The country inhabited by Sparky, Bandit, Patches, and Snowflake.
Somehow it relieves you to know this.
Living in only one world when you can live in five.
Gen being two and a half, caterwauling awake in the middle of the night.
Lying there in the dark, whirling up toward action, you wondering what she can possibly already know at her age that can frighten her.
The perpetual fragrance of warm electronics in the office air.
A child’s vision is not as sharp as an adult’s until he or she is nine years old.
All that looking.
All that data flooding in.
You crayoning the letters M-O-M on a piece of paper and holding it out to her and asking her what it spells and she barking mom! You clapping and crayoning the letters D-A-D on the piece of paper and holding it out to her and asking her what it spells and she barking mom! You not clapping and crayoning the letters D-I-A-T-R-I-B-E on the piece of paper and holding it out to her and asking her what it spells and she barking mom!
The problem being the way you sometimes leaned back in your office chair and stared at your computer screen and felt yourself being enucleated by rays originating from computers all around you.
Being ground zero, in a sense.
How the artificial light among the cubicles remained exactly the same, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year.
A vibrant bluecheese-white glare.
The kind of light that made you want to wear sunscreen.
Only when Andi touches your belt buckle do you realize you have floated away from her.
Only when you hear your own zipper sizz do you open your eyes.
Then you are in the middle of making love.
Parched grass.
Licorice.
Shutting your eyes, holding her head in your hands, you let yourself spill into this moment, a person trying very hard to forget several things at once.
Now you are singing along with something by Led Zeppelin.
You are singing along with something by Led Zeppelin and Andi is swaying back and forth to the beat, playing air guitar, gazing around as if surprised to discover herself where she is.
You drum the steering wheel with the heels of your palms.
The road you are on curves and drops quickly by a two-story buttery-yellow schoolhouse into the jumble of Elk River’s gravel streets, vacant stores, one-room bars, and sixty people, none of whom are outdoors today.
A dirt landing strip.
Heavy clouds grazing mountain peaks.
Old pickups with flat tires and snowmobiles raised on cinder blocks scattered across weedy yards, hides tacked on metal roofs, animal skulls and racks fitted on fence posts and doorframes.
Dingy blue plastic tarps half-covering disorderly piles of tamarack, pieces of engines, oil drums, naked paint cans, sawhorses, dismembered motorcycles.
Here, people are comfortable with a certain degree of residential clutter.
It makes them feel like they belong, apparently, like they are here to stay and not simply passing through.
The part they might need is always within reach.
In front of the country store with a wooden sidewalk and weathered faux-western exterior, a sign reads: END HIGHWAY 8.
You park and step out.
Andi cracks her vertebrae with an abrupt twist at the hips.
You stretch by pushing your fists down behind you and arching your chest forward, your head back.
On the walls inside the country store are mounted the heads of elk, deer, and moose. Pelts of coyote and raccoon hang on either side of a stuffed cougar. The paneling has absorbed years of sweet smoke from a wood-burning stove.
Wandering rows of camping supplies, you try to take this all in without appearing to take it all in.
Pick up and examine an old-fashioned iron frying pan, put it down, touch a state-of-the-art camping stove, read the back of a bottle of iodine purification tablets, study a pocket knife that looks like it was designed by NASA.
The problem being sixty e-mail messages a day.
Seventy-five.
Split keyboards, vertical keyboards you typed on by resting your hands in karate positions on your desk, keyboards built into the armrests of your chair that made you feel like the captain of an intergalactic starfleet cruiser.
Andi is up at the counter, talking to a woman in skin-tight jeans and a blank white t-shirt whose dark brown hair is streaked with gray and cut in a seventies shag, short in front and on the sides, long in back.
Yeah, honey, the woman is saying. I’m smokin’ a lot more since I stopped.
Her laugh sounds sticky.
There being 525,600 minutes in a year.
525,600, more or less.
A foil lozenge of freeze-dried lasagna so sparklingly incorrupt you want to buy it just to have it nearby, a camouflage baseball cap, a combination sunscreen-and-mosquito-repellent with a red warning on the white back that blindness may result upon contact with one’s eyes.
Somewhere in the store a cat mrowling in heat.
The wooden floor squeaks when you shift your weight to reach for a clear plastic jar filled with marigold-yellow fish-egg bait.
You lift it, put it down, lift it, realize Andi is counting out change for two soft huckleberry ice creams in waffle cones.
How your young colleagues began staring through you as though you were a piece of furniture blocking the view of something interesting ten or twenty feet behind you.
How they appeared bored or ironic as soon as you started speaking.
How it became clear you did not belong to the same species any more, how they looked at you like the first homo sapiens must have looked at the last of members of homo erectus.
As you step up beside your wife at the counter, the woman in the gray-streaked shag says:
Hell, honey, I don’t believe in that daycare shit. My son sees plenty of other kids his own age on TV, don’t he?
She says this with her eyes shut and as if there is a microphone hidden in her right shoulder socket.
Thanks, Andi responds, handing one cone to you and accepting her change.
She frees two napkins from the dispenser on the counter, passes one to you, and wraps the other around the base of her cone.
Sweet smoke. Fried bacon fat. Damp tent canvas.
You have a good day now, the woman tells the microphone in her shoulder socket as you walk toward the door.
You too, Andi says.
Do what I can, the woman tells the mike. Do what I can.
Outside everything is different.
A cetaceous tourist bus across the street, chugging like the engine room in the hold of a supertanker.
Behind each tinted window, a camera pointed at you.
Flashes popping in daylight.
Andi freezes, lowers her ice-cream cone to her bellybutton, and stares.
It’s okay, you say, halting beside her. They’ve probably come from out east to see what the edge of the world is like.
Look, she says.
How the indigenous live…
No. Look. Look who it is.
Then you see what she means: behind every window a version of Grannam.
She is wearing so much makeup she appears clownish in her baby-blue pantsuit, pink scarf, and bulbous gold censer-earrings.
Some versions of her still wear mustard from lunch smeared on their cheeks. Some slump in a way that implies their backbones have been extracted. Some point at you. Some mouth words in your direction, reach around the seats in front of them and tap other versions of themselves on the arms and then mouth more words, pointing.
Flashes popping like methadrined fireflies behind the tinted windows.
Now the bus beginning to drag itself away from the curb, slouching up the road.
At the first corner, it swings wide to the left, then sharply to the right, onto the intersecting street, straining up a small incline, disappearing among rundown houses, gears ripping as it struggles to gain momentum.