I sat there for a while, letting the ice in my soda turn to water. The street sign at the corner said “Gettysburg Avenue.” There was some kind of trailer park across the road, some weird metal canisters, a strip of snowy dirt for cars to turn around in. I mean, real fucking nowhere. Two high school girls were finishing lunch at the next table, dropouts maybe or seniors on a lunch break. A fat one and a pretty one, both eating fries; their chicken wrappings were smeared with ketchup. The thin paper kept moving under their fingers as they pushed the fries around. One of them, the pretty girl (she had a small cute acned face, and a nose ring, and straight dyed-black hair), had to lick her knuckles clean.
The fat one said, “Good to the last drop.”
For some reason I felt jealous. They weren’t talking much but seemed comfortable together. I missed the friendship of girls, not just in a sexual way, though that, too.
Robert had told me I could stay with him for a few weeks. Longer if necessary. He was renting a mansion in Indian Village, which he planned to use as a base of operations. They had a full house but could always put a mattress somewhere. We spoke on the phone the night before I set off.
“It’s good times,” he said.
This is part of what I liked about him. In his company, I felt close to the center of the action, whereas personality-wise, I’m a periphery guy. My mother sometimes warned me, You live too much in your head. But where else are you supposed to live when you’re in the car.
A HALF HOUR LATER, I stopped by the side of the road to pick up a hitchhiker. This girl, who looked about twenty years old, was standing by the access ramp, holding up a piece of cardboard box with detroit scribbled across it in fat felt-tip. She had messy blond hair and a white face and looked cold. Her nose was reddening in the wind, and she wore cowboy boots and a faded denim jacket.
As soon as I pulled onto the hard shoulder, her boyfriend came out of the trees and joined her with the bags. They were both German, hitching their way from New York, Astrid and Ernst — or Ernest, she said, in her jokey-sounding English-and-American accent. She had the slightly scornful look of pretty girls but turned out to be light-headed and much too chatty for a three-hour drive. I was annoyed with her from the beginning, because of the boy. Ernst sat in the back with his earphones on the whole way. Probably he was grateful for the break. Astrid needed a lot of responding to.
She sat in the passenger seat, peeling an orange and sometimes offering me a piece. The scent of the orange soon filled the car. When she was finished with that, she took a ball of yarn from her backpack and began to knit.
All the artists she knew were moving to Detroit — it was the new Berlin, she said. Hip and cheap. New York was dead already, expensive and dead. The only interesting thing you can see in New York is what money does to cities. And so on.
She asked me why I was going to Detroit and I tried to explain myself. That a friend of mine from college, who had made a lot of money, was buying up run-down neighborhoods and renting out the houses to people who had the skills or energy to bring the neighborhoods back to life.
“Artists?” she said at once.
“Not just artists.”
But she took out a pen and wrote my email address on the back of her hand. For an hour she fell asleep, but when she woke again, on the outskirts of the city, she fished out a camera from her bag.
“Do you mind if I roll down the window?” she asked and leaned out of it, against the wind.
“Where are the cars?” I said. “Where is everybody?”
“Slow down. I want to take pictures.”
There’s a kind of momentum to driving on the freeway. After a while, it’s hard to come off, everything passes too quickly — the grassy verge, the trees growing up from the streets below, the exit signs and apartment blocks and office blocks and stadiums. But roads are mostly what we saw, around and below and above. I kept driving over the shadows of bridges and said out loud, the way you do for foreigners, “Spaghetti Junction.” But really the whole thing reminded me of those sugar-spun cages you get over fancy desserts. I imagined lifting up one of those bridges with my finger, and watching all of the other highways, and not only the highways but also the exits and avenues and boulevards, streets, roads, crescents, lanes and alleys, pulling away from the ground, because they’re all connected, and leaving a tan line across America, the color of earth, with a few worms digging around underneath, some pill bugs and dirty wet leaves.
For a few minutes the sunlight flared in the rearview mirror, blinding me against it. Astrid kept snapping away, and then the angle shifted and the road opened up in front of me, concrete-colored. There was so little traffic all the cars had the air of survivors.
Somehow I had drifted off 75 onto Gratiot. There was an intersection, and then a park, or at least an open space, covered in snow, with trees in the distance and a skyline behind them; and next to the road, a low gray industrial unit, built out of cardboard, it seemed, with the words chicago beef company plastered across it in cartoonish letters. For a second I thought I was in the wrong city, I could have been anywhere. Navigating by freeway is like reducing the country to binary code. Every exit you pass is a yes or a no and by the end of the process you hope to end up at the right answer, the right place, which is what the code means. But after a while it all looks like code and I pulled off Gratiot onto Vernor, and then off Vernor onto a side street, to see if there was anything there.
By this point it was six o’clock, a few days before the clocks went forward. A late winter’s late afternoon; the streets looked red. After a few blocks I got stuck in some cookie-cutter cul-de-sacs, with cheap executive-style homes. Their gardens backed onto a cemetery, whose front gate made a dead end in the road. I stopped to look at the map and Astrid and Ernst got out.
“What are you doing?” I said. I could see their breath in the air.
“We’ll find a bus or something. Don’t worry.”
“You can’t get out here.”
“Americans always think America is so dangerous. Look at these houses,” she said. “It looks like Bamberg.”
When I left she was taking pictures. The snow made everything seem prettier. Ernst had a guidebook in one hand, like a good German schoolboy. The trees of the cemetery looked like the opening of a wood.
But the streets on the far side of it made me worry. I found Vernor again and followed it for a while, past clapboard homes and factories fronted by wire fence. There were churches and barbershops in single-story brick shacks.
Somehow my dad’s presence in the car was very strong. This happens to me sometimes; my reactions take the form of a conversation. But I was also remembering something. A few months after Katrina struck, I flew home for Christmas, and one day he persuaded me to go see the Ninth Ward. It’s about an hour’s drive from Baton Rouge, the last couple of miles through the city itself. Eventually we entered a ramshackle neighborhood, with sagging roofs and broken-paned windows, but there were still a few cars in the driveways and flowerpots on the steps.
“Is this it?” I asked him.
“How bad do you want it to be?” he said.
Then we came upon streets where the houses looked stepped on. Their insides lay spread out over the yards: refrigerators and rocking horses, cable wires, cheap carpeting. It looked like the end of the world.
“Satisfied now?” my dad said, and I heard his voice in my head, asking the same question, as I drove through Detroit. There wasn’t any traffic on the road to force me along. Mostly what I saw was empty lots, not falling houses — block after block of grassland. Trees grew out of the roofs of abandoned buildings. There were abandoned cars, too, and tires, shopping carts and heaps of trash sitting where houses used to stand. The effect was rural, not suburban. Snow turned the lots into fields, and the windows of occupied homes glowed like small fires.