where unauthorized expenses were moot. I had made one test during the week to see if the account I was planning to filch from was being monitored. I used it to buy a good meal. Food had not been any part of the itinerary that had been planned for me. Hunger is a major temptation.

The strip-mall landscape along the way to the airport is a version of the clean sordidness that you see all over Las Vegas — cheap-vice retail — and typical of cities that have no other sprawl to converge with, in that the original landscape intrudes here and there. The fresh interstitial patches of desert — reddish earth, with a few cholla cactus and and small joshua trees, in this zone — were a comfort. The same could be seen from the airline concourse and from the light-rail-style tram with no seats that carries passengers about a half mile to and from the main terminal. I killed time riding the tram back and forth, drinking a beer and playing a few dollar slots under a giant desert panarama with horses, painted on a panel that wrapped around part of the ceiling system below the skylights. Winning the slots was a problem, because it meant being weighed down with about five pounds of coins. Losing most of it back was a good time killer.

I had bought a ticket to Oakland, figuring that would have less ostentation for the people who might be there to arrest me when I landed. I could easily catch the intercity light-rail — BART — there and take that, or that and a ferry, into the city. It might be nice to spend part of the trip on water — a drink and then up on deck watching the skyline approach, then a streetcar to a business-class hotel.

It’s not in our nature to say what we might have seen from a window seat on a commercial airliner. Never mind that anybody a hundred years ago would have felt like a god, floating above that real-life version of the model railroad in Aunt Genevieve and Uncle Aloysius’s basement. Once you’ve gotten to monotony with the tiny airliner window, what will you want to say? You may be horrified with the what-goes-up-must-come-crashing-down possibilities, but how many times is that going to be part of a good story back home? Big deal, if you depart Taipei for Paris in a howling storm for the first airplane ride of your life and the plane buffets beyond any expectation, seeming to climb almost straight up, roaring. You may level-off after that in blinding sunlight above the clouds with nothing to look at out of the window for hours and hours but a flat expanse of puffy whiteness just below the plane, until nightfall, when there won’t even be that.

How well can you regale the folks at the office on Monday with a story about coming into Orange County International and seeing that one of the nearby squares of lights on the grid below had sparkling little puffs of fireworks from Disneyland? How about seeing the intimate details of two hundred houses and yards in twenty five seconds, landing at San Diego? Or say you came down from over the pole into Scotland, the north of England, and you could have counted the shining lochs, rough stone walls and hedgerows, the few cars on the narrow roads between and the fewer houses and churches in the corners of that rocky plaid. There’s a cabin on the lee side of a hill on the approach to Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Alaska that you could see somebody waving from and tell how they feel about it. From far enough out, Fiji might look to you like a greenish floating muffin that you’re going to land on, until you see some of the smaller associated islands. Those were corroded corrugated metal roofs of a jumbled shanty town, not drifts of giant dried leaves just beyond the apron around the runway at Sahar Mumbai. But who wants to hear about it?

What I can say is that when I’m stranded in a long line at the supermarket, being assaulted by the tabloids, I’m not dreaming that an editor will assign me to hob-nob with the foible-and-pecadillo challenged celebrities on those magazine covers — none of the soul-sucking conflicts and mutually disappointing expectations in those “narratives.” I’m dreaming of passing slowly above a scene of moon-lit breakers and California coastline with clumps of lights that suggest any number of possible ways of life; what I saw on the ocean-route flight from LAS to OAK that night, on my way to write a story about some people who know that fame-and-fortune is only one possible byproduct among many, when you’re being creative. I would likely be daydreaming of wide horizons. Fast Lane? Uh uh. Scenic route.

OAK was industrial, in a Bay Area kind of way. Almost military — an Air Force base for civilians. Easy to imagine a flat gray coastal edge to middle California from there, were it not for San Francisco and Marin. The bus from the airport to the BART station at the Oakland Coliseum runs through ugly light-manufacturing tracts and BART does much the same, slowing and rattling through turns, even though they are banked. The BART planners seem to have made it a point to give us a view of the backyards of semi-urban houses, like a monorail ride through Todayland at the World Of America exhibition that might tour third world lands looking to impress guest workers, if we had a fabulously bankrolled labor shortage, or maybe if we decided that a portion of our national debt should go toward full disclosure.

The ferry landing’s waterfront area on the east side of San Francisco Bay has seen a lot of urban renewal and the ferry runs through a shipping port estuary, before gaining the open water.

San Francisco has, of course, examples of working public transportation from every era that didn’t use horses. I could squint on the streetcar and be at any time in a seventy-five year span. We even got some sparks from the overhead wires that I could see flashing in adjacent windows.

When I got settled in my San Francisco hotel room, I realized that you don’t have a very good plan if you can’t account for big problems with having to go back to “square one.” If you can scrap the whole thing at any time without landing in the gutter, you are free. Mostly, I was thinking, planning is about modifying the plan based on what comes up as you go along, even if you have scoped-out all the information about your itinerary. I must not have really thought I would get that far, and between the Las Vegas convention center and San Francisco, nothing had come up to carom off of.

Having gotten this far, I began to rethink my idea that I would just use a few days or a week of freedom to bring all my notes together into one peice on what “my” kids were all about. It had once seemed like a dream to be able to spend that much time off the thoughtlessly bucking treadmill; time enough to do nothing but write. Now I started to dream about writing the biggest story I could get into before getting caught. Rather than planning to sit there and wait, I started to think about running.

I would figure out a way to buy tickets to fly out of the country from any of several different cities. I would use the company account to fund several new accounts with cash in between. My preliminary thought was to travel randomly on the ground to each airport and spend each night in a different hotel. It was not just an idea to be a moving target. I was also thinking that the whole thing would be too complicated to be worth the effort of anybody thinking about trying to track me down. When my publisher’s office stopped allowing transactions on their credit card, I would be able to leave the country, if there was a big enough lag between that cutoff and the police getting involved.

Bobby — one of “my” kids, who routinely hacks into engineering projects that he can contribute to — tells me he has no credit cards, just ATM cards with credit card function. “If I don’t fill out any credit card applications, they’ll have a hard time proving that I was ultimately about defrauding them, which eliminates a whole huge layer of intrigue. You know how easy it is for me to live below my means.”

I asked him what he did if any of his vast array of hacked interships offered him access to a credit card account for expenses or comps. He said, “I tell them to buy whatever I might need or ‘No thank you. I only accept authorized cash payments for contracted work or gifts of merchandise with a transaction record.’”

“Above all, it’s always best to be who they expect, not who you are.”

“What if they want to take you out to dinner?”

“I tell them it’s impossible for me to physically be there. Some medical reason, fear of flying, scheduling conflicts…”

“And if it pisses them off…”

“I walk. Quit the project. I have all the work I need. The trick is to never waste time on their company politics. Just produce until they make it inconvenient, then produce for somebody else. There are more overextended workgroups on short deadlines than I could ever run out of offering to help. On an internship, I have no liabilities. Besides, production is about eight percent of the average high-level engineer’s time on the job, if you really count everything that isn’t hands-on. See, there’s no other way to get any pleasure out of the work.”

And Bobby still has plenty of time for his friends.

I wondered how many little checking accounts I would manage to open before there was a hand on my shoulder.

Obviously, it had been a long day, but I still spent a few hours that night and into the following morning typing up some hand-written notes. These were things I had put away quite a while back, with no good reason to expect that I would ever get to get back to them again. I just wanted to start feeling like I was “home” — that I was finally doing what home wouldn’t allow.