Cobwebs

I begin in Chinatown, where the red lanterns still flicker at midnight, and the arabesque lizards stare out from the walls with dull jade eyes. I cover them with birds, track down the Trojans, draw a bird devouring the “J.” At night, the boys practice parkour near the mahjong tables in Temple Square. They bounce back and forth between the frozen escalators, scale the fiberglass shoes hanging in front of the open-air shopping mall.\n\t\nA boy in black watches as I spray a lopsided bluebird, its head malformed with a bright orange bill.\n\t\n“Maybe,” he says, and his teeth gleam white inside his black balaclava. “Maybe the universe has given you a different talent.” He jumps to grab the sign for the noodle bar, swings his legs to hang upside down from the railing, then grabs a canister from my bag.\n\t\n“Talk to the pixel lady, “ he says, spraying a butterfly in day-glow pink. “She can tell you your fortune, although, as old as you are, you should know it by now.”\n\t\nAcross the square, a woman enters, glowing in a dress made from hundreds of supple screens. They flicker and flash, a barrage of voices. Figures emerge from the shadows, reach for her hands. \n\t\n“Be brave,” the boy calls, spraying butterflies like flower petals as he leaps from a clothesline onto a roof.\n\n[[No need for fortunes. | Fortunes]]\n[[The woman's eyes are dark as movie screens. | Screens]]\n

I visit the wastelands, places where concrete and traffic make life untenable, where the only faces are hints and flashes, sudden expressions behind metal and glass. There is no life here, but life passes through without alarm. I hang from bridges and fling spray paint to approximate the flowers.\n\t\nWhy “Trojan”, I wonder, even as the rain falls and the paint drips. Particles of dirt stick to the color so that it fades even as I'm watching.\n\t\nBecause it was Samara's, I've never liked graffiti, resisted its illicitness and masking, the identity alluded to but never revealed, its tendency to speak in code.\n\t\nNow, though, with the paint drying on my hands, my cuticles dyed pink and red, I understand the allure of discovery, the gleeful announcement that someone has been even here, to the highway where construction has obliterated the shoulder, to the Hayes Bridge where three workers died during construction, even the vast acres of the airport parking lot, where no one lingers, not even for a cigarette.\n\t\nAt night, I often hear footsteps, sirens blaring in the dark. Now, I hear the jangle of handcuffs, the click of a gun snapped out of its holster. Something large charges across the cobblestones. A recorded voice speaks, “Vandals have no rights in this city.”\n\n[[I slip into a store. | Store]]\n[[I race through the alleys. | Alleys]]\n

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The city of the map is a distant version of this city: wide streets that once were narrow, abandoned factories that once fed hundreds of families. Once, the crumbling row of brick was an alley of tiny food stalls, cramped windows spewing steam and the scents of skewered meats, now faded to smells and strangely-shaped stains. My sister Samara, eight years older, is barely a name, barely a collection of features that resembles my own, a presence more than a memory, a shape more than an absence. If the map is her city, then it is a different city, a different world that mirrors my own without intersecting. We have both walked these streets, but they have never been the same streets.\n\nYesterday's successful merchants are now figures crouched on squares of cardboard, huddled beneath lizards so faded they might be hieroglyphs. The lizards curl, cerulean and amber at the base of lampposts, olive and magenta around the greening statues outside the shuttered art museum. Inside, the statues must be shrouded in cobwebs, but in Samara's day there would have been ticket-takers and gallery guides, newly applied vellum on the walls.\n\nAt the end of the block, near the tower of stone that once held an insurance agency, my father stumbles in his tattered blue coat. He presses his fingers to the walls, as if he could read painted lizards like braille.\n\n“Are you here?” he shouts, turning his head to look. His eyes focus in different directions, eyes that have always contained the stories of the eyes they would become, milky blue, sheened like oil.\n\n[[I go to him. | Him]]\n

Samara disappeared the year she turned fifteen, vanished in the night, taking only her backpack and all of her graffiti paint. And so, we never learned whether she was responsible for the lizards painted around the city, or the name "Trojan" with its flowered "J." \n\nMy father kept her room, dusted the glass turtles and warmed the blue lava lamp. The year I turned fifteen, my mother dismantled everything, sold Samara's guitar, donated every one of her Belle the Babysitter paperbacks. \n\n“My eyes,” my father complained. Already the colors were leaving him. But by then Samara's room was a foldout couch and the smallest television, the tilting red lamp passed down from my grandfather.\n\n“Have you done your chores?” my mother asked me as she settled into the business of dying. What she meant was I was not going anywhere.\n\nWe never told her that Samara left behind two diaries. My father and I secreted them away. I kept third through fifth grade, a ratty notation of preferred meals: spaghetti and barbecue cups, a careful recording of her favorite friends: Hilde the Green Ninja (73 points) and worst enemies: Slimy Tobias (-113 points). My father has sixth grade through ninth grade, and he fingers the pages, feels the creases for the ghosts of letters.\n\n“She planned to go to sea,” he says, holding up a spiral notebook labeled “The Most Boring Things.” But when I push aside his fingers, she describes only a theater audition, a phone call she'd gotten from Arial, Unicorn Killer (52 points) asking if it was okay to date Patrick, the Most Beautiful Painter (268 points). \n\nHidden in the wasteland of my father's bedroom, “The Most Boring Things,” must smell of peppermint and Vapor-Rub, and maybe Samara is still documenting, online, like everyone, cataloguing dinners and disappointments, assigning all of us a score.\n\n[[I search my father's room for “The Most Boring Things.” | Boring]]\n[[I search online for a blog by Samara. |Blogs]]\n

Folklore of our city begins with the tree people, the lithe forebears who lived whole lives in the air. Skeptics place the tree folk with Johnny Appleseed and Babe the Blue Ox, but the truth is the city's forests have airborne hovels, braided branches, rickety platforms lashed from vines.\n\t\nThe city's slogan is “Paradise Among Branches,” and before the great fires, the downtown was filled with trees, their leaves and seedpods clogging the drains. The Great Church of the Canopy believes we will all one day go back there. One day we will regrow our tails, discover our latent talents for climbing.\n\t\nWhen someone disappears, it's always rumored she's returned to the forest, grown naked and feral, hair tangled with insects, but my father has never checked the woods.\n\t\n“No daughter of mine,” he says. “No monkey person is a daughter of mine.”\n\t\nOne day, the story goes, we'll wake to a yearning. Our shoes and clothes will feel suffocating, constricting, our language limiting, the sky too far.\n\t\n“Why not explore every option?” I ask, but my father marches over stone and pine bark, brandishes his cane at the gray, hanging sky.\n\t\nHe's always been strong, but the trees dwarf my father, seem to shift their roots to trip his feet. He walks on, despite the stumbling. Lifts his head in the driving rain. In darkness, he cries out at forest nightmares, but the branches claw, and he does not bow his head.\n\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

“A cemetery,” I tell him, because he will want to complain. “Not a sculpture garden.” But he's already too far, using the feel of the gravel to guide his way. He circles the stone crosses, ducks under pine trees distilling rain onto lichen-covered tombstones.\n\t\nTo the unfamiliar, the cemetery could seem like a military sculpture garden, the size and heft of the tombstones indicators of accomplishment and rank. The font and chiseling might share the secrets of status, the heft and pressure clues to the manner of death. The crying angel might have been a woman who ranked highly as a mother before losing her children to the haze of dementia. The marble pyramid suggests a scholar, waging war between the fresh-bound copies of his own books, who died of a heart attack, pencil in hand.\n\t\n“I've found the POW koi pond!” my father shouts, holding to the railing of the McDonough family mausoleum. “The infantry rose gardens must be nearby.”\n\t\nThe tombstones at his feet are all marred by graffiti: flowered Trojans, and arabesque lizards, tags and symbols, stenciled tigers, scrawled figures with colored eyes. The mayor's anti-graffiti forces might have tried to bury them all, as if sandblasting and fines couldn't be enough.\n\t\n“You're standing on graves,” I say, but he doesn't hear me. He brushes a chubby cherub's cheeks.\n\t\n“Lieutenant Despard?” he asks it. “General Lee?”\n\n[[I find hauntings on my phone. | Hauntings]]\n[[I lead him to the weeping fountain. | Fountain]]\n

My father has never gone digital. His photography has spawned mountains of film canisters, miles of negative strips. In his workroom, binders full of contact sheets tilt and tower. He's kept every test strip, every bracketed experiment, every sepia wash and dodging tool. \n\t\nNow the doctors have started in with “test phase” suggestions, new technologies in experimental phases. “We could mimic your sight,” they say, “implant a microchip. It won't be real sight, but something similar.”\n\t\nMy father laughs. He has never heard the click of a digital shutter, never considered histograms or Adobe Photoshop. \n\t\n“Can you imagine,” he says, rolling sightless eyes at their suggestions. “If in the end, I become a robot.”\n\t\n“Become?” I'd like to ask, but there are kindnesses owed the old.\n\t\nThe binders labeled “Samara” are filled with walls instead of people, and I remember the smell of the paint in her room, the drop cloths and canisters, Sharpies and stencils. \t\n\nSamara's art was my father's biggest failure, and yet he's spent his seeing years photographing graffiti, the arabesques and signatures, caricatures and slogans, the whole careers of illicit artists. He's certain the lizards are hers, the tiny scrolls embroidering the scales, or else the sprayer, “Trojan,” with the flowered “J.” \n\t\n“She'd want everyone to know she was a girl,” my father said.\n\t\n“Woman,” I did say, that time.\n\n[[I search for lizards. | Lizards]]\n[[I look online for flowered “J”s. | J]]\n

<div class="title">//City of Cobwebs//</div>\n\n<div class="author">//Julialicia Case//</div>\n\n[[Begin | Beginning]]\n

As soon as the snow melts, my father turns himself outdoors, channels his own mother, throws himself outside. He sits on the porch and whittles the firewood while the angry March winds stiffen his fingers.\n\t\n“Samara thought you knew her,” I say, throwing open the screen door before his sightless eyes can dissuade me. “You were the only one who made her feel like a person.”\n\t\nMy father's porch chair is empty, the knife still quivering, sunk into the wooden sign that says “Welcome.” The wind brings a quavering voice, a distant tremor from down the street, a fluttering blue coat with tattered sleeves.\n\t\n“Admit you've seen her,” my father accuses an abandoned shopping cart. “You know her,” he address the empty Holy Family parking lot. “You know she's here, somewhere, in the city.” The parking spots pay him no mind, are distracted by the nun unlatching the gate.\n\t\n“We all meander toward Armageddon,” a homeless woman tells the statue of John the Baptist.\n\t\nMy father fingers the brickwork, feels for traces of Samara's graffiti.\n\t\n“You really saw her,” I mean to say, but my words go another way. “Old man,” I say. “You old, blind man.”\n\n[[I go to him. | Him]]\n

The East Promenade is a narrow boardwalk, rotting and shaking. I guide my father to the handrails. His legs tremble in the cold wind. The arcades sit empty and shadowed. If these once were games, they've been boarded up, packed away with crates of unclaimed prizes. My father stumbles over a deflated basketball, and I grab his shoulders, resist the urge to try and heft him.\n\t\n“I hear music,” he says, pushing forward, kicking up sawdust.\n\t\n“You're imagining,” I say, twice, before he hears me.\n\t\n“All of these people,” he says, waving a hand at the empty walkway. “These parents don't know they're in the wasteland of child rearing. Your family is a journey you travel on your own.”\n\t\nAn ancient carousel hulks in the darkness, the animals rusty and as blind as my father. “Such music!” he says. “Such wonderful music!”\n\t\n“What music?” I ask, though it's true the wind howls at flaking paint, snarls and digs at the rust. “What music?” I say, but he's stumbling forward, the lights up ahead like a dream coming into focus.\n\n[[Time for a drink. | Drink]]\n[[Time for a snack. | Snack]]\n

The shelter district is near the refineries, sending their flames up into the night. My father once worked there, pressing buttons, monitoring levels. “Nothing compares to having power over power,” he told me once, the day I told him I hoped to study library science.\n\t\nThe shelter gate is newly painted, tall and metal with concertina wire coiled and waiting. “There are hundreds of Samaras,” the guard says, “but there's a tour starting now.”\n\t\nI file onto the monorail with the others: hopeful mothers fingering threadbare handkerchiefs, stoic fathers, jaws set and stern. The children crowd the front window, wave through the glass as we pass rows of blue tarp tents, the lengthening line for the only dining hall.\n\t\nThe children call the names of missing family members. “John Brian!” They search the crowds of upturned faces for a face that resembles one of their own. “Tasha! Aunt Tasha!”\n\t\n“Sit down,” the parents say. “Let the adults look.” But what need do children have for parents, who can kills dreams so quickly, without remorse?\n\t\n“Samara!” I should call. “Samara!” I should scan the faces for her hair and eyes, but I can't stop looking at the rest of the tram, where the parents take no notice of me, have no interest at all in what I've become.\n\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

The serpent caller's tent sits at the edge of the park, a billowing mass of canvas that leans toward the neighboring junkyard, reaches toward the dismembered cars and disembodied appliances. The “Show Times” board lists no show times, but a blue light glows in the center of the ring when I guide my father through the tent flap, consider the benches arced around the stage.\n\t\n“Do you hear hissing?” My father says. “Snakes are hissing all around us.”\n\t\n“It's nerves,” I say, hearing only the billow and pop of the canvas, the subtle lapping of the lake outside.\n\t\n“I hear pythons,” he says. “I hear mambas and pythons.”\n\t\nThe blue-lit stage is covered in a layer of sawdust, but up above the ropes twist and dangle, almost slither in the dim.\n\t\n“What do you see?” His fingers curl and tighten around my arm. “Why do you never describe what you see?”\n\t\n“I don't know,” I say, but he's too distracted to hear me, whirling at the snapping canvas, the twang of swaying cords and cables.\n\n[[I look for Scylla in the back. | Scylla]]\n[[I divert him with videos on my phone. | Phone]]\n

My father doesn't notice me until I am upon him, until I touch the sleeves of his tattered coat.\n\t\n“Devil be gone!” he wrenches his arms, but I grab his hands, hold tight to the paper of his thinning skin.\n\t\n“It's me,” I say. “It's only me.”\n\t\n“You are a disappointment,” he says. “You've always been a disappointment.”\n\t\nHis eyes are gone, and his limbs are going. His legs creak and tremble; he holds to the walls. Still he wanders the streets of the city, drags himself onto busses, flashes his senior pass, expired, but who can turn him away?\n\t\nI find him in the courtyards of strange apartment complexes, find him among the homeless, holding cardboard signs at intersections. She could offer him money, and still he would not see her. She could brush his sleeve, and he'd shout as if at a stranger.\n\t\n“I would know her sound,” he says. “Her smell. Are you even helping?” \n\t\n“I'm searching for you,” I say. “I have to search for you.”\n\t\n“Imagine,” he says, spooning carrots and potatoes, masticating stew beef with softening teeth. “Imagine with each choice, all the things we are not choosing.”\n\t\n“I'm doing what I can,” I say. “I haven't given up.”\n\t\nHe looks to the armchair as if it were a window. “All our lives are a narrowing down.”\n\n[[I take him to the amusement park. | Carnival]]\n[[We visit the military statue garden. | Statues]]\n

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“I'm not much of a follower,” I say, although of course even a honey-eyed stranger can see through the lie. Haven't I always followed Samara, chased the ghosts of her abandoned bedroom, the rock posters that were always more interesting than my own rock posters, her paperbacks, always more adventurous than my own?\n\t\nI have never been told a story of Samara at a park, never been told of picnic pavilions before my time, never seen photographs of her barreling down the tallest slide. There are no stories of a park, and so I go to a park, to the biggest park, the oldest park, walled by smooth stones hauled up from the river. I wander the paths that were never her paths, consider a radio tower that never prompted her to tip her head back to squint at the sky. The rotting picnic tables have never smelled of new, green wood. The crumbling pavilion fireplace was never whole, its fallen chimney never a conduit for smoke.\n\t\nA crimson lizard twines around the thickest wooden beam. Its green eyes gleam as if the paint were still wet. She could be here somewhere, could be at the river, letting the current steal the color from her brushes. Even as I'm thinking it, I see my father in the field, the hem of his blue coat dragging among the weeds. He holds out his hands as if he might touch her, as if Samara has always been just inches ahead.\n\n[[I go to him. | Him]]\n

By the time I agree to search for my sister, Samara, my father is almost completely blind. His eyes scan the yard without landing on anything, not the scarlet cardinal, not the sapphire gazing ball, not my mother's irises, which still bloom indigo every year without her. His eyes don't linger on my face or my eyes. \n\n“What took you so long?” he accuses the socks flung patchwork on the clothesline. “Why on earth have you decided to help now?”\n\nWhatever happens, it is certain he will never see me, will never understand who I am. There, among the robins, the greatest failure of my life has come to pass.\n \n“Because of love,” I say, but he can't see how I address the dogwood, the pink so fierce it is painful, searing sharp and deep.\n \n“Well,” he says. “Just don't try to convince me we've lost her.”\n\n[[I begin with the photographs. | Photos]]\n[[I begin with the diaries. | Diaries]]\n

My father has never remodeled or repainted anything, not the avocado shag carpet, not the kitchen's peeling linoleum, certainly not the bathroom filled with warped wood and bubbled paint. Samara stared into the same mirror. Her eyes blinked among the faded collage of shower curtain, towels, and broken laundry hamper. \n\t\nWere we both tall enough to see the layer of dust that softened the top of the medicine cabinet? Could we both look through the window and into the neighbor's algae-colored pool? Perhaps the Samara in the mirror is the closest Samara, the most recognizable one.\n\t\nOut in the yard, my father cracks the croquet mallet, brandishes wickets while pushing past the peonies. “She always loved croquet! Loved it!” The lawn darts are warped, faded relics from the garage, and he flings them away from the lawn, over the chain-link, where they scrape and roll on the asphalt.\n\t\n“Our whole lives are contained in our childhoods!” he yells. “Even our deaths,” he tells the streetlight near the bus stop. “Especially our deaths.”\n\n[[I go to him. | Him]]\n

As I approach the purple curtain at the back of the arena, a cloaked figure steps onto the stage. An indigo hood drapes to cover its face, and it raises its hand as if for silence.\n\t\nMy father, of course, doesn't see or hear it. “Snake tongues,” he shouts, clapping his hands to get my attention. “I hear snake tongues from the back!” He struggles to stand, but he can't find his cane. “Are you looking?” he shouts. “Are you checking the back?”\n\t\nAlone in the auditorium, despite the waving and the shouting, he seems small and fragile, barely a child. Onstage, the figure drapes itself with snakes, tendrils of emerald and crimson scaling its arms and torso. The snakes' eyes flare gold and fiery, and the figure's coat glimmers with an arabesque lizard, the kind Samara used to draw as a child. The figure slithers and writhes, arches and seethes. I have only eyes, though, for my father, a pale face in the dark of the room. He waves at the ceiling, calls to the canvas, ignores the figure who ignores him in return.\n\t\n“I hear hissing,” my father shouts. “I know I hear hissing,” but his face is faded, like that of a ghost that doesn't know it is a ghost, yet, like a child not yet aware it's alone in the night.\n\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

The dark clouds deepen the shadows of the forest, the arc of the trees and the echo of the rain. The red raincoat flashes then disappears into shadow, a twisting trail of meandering paths.\n\t\nAs we push through the rhododendrons, the woman re-appears, her raincoat bright. Her dog has two eyes, but hobbles on three legs, and her eyes are a different, brighter blue.\n\t\nWe see her again as we're circling the duck pond. She's taller and thinner, with a hook to her nose. She's walking a cat, and it's missing one ear. “Hello,” she says, as if it's the first time.\n\t\nMy father says nothing, ignores the greetings. He stumbles forward, brushes the leaves. “Where are the sculptures?” he asks. “Where are the statues?” Drops of rain run down his face.\n\t\nEvery so often, I see two other figures among the trees, at the far end of the path: an old man in a blue coat, stumbling and flailing, a younger person who looks like me. At each turn, I expect to run into ourselves, older and thinner, versions molded by different lives. \n\t\n“Wherever you go,” my father says. “The world smells like you.”\n\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

Patrick has stopped painting, and now he is famous for his carvings: massive beasts constructed with chainsaws and logs. People come to the city just to watch him wield angry metal, to wander the paths of his wooden bestiary. His partner, Tomas, is a renowned horticulturist, a grafter of trees, a cross-pollinator and genetic wizard.\n\t\nThe bestiary blossoms with manufactured trees, blooms bright as stars, fragrance deep as memory. All the plants are infertile, once-in-a-lifetime creations, and they bend and sway among Patrick's creations, the mangled carcasses of the fallen.\n\t\n“If you're hunting Patrick,” says the sign at the gate, “just follow the sound of the chainsaw.”\n\t\nThe paths of the bestiary are made from scattered metal, screws and bolts pressed silver into the dirt. Creatures watch as my shoes clink on nails. Griffins and manticores snarl and paw.\n\t\nTomas meditates on a cushion between a grove of mulberry-cypress trees and a clump of citrus-scented cacti with spines bred to sink straight to the bone. The distant chainsaw drones, and wood splinters. A sign says, “Patrick always returns at dark.”\n\t\nAlongside the greenhouse sits a heap of the magical discarded wood, bred for its rainbow hues, misshapen creatures marred by mistakes. “Bonfire at dusk,” reads a sign by the fire pit, “watch our promotional materials while you wait.”\n\n[[I wander the bestiary. | Bestiary]]\n[[I watch promotional videos. | Promotion]]\n

The bus to the amusement park passes the theatre district, the gaudy pink lanterns festooning the signs like ancient Christmas lights. \n\t\n“Why not the Docklands?” my father asks, shifting to scan the lines of figures huddled for tickets. “The amusement park is borrowed time.” His elbow jams my ribcage. His hair smells like mint and bicarbonate of soda. “The hours are numbered. We must choose our expenditures carefully.”\n\t\nOnce through the toothless mouth of the laughing clown, though, I have to chase him through the shooting gallery, have to dig for change once he picks up the softballs and begins hurling. The man running the booth has muttonchops that tell the story of bygone days. Overhead the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel squeak to one another. Oil drips and puddles the sawdust. My father's throws careen into the racehorse game, splash a pond full of tottering rubber ducks.\n\t\n“You might try the East Promenade,” muttonchops says. “They've got games for the sightless, music for the deaf.”\n\t\n“I'm not deaf,” my father says, but the man just reaches for my dollar. \n\t\n“Used to work for the fortune teller,” he says as I examine the lizard painted on the wall behind him, lavender with an arabesque tail, next to a poster for Scylla's Snake Haven sideshow. \n\t\n“You know someone named Samara?” I ask, but he only offers paper tickets.\n\t\n“There's no sense,” he says, “looking for lost things at a carnival.”\n\n[[We visit the East Promenade | Promenade]]\n[[We visit Scylla's Snake Haven | Snakes]]\n

The city hosts the world's largest online graffiti archive, networks and forums filled with sightings and photographs. In the beginning, the city wanted to crack down, wanted to sandblast and re-paint, wanted every defense against spray paint and stencil.\n\t\n“We are watching,” the archive intended to imply. “We are watching you, and we are tracking.” For a time, there were rumors of “anti-taggers,” patrol forces summoned by secret cameras. Even the darkest alleys were thought to be protected by lasers, tripwire, and sirens. “Just try,” the archive says on its homepage. “Try to get away with vandalism.”\n\t\nNow, amid citywide heroin use and skyrocketing unemployment, the archive is the mayor's most embarrassing blemish, an over-told joke about how the richest years spawn the most useless initiatives. But even before that, the taggers scoffed, used the archive as a forum for their messages. Every drawing was a middle finger, a rallying cry to the oppressed. “Try, just try, to stop us.”\n\t\nTrojan was the most successful warrior, the flowered “J” scrawled and sprayed on fountains and skyscrapers. She tagged city hall in three different locations, tagged police and fire stations, public plazas and high school courtyards. The mayor claimed it could never be a single individual, was evidence of widespread legions of the unsavory. For my father, I've bookmarked every Trojan webpage, and still there are thousands, hundreds of new ones almost every day.\n\n[[I am so tired of searching for Samara. | Tired]]\n[[I am skilled at exploring the forums. | Forums]]\n

In Electronics, no one buys electronics. The wall of screens flashes a bright collage.\n\n<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/W4jUTWKy35Q" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>\n\n“So sad,” says a woman beside me on the balcony. “So sad how we waste our lives.”\n\t\nBut down below, people are laughing. They've never been happier than in this store.\n\n[[I watch another. | Another7]]\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

Samara disappeared two days after my seventh birthday, when she gave me two presents: a video game and a boat. For years, I believed she'd intended them as clues, a map I could follow, a way of saying: You are not abandoned. I might have given them to my parents, but instead I hoarded them, the video game with its flashing animals, the old-fashioned galley boat with its sails and rigging. My parents tried police stations and morgues, but I knew she was thriving, painting the city, building a life in the Docklands or Flashytown. I was certain she was turning into something, becoming someone she could only become without us.\n\t\nNow, on my houseboat, her gifts seem like hurried afterthoughts: an off-brand game with characters made to resemble syndicated ones, a dollar store boat with a cheap plastic anchor. They look like stolen presents, things she found at night, in dumpsters. Instead they say: I have already forgotten you.\n\t\nStill, though, maybe the oldest clues are the most appropriate. Samara loved the bustle and the color of Flashytown, the lapping water and creaking wood of the Docklands. When I moved to the docks, it was partly because the gulls made me think of her, imagine her transformation. If I've avoided Flashytown, it's for the same reason: the constant change, the constant evolution, a scared runaway becoming something unexpected. Who knows what we will find if we find her. Who knows the kind of creature she has become.\n\n[[Visit the Docklands. | Docklands]]\n[[Visit Flashytown. | Flashytown]]\n

The bullet train is fast, but goes only to Flashytown, an underground track that passes in a blur. Once the mayor thought that bullet trains were the future, that they'd connect the city in a network of speed. But when the Flashytown tunnel was complete, no one wanted another line. Instead the city invested in the trolley with its clanging bell, the taxis with their smiling yellow lights.\n\t\nI try to avoid Flashytown with its buildings of windowless steel and sparkling glass, surfaces for projections, advertisements, and images. A rock star hammers his guitar. A football player charges in slow motion. A soda glistens with condensation. Tonight, though, the district is dark, the skyscrapers flat planes of looming shadow. Nothing is darker than a defunct screen.\n\t\nPeople stand on the sidewalks, staring up at the stars, which are the brightest lights now in a sector that has never had a need for streetlights. \n\t\n“When will they change?” I hear a small voice say.\n\t\n“Any minute now,” an older voice answers.\n\t\nIt is too dark to tell who is rich and who is homeless. People walk shoulder-to-shoulder, tattered coat sleeves brushing Calvin Klein. I hear the plop of someone dropping a coin into another person's coffee. I follow the horde, everyone walking toward a distant green blur. I shoulder my way to the front, and see the green is an arabesque lizard, with a glow-in-the-dark tail and a sparkling glass eye.\n\t\nDown the block, I see another glow, and then another.\n\t\nA man grabs my arm from a doorway. “Inside, we have all the servers you need.”\n\n[[I follow the lizards. | Lizards2]]\n[[I follow the man. | Servers]]\n

/* Your story will use the CSS in this passage to style the page.\nGive this passage more tags, and it will only affect passages with those tags.\nExample selectors: */\n\nbody {\n\t/* This affects the entire page */\n\tbackground-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #7c71c1, #241f47)\n\t\n}\n#passages {\nbox-sizing: border-box;\npadding: 0 3%;\nmargin-top: 3%;\nalign: center;\n}\n.passage {\n\t/* This only affects passages */\nbackground-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\npadding: 2em;\nborder-radius: 1em;\nfont-family: Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, serif;\ncolor: black;\ntext-align: center;\n}\n.passage a {\n\t/* This affects passage links */\n\ttext-align: center;\n\tcolor: #191970;\n\tfont-size: 100%;\n}\n.passage a:hover {\n\t/* This affects links while the cursor is over them */\n\t\n\t\n}\ndiv.title {\nfont-size: 400%;\t\n}\n\ndiv.author {\nfont-size: 150%;\t\n\t\n}

In the beer tent, the servers don't smile. They heft massive tankards and fling them along worn wooden tables. Beer sloshes, foam flies. Up above, the accordion band pushes a frenetic tempo. Along the balcony, glass goblets reflect people's faces as they holler the words to the oldest songs. On the floor, we crunch peanut shells, duck out of drunk embraces, though my father pretends to recognize every swatch of skin he touches.\n\n“We once shared a taxi,” he tells a woman's left shoulder as she shrugs away from another man's embrace. “I'm almost eighty,” he tells her retreating flounce. “I never forget a face.”\n\n“Wait,” I say and he hurries through the crowd with instinctive finesse, but he ignores me, slips away. Eventually, I abandon nonchalance and run after him, frantic, as if he were a child, unaware of the shouts of “Old man, hey, old man!” tossed down from the balcony. \n\n“Be careful,” I say. “Take care,” but he's flirting with a support beam, raising his glass to a pile of worn coats. Up above, the singers fling garbled songs, their shadowed shoulders like vultures awaiting collapse.\n\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

The Docklands churn with people and cargo, pop-up markets of flopping fish and churning squid. In the food tent, the cook throws sardines, still flopping, into the deep fryer, until they're crisp enough to eat the fins. \n\t\nWhen I first moved to the docks, I ate nothing, not even the coffee, as thick and dark as leaking oil. Now, I crave the crunch of bones, the fatty hiss of a fried, unclouded eye. The bread is soft, the mustard whole-grain and sharp with horseradish.\n\t\n“What are they eating?” I hear a child ask as I bite in.\n\t\n“Death,” I growl without thinking, surprised at my voice, husky and cracked, like a sea captain who's come through too many mutinies. \n\t\nAnother sailor laughs, raises her glass. “To death,” she says, biting with wooden teeth. \n\t\nI look for the child, but they grow old so quickly here.\n\t\nLater, wandering the docks, I think of the fish, bones absorbed into my bloodstream, scales transformed into energy and motion. Years down the line, they will have their revenge, will come for me in diabetes, cholesterol, and hypertension. I won't mind. I have chosen them.\n\n[[My father will be waiting. | Waiting]]\n

People are rarely disinterested in a bakery. In the display cases, strawberries glisten atop of fruit pies. Frosted cupcakes bloom in every conceivable color. Rich chocolate cakes ooze ganache and whipped cream. Trays of baklava drip with syrup. Workers arrange donuts, thick with glaze and nuts. Cookies emerge from ovens, edges still sizzling, the chocolate melting.\n\t\nThe briefest cure for hopelessness is a visit to a bakery. Despair fades among éclairs and tiramisu. Misery pales when faced with indulgence.\n\t\nA woman frosts a carrot cake that bursts with nuts and raisins. The cream cheese icing drips and oozes.\n\t\nHow long since my father's house has smelled of sugar? I reach the counter just as the woman has finished piping the carrots along the edge. She tapes the box, ties a ribbon. Above, on the balcony, Torvin waves his sack of popcorn. \n\t\n“I'm buying his, too,” I say.\n\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

Torvin waits outside Fenton Jail. His briefcase gleams with polished leather.\n\t\n“I thought you would go to the shelter,” I say. \n\t\n“No one goes to the shelter,” he says. He buys two ice cream cones from the vendor, and together we consider the inmate database, the black and white photos with haunted eyes. The ice cream is the best I have ever eaten.\n\t\n“Don't look for Samara,” he says. “Look for your mother.”\n\t\nThe registers are filled with mothers, incarcerated women desperate for glimpses of the children who paw the waiting room vending machines, make faces into the mirrors of the one-way glass. So many of the inmates have eyes like my mother's, eyes watery with worry, mouths thin from years of lips pressed with anxiety.\n\t\n“Eighty percent of missing women have new families when we find them,” Torvin says. “Ninety percent have gone on with their lives.”\n\t\nMy mother took pains to leave nothing of herself behind. “I am a life,” she said. “Not a memory.”\n\t\nSomewhere my father, too, is doing last things: eating the last banana, pouring himself a last glass of water. He finishes his life by making the choices that remain to him. Sunlight or shade? Recliner or couch?\n\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

Before she died, my mother auctioned her belongings on eBay, sold every last thing under the pseudonym, Memory Killer, with an approval rating of 9.1.\n\nIn first grade, I approached her with the permission slip for the dairy farm field trip and found her posting photos of her favorite clothes, the floral-print dress with massive shoulder pads, the denim jacket, carefully ripped. “I am not a museum piece,” she said.\n\nAs she died, she wore only cotton slips and burlap dresses, burned it all the morning she donned the hospital gown for good. She made arrangements for cremation, had her ashes shipped to a second cousin removed whom she had never met, and who scattered the remains among the rusted cars of his scrapyard.\n\nWe were left with an outdated telephone book she may have used, a pair of unopened envelopes promising she'd won a sweepstakes. My father keeps a coffee mug that reads “World's Best Mother,” but it's so shiny and unused, it probably never belonged to her. The perennials she planted are the only real evidence of her. She dug and dug for the bulbs, but she couldn't pull out all of them. \n\nNow my father tromps through the beds, thinking he's on the path. He stomps the daffodils, decimates the hyacinths. “I've found the honeysuckle,” he shouts, clutching poison oak. “She said she'd leave nothing, but we don't control what we leave behind.”\n\nAlready the rash blooms on his hands, puffing his knuckles. “We all make a mark, even if we don't want to!” he yells at the paperboy, who forgets to throw the paper. “Even you,” he tells the mailbox. “Even you!”\n\n[[I go to him. | Him]]\n

Fifteen years at the Docklands, and still I don't know the layout of the marina, all the boats and wharves and planks and gangplanks. The water deposits debris and starfish at every piling. The mollusks shine beneath the surface in cancerous clusters.\n\t\nIt is impossible to wander the marina and not see myself, at twenty-five, touring the docks, ducking into houseboats with names like “Jack of All Trades,” and “Treats Objects Like Women.” I remember the youthful fears, the strange revulsions: the clicking of a beaded curtain, the garish yellow of a certain prow.\n\t\nGrowing old is a process of deadened emotions, swallowing fear and disgust until they become normal, like an embedded toenail. People die at the docks: monthly drownings, yearly stabbings, weekly inebriated fistfights turned lethal by the treachery of wires and pylons. In the beginning, a trip through the Docklands set my chest aching, my breath ragged. Now, though, my heart is always tight. \n\t\n“Aging,” I say, and a sailor turns to glare with his remaining eye. His boat's name is “Trojan” with a flowered “J.” Samara disappeared too early. Her memory is too young, too vibrant, too saturated with jealousy and inadequacy. How would I stand it if I found her?\n\n[[I talk to the sailor. | Sailor]]\n[[I continue on. | Continue]]\n

The most dangerous supermarket has too many concerns to worry about products. The cans are still wrapped in crumbling labels, brittle reminders of fonts and colors preferred by advertisers of decades past. Defunct brands of pickles darken and sharpen under layers of dust. Boxes of mixes call for products no longer available: Melt-o-meal, Wholesalt, Sunset Oil. Rusting carts half-filled with abandoned products sit forgotten in the aisles, eerie memorials to vanished consumers.\n\t\nThe loudspeakers play songs I remember, doo-wops and crooners, nothing newer than 1960, and I follow my mother's old path without thinking: bananas, bread, two percent, paper towels, the aisle where Samara always begged for marshmallow cereal, the one where she once pocketed a chocolate bar, the pet aisle where I always asked for a dog.\n\t\n“We'll see,” my mother says, her voice as raspy as the wheels of a shopping cart. “Ask your father.”\n\t\n“I need pencils,” Samara says, “for school tomorrow.” Her voice drifts past the vinegars and mustards like a graveyard wind.\n\t\nThe aisles are empty, wide, with careful rows of ordered packages, but something moves in the neighboring aisle, something massive and weighty, dragging and creaking. Something oozes like a gutted snake. Something smells heavy, like decaying leaves. At each turn, I expect to see it, giant and shapeless, tendrils wrapped around some elderly shopper. The aisles are empty, though, except for abandoned carts. Footsteps shake the floor. The smell hangs, thick and pungent.\n\t\n“There's a reason, you know,” my mother whispers from the afterlife. “A reason we stopped shopping here.”\n\t\nArial, Unicorn Killer, pushes through the automatic doors. “You look like your sister,” she says. “A little smaller, a little less brave.” She has wide, flat hands, good for crushing, but I hurry from the approaching darkness and have no time to compliment her. \n\n[[My father will be waiting. | Waiting]]\n

The city's benches want things. They smile and cajole, promise the impossible. “Live wrinkle-free!” says Hannah Gorman, spokesperson for Beauty at Any Age. “Gain ten pounds in one week! Pure muscle only!” says Victor Denos, former fight-night semi-finalist. Near the overgrown overlook, Torvin Henders peers out from a garland of ivy. Beneath the leaves, his eyes don't match his smile. “I Can Find Any Missing Person,” the backrest says. “Using Any Means Necessary!” The bulge in his pocket might be a notepad or a sachet of poison. He responds to my text immediately, as if he's been waiting.\n\t\n“Sisters are my specialty,” he writes. “Results or your money back.”\n\t\n“What kind of results?” I write. “What do you mean by specialty?”\n\t\n“Are you paying?” he responds. “Or are you giving up on your family?” He doesn't wait for an answer. “I need intel on your sister. How old? What size bra cup? On a date does she prefer music or dinner?”\n\t\n“My father is dying. She's my only remaining family.”\n\t\n“I'm sorry for your loss,” he writes, “but I really need to know her measurements. Would you describe her as athletic? Fit?” \n\t\n“Never mind,” I write. “I shouldn't have contacted you.”\n\t\n“Don't get bent out of shape,” he writes. “The end of a family line needs to have a sense of humor.”\n\n[[I meet him at Theatre of the Living. | Theatre]]\n[[I meet him at Sapphire International Buffet. | Sapphire]]\n

I walk with the rest of the shadows, all following the green glow of the lizards, which beckon, distant, from shadows, shapes and planes rendered unrecognizable in the darkness.\n\t\n“What is it advertising?” One voice wants to know.\n\t\n“The future,” another one says.\n\t\nAll too soon, people remember their cell phones. As they turn on their flashlights, fire hydrants and mailboxes emerge in startling silver, a glowing haze illuminating everything. The homeless and technology-resistant are recognized by their darkness, their unwillingness or inability to contribute to the cause. They are elbowed aside, pushed into alcoves and stairwells. People pause to check their messages and watch funny videos. Tinny music is punctuated by loud bursts of raucous laugher. Soon, only a few remember the lizards, the perches suddenly revealed as bus stops and newspaper dispensers. \n\t\n“A new energy drink,” a voice says. “An upcoming album.”\n\t\nWithin minutes the sandblasters have arrived to scrub. The blank eyes of their masks reflect the glow of the tiny screens like a million pupils.\n\n[[My father will be waiting. | Waiting]]\n

“She may be gone,” I say. “It's possible we're looking for a ghost.”\n\n<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/72393215?color=ffffff&portrait=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>\n<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/72393215">Modern Ruin: Black Hole</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/frostjeff">Jeff Frost</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>\n\nHe holds the speaker to his ear and narrows his eyes. “As a child, I could never have imagined a world where you could play “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at any time.\n\t\n“We should prepare ourselves,” I say. “It's a possibility.”\n\t\nBut he's singing along with an old memory. “Truth is marching. Truth is marching.”\n\n[[I try another. | Another4]]\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

I remember so little about Samara: her bright yellow bedspread, the blue streak in her hair, her preference for unusual nicknames. Was she one for speaking? One for sending her thoughts unprotected into the air?\n\t\nThe blogs are wastelands of discarded ambitions, completed travels, lifestyle changes abandoned, children grown beyond photogenic range. Samara could have adopted any online presence. “Notes from a Vegan Prairie Runner.” “Reflections of a Wool-Weaver.” “Evangelical Recipes for the Gluten-Free.”\n\t\nWho was Samara when she wasn't being everyone? Did she ever pretend to be me?\n\n[[I consider myself. | Me]]\n[[Distraction is the best cure. | Distraction]]\n

“To think,” my father says as I guide him across Great General's Bridge, “a lifetime spent in the city, and I've never visited the military gardens. I've never even seen the entrance.”\n\t\n“I've been,” I say. “As a child on a fieldtrip.” But now that I think of it, did I go on that fieldtrip? I remember rain, a fever, a nurse's office with walls the color of faded khaki.\n\t\n“That's every father's dream,” he says, “ to send his children to the summits he's imagined, to watch them crash through doors that have been barricaded his whole life.”\n\t\nA quiet rain pockmarks the river. A bargeman in a poncho raises his hand. The signposts for the sculpture garden seem tilted and askew, pointing the way from twisted posts. The neighborhood streets weave with narrow lanes and tiny cottages, vibrant lawns with lilacs and gap-toothed llamas.\n\t\n“That house has a llama,” I say. When I lean to inspect the scrollwork of the fence, I notice graffiti, the word “Trojan” with its flowered “J.” I turn to tell my father, but he's a whole block ahead, wrestling with a leaning cemetery gate.\n\t\n“Trojan was here,” I say, but he's tugging at chain-link, pressing his cheek to the wet metal.\n\t\n“If no one has been to the sculpture garden,” he asks a tub of pansies, “how can we know if it exists?”\n\n[[I follow through the cemetery. | Cemetery]]\n[[I pull him away toward the forest. | Forest]]\n

/* Your story will use the CSS in this passage to style the page.\nGive this passage more tags, and it will only affect passages with those tags.\nExample selectors: */\n\nbody {\n\t/* This affects the entire page */\nbackground-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #49127c, #08020d);\t\n\t\n}\n\n#passages {\nbox-sizing:border-box;\npadding: 0 3%;\nmargin-top: 3%;\n} \n\n.passage {\nbackground-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nborder-radius: 1em;\nborder-style: solid;\nborder-width: 0px; \nborder-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nwidth: 75%;\nfont-family: Garamond, Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, serif;\nfont-color: black;\t/* This only affects passages */\nmargin: 0px;\npadding: 2em;\t/* This only affects passages */\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a {\n\t/* This affects passage links */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a:hover {\n\t/* This affects links while the cursor is over them */\n\t\n\t\n}

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/* Your story will use the CSS in this passage to style the page.\nGive this passage more tags, and it will only affect passages with those tags.\nExample selectors: */\n\nbody {\nbackground-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #330099, #390e60);\t/* This affects the entire page */\n\t\n}\n\n#passages {\nbox-sizing:border-box;\npadding: 0 3%;\nmargin-top: 3%;\n} \n\n.passage {\nbackground-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nborder-radius: 1em;\nborder-style: solid;\nborder-width: 0px; \nborder-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nwidth: 75%;\nfont-family: Garamond, Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, serif;\nfont-color: black;\t/* This only affects passages */\nmargin: 0px;\npadding: 2em;\t/* This only affects passages */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a {\n\t/* This affects passage links */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a:hover {\n\t/* This affects links while the cursor is over them */\n\t\n\t\n}

The tobacconist's is cramped and clogged with smoke from the speakeasy, a yellow haze that matches the walls. I shove my hands into my pockets and consider the pipe display.\n\t\n“Interested in anything particular?” asks the clerk, lips hidden under a handlebar moustache.\n\t\n“I've decided to take up smoking,” I say.\n\t\nOutside, things clatter over the sidewalk. In the days of the anti-graffiti initiative, there were rumors of robots, of machines on patrol. I hear the scratch of metal on stone, the grinding of gears, but I don't look through the shop window. I pretend that I hear nothing.\n\t\n“This one's a beauty.” The clerk pulls a pipe from a tortoiseshell box.\n\t\nLaughter, as the door to the speakeasy bangs against the wall, and for a moment the shop fills with raucous roaring, the tinkle of an out-of-tune piano. A woman with earrings like tiny blue birds lurches against her partner, a man in a green pinstriped suit. She looks down to regain her footing, and I recognize her teeth, recognize her mouth, which is a younger version of our father's.\n\t\n“Samara,” I say, stepping forward to touch her. “We've been looking all over.” I wait for recognition to seep into her eyes.\n\t\n“How cute,” she says, smiling at the tinge on my hands. “You're painting. I did that as a child.”\n\t\n“Our father is dying,” I say. \n\t\nShe shrugs out of my grasp, pats my hand. “Paint-covered hands are a beginner's mistake,” she says. “All the experts wear gloves.”\n\t\nThe bell over the door rings as they push out into the street, where the streetlights flash against angry metal.\n\t\n“Who's that?” the man asks her.\n\t\n“History,” she says, as the door falls shut behind them.\n\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

“I'm seeing a man about a haul,” the sailor says, leaving the boat quickly, without looking back. I follow him into a video bar in a creaky old barge, docked for so long that the mollusks attach it to the pier. Video screens are inset into the wooden bar, and the copper mugs dance with reflected images.\n\n<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HGNmTZlGNl4" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>\n\n“How long have you owned the “Trojan?” I ask the sailor, who glares twice as well with his working eye.\n\t\n“The “Toe Jam?” he asks. “It used to be “Tarzan” until someone played a prank.”\n\n[[I buy a round. | Round]]\n[[My father will be waiting. | Waiting]]\n

I drop the bag, letting the paint cans roll into the gutter, race past the mortuary, duck under the tracks of the elevated train. I pass the bar with its one withdrawn bouncer, pass a burning car and a bus with a “Not in Service” placard.\n\t\nThe sound of pursuers clatters and echoes. Paint cans clang, and dogs growl and bark. I pass prostitutes shivering in tube tops, pass the drug dealers' cars with their thumping bass.\n\t\n“Don't run,” someone calls. “Draws them like zombies.” The train passes above, and the sparks rain down.\n\t \nI lean against a vending machine, but no one is coming. My shallow breathing slows and deepens. In a far-off dive bar, a banjo plays. Officers on drug patrol wait on street corners, sit on church pews donated for their comfort. A helicopter sweeps its searchlight and finds nothing.\n\t\nThe alleys are filled with burglars and kidnappers. People in masks dip their chins in greeting. As a child, I worried about muggings and theft, but now with the sounds of the police approaching, a woman grabs my shoulders, presses me against a wall. \n\t\n“My friend's had too many,” she says, but the police aren't even listening. They're dragging my bag, rattling my paint. At the far end of the alley, a teenage girl sprays “Trojan” on the wall. The ink is the color of cherry-flavored cake.\n\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

For a week, my father is greedy for noises, slamming doors and blaring radios. Then, he hears only the sounds inside his head. When I touch his shoulder, he whirls with the remote control, slaps a black bruise on my wrist.\n\t\n“BEGONE DEATH.” He speaks now only in the loudest register. “I AM NOT READY.”\n\t\nI take the remote and mute the television.\n\t\nHe takes my wrists. “CHILD, ARE YOU MY DEATH?”\n\t\n“No,” I say. “Not as far as I know.”\n\t\nHe spends his days sniffing my mother's irises, as if the garden could tell him what is coming. \n\t\n“I ALWAYS MEANT TO ASK HER,” he says. “WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEATH AND A PROTECTIVE ANGEL?”\n\t\n“It's in the eyes,” I say, though he won't hear me. “She always said you could tell by the eyes.” I touch his eyelids, and he smiles in recognition.\n\t\n“IT'S TRUE,” he says. “YOU'LL RECOGNIZE SAMARA BY HER EYES.” He touches my face. “BE CAREFUL. ONE DEATH LEADS TO ANOTHER.”\n\t\nHe won't hear me if I say it, but if one death leads to another, it is only in the way absence leads always to searching. An entire life lost in the hunt for the past.\n\n[[I look for Samara's old friends. | Friends]]\n[[I visit Samara's old haunts. | Haunts]]\n

/* Your story will use the CSS in this passage to style the page.\nGive this passage more tags, and it will only affect passages with those tags.\nExample selectors: */\n\nbody {\nbackground-color: #330099;\t/* This affects the entire page */\n\t\n\t\n}\n#passages {\nbox-sizing:border-box;\npadding: 0 3%;\nmargin-top: 3%;\n\n}\n\n.passage {\nbackground-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nborder-radius: 1em;\nborder-style: solid;\nborder-width: 0px; \nborder-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nwidth: 75%;\nfont-family: Garamond, Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, serif;\nfont-color: black;\t/* This only affects passages */\nmargin: 0px;\npadding: 2em;\t/* This only affects passages */\n\t\n}\n.passage a {\n\t/* This affects passage links */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a:hover {\n\t/* This affects links while the cursor is over them */\n\t\n\t\n}

I follow a path of old spark plugs through a grove of espaliered strawberry trees, the berries as large and heavy as apples. “Careful,” the signs say. “Modified agriculture has not been tested for safety.” Deformed wooden deer lie scattered and splintered under the branches. The chainsaw drones like a lawnmower, like something drowsy and familiar from childhood.\n\t\nSatyrs with curved horns and cloven feet perch on walls made of engine blocks. Their eyes glitter with inlaid rubies. A thin trail of screwdrivers, arranged handle to end, leads to a dark thicket, a tall stand of zebra bushes tangled with thorns and rose-berries. “Grove of the Unicorn Killer,” the sign reads.\n\t\nUnder leaves black as obsidian, two carved women struggle, one with a horn, the other clutching an axe. One woman carved from ruby wood lunges at the other, made from wood deep as indigo. The ruby woman opens the unicorn woman with her axe, even as the horn spears her throat. Nearby, a man carved from pale pinewood paints a mosaic of broken glass. Both the painter and the painting are beautiful. A flowered word “Trojan” is sprayed across the landscape, and painted lizards watch from the trees. The painter notices nothing, not even the women, who bleed chunks of red glass he could use in his painting.\n\t\n“The bestiary is now closed,” a voice calls over the loudspeaker. “Visitors who do not exit, accept the risks. Gates are closing now.” The voice blares, and the satyr's faces writhe in the gathering shadows.\n\n[[My father will be waiting. | Waiting]]\n

The Trojan forums are filled with people claiming to be Trojan, aching teens that would have been babies at the time of the first city hall tag on the pristine white shutters of the mayor's favorite window. There are middle-aged men, divorced, estranged from their children, who paint flowers at night in their studio apartments, practice on the boxes filled with remnants of destroyed lives. There are college students sneaking out of their dorm rooms, looking for any relief from the tedium. There are ex-convicts who've practiced in jail, perfected their “Trojan's" on county-issued stationary. There are desperate shop owners who've tagged their own windows in hopes the publicity might bring in more business.\n\t\nThe forums bristle with anger and derision. “Who is the real Trojan?” Pathogenesis asks. “A world full of fakers,” Taemoon replies. “I am the real Trojan,” writes TrojanTheRealTrojan.\n\t\n“But I am the real Trojan,” I write under the code name Samara3.\n\t\n“There is no real Trojan,” Samara4 replies.\n\t\nOutside, in the garden, my father can't find the handle of the water spigot. He stands in the flowerbed in his tattered blue coat.\n\t\n“I've given my life,” he calls through the window. “I've given vitality. Given every one of the very best years.” The mud splashes his shoes. “What have my children ever given me? What have I ever gotten in return?”\n\n[[I go to him. | Him]]\n

This is my city, and I visit the places I love, the places of my past: the brewery district, Cathedral Alley, the rainbow fountain, the fish tank windows of The Cavalier's Café. I cover flowered “J's” and arabesque lizards, climb fire escapes and rotting ladders. The places of childhood are dim and faded. The places I love, shuttered and abandoned. Quickly, I overwrite every favorite memory with every decaying truth.\n\t\nThis is Samara's city, and I trawl the textile warehouses, the sagging children's museum, the ruins of the zoo where the last panda was born. The arabesque lizards become my lizards. Every image I find, I mark with my name.\n\t\nThis is my father's city, and his places now are grassy lots and reclaimed buildings. His boyhood apartment is razed to the ground. I tag oil barrels and shelters, paint the burned husks of all the sites of tragedy. Even the benches and bus stops no longer remember him.\n\t\nNear a convenience store, where the windows glow with soda fountains and day-old donuts, I see another sprayer, holding a can the color of a circus balloon. An arabesque lizard appears line by line on the husk of a pay phone. I race across dirt, across potholes and broken bottles, grab at the shoulder, spin it around.\n\t\n“What?” says a bearded man with ice-blue eyes. His can sprays a thin haze into the air. “What?” he says. “ You crazy weirdo.”\n\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

The woman's hands guide the faces around her, brushing people's chins, adjusting her skirt. Her clothing flickers as the screens change. Around her, people drop to their knees to look. She touches my cheek with long fingernail, her eyes the deepest I have seen.\n\n<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V9BQbA93agI" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>\n\nThe courtyard smells suddenly like my father, like peppermint and cedar. She touches my face to adjust my gaze.\n\n[[I watch another. | Another6]]\n[[I hurry home. | Hurry]]\n

The stalls for the food and curio vendors all tilt and tremble on the verge of collapse. The vendors are gaunt, emaciated, with skeletal faces and deep, hollow eyes. They offer corn dogs and funnel cakes as dried and desiccated as their fingers. The smells hover, sharp and pungent, sweet as rot.\n\n“Try us,” the curio vendors say, offering rabbit's feet speckled with blood, dream catchers crisp with the remains of dead spiders. “A bit of luck,” calls the one with the eye patch, holding a dried green clot in the palm of his hand. “Some future for your trouble.”\n\t\n“My oldest,” my father says, holding out both hands. “Tell me the truth of what's happened to my daughter.”\n\t\nI've always thought my father gaunt and thin, but the hands that reach for his are gaunter and thinner still. I pull him back, but already a man with a missing nose pours colored orbs into his palm, red, pink, and yellow, as shriveled as dried fish eyes.\n\t\nMy father tosses them into his mouth, covers his eyes, awaiting a vision. I wait for him to hack and collapse.\n\t\n“A good batch,” the candy vendor says, offering a sample of rubbery taffy. “He might like this, too.”\n\t\n“I taste great sadness,” my father says. \n\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

/* Your story will use the CSS in this passage to style the page.\nGive this passage more tags, and it will only affect passages with those tags.\nExample selectors: */\n\nbody {\nbackground-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #0981aa, #28007a);\t/* This affects the entire page */\n\t\n\t\n}\n#passages {\nbox-sizing:border-box;\npadding: 0 3%;\nmargin-top: 3%;\n} \n.passage {\nbackground-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nborder-radius: 1em;\nborder-style: solid;\nborder-width: 0px; \nborder-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nwidth: 75%;\nfont-family: Garamond, Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, serif;\nfont-color: black;\t/* This only affects passages */\nmargin: 0px;\npadding: 2em;\t/* This only affects passages */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a {\n\t/* This affects passage links */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a:hover {\n\t/* This affects links while the cursor is over them */\n\t\n\t\n}

Sapphire International Buffet is out on the edge of the city, ten blocks past the furthest metro station. I turn the corner and find a burned husk where it used to sit, in a charred, vacant lot, the scorched remains of half a wall. A man waves from the fire pit, where a woman with a checkered headscarf scoops beans into a bowl.\n\t\n“We've been waiting for you,” Torvin says, and the woman offers a tin spoon. “There's nothing more desolate than the end of the line.” By firelight, his features change. His nose bulges and thins. His eyebrows narrow and thicken. “Eat,” he says, and the beans taste like my mother's from years ago.\n\t\n“How do you know she hasn't left the city?” Torvin asks. Beyond him, in the trees, fireflies rise and cluster. My father will never see fireflies again.\n\t\n“No one leaves the city,” I say.\n\t\n“We should divide the work. Save you some money,” he says. “Someone take the shelters; someone visit Fenton Jail.” He puts down his bowl, shakes the woman's hand. “My client will pay,” he tells her. “Just send me a message when you decide.” He heads away from the metro, into the trees.\n\t\n“What does it come to?” I ask, digging for my wallet.\n\t\n“Just one,” she says. “One year of your life.”\n\n[[I check the shelters. | Shelters]]\n[[I visit the jail. | Jail]]\n

Before I moved to the Docklands, I remember seeing lizards each week at the market, a turquoise gleam in the hollow of the arcade above the fig and date vendor, the jewel of its red eye the same gleam as the grapes. The streetcar stops at the fountain, where the statues huddle and shrug into themselves, suspicious of the water, still dyed green from St. Patrick's Day. Rain falls as I wander the alleyway, examining the ghostly advertisements on the painted brickwork. “Clothes pressed while you wait. One bundle, twenty-five cents.” \n\t\nThe market, too, is only hauntings, holes that once supported posts, the faint scent of rotting apples. The lizard still curls among the rusting grates. My father suspects Samara because of its tail, an arabesque that matches a cat she once drew in school.\n\t\nThe shadows shift, and a man steps out of a doorway. “A lizard follower,” he says. “I thought we'd seen the last of them.”\n\t\n“Are there other lizards? Other places in the city?”\n\t\n“I'm not sure about lizards,” he says, offering a map. His golden eyes are the color of honey. “But there are people like you everywhere.”\n\n[[I consider the map. | Map]]\n[[I go my own way. | Own way]]\n

I buy my own spray paint, collect my own sharpies, gather everything together into a backpack and a canvas bag. I practice in the basement among the ruins, the boxes and remnants of a family at its end. I dig for threadbare sheets, decorated with old cartoon characters, string them up in front of cartons of Christmas ornaments, the artificial white tree with its broken blue lights. How long has it been since we celebrated a holiday?\n\t\nThey said Samara was gifted, but I practice the arabesque lizards, practice Trojan's flowering “J.” The nozzles rub my fingers raw. The smell of the markers brings on visions. I see the four of us in a canoe, arguing over paddles, tangling our lines around each other's fishing poles. At the campfire, I sulked over the unfairness of Samara. Our father drifted to the shore with his headphones. Our mother went on solitary walks that lasted for hours. On the way home, we rolled our eyes and slouched, waited for a freedom that never quite came.\n\t\nBy the end, I make the lizards almost perfectly. I flower the “J” with a practiced hand. Then I design my own bird, lopsided, but vivid, with a drooping beak that longs for spring. It perches on the flowering signature, takes the lizards in its mouth. The bird cocks its head like an endangered species, with no nest, no mate, only the faint hope of hearing the song of one of its own.\n\n[[I start with buildings. | Buildings]]\n[[I start with overpasses. | Overpasses]]\n

/* Your story will use the CSS in this passage to style the page.\nGive this passage more tags, and it will only affect passages with those tags.\nExample selectors: */\n\nbody {\n\t/* This affects the entire page */\nbackground-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(left, #ccffff, #076585);\t\n\t\n}\n#passages {\nbox-sizing:border-box;\npadding: 0 3%;\nmargin-top: 3%;\n\n}\n.passage {\nbackground-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nborder-radius: 1em;\nborder-style: solid;\nborder-width: 0px; \nborder-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nwidth: 75%;\nfont-family: Garamond, Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, serif;\nfont-color: black;\t/* This only affects passages */\nmargin: 0px;\npadding: 2em;\n\t\n}\n.passage a {\n\t/* This affects passage links */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a:hover {\n\t/* This affects links while the cursor is over them */\n\t\n\t\n}

Arial, Unicorn Killer, manages a deli in the most dangerous supermarket. Out front, the coin-operated horse and the wide-eyed frog huddle, relics from my childhood. A woman holds a tiny child on the frog as it tips and tilts with a mechanical groaning, the red light of its eye flashing over the dilapidated cars slouched in the parking lot. A shivering girl clutches a switchblade at the bus stop. The automatic doors whir and rattle, opening to an entryway filled with fabricated smells. The child's cries of terror drone flat and repetitive.\n\t\n“Arial goes by Rex, now,” the meat slicer says, touching the counter with crinkling gloves. “She'll be in at midnight to start the week's grinding.” She hands me a napkin with something gray and shapeless. “A sample,” she says.\n\t\nThe display case is filled with the Jell-O salads of childhood, wobbling green threaded with carrots, muted pink clotted with white. I remember how the women lined at the counter, my mother pushing through in search of something for dinner. Samara liked the pineapple pieces the best, the bleeding red of maraschino cherries. Now the edges of the salads are yellow and crusted, suggesting long purgatories under cellophane in the walk-in. I hold the sample like a relic from the past. I can't tell if it's starch or meat.\n\t\n“Our specialty,” the woman says, hefting a cube of ham for a man hunched over a walker. She grins with brassy teeth. “Just eat it,” she says.\n\t\nI remember Samara, always taller, always first, pushing past me to the counter, tilting her head back, opening her mouth. As a child, I would've known, right away, if it were poison.\n\n[[I wander the aisles. | Aisles]]\n[[I wait outside. | Outside]]\n

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/202117902" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>\n<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/202117902">Maple & Beech - "Cavers" (Official Lyric Video)</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/mapleandbeech">Maple & Beech</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>\n\nHe can't see, but I turn up the volume.\n\n“Anecdotal,” he says. “Pure circumstance.”\n\n[[I play another. | Another3]]\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

By the end of the month, my father's voice has withered to a whisper. The shouting has ravaged his vocal chords, and there's no going back. His body, too, thins to gauntness, hollows under eyes that no longer focus, drooping earlobes amplifying nothing. I fill the room with his favorite smells, homemade applesauce that he complains tastes metallic, laundered shirts that billow around his shoulders. He sits in the reverberations of the glowing space heater, rocks in the chair his own father died in. He fingers pine cones and sea glass, spends hours rubbing the grooves in the vinyl of his boyhood, fingers the wound strings in a guitar so out of tune, even the birds fly away when he plays.\n\t\nI lean close when he tugs at my sleeve. He touches the knobs of my wrists, the swell of my knuckles. “I know it's you,” he whispers, pulling my ear to his lips. “Recognize you by the smell of the sea.” His voice cracks, soft as the wind through crabgrass, the sound of pain as deep as a heartbeat.\n\t\nHe's so light now, I could lift him, could carry him through the house the way he once carried us, hefted us on the nights we refused to climb the stairs to bed. \n\t\n“Tell her,” he says, in his loudest whisper. I press a finger to his mouth, feel the chap of his lips, but he brushes me away. “Tell her regret is the only evidence of life.”\n\t\n“Tell her yourself,” I try to say in the way my fingers press the flesh of his palm. “Tell her yourself,” I say in the smell of roasting beef, too tough, too stringy now for him to chew.\n\n[[I resort to letters. | Letters]]\n[[I resort to pictures. | Pictures]]\n

My father believes darkness keeps the blindness at bay, and I've never known his bedroom to see the sun. At night, the wood has the same hollows as at mid-afternoon, and faded ovals suggest faded sepia photos, inscrutable both by day and by night. The room is full of boring things: tissues and tie tacks, vaguely patterned neckties, the same pair of shoes in slightly different shades. \n\t\nI slide aside a stack of faded boxer-briefs, and “The Most Boring Things” rests in a plastic sleeve under a layer of transparent undershirts.\n\t\n“I've never believed in angels,” Samara writes in the very last entry. “No matter how many times my mother assures me they exist.” She's written in a green ink pen, and her handwriting spikes and points like the tips of newly mown grass. The city in her descriptions is thick with pastels and new plaster, murals dazzling with colored glass. “It is,” she writes, “the best, most vibrant city.” Our parents, too, are unrecognizable. “My mother sings and bakes yeast breads.” Of our father she says, “He sees me more clearly than any other person. He knows exactly who I am.” \n\t\nI've watched my father finger the lines, wishing for braille. “She felt unseen and unloved,” he's said.\n\n[[I consider the remnants of my mother. | Mother]]\n[[I offer my father reassurance. | Reassurance]]\n

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Hilde the Green Ninja teaches mathematics at Hilltop Middle School, perched on a hill in the middle of a swamp. At the base of the hill, houses lean and tilt, streets buckle, water seeps. The mayor's council is working on rehabilitation, but each year this sector sinks another inch. The students barely look up when I come in. They scribble at worksheets, punch at calculators.\n\t\n“Imagine,” Hilde says to me out in the hallway, “A whole generation kept sleepless by nightmares of being swallowed by mud.”\n\t\nThe middle school is dimmer than I remember, the halls dank with the smell of blooming mold. \n\t\n“You look old,” Hilde says. “You look tired and old.”\n\t\n“Samara will look even older. Have you seen her?”\n\t\n“Does anyone ever see Samara?” Hilde checks her watch, scribbles on the cover of her grade book. “She's probably here right now.”\n\t\n“Like a ghost?” I say.\n\t\n“Like a memory.”\n\t\n“Our father is dying. He has last words.”\n\t\n“We all have last words.” A bell rings, flat and brittle. The students file into the hallway, the carpet squelching under their shoes. “You could try the others,” she says. “Arial or Patrick.”\n\t\nA boy tugs the hem of Hilde's blazer. He points at me. “Is that the magician?”\n\t\n“In a way,” she says.\n\n[[Arial, Unicorn Killer | Arial]]\n[[Patrick the Most Beautiful Painter | Patrick]]\n

“The military garden must be in the forest,” I say, taking his hand to help him avoid the rotting planks in the footbridge, and wondering if were are the first, the only members of our family to stop on this tanbark, whether any of us have ever before examined the striated green of these ancient pines.\n\t\n“Nothing good ever comes of a forest,” my father says, whacking a tree with his cane and sending the bark flying.\n\t\nA woman in a red raincoat leads a one-eyed dog on a leash. “Hello,” she says, but my father ignores her.\n\t\n“There's that poem about how the world would end,” my father says. “You know, fire or ice?”\n\t\n“I've always thought darkness,” I say. “Although that probably means ice.”\n\t\n“Mosquitos,” my father says, stumbling over roots. “He didn't mention them.”\n\n[[We wander the tree houses. | Trees]]\n[[We follow the woman in the raincoat. | Raincoat]]\n

Weeping Fountain\n\nIt's too cold, still, for the Weeping Fountain, whose spigots are all silent cylinders of metal. The rain dots the pool, pecks at the angels. My mother believed that angels followed us, that we go through our lives with their hands on our backs.\n\t\n“When we approach death, it becomes easier to see them,” she said. “You'll see them watching you, ushering you to the next realm.”\n\t\nMy childhood was a constant terror of strangers, the unknown people at subway stops and newsstands. Anyone could be an angel, any hand on my shoulder, a summons to the afterlife.\n\t\n“Being a parent is one of the great wonders,” my father says. “Imagine bringing people into the world, raising them, teaching them. Then one day they lead you to places you've only dreamed about.” He trails his hand in the water while the angels cry around him, wings flung over faces, cloaks dangling in water.\n\t\n“Here I am,” he says, touching a flaming sword, a massive sandal. “Here I am finally, among our greatest warriors.”\n\n[[I take him home. | Home]]\n

/* Your story will use the CSS in this passage to style the page.\nGive this passage more tags, and it will only affect passages with those tags.\nExample selectors: */\n\nbody {\nbackground-color: #49127c;\t/* This affects the entire page */\n\t\n\t\n}\n\n#passages {\nbox-sizing:border-box;\npadding: 0 3%;\nmargin-top: 3%;\n}\n\n.passage {\nbackground-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nborder-radius: 1em;\nborder-style: solid;\nborder-width: 0px; \nborder-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.85);\nwidth: 75%;\nfont-family: Garamond, Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, serif;\nfont-color: black;\t/* This only affects passages */\nmargin: 0px;\npadding: 2em;\t/* This only affects passages */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a {\n\t/* This affects passage links */\n\t\n\t\n}\n.passage a:hover {\n\t/* This affects links while the cursor is over them */\n\t\n\t\n}

The Theatre of the Living is a box department store with a balcony, a ring of seats around the outside walls. “Watch life while living life!” the slogan goes. Patrons can choose to complete their shopping or to climb the stairs to the plush chairs, buy a popcorn, settle in. Will that man buy generic or name brand? Will the mother give in and a buy a hamster for her son? Will the old couple choose to wait for their prescriptions or to come back later?”\n\t\nTorvin has chosen a seat near Home Furnishings. “Women love throw pillows,” he says. It's only a matter of time.”\n\t\n“I don't think Samara shops here,” I say.\n\t\n“Everyone shops here.” Torvin rattles his Raisinets.\n\t\nA family wanders through automotive wares. The father wants to buy everything, but the mother reins him in. The older child pushes the cart and reads from the list. The younger one hangs back, testing to see how far the distance can grow before the family notices. The parents round a corner, begin another aisle. Everyone looks bored. This is nothing special.\n\t\n“Your life is happening,” I could yell to them. “It's really happening.”\n\t\nTorvin slurps his soda, clamps my arm. “What'll it be, my friend?”\n\n[[I observe the bakery. | Bakery]]\n[[I visit electronics. | Electronics]]\n

The flowers on sale outside the store have either died or not yet bloomed, spiky twigs in cellophane-wrapped pots. There are lawn scarecrows with the dried faces of dehydrated apples, welcome mats already muddied by strangers' shoes. The empty bus waits by the empty bus stop, its lights hazing the air a ghostly blue. Distant gunshots pop like fireworks. Sunset burns the sky ultraviolet and orange.\n\t\nArial, Unicorn Killer, drives a blue Saturn with a white driver's side door. Her gray hair twists into whorls like cobwebs. “You need help?” she asks, and then looks closely. “Of course you do.”\n\t\n“Our father is dying. I'm looking for Samara.”\n\t\nArial nods, holds her blue purse with powerful hands. “When they asked in fifth grade what we wanted to be, Samara said 'invisible.'”\n\t\n“He's frantic,” I say. “Losing his mind.”\n\t\nArial's key opens a metal door painted the same gray as the store. Inside is a tiny blue room rowed with time cards. “Death is like a chasm,” she says, punching her card in a responsible-looking square clock. “When our parents fall in, we see how our own feet hang over the edge.”\n\t\n“She'd want to see him.”\n\t\n“She called you Peacemaker, said you'd live your whole life without ever making it your own.”\n\t\n“What did you want to be? Back in fifth grade?”\n\t\n“Have you? Have you made it your own?”\n\n[[My father will be waiting. | Waiting]]\n

On the porch, my father sits in his father's rocking chair, his legs swaddled in blankets, the home-care nurse clucking. He can't see the bursts of the neighbor's pink roses, can't hear the radios of the cars that pass. The nurses say his sense of smell is gone. His taste is going. When he speaks, his voice is the quiet creak of a hammock swaying.\n\t\nWhen I touch his shoulders, though, he stretches his arms, grasps at the air. “Is Samara here?” his fingers ask. “Promise,” he says with the tautness in his throat. He moves his head as if to stare into her eyes. “Promise me,” he says with the tension in his shoulders. “Promise me you've found her.”\n\t\nWhen I take his hands, he gapes, his mouth toothless and laughing. He throws his head back as if in thanks to the porch light, his joy a bullfrog in his throat. His hands clutch mine, pressing my knuckles, rubbing my wrists. I lean to let him touch my face, to brush my eyelids, sweep my forehead. “You've come back,” he says with his tender, desperate fingers, and I am Samara. For him, now, I will never be anyone other than Samara. I will be Samara for the rest of his days.\n\t\n“I tried,” I say. “I'm sorry. I tried.” I hold him close, and he trembles with joy. The damp of his tears wets the front of my shirt. “I'm so sorry.” I say.\n\t\nSoon, I will be the only one left to recognize the wind here, the arc of the afternoon light through the apple tree. “I'm sorry,” I say, but I touch his head, feel the bristle of his hair, as if I won't replay the ending in my mind forever, as if it were ever possible to say goodbye a final time.\t\n\n\n[[Remember | Beginning]]\n