Sleepwalk

by Dan Chaon

“Looks like it’s going to start snowing,” I say. “Must be from that typhoon they’re having up to Seattle.” “Hm,” Liandro says, and he is about as interested as any of us are in hearing a fifty-year-old white man chat about the weather.

You have to wonder about these settlers of the Great Plains. These white people who in olden times killed the natives and laid claim to this dirt and stuck to it; who stranded their children and grandchildren with a birthright of dust. A collection of clapboard shacks with backyards full of unmown pigweed and junked cars and abandoned swing sets and withered, thirsty trees. Was the genocide worth it?

Grosse Point Lighthouse,

It’s a conundrum.

I’m thinking about all this as I’m driving along, and it gives me the fantods.

Japanese ero guro,

“Maybe you were just a limerent object,” she tells me.

he said, that there was a pattern to the spread of the Spome Derner’s seed, the Mandelbrot equation, zn+1 = zn2 + c, he said. “It’s like … mold…”

But there are a trio of teenagers skateboarding in the parking lot, making use of the asphalt and the halogen lights. They’ve built themselves an obstacle course made out of scavenged construction materials, and they are all performing daredevil tricks, but they stop and stare as I ride up on my Segway, a longhaired, barefoot Sasquatch of a man—gaping at me as if I am some mythical creature descending into their midst, accompanied by a large, scarred, and muscular hound. “Greetings, mortals,” I say in a jokey voice, but they just look confused. They are maybe sixteen years old or so, lanky and shaggy haired, tall as men but still boys nonetheless. They take a step back from me. Sometimes I try to be exuberant and expansive with teenage people and it just scares them.

Murchison Promontory

Temple of the True Science.

“dead man’s hand”