An old flame of mine is coming to town.

“You still have a thing for him,” Saul says. 

“He’s dreamy,” I say.

“It’s good when they’re also awake.”

I work for the newswire, and I cover the economy, plus politics. I’m still getting the rhythm of it.

“Don’t call them consumers,” my editor tells me, reviewing a piece. 

“What should I call them?”

“People.” 

Saul’s car got towed the other week. He went and got it from the pound, a place filled with pathos. Crushed fenders, patched windows. To retrieve your vehicle is to “redeem it,” in DMV-speak. There was a big sign out front with an arrow pointing in, Saul told me. Huge block letters that spelled out REDEMPTION.

◆

My editor goes for the pitch: voter sentiment in rural zip-codes. Katherine, a friend restless in a new job, will come along. She needs diverting, I need company. 

Driving, we stop often.

“BODY PERFECTION SHOP,” a billboard reads, meaning for cars.

We listen to playlists from the turn of the millennium—”NOW That’s What I Call Music! 1-10.” Commercials for the CDs played on TV when we were kids.

“It’s called pop music for a reason,” Katherine says. “Why would we listen to unpopular music?”

As we drive, we pass: dead deer, hawks, churches.

“He beat on me. He threatened me with a gun,” says the woman in the diner in West Virginia, of her first husband, after our interview. “Then he said he wanted a divorce. I got a lawyer. I didn’t want anything. She said she’d find out what he had and get me half. Retirement, stock—I had no idea.”

In the towns, we pass Mason lodges, Moose lodges, American Legions.

Katherine grew up in the south—Georgia, Florida. Her family moved around. We met as reporters at an outlet that slowly went bust, after which she took a coding course. Now she makes better money. When we’re both single, we see a lot of each other.

“I used to have garden-brown hair like yours,” said the cashier in the West Virginia diner as I paid. His hair was pure white and long. On his nose, small spectacles.

We stay at a house in the nearby “holler” (Katherine’s word) with its flowering plants—wisteria, Virginia creeper. The owner tells us what’s in bloom: redbuds, peach, quince, forsythia. He says the carpenter bees are harmless and we can swat them with our hands.

“Here’s what’s fruiting—fiddleheads, mushrooms, and ramps,” he says, though we hadn’t asked. “The babies are fawns,” he adds, and gestures towards the woods. 

When we leave, one leaps out ahead of us on the road.

“Where there’s one there’s more,” Katherine says, warning in her voice.

Yard signs read the names of local politicians: ELECT CRAW II. “Elect Craw two,” we repeat like gulls. “Craw two.” A horror movie name. Highway signs advertise guns and ammo. 

Behind the wheel, I remember traveling takes me out of myself.

Katherine doesn’t comment on the scenery, but there are three sweet-eyed dogs at the next farm, and she’s good with them. She tells one to sit and it does. When they’ve been pet and exclaimed over, she tells all three to go—sternly, authoritatively—and they do. Only when they’ve bothered us too long and ardently.

“Dogs love environments like this,” she says, “where they can be outside, dig, be in the woods. In another life, I was a dog.”

The wisteria hanging from the roof in vines is delicate, fragrant, pale purple. I send a photo to Saul and he says he wants to buy some for his apartment balcony in the city.

“Does traveling take you out of yourself?” I ask Katherine. 

“I’m not sure,” she says, riding shotgun, looking at her phone.

On the porch of the next farmhouse, our host talks with his neighbors. When they finish, sun going, air cooling, one says, “Well, Rob, guess I’m gonna walk home slow.”

As I drive, Katherine tells me about her new role. She’s troubleshooting a tech phase-in at Walmart, remotely. The self-checkout stations will use machine learning, computer vision, and frequencies from tiny tags. “They rely on a confluence of signals,” she says. The company leadership is slow and resistant to adoption, but the systems will reduce labor costs, consumer waits. (“People waits,” I say.) Katherine used to shoplift from there as a teen. Unclear if the new system will make it easier or more difficult to shoplift. “Shrink’s priced in.”

ANTIQ, reads a sign, three letters missing.

PRAY, reads a billboard. SALVATION 

FIREWORKS Next Exit

“Where y’all from?” they ask in every diner. “Are you girls in school?” 

“I work at Walmart,” says Katherine, leaving it at that. 

“I’m a reporter,” I say.

“If you lived here you’d already be home,” reads the sign, a classic.

There’s the pleasure of clear skies after days of fog and rain.

“Do you like to camp?” I ask, passing forests, campsites.

“I camped a lot when I was a kid because we didn’t have the money to stay in hotels.”

“You don’t comment on the scenery.”

“Maybe I’ve seen more of it than you. You’re the city girl.”

“Shall we play, ‘I Spy?’” I say. “Shall we play the Alphabet game?”

Katherine’s father had them do math problems in the car on family trips, transforming numbers with words, then asking his kids the answers. She and her brothers did the equations in their heads, following along, competing to be right.

“I do think it made me better at mental math,” she says. “Though where did it get me.”

At one stop, there are board games on the cabin’s shelves, and we play a round of chess. Neither of us want to sacrifice any pieces. A draw, we shake on it.

Tractor Supply 

GOLD PAWN

On an unbroken stretch of highway, I ask Katherine if she’s spoken with ChatGPT or any of the other bots. She hasn’t, but she’s game. She asks a bot to read our Tarot on her phone, and it does. Then she asks it again, and it says, “As a Large Language Model, I do not have a body, and cannot read Tarot cards.” Then she asks it again, and it does. 

We pass long yellow fields with trees planted for shade around farmhouses beside silos.

After a downpour, the greenery’s extravagantly lush. We cross bridges in cloud cover, come upon vistas, drive through misty tunnels lit with orange light under mountains.

“Where will you spend eternity? Jesus Christ knows the answer.”

There’s bright violet water in the extremely clean toilet bowl in the Pilot gas station—the kind with laundry and showers for the truckers.

Driving through a state park, we approach an “Information Center.” 

“Do we need any information?” Katherine asks.

“How?” I say. “Why?”

“Where and when?” she says. “And, for that matter, what?”

In Bloomington, Indiana, we stop at an all-gender bathroom at a coffee shop near the university. There’s a fawn in someone’s yard. When it sees us, it starts and trots away down the suburban street.

“Poor thing,” says Katherine. 

“Threat or victim,” I say.

Some of the clouds, unmoving as I drive, look affixed to the sky or painted. When we stop, one looks caught in a tree, tangled and held by its branches.

I have taken no notes. 

“What’s that about,” says Katherine, when I confess as we unpack the car. 

We unearth fast-food containers, crumby bags, empty cans of seltzer.

“Self-sabotage?” I say, gathering stale clothes and sweaters from the trunk.

“You’re a puzzle,” she says. “A stranger to yourself.”

◆

Back in the office, I get on the phone to try to recreate the scene.

“It’s that old chestnut,” one source says when I call. “A recession is when your neighbor loses their job, and a depression is when you lose yours.”

“Maintain a dispassionate voice,” reads the email atop my inbox, a reminder from the Standards and Styles team, for everyone working at the wire.

When Katherine disliked her job and didn’t work hard, she said that at first it felt liberatory, stealing back her time. But later she realized that all she was doing was teaching herself to be inattentive. 

“The agency’s working on a report,” the economist tells me. “They say it should take a few months, government time.” Meaning longer.

My commute, on the ferry on the Hudson, is like traveling on light or air. That buoyant. It’s quiet, and everyone is delighted by the view. Everyone takes their phones out, points them towards the water and sky.

“I’ve got more singles than Tinder,” says the man at the register, making change for a five.

Now I’m asking Saul about a time he felt abandon. 

“This is because what’s-his-name is coming to visit?”

“Could be.”

He makes a face. Then he tells me about a time he went swimming in a water tower with friends at daybreak after a roof party. The water marbled the light inside the cistern. They were young and fearless, he said, and it was deep and cold. 

“I think your life is harder than mine,” Katherine’s saying to her sister on the phone. Her sister has two young kids and works full-time. She’s just been hospitalized for exhaustion, and Katherine’s volunteering to go help out.

“It is,” her sister tells her. “Your life is lonelier than mine.”

At the interview with the bank CEO, in the office conference room, there are two or three women reporters and six or seven men.

“People are buying more lipstick and cosmetics now,” the CEO says at one point, gesturing towards me. “As they do in a downturn.”

Next he calls cryptocurrency “young, sexy, and innovative.” I feel his eyes again in my direction.

Then he speaks didactically, also at me.

“Do you know why there’s a hundred dollar bill?” 

I say nothing.

“Do you know who came up with the hundred dollar bill?” 

Nobody says anything.

“It was Richard Nixon. Do you know why? It’s because if there were a million dollar bill, you could carry around a million dollars at once. You know how much a million dollars weighs in hundred dollar bills? And they’re traceable, there’s residue. So they can’t be used for drug dealing, for crime as easily. None of that exists with crypto.”

“We begged them to regulate it,” the CEO says. “But the financial system hasn’t collapsed. It hasn’t destroyed the financial system.”

“People lost money,” someone says. “Vulnerable people.” 

A beat. Retirement, homes, college educations. 

“Now the regulators come to us, they say, ‘What are you going to do to help?’ We say, ‘Nothing. Absolutely not. Good luck.'”

I remember we’re off-record and wonder what else to expect.

◆

“The heterosexual couple is the silliest unit,” Katherine tells me on the phone. She’s staying with her sister and brother-in-law and their kids.

“In what way?” I say.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Putting cake in each other’s mouths.”

◆

“You wore that to tempt me,” my old flame says, when he picks me up in the morning.

 “Laundry day,” I say. 

◆

At the beach, while my old flame surfs, I find the waves hypnotic. The light’s bright, air warm. The waves mesmerize, and I’m dazzled. He comes back out and kisses me. Then he tells me how to read the waves—where the crests break, in which direction, why. How they come in sets, and when it will be calm. He tells me when a wave will be a wall, which means it breaks without a crest, which makes it no good to surf. While he talks, the waves take on particularity. They take on style. My old flame tells me which surfers don’t know what the waves will do, pointing them out, and which have better form. A pattern of behaviors comes into focus. He tastes of salt like he has in the past. He’s hardly eaten, though I’d gotten us coffees and a danish on the way. He walks back in, surfs until he grows dizzy, and then we go for lunch.

While we eat, I make a joke about the moon to him—about the moon determining the waves. My old flame laughs and said he used to think that too, and explains it’s all the weather and the wind. The moon is just the tides.

◆

“I can’t be nervous with you,” he says in bed, the night before he goes. “Because what we had once was good, and you can’t ruin the past.”

◆

In the fall, a reporter drops off the campaign trail, and my editor asks me to fill in. I catch a flight to Grand Forks, North Dakota. 

At the motel, I wake in time for breakfast. It’s the “C’mon Inn”— a budget spot not far from the rally. My assignment: report the candidate’s remarks and be a body on the ground. The wire requires someone at the scene in case of breaking news—a gunman, a bomb.

From the kitchenette, I take bacon and eggs, a styrofoam cup of coffee, a corn muffin and a strawberry-banana yogurt. I bring it all to a table by the kidney-shaped pool.

Near the water, a religious group in matching Day-Glo T-shirts eat cereal and toast. I sit alone, texting with my editor. Then I hear one Day-Glo say someone should really use the pool, why not me, I look spry, live a little. Charmed, half-full, with enough time until the event, I agree.

When I come back from changing, the woman’s seated at the edge. I tell her to join me, take her own advice, the water’s fine. She says why not.

The air smells clean, like chlorine and hash browns. As I hand-over-hand back and forth, the woman chats. She’s self-deprecating about her appearance, her abilities. She’s glad the breakfast was free, the scriptures she downloads—also free.

“Too many children, too far apart,” the woman says, gesturing to her midsection, explaining why she hasn’t gone swimming in years. Beneath her shirt and shorts, her body’s soft and wide, face wrinkled and lively. Her toenails, dangling, are painted peach.

The woman tells me she married at 20. Soon after, her husband lost his lower leg in a farm accident—the grain grinder—then more of the limb to gangrene.

One of her sons, a truck driver, recently hurt himself in an accident. Now he sits in a subsidized apartment, recovering and watching Westerns. All he wants is his license back, but the doctors say he isn’t well enough to have it, that he may never be well enough.

I check my phone—time is getting away from me. As I leave, I look back to see she’s gotten into the water.

Nothing I could use. 

Katherine, to me, when I recount the scene: “How did it make you feel?” she asks. “Did it wash over you? Were you moved? Bothered?” She’s doing dishes in her kitchen.

“Yes,” I say. 

She looks annoyed. 

“Did you turn in the piece?”

“I did.” 

Then I tell her about the hawkers outside the stadium. At folding card tables, vendors sold unofficial hats and T-shirts, buttons and pennants. Almost none supported the candidate, but there was steady demand for their wares. One man said he’d been selling at rallies for decades and that—in his experience—whichever candidate out-sold the other would always win the election. I tell Katherine the celebrity candidate was out-selling his opponent by a mile.

Mostly, the media will get this story wrong. It will be a surprise upset in November. But the man on the street will have predicted it, Katherine will remember, election night. A free-market oracle.

◆

Now Saul and I are having lunch at the Pearl Diner near my office. Linoleum tabletops, Christmas lights indoors. He’s talking about his heart, which still feels the effects of treatment he had for lung cancer when he was young.

“And there’s the miasma,” he says, inhaling a burger.

“The miasma,” I repeat—Greek for a cloud of shame.

“There’s my asthma,” he says, laughing, trying to both swallow and breathe.

I eat his sweet potato fries. He sips my coke.

“Your turn,” he says. To complain.

I tell Saul I’m a hack. I list the failed reporting trip, the off-record CEO, the woman in the pool and salesman I ignored. I say I have no ear.

Saul takes it in, chewing quietly. He ketchups a fry.

“I don’t think that’s it,” he says. “I think you’re experiencing a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information.”

“What do I do about that.”

“I’m better at diagnosis than prescription.”

From the diner, across the bridge to Brooklyn, I try to walk home slow. 

◆

At the office, they’re training us on the latest AI. Here are the notes I take on the bots:

“They produce the most likely next word, not necessarily the most accurate.”

“They produce language not truth.” 

“They generate text, but we should not rely on them to produce knowledge.”

Like human artists, Artificial Intelligence is bad at rendering hands. Learning to paint and draw, students joke about leaving them for last or hiding them—the trouble is the muscles and the bones. What does the AI struggle with? Most often, the number of fingers.

Today I also learned AI is able to see gradations in a scan for cancer that a human eye would miss.

◆

“Do you like it?” asks the stranger outside the tattoo parlor, gesturing to a drawing in the window. 

“Not really,” I say. “Do you?” 

The man smiles. 

“What is it?” I ask. 

“It’s my work,” he says. “The sketch.” 

“Oh,” I say. “I see.” 

◆

“So what happened with that guy?” Saul asks. “Your ex, the fling who came to stay.”

We’re at his, theoretically working. A notepad of mine with quotes for an article is lined with doodles of his face. 

“It was good,” I say. “And safe. And now back in the past.”

I get up to pour a glass of water at his sink. Saul comes to where I stand, the faucet running. 

Then he kisses me. When the glass I’m holding overflows, he reaches around me to turn off the water, lips still to mine. We’re both calm—it feels normal. We move to his bedroom and soon there’s nothing between us. 

“Maybe use your words,” he whispers then. I’ve been staying quiet—just noises and sounds. “Tell me exactly what you want, what you’re thinking.”

I’m thinking I want to lose myself in sex. Pure sensation, bodies without minds. 

I tell him, and he holds me, and I instantly relax.

◆

Now Katherine’s always taking a trip, hitting the road. She can work from anywhere. Sometimes, she calls me on a drive or FaceTimes. Today she told me about a man who sat beside her at the counter of a greasy spoon, like the ones we stopped in.

“What makes you tick?” the stranger asked.

“I just tick,” she said, refusing to play.