The hum of streetlamps reminds David of what once was; their perpetual song is a mockery of summer’s cicadas, long gone. Now his breath hangs in the air, a fleeting monument to his existence, his body at the bus stop, where it always is past 10:00pm, Sundays through Thursdays, rain-or-shine, struggling-light-bulbs or insects’-mating-call. In the cold, everything becomes sharper, like a photograph with too much detail, too much in focus, eyes fighting to paint a complete picture. He decides to see nothing instead of trying, mind blurring the words of a black and yellow advertisement for a lawyer–or a toothpaste, or a gentleman’s club, or a furniture outlet, it doesn’t matter–wandering to the seasonal inventory that still has to go out, a coworker who never charges her PDT, and what kind of innocuous, loosely described microwaveable chicken-vegetable platter is waiting for him at home.

When his last associate peels away from the parking lot, headlights polka-dotted with snowflakes flashing carelessly by to disturb his quiet wait, everything becomes wholly bare in a way only America can be at night; the parking lot is recognizable as a sea of asphalt again, unending, instead of avenues of neatly parked comfortable cars, waiting for their comfortable drivers to return, to drive them back to their comfortable homes. In a recurring dream, David rises from his bus stop, and walks on and on and on, right up to the end of it. Unmarked by white lines or cement parking blocks, unceremoniously, the lot stops, a steep drop to the nothing below, cartoonish fog intent upon excusing the lack of explanation. Sometimes, in this dream, David sits right at the edge. There is no real thrill to it, only the quiet recognition that it is over. In others, before he can reach its end, the gaping pit expands–the mouth of America–and rises to meet his orthopedic shoes, threatens to swallow him whole, immortalizes him in company colors and derisive, assertively friendly “Davie” nametag. He isn’t sure which version he prefers.

It could be another dream, this night, another acquiescent evasion of reality–it holds the same arid lucidity, but the bus never arrives in his dreams, and his nose runs into his beard grotesquely. The quiet is replaced by tires whirring through brown slush, and breaks that creak like old bones. He rises to meet the warmth of burning gasoline from a cold metal seat, the engine rattling and alive like a smoker’s exhale. Doors hiss open, and David trades one otherworldly plane for another, stepping into a wash of blue light, and the watch of glossy, tired eyes.