We never like to be too far from the sea, W. especially. Doesn't he always demand, when he visits me, to be taken to the sea? And doesn't he always take me directly to the sea, when I visit him? I'll meet you at the sea, he texts me, when I text him from the airport. I have to go straight there, straight from the airport to the sea to meet him.
And now, in the middle of America, when the sea's so far away? What then? What to do? Let's go to the Mississippi? But how do we get there?
We're lost in America! Here we are, in the deep south, and thoroughly lost! What are we doing here? What led us here? Some terrible mistake, we agree. Some lapse in the logic of the universe. Luckily, one of the blue-capped tourist guides in Memphis shows us the way. Is that really the Mississippi? It really is the Mississippi, wide and brown. Why is it so brown?, I ask W. It's full of mud, he says. Water and mud.
On the banks of the river, Sal takes photos of us for W.'s Facebook page. He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses, a horse catamaran, with the camera set on automatic. And behind us, the great brown Mississippi, rolling improbably along.
America's so big!, we agree. It's overwhelming, really, when you think about it. How far is it to the coast, east or west? A thousand miles? Two thousand miles? Some great, improbable distance, we're agreed. Some distance of which we cannot conceive.
There's so much space here. America's so exposed. We think of the terrible signs we saw from the Greyhound bus of a passing hurricane. Houses torn up, trees uprooted and flung about. I took photos. We'd never seen anything like it. America's in danger, we agree. It's too big! It's too vast!
We think of the coming catastrophe, of the winds that will sweep it, the deserts that will claim it, the skies that will darken over it, America's body. Will it be here that the apocalypse rises to its greatest magnitude?
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