Outside, a warm September afternoon blurs into evening, another Sunday lost. You're listening to the same chill piano piece. You found it on vinyl back in the college record exchange? You've put it on nearly every weekend since, remember? Cool washes of piano chords seem to go with the lazy atmosphere like wine and bread. These moments come fewer as the days seem to drag on before they slowly fade on the edge of memory.

You're on the road to Connecticut. A baby shower. Yours. The Manhattan skyline creeps along the horizon towards you slowly. But there's something different about it this time. Something's not quite right. Something's missing.

Jersey. 95. A stretch of highway you've humped every other year, the same truckstop diners, the same median strip urinals packed with the same sweaty tourists and crying kids and lines to the women's room. And they never make them bigger because they don't get repeat customers and the locals don't give a fat rat's fart about the median strip urinals that they have the good sense to never use. It's not like they're competing for your urine.

New York. The Deegan Freeway. A right, a left, a cloverleaf, and the skyline fades into the rearview. You're in Connecticut. Again.

You're waking up in another hotel room. You can tell it's a hotel room by the smell: antiseptic bathroom cleanser, dust, and the cool recycled smell of the air conditioner. There are the same thin drapes, the same square fireproof ceiling tiles, the same gold-toned desk lamp. The mattress squeaks a little as you get up to go to the window. You pull the plastic drap rod and outside it's bright and hot. It's hot, summer probably, and a thin layer of condensation fogs the view above the AC unit which hums relentlessly. You turn the dial to Fan and go to the bathroom. It's still you in the mirror. There's the neatly wrapped, single use cake of soap, the toilet seat sanitized for your protection, the tightly folded bathtowels, handtowels, and floortowels.

A clanging comes from outside, down the center of the street, closer as you approach the window and pull the drapes apart. A streetcar. It creeps along deliberately, pausing at every intersection, blocked by a car trying to cross its path. Tourists (or people playing the part of tourists, complete with video cameras, plaid shorts, and straw hats) huddle around a patch of dead grass and dirt next to the trolly stop. You've seen this before. You've been here. You've waited at that stop, catching the trolley in the opposite direction, towards the university district. That's when you remember. You're in a hotel in New Orleans. Saint Charles Street, because that's where the streetcars run. Now, you only have to figure out why you're here.

Next to the remote control, on top of the laminate cabinet, is a schedule. Music. Jazz Fest. The schedule is thick, fifty pages on newsprint, four color, stapled. But you don't like jazz. Food? You like the food here, but you don't like jazz.

Someone's knocking on the door.
-Yeah?
A woman. You open the door.
-Hey, ready to hit the Quarter? I'm about ready to eat my left leg.
Tall, slim, early thirties, Foster Grant wraparounds, wide brimmed straw hat.
-You ok? You look kinda flushed.
-Took a little nap. The weather...
-Yeah, the heat. So, what'll it be?
-Hm?
-The Quarter? Let's get some lunch.
The French Quarter. They have food. They have booze. Yes. You want to go to the French Quarter.
-Gimme a second.
Keys. Wallet. Sunglasses. Polaroid. Don't forget to slam the door on the way out.

How can one person cough so hard and yet still show up to work? She sneezes so hard, I expect to see a piece of brain matter fly over her cubicle wall. You could tell her about this thing called “sick leave.” You could leave a note saying that you don’t appreciate having to live in a Petri dish with a floating all-hacking, all-spraying diseasebag. It’s bad enough you’re stuck in a sealed environment with her for 8 hours a day, breathing the same recirculated, sick-building syndrome air. On top of that, there’s the vacuous phone conversations (“How are you? Not much. The kittie did the cutest thing this morning!”), the constant diet soda consumption, the incessant whining about the latest syndrome she’s convinced she’s suffering from which just happened to be on the cover of this months Popular Hypocondriac. The least she could do is offer to pay for the Lysol.

The worst is the nausea inducing infant talk that passes for conversation (loud) with her main pimp daddy. Sicky sweet with just the hint of pedophilia on his part. Much as you try and eliminate the image from your mind, all you can think about as the two of them playing an erotic round of “goldilocks meets the construction worker.”

There’s always been a sickly one. In gradeschool, it was the girl who threw up on every field trip. You could set your watch by it. In college, it was the anemic Deadhead in the food co-op with the “vegetarian” can who died of malnutrition. Today, it’s the neurotic twelve-stepper with the husband 20-years her senior, and the half dozen cats.

Privatizing public space. It makes you want to just stay at home rather than deal with a world of individuals who all act the same.

You check your bank account and find that you have $912.72 more than you had the day before. Three weeks later, you get a phone call.

-An erroneous deposit was made to your account on April 2.
-That's nice. I suppose you want your money back.
-We will be debiting your account.
-So I guess I'll need nine hundred bucks to cover that.
Silence.
-So, when will this debit happen?
-Uh, hold please.

You check your bank's web page. You have $62 left to last you two weeks. You will have to eat beans. Fortunately, you really like beans.

-Sir?
-Yes?
-When we debit your account, you balance will show a negative.
-Looks like you already debited my account. You always call your customers up after you take their money?

Silence. You tap your desk with your ballpoint pen twice. You imagine what it would be like to shove the pen in the bank teller's eye socket. The car would have to be waiting outside the bank, ready to make a run for the border. It would have to be a good car, an early model Barracuda or a modified Olds 442, something that would leave the unmarked Caprice Classics in the dust. But before you crossed the state line, you'd plow through the tire shredder stretched across the two-lane blacktop. The car screeches to a halt just beyond the roadblock, a cloud of grey rubber smoke and blaring sirens linger in the air as you open the driver's side door and chamber a round.

-Sir?
-Hm?
-I apologize for the error.
-Don't worry about it. Listen, what color eyes do you have?

Your identity has been reduced to a series of small plastic cards you keep in your right front pocket.

A driver's license.

The head that stares back blankly was yours but isn't yours now. (Did I really have a beard? Was I always clean shaven?) Issued 5/14/99. May. The weather was changing and you were in another line waiting to have your picture taken. You'd spent the morning in another line, just to take a test to prove you knew how to take a test. When your photo is done, you wait in another line for the privelege of giving some ambivalent worker a check. That was you then. Who are you now?

A credit card.

Vacation in London: $1374. Laptop computer: $2275. Fourteen years of revolving credit payoffs at 18%: Priceless. Where did the money go? Where did the stuff go? You should find out.

A money clip.

That was Harry's. Stainless steel with a nail file and cuticle knife. You got it when you helped clean out his place in Connecticut after his wife died and he moved down to Virginia to spend his last days with his daughter. You used to hang out with the old man for lunch. Brought him a small cheeseburger and talk about the goddamn taxes taking a bite out of his ass. Then you'd leave him alone to watch tv and read his Zane Grey novels. He's gone now, buried next to his wife in Connecticut. You haven't had a cheeseburger since.

You're in a long hallway, seats on either side, staring at the wall.
You have a suit and jacket and tie on. The hallway is crowded with people reading the morning paper or talking on their cell phones or staring blankly at the wall opposite them. Men and women who look like lawyers pass, carrying thick leather portfolios, checking their day planners and handheld computers and cell phones. Their shiny shoes click and echo down the long corridor. All of these lawyers deliberately avoid eye contact with you.

Why are you here? What have you done? If you were under arrest, you'd be in a cell or handcuffs. You would have some sort of police escort. So it's not you that they're after. You're worried about what you've done, but you don't have to worry about THAT. Not for now, at least. But you still feel guilty, just like you did when you were a kid. All that your father had to do was stare at you with that thousand-yard stare and say, "Alright, I know what you've been up to. I'm giving you a chance to come clean." You'd confess to the Lindbergh kidnappings and shooting McKinley, anything, just to avoid having to deal with that stare. Is it any different now?

Obviously, they want something from you. You have to be here, in this place, for a reason. So, it's not what you think it is. It's something much more trivial: a lawsuit maybe, or testimony in a trial. Ridiculous. You can't even remember why you're here, let alone what you think happened. What's the use in calling someone in your condition to give testimony in a case you know nothing about against someone you don't remember for a situation of which you have no memory? Does it even matter? Whatever you say, the lawyers will twist it around to mean what they want it to mean. That's what they get paid to do, manufacture truth out of fragments of memories and scraps of facts the cops dredge from the river with grappling hooks, or that they find lying in the backseat of cars.

You've been here before. Maybe not this place, but this situation. Waiting around with strangers for something to happen, something legal, someone to pass judgment and say you're innocent or you're guilty. Those are pretty big words. This is the place you come for the big words, the final words, the concrete words that make sense of everything. The words that absolve you of your sins or pass judgement on your actions. You will hear these words, but you will have to wait for them.

Maybe it's just a parking ticket. You always appeal parking tickets and moving violations. Half the time, the issuing officer doesn't show up, in which case, the state offers no evidence and you are free to got. Half the time you can bluff your way into having your fine reduced and your points eliminated.

Something's stabbing you in your chest. You fumble for something in your jacket pocket. It's a piece of paper that says you are to report to Room 3130 for jury duty.

It's like waking up all the time.

One moment you're typing at a flickering flatscreen and the next you're driving down the highway screaming a Grand Funk Railroad tune at nobody in particular because your radio was stolen last week, and yet it's still there like a phantom amputated limb. The gaping hole in the dashboard makes you uncomfortable, so you stuff a small furry parrot puppet into it. You take some solace in this, replacing a gaudy mechanism with something more inviting, trading a wire monkey with the bottle for the fuzzy monkey without. Your life has become a series of such tradeoffs, compromises which you accept with quiet resignation because you've rationalized it's not worth getting upset about.

There's a line from a movie where the old man says that money and time behave like quicksilver in a nest of cracks; when they're gone we can't tell where or what the devil we did with them. He knew whereof he spoke. So rather than look back and wonder, you will reconstruct what little you've kept in mind, assembling this account from scraps and notes that you shore against your ruin. So let's start at the beginning.

You're holding a scrap of fading paper says that you were born on November 5, 1967 at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC. That would make you a Scorpio. Your familly lived at 3953 Alabama Avenue, SE, in a three-bedroom detached house. Across the street is Fort Dupont Park, a Revolutionary War-era fort which protected the District from the invading British. When your family left in 1975, the park became a dumping ground for victims of gang slayings.

Your family left for the same reason every middle class family leaves the city: the crime, the taxes, the schools. Later, you would watch the great black flight, as middle class African Americans flooded into Prince George's County. They left for the same reasons. Twenty-five years later, the crime is creeping up, so are the taxes, and the schools consider it a noble achievement to go from 60 percent illiteracy to 30. Six out of ten murder cases are never closed. You can't own a firearm. You were part of the great white flight. Now you're part of the scourge of reverse white flight. You have nowhere else to fly to, so you stick it out and wonder how you ended up here.

There was a basketball court across the street in the park, but nobody every played there. Kids older than you flew motorized model airplanes tethered to a wire. Standing in center court, they'd fire up the gasoline engines and spin in circles while the airplanes, a cross between a sewing machine and a chafing dish, belched smoke in concentric circles. The pilots would stop after half an hour, obviously nauseated by the spinning and the smoke.

Of all the things to remember, why the smell of gasoline engines, the cut grass, dogshit stuck in the nooks of your sneakers? Why the lawnmower buzz, the screaming in the street at midnight, the jackhammers digging up the sidewalks again? They rush at you like the ranting homeless man on the corner, begging your attention because he has to warn you of something vital to the nation's security, but he can't make himself understood. You can only turn your back on them and keep walking, but the more you ignore, the more persistent he becomes. You continue walking and his screaming recedes into the distance.

But there he is again the following morning in the middle of the road with a squeegee.