1

We rage out of Chicagoaround four in the morning, hurtling southtoward Arkansas because my mom needs help kidnapping my father. Actually, that’s a lie. A truer reason: I’ve been looking for an excuse to leave the city, planning my escape, biding my time, and Arkansas seems like a reasonably good place to hide. The kidnapping-my-father thing is a new development, a situation I donot entirely understand. Normally, I ignore Mom’s calls, but I was pretty fucked up last night, and my phone kept buzzing, and it wasafter midnight, so I thought… well, I don’t actually remember what I thought. Remembering has sucked since I got this fun new dent bashed into my skull.

Anyway, we are drinking. We are driving. We are making good time. Once we clear the suburbs, the Stevenson Expressway turns into I-55, and the grasslands roll into an endless brown blur. I’ve heard Indiana called America’s Hallway, but Illinois is Chicago’s Doormat – an unwelcoming strip of dirt, good only for wiping the shit off your shoes on your way to the Magnificent Mile. This is the Land of Lincoln, the Prairie State, and while they already burn these prairies every few years, I wish they’d do a better job. Scorch the earth and be done with it. Salt the fields, stanch the rivers, roll Illinois up like a sleeping bag, and send the white folks back to wherever we’re supposed to be.

This is the place I am from, but I’m from it like the Asian carp is from Lake Michigan. Invasive and destructive. I am a virus with great teeth, upturned nostrils, overpriced shoes, an ironic fashion mullet, and mild oral herpes. I guess you could call me the World’s First Honest White Man, but I don’t identify as a man anymore, so you’d probably call me other things first: pale, mesomorphic, alcoholic, workaholic, successful, violent, queer, pessimistic, autophobic, unheroic, semi-effeminate, sexually deviant, socially confused, normally repressed, compulsive, repulsive, and photosensitive. That’s an incomplete list, obviously, and probably a bit overdramatic, but I am in the mood for drama. I am floating near the cold center of a vaguely erotic black hole, sucking space and time, trying to find something to hold on to that I won’t destroy.

In other words, I am simultaneously experiencing a breakdown as well as a breakup. You might think these two things would cancel each other out, but they do not. If that sounds shitty, it is. If it sounds sad, it’s not. If anything, it’s hilarious. I am learning to laugh and smile and scream in the face of devastation. Plus, the drama gives me an excuse to self-medicate. That’s part of why we stole this car from my ex-boyfriend.

We race down the highway with a cop car in the rearview. An unsuspecting highway patrolman, maybe, but I can’t seem to shake him. I can’t eventry to shake him. He’s been barreling behind us for the better part of fifty miles, and I can’t risk doing anything suspicious or overtly elusive. I slow down, and he slows too. I change lanes to dodge dawdling trucks, and so does he. A waking fucking nightmare, but also kind of amusing. I keep telling myself this state trooper would pull us over if he knew about my crimes, and he hasn’t, so he doesn’t. That is the logical conclusion, but my father taught me never to trust things like logic or perception or the cold solidity of fact.

My father is a fool, but he is also very persuasive. He has a kind of lunatic charisma, like Alex Jones with less emphysema. I don’t know how or why he has wandered away from my mom again, but I do know the wordwandered makes it sound like he’s got Alzheimer’s or some other diagnosable excuse. And he doesn’t. Not really. There is something wrong with him, theremust be, but he’s been tested many times for many things: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, PTSD, whatever the doctors can think of. I’m not sure how he manages to beat these tests, but he comes out spotless every time. And here we are.

When Mom called me from Arkansas, I was lounging on the damp red futon I’d been Airbnbing for thirty-three dollars a night. The futon was located in the basement of a blue-haired elderly woman with sparkly tooth gems, seven large dalmatians, and the questionable business model of running a low-rent motel for the downwardly mobile. My living space was cordoned off from the rest of the basement with floor-length white curtains, like an army hospital. I’d been crashing there for two weeks – since leaving my ex – because I enjoy pretending that I’m still as poor as I was growing up. Wait, sorry, that’s not totally true. The real deal is I recently burned my entire life to the ground when I took my vow of radical honesty, and now I need cheap places to hide in case I can never find work again.

Either way, I didn’t hate the Ai