The Amtrak depot was cold, which was why I wondered about the young blond woman across the waiting room from me wearing sequined flip-flops, her arms bare. She looked to be the age of the college freshmen I’d taught the previous spring. Wasn’t she chilly in this dank station? I’d noticed her earlier as well, because her sweatshirt and pants were so sharply green that I’d almost had to squint to look. I tend to take note of girls her age, young women with slight bodies and cagey faces, because of how they shock me back to who I was at nineteen. Now, on a rainy September morning, in this featureless warehouse gully of Saint Paul, the girl had stripped down to a thin tank top. How could she be hot in this drafty station, when the heat still hadn’t been turned on for the season? But I forgot about her as we all lined up to board the train.

 

The Empire Builder is the name of this passenger line on the West-to-Midwest route along the northern plains. It runs from Puget Sound to Chicago, stopping on the way in this Saint Paul industrial park. A double-decker Amtrak cruiser with curved and weather-splotched observation-car windows, the Empire Builder is not just one train but a fleet of four—two traveling west, two east—passing each other in the long silence of Montana and North Dakota. Narrow headlight beams intersect in the middle of the night on the far western segment of the route, the whoosh of speed catching for a moment in the vacuum of their passing, lives echoing each other in the occasionally lit-up windows, passengers up late drinking or reading or staring out, until the whoosh resumes and the meeting is over with a spark, a clank, a long whistle’s moan into the dark.

 

I always cringe when I hear the stationmaster announce this train’s name. I hate all those parts of American history that are about rounding up the natives and making way for progress. The Empire Builder was the nickname of the nineteenth-century Saint Paul railroad magnate James J. Hill, and this train was named in homage to the roots of development frenzy, when train tracks wrapped the continent in a leash of steel that must have made the old coot lean back in his chair, rub his one good eye, and think, Mine, mine, mine.

 

Yet all Americans, even the most put-upon among us, might have a little bit of empire building in our makeup, some desire to refind the lost parts of ourselves through locating and owning, landing somewhere and inscribing our names. I recognize the baser version of the urge when I come across stuff I want, from a loft with a view in my home city of Chicago to a sweater with a low neckline I know will cause my spouse, Linnea, to kiss my collarbone. Mine. This blank pull of wanting, a desire to erase all obstacles, can reel me into one of those give-that-girl-a-crown-and-a-bundle-of-roses daydreams, the girly version of James J. Hill’s long recline back in a leather chair as cigar smoke forms a crown just above his head.

 

Boarding the train to Chicago, I was trying to pinpoint what it was I meant to regain on this trip back, when behind me someone yelled. “Hey! We need help over here.” I turned to see that underdressed blond girl again. Pale to begin with, she had blanched gray-white, her eyes unfocused, her thin body slouched on the shoulders of two mom-like middle-aged women with hair pulled back into ponytails. These women had probably been looking forward to curling up on the train and sleeping at least until Wisconsin Dells, and now they had this kid—they didn’t seem to know her—hanging off their shoulders, loose-limbed as a straw girl.

 

The line moved forward, out of the station and toward the platform, but when I looked back a few moments later the girl was lying down flat on the floor. Her feet had fallen askew. A silver ring glinted dully from one of her wan toes. A paunchy stationmaster with thinning hair leaned over her, shouting, “Are you conscious? Can you hear me?” Even though the guy was yelling, he sounded calm, unruffled, almost bored, taking care of his daily routine. The women who had been holding the girl up crouched around her now, as if they were conducting a séance. The stationmaster called an ambulance on his walkie-talkie. Was the girl having a seizure? Maybe she hadn’t eaten yet this morning. Maybe she hadn’t eaten in a week. She was skinny enough to be bulimic.

 

There was nothing for the rest of us to do; already too many people were crowding around the fallen girl. The stationmaster asked folks to please step forward. We boarded the train, most of us craning our heads back twice, three times, to gawk.

 

This kind of thing, skinny blond girls fainting in broad daylight, is always happening on or around Amtrak. It might be something about the train, a long container of change that compresses people together, as in the plot of a 1970s disaster movie, all those lives that wouldn’t otherwise intersect stuck together behind a smoke-spewing engine dragging them across the prairie. Still, I sometimes take Amtrak back to Chicago because I like the train and don’t like planes, and because the train helps me remember times past, when I was a skinny, fallen blond girl myself.

 

On this trip, if anyone had asked, I would have said I was traveling home to see a show by the photographer Terry Evans, a series of large-scale aerial portraits of the city and its suburbs, exhibited outdoors, in the Loop’s new Millennium Park. But I was also homesick. As long as Linnea and I had been together, nearly twenty years, and despite all practical home and work considerations, I’d been wishing we’d leave Minneapolis and move back to Chicago, and lately my longings had gotten worse. Evans’s panoramas of the urban prairie, shot from such untouchable heights, felt both familiar and strange. The shift in visual position recast the broken whole as beautiful, and the photographs became like mirrors held up to parts of my body nobody in Minnesota could see. This personal terrain—the histories gone missing in me but then seen anew—was what I sought each time I ventured back to Chicago. I wanted some key to discern the difference between what, in Alcoholics Anonymous, we describe as the things we can change and the things we cannot.

 

Though Linnea and I are not morning people, she was good to me this early Sunday, waking at 5:00 a.m. to get me to the depot an hour before departure. She had even come into the station, her curly gray hair mussed, one sweatpants leg shoved up a little higher than the other. She’d waited with me for more than an hour, the train late again, though I was lousy company, griping about stiff seats, hard lights, and the nonexistence of the long-awaited bullet train between Minneapolis and Chicago that promises, if ever built, to whisk passengers there in three hours, which pretty soon would be the amount of time I’d been waiting for this blasted Empire Builder.

 

HALT. Years back, when I first quit drinking, the AA old-timers warned me about hours like these, when I’d find myself hungry, angry, lonely, tired. HALT is what they called it. Acronyms and slogans are big in AA, and some of them are silly, but this one has always made sense to me. Stop moving forward. Pay attention. Wake up before you take another step. The idea is to stop you before you take a drink, which wasn’t a big danger in that nothing train station so early in the morning, but in my case HALT was also a warning to change direction before I had to be sorry later for something I’d done or said to Linnea. HALT is one of the ways I usually remember to live since moving away from Chicago.

 

 

The train takes at least eight hours to get to its terminus, if we don’t stop and sit somewhere in the Wisconsin brush. I like to watch, from the train windows, the shifts between Minneapolis and Chicago, the seismic recalculation, a remaking caused by the slow, ravaging route the glaciers took, by centuries of immigration, by the transformation of the prairie into the American farm.

 

When I was the age of that girl we left on the station floor, I did things on trains that I have trouble understanding today, risky things I thought would make me happy, like making out all night with an off-duty conductor on the line running west back to Chicago from Syracuse, and time-wasting things, like spending an hour in an onboard ladies’ room lounge with a glaze-eyed redhead recruiting for the est seminars she promised would free me from the past, transform me into a human who was cleaner and better than I could ever expect to be.

 

Even on this trip I found myself doing things I’d never do on land, as when I sat still and smiled while a very thuggish, very young man in the adjoining seat told me he was on his way into the city for his day in court and then tried to pick me up. I’ve been known to tell complete strangers minute details about my life, but I told this young man nothing. I wanted to avoid getting stuck on the train next to a guy who might turn out to be a homophobe who knew too much about me.

 

It’s volatile enough that so many on the train, in the Midwest at least, are often people already in trouble, possibly lost, some so close to combustion that one thing or another is bound to blow the minute they sit down for an hour or more, hoping to get away, hoping to arrive in a far better place. There’s always the danger, on the way there, of falling off or down or through, of never arriving at the alabaster city. Which was why I kept muttering the words the stationmaster had shouted into that fainting girl’s ear: Are you conscious? I had long been whispering the same question to myself.

 

 

INSET 1 Imitation City

 

People, twenty-eight million, from all over, poured out of the train depots in 1893 just to see Chicago’s alabaster city. The white buildings of the world’s fair were as long as the fields these visitors plowed back in Indiana. The central plaza featured statues with bosoms bigger than cow heads, waterways wider than the boat harbors back in the Old Country, fountains with Our Lady Columbia at the center, surrounded by water spouting taller than the rock ridges along Lake Superior’s shore, back up in Michigan mining territory. Those who came stood on ferries, on overlooks, and they stared and stared, as if they were viewing ancient Athens. But this was someplace new.

 

The alabaster city was Chicago’s dream of itself. Most of those people, not just Chicagoans, must have known the White City, as it was otherwise called, was a phony—a vacation park, an extravaganza, the real city’s mythic twin—but they didn’t care. They were looking for the technology of completion, some shimmer of a future freed from the past.

 

The White City was made of 120,000 incandescent lights; 18,000 tons of iron and steel; 75,000,000 feet of lumber; and 30,000 tons of plaster, cement, and hemp that formed a compound called “staff,” which held up the walls. The Ferris wheel had cars the size of train engines. This was at the cusp of the twentieth century—before machine-made wars and atrocities sullied America’s technological optimism—the time of intellectuals like Henry Adams who thought we might replace the Madonna with the Machine. Katharine Lee Bates wrote about the White City in the song “America the Beautiful.” Thine alabaster cities gleam. The empire builder’s dream of America has always promised that by taking possession of a new place we can repossess ourselves, make our lives over. But the White City was mere intoxication, a touchable mirage, a gorgeous scam, a whitewashed stage set sparking and trilling in the Midwestern sun. Oh beautiful.

 

 

INSET 2 Shimmer City

 

The frontal blast of the engines, the streaking whistle wail—these were part of the wallpaper of my childhood. A train horn is a memory trigger, my version of Proust’s madeleine, the sound transporting me to a physical past where the rail traffic was too constant to be worth anyone’s notice. Once I was gone, the minor-key pitch of the whistle was what first carried me back to that landscape of trains.

 

It used to be that I traveled back to Chicago only when my mother or father begged me to attend a graduation or retirement party, showing up reluctantly, leaving much of myself back in Minnesota with my new world of lesbians, oddballs, and dropouts. All the way there and back I felt transparent, stretched clear across the upper prairie, belonging to neither place, not fully occupying the present.

 

I have a black-and-white photograph my father took when I was twenty-two years old. In the photograph my hair is braided down the right side of my head, as I wore it then, imitating some singer-songwriter I’d seen on an album jacket. The shutter captures me as I turn back to look at my parents before stepping onto the platform at Chicago’s Union Station, on my way back to Minneapolis, wearing the same scowl that appears in all the pictures my dad shot of me during those years. As soon as I was alone on the train I would release my held breath, smile. But before I boarded—surrounded by the Daniel Burnham–designed train station, with migration history swirling past in a hundred configurations, my mother crying, my father pointing that camera at his only daughter—I refused to admit I was leaving anything behind.

 

Half a dozen years later, when Linnea and I were newly in love, we took a driving trip from Minneapolis up along Lake Superior and into Ontario. Our destination was an amethyst mine near the upper Great Lakes, just east of Thunder Bay. In the mid-1980s, lesbians loved to talk about the healing power of herbs and stones and crystals. The amethyst was said to be a sobriety stone, and the lilac glint of the raw gem cast a light that read to me as clarity.

 

I was newly sober. Correction—I had stopped smoking pot and drinking, but hadn’t really earned the designation sober, still trying then what AA terms the precursor to actual change, the easier, softer way. I hadn’t yet done rehab, or even AA. I didn’t know yet about the work required to get and stay clean. Years later a sober friend would tell me that 90 percent of us relapse at least once. I had yet to take note of when, how, and why I drank, or of why I might want to (and in fact did) drink again. I’d stopped drinking cold, because even though I was still in my twenties, I was sick and scared and didn’t know why, and all around me my drinking and drugging friends and lovers were either spinning out or sobering up. I was afraid of being left behind with nothing but a cheap bottle of wine. And then I fell in love, with Linnea, who, I found out soon enough, liked me only when I wasn’t drinking. That sobriety could be contained in a stone was just another projection—like the alabaster city—but I was still a believer then.

 

Mining amethyst is not like mining coal. The mines in Ontario were really just open ground, like a u-pick-’em raspberry field. The amethysts were glassy purple gashes in the rocky Canadian earth. All we had to do was reach in and gather up all that sobriety, I thought, as if serenity were a commodity I could purchase by the pound, as if the simple weight of a pretty rock in my pocket was all it would take to make me change.

 

But first we had to get there. We’d meant to stay over along the way, on the Lake Superior shore, but it was a weekend night in resort country, and there wasn’t a room anywhere. We couldn’t find even an open campsite. So we drove on north and reached the Canadian border well after midnight.

 

When the border patrolman asked our professions, Linnea had a clear response. She was a graduate student, a teacher. I had no clear categories to offer the man. I was a barely published poet, but did he want to scribble this onto his form? Did he want to hear about my last temp job? When he asked me what I did for a living, I stammered and he squinted. I must have looked like a fugitive making an overnight crossing. This aspect of me might be hard to pick out now, unless my tattoos are showing, but then, I still had the air of a teenage delinquent. My hair was bobbed shorter on one side than on the other and streaked unnaturally red, with a band over the ears shaved all the way to the scalp. I wore a tight, short halter that didn’t entirely hide my nipples. The patrolman motioned for Linnea to open the back of the truck, and I whispered to her, “I should say I’m a stripper.” I meant to make her laugh. Instead she pinched me and whispered back: “Shh.” In our early days Linnea was always shushing me.

 

The guard went through the bags, stopping before each to ask whose. When I claimed a bag he opened every zipper, pawed through clothes, held every herb tincture up to the light. I don’t know why he took my word for which bags were mine—did he just want to touch my underwear? Linnea pinched me again and gave him her best grin, and finally he let us cross over.

 

Thunder Bay, the second largest city in Northern Ontario, is nothing like the homey stretches of highway that line upper Minnesota’s north shore, with their quaint donut shops and nature-art galleries. The Canadian side of the border is a shipping port and mill center, its industrial identity evident even at 2:00 a.m. We were relieved to find a street of old-time lit-up signs, their red arrows pointing down from the damp darkness toward a cluster of drive-in motels, the sort of relics that still operated without irony in pockets of the 1980s. The place we stayed, called the Holiday Inn, looked more like a no-tell motel of fifties noir flicks than the clean and well-lit American chain of the same name. It was a cheap joint with weathered clerks who didn’t look twice at two skinny lesbians in leather rancher hats and studded boots. Midnight cowgirls on a sex jaunt wouldn’t have been anything new.

 

The cabin’s room was narrow, the front door not more than five sturdy steps from the back windows. The frilly curtains were drawn and we didn’t look to see where we were, just stripped down and fell into bed. The air was muggy and close and I covered up with just a sheet.

 

We were sleeping skin to skin when the siren scream woke us. I clutched the sheet around my chest like a movie starlet. Linnea swore in Jersey Italian. She staggered to the windows, pulling open the curtain just in time to catch the tail end of a freight train speeding past, not six feet from the glass. The sad pipes of the locomotive whistled, I pressed the clammy sheet against my chest, and Linnea and I reached for each other in the darkness. We didn’t sleep the rest of the night. Newly in love then, I thought my past had been replaced by my present, but the pitch of that whistle carried me home through the back door of Chicago, as if the map itself had folded around my thighs and pulled me down, south of the Great Lakes shipping ports, to a geography of rails, discarded tires, smoke, and broken industrial pilings. Shocked awake this way, I felt as if I’d fallen back to the swarm of a downtown train depot, hiding from my father’s camera within the shadows of all the yearning bodies who had come before me and the shadow of my own body as well, as it had been, as it lived in me still. I was no longer merely a grown woman pressed against the body of her lover in a noir motel room, but also an immigrant mingling in a ravine of history with no idea of how to get out again.

 

In a fully conscious geography, the landscapes of memory loop into and out of the body like the Empire Builder, streaming into the West and back again, the whistle flowing behind like a farewell song, a constant circle of departure and return.

 

 

The map of the Middle West is geography as solution, the hard yellow sprawl of Chicago surrounded by the spokes of train tracks that seem to, and once did, hold it all together. The city and its hinterlands are interdependent, the farms unable to exist without the city to hawk their harvests, the city unable to exist without grain to store and sell. The Empire Builder trundles into and out of Chicago on tracks that were laid to guarantee that all trade from the East and the West had to change trains here. During its heyday, up to thirty-seven lines terminated at Union Station.

 

Alongside these migrations of commerce came the literary arrivals. Take, for instance, Sister Carrie, the creation of nineteenth-century Indiana writer Theodore Dreiser, who comes to the city drawn by her ambition but finds that her dream of Chicago begins to fade the minute she steps foot into the trouble of the city itself. If I had been among the exclaiming horde—a girl looking for work like Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber, or another world’s fairgoer trundling into the city’s meaty center—then I would have been a woman not so much brave as stubborn enough to take a trip like this alone. I would have been fluttery as the trip began, or as I imagine it begins, on the crowded train platform in Chicago, October 1893. She is the only woman not wearing a hat. The air is tart, but still she perspires. Earlier, on the train, on the way into the city, her dress snagged on a hinge of her seat as she tried to discourage the attentions of the well-dressed but somehow dirty gentleman sitting beside her. She hopes now that the fray along her hem is not too obvious. She doesn’t take the train directly to the fair, as some do, but disembarks downtown. The station is polished and hollow. She doesn’t shout to see if her voice will echo, but wonders if it might. She would have tried if she’d been less alone, or closer to home, but now she doesn’t want people to stare. She pushes her way deeper into the station and sees there are so many people that if she did yell out her voice would be absorbed into mounds of cotton clothing, nests of ladies’ hats, the flesh of the masses themselves, who suck up particular sounds and replace them with a monosyllabic buzz. This is her first awakening to the actual city: dissonance, static, a cotton-absorbed hum.

 

 

INSET 3 Rose-Colored City

 

My dad’s mother, my gram Rose, left the Lake Michigan mill plain for the Floridian Gulf Coast at age seventy and by the time she was ninety-five had forgotten most of the actual city, but she never forgot the Chicago she imagined. In Rose’s late years the neighbors found her lost on the way back from her walk around the golf course, the old lady with the flyaway hair who ventured out once a day, if it was warm enough, to sun herself along the road in front of her house.

 

By the time I thought to ask her questions about her old Chicago, Gram Rose didn’t have much to say about the East Side port district where she’d grown up, claiming not to remember anything that might make her look like she’d come from the city’s lower depths. Even before the dementia set in, Gram told no stories of growing up on Avenue H, and after she started slipping I heard her proclaim more than once, “I am the last living sister,” even when her youngest and very much still living sibling, my great-aunt Babe, had just been to visit. Babe was the one who told me how their father had lost his toes in a railroad-yard accident and how Gram had nearly been kicked out of the South Chicago Hospital nursing school when they found out she’d secretly married. Babe hated the way Rose seemed so happy to erase the family story. She would grab me by the arm as she talked, her hand dry and powdery against my skin, and ask me why her sister told so many fibs. But perhaps Rose didn’t lie so much as make herself into a fiction she came to believe, becoming herself a living version of the alabaster city.

 

Rose remembered Chicago’s hazy spires, the two-digit address on the building where she’d worked on Michigan Avenue. The numerals floated before her like voices from a heavenly metropolis that now whispered to her late at night, voices she whispered back to, saying, “I’m ready, anytime now, whatever your plan is for me,” the management of her celestial city having transferred seamlessly from Mayor Daley to God.

 

 

INSET 4 A Far Better City

 

In AA the geographical solution is when we move to a new place in order to make ourselves over, and thus avoid confronting the reasons why we needed an overhaul in the first place. Could it be that I’m drinking too much? Is it a problem that I smoke pot alone every night until I fall asleep with the pipe still glowing? Or is the place where I live the trouble? We might wish to get conscious, but the shimmer of an easier, softer city distracts.

 

When I left Illinois it was because I thought my geography was killing me. I thought location—not lack of will, not pot-and-vodka-tonic-induced torpor—was keeping me from moving forward into my own life. Oh, my aching geography. After I’d dropped out of the University of Illinois, I thought I could save enough money to move back up to the city. But I didn’t make it. I drank too much, both with friends and at work, so much in fact that some winter nights, walking home alone after waiting tables at a motor inn dining room—where I stole wine from the house spigots and begged cocktails from the lounge bartender—I fell into snowdrifts, laughing, honestly believing it was hilarious, the way I was living.

 

Once, I sat on the curb of a leafy Urbana street with a bottle of blackberry brandy, drinking at 8:00 a.m. My then boyfriend, Leonard, had just moved that morning, packing all his books and tools and beer into a VW wagon, driving away toward his own geographical solution, in Minnesota, leaving me free to do whatever I wanted. I was ambivalent about our relationship, yet still felt unmoored. What I wanted, first off, was to drink, which I did, right there on the street. If anyone sees me out here they’ll think I’m an alkie, I thought. And I laughed again.

 

I had a map of the world then, pinned to the wall in my studio apartment. Along the bottom I’d written HEJIRA, the title of my favorite album, by Joni Mitchell, where Joni herself appears in the cover art, standing in a black beret and matching cape on a smoky road, an empty highway superimposed over her torso. Under HEJIRA, I wrote, in black magic marker, one of its definitions, a translation from the original Arabic: Any trip or journey to a far better place. I put pins in cities—New York, Hong Kong, London—that seemed to me much better than Urbana. If the Emerald City of Oz had appeared on my map, I would have pinned it, too. I’d never been near any of those places but liked to imagine myself in that black beret, smoking, stopping traffic, a flask of brandy in my stocking. But really I had little idea where, or how, to live.

 

Perhaps my geography was killing me. In the history of cities, the steeple and the skyscraper have always been confused. Both are temples that feed our longing. Both are bridges to sanctuary beyond the reach of the human body. They are another kind of geographical solution. In the years since then I’ve been to most of the cities on my old map, and still when I stand staring up at a skyscraper, what I feel is akin to a crush on a movie star. It’s too easy to forget that temples are not gods, feelings not necessities. What cathedrals, oversize Ferris wheels, the tallest buildings ask us to do is to feel small and hungry in the light of dismissive wonder, to feel full of want, pulled to possess what might feed that want.

 

 

INSET 5 Steel Mill City

 

Great-Grandma Kata—long before she was Gram Rose’s mother-in-law—not yet eighteen, not yet emigrated, her hair loose around her ears, might have gazed out from her Croatian mountain village in the direction of the sea, clenching and reclenching her fists, wanting something, wanting more, wanting out. Years later, on the other side of wanting, an American now, hair pulled tightly away from her face, she may have clenched her fists again as she glared out over Chicago’s East Side port, her eyes stinging from mill smoke. Her husband, Big Petar, was off again, no doubt leaning over a rickety table and drinking with his countrymen, lost in his telling of yet another story of yearning.

 

Maybe Kata started out loving Chicago’s well-lit wonders, the late-nineteenth-century granite spires, the lace of electrical wires, the luster of new steel mills. This might have been reason enough to refuse to leave the city when her husband, who’d already dragged her from the mining towns of Michigan and Minnesota to the mills of Chicago, decided his geography would never stop killing him unless he kept pushing, continually moving onward, westward. The untried mines were always ahead. Here the machine of the city still sputtered its promises. The fire from the mills stained the lakefront orange, and the alabaster city’s gleam—that phony holiness—faded fast in the stink of Big Steel.

 

When Big Petar and Kata had arrived in Chicago they’d joined thousands of newcomers—the Poles, the Italians, the Serbs, the Czechs, the Croats—the last rush before the new twentieth-century immigration laws shut down the exodus from southern and eastern Europe. Petar had still been a young man when they lived above the tavern on Torrence Avenue. Loose limbs on a lanky frame, an unruly mat of dirty-blond hair, a long lope of a walk, shoulders that stooped, and arms that rose up to his face when he told a joke. The long family nose. The big, excitable eyes. The creases in both his face and his clothing lined with mill dust. The smile that changed his brooding expression into an invitation to pull up a chair.

 

My family remembers Kata as bitter woman, pushing her husband away, but perhaps more than just Big Petar, it was the never-ending wanting in both of them that pissed her off. Perhaps she’d been led to believe that in America come, come, come would translate to mine, mine, mine.

 

 

INSET 6 Disillusion City

 

Every weekday morning of the summer I turned nineteen I took the commuter train from the southeast-side mill suburbs, up into downtown to work at a bank in the Loop, and every evening, unless I was meeting a friend, I took the train back down again. Sometimes I came up on Saturdays, getting paid overtime to reorganize the tellers’ files, until the security guards shooed me out at noon.

 

Because it was the weekend, when the bank was closed and no customers could see me, I wore tight jeans and sleeveless blouses that I left unbuttoned too far. (When I’m alarmed by the outfits I see nineteen-year-old women wearing today—the pants that barely cover pubic hair, the visible thong—I’d do well to remember how I dressed at that age.) Even my red patent leather sandals, with a platform sole in the front and a spike heel in back, shoes that ripped up my feet when I walked west across the Loop from the train station to the bank and back, were meant to tilt me toward some edge. I wanted the city to be aware of me, but I stiffened when men yelled from street corners or sat down next to me too close in the train-station waiting room. Their wanting felt too much like owning.

 

I never went straight home after work on Saturdays. Sometimes I boarded a city bus and rode, just to see where I would end up. I carried a 35-millimeter camera my dad had given me. I’d learned how to use it in my college classes and was working on a series—construction workers’ cement-splattered boots, secretaries’ neat pumps—a collage of feet, perhaps inspired by how badly my own hurt in those bloodred shoes. But I took no pictures from the bus.

 

One Saturday afternoon I hopped on the Lincoln Avenue line and rode it all the way to its terminus. I had no idea how far the bus would take me. Into a neighborhood I wouldn’t want to be by myself? I knew the CTA bus wouldn’t cross too far over city lines. My heart banged, my hands were jittery, my camera bounced between my thighs, but I kept riding, resting my head against the streaked glass as the city gradually turned over, first shops and bars and little storefront restaurants, then long stretches of brownstone walkup apartment buildings. I watched as if I was a mapmaker charged with depicting the route, internally etching intersections and street names. What I was watching for I couldn’t say, but I thought I might find it from the bus.

 

Finally the driver pulled into a drab strip mall and stopped. The bus idled at the curb. Another bus was ahead of him, preparing to pull away and drive south, the direction from which we’d come. It was time for the driver’s break. He stood up, stretched, stared at me. Was something wrong with this young string of a woman, her hair that messy curly style all the girls were wearing? She looked like she didn’t eat. Her shoes were better suited for disco dancing than riding the bus, and her shirt was unbuttoned too far. He could see everything she had, not that it was much. Was she heartbroken? Drunk? Unconscious? If he yelled at her would she hear him?

 

“End of the line” is what he shouted. I looked up at him. He was correct, there was nothing for me on this bus, but what was I supposed to do about it? He repeated himself, softer this time. “End of the line, kiddo.” I peered into his face and nodded, but did not get up.

 

 

The container moves. Humans combust. One terrain streams into another. Halfway to Chicago—impatient for the train to get me to the Loop before dark, in time to see those Terry Evans landscapes waiting along the lakeside like detail maps set in the downtown margins—I eavesdropped on a conversation between a passenger and the conductor. The reason the train had been so late that morning, it turned out, was the onboard birth of a baby the night before, outside Minot, North Dakota. The last time my mother-in-law rode Amtrak, from her home station in Wisconsin Dells to Minneapolis, her train was held up for a couple of hours after a skinny boy sitting a few rows behind her OD’d on heroin. I don’t know if the Midwestern mommies riding west that night surrounded the boy, if they shook him, shouting, “Are you conscious? Can you hear us?” At some point the conductor must have noticed. This one, he’s not breathing. The train sat still in the weeds while they waited for the ambulance. If that boy made it to his far better place, he found out it wasn’t located anywhere near Seattle.

 

 

INSET 7 City of Mine

 

One night, after making love on our living room couch, I fell asleep naked in Linnea’s arms. When I opened my eyes again she was watching me. I whispered, “What do you see?”

 

“Mine, mine, mine,” she whispered back. Possession, she was trying to tell me, is not always a matter of empire. Some possess land but others take conscious possession of their senses. I take myself to Linnea, awake, and thus I take Linnea, by which I mean I take her desire to hold what I wish to give. What I wish to give is bound to what I once lost, or had taken, when I was a young woman too drunk to choose what I gave, lacking the wherewithal to accept or reject how lovers, or even strangers, fucked me. The better light comes, as we say in AA, of neither regretting nor denying history.

 

There is a retaking that comes of reseeing. To re-enter the city with full possession of the senses is to be able to see not just what I want, not just what I remember, but also what is, now and always, really there. That girl in the Saint Paul train station, maybe she was in trouble, maybe she was just having a bad day, but the girl I keep looking for, the girl who was me, she is always present, always unconscious, then conscious again.

 

One of Terry Evans’s photographs frames a limestone quarry in the near-south suburbs, close to the house where I lived when I was that girl, still in high school. While sitting in our kitchen, my family occasionally heard the excavation blasts, almost loud enough to rattle the plates in our cabinets. This was some of the limestone out of which the downtown skyline was made. The Thornton Quarry I remember is a grind of trucks and shovels, steel against stone, but from the air, in Evans’s photographs, the scarred stone walls become also sculpted sand, the truck road descending to the canyon bottom remade as a delicate spiral.

 

 

My Empire Builder did finally lurch into this truck-and-shovel Chicago, through the backyards of the northern suburbs, past the junkyards and warehouses at the edge and into the hum of the center itself. If this were a hundred-plus years ago and I were on one of the trains headed to the world’s fair, I might be the woman thinking: I am insignificant. By this I would have meant not so much small as lacking comprehension, taking up space yet unworthy of my own attentions. Which is the way I myself felt more than a century later, in the train depot just west of the river, the second Union Station, rebuilt on this same spot in 1925, then refurbished in the 1980s into a maze of escalators and closed-in waiting rooms. I came up the escalator toward the doors and bumped into bodies moving in every direction, all busy with purposes that didn’t concern me.

 

The purposes of jostling strangers don’t concern our lady fairgoer, either. She is so overwhelmed she fears she might faint in the station center, where the floor stinks of furniture wax and dust and the muddy heels of farmers’ boots. No one will see her if she falls. No one will shout “Dearie, Missy, can you hear me?” But she doesn’t faint, nor does she call out or even sit on a polished wood bench. She circles the perimeter, holding tight to the handle of her valise, watching for the way to Congress Street. She hasn’t awoken yet, but hold on, she will.

 

I opened the station door with my back, rolled my luggage out onto the same Congress Street. What did I want from my Chicago, illusory or real, from Linnea, from my marriage, from my adult life waiting patiently back in Minneapolis? I looked ahead, at the gray Chicago River, then up at the foggy glass and granite boxes of downtown, some city struggling to be tall in me.
 

Later still I walked south to the cusp of Buckingham Fountain, the same three tiers of spouting water set between Michigan Avenue and the lake that I’d watched from behind a car window when I was a girl, without ever getting so close. Simple awareness can locate, mere recognition that the wide-awake body is a map of obtainable and unobtainable wants. That a woman standing near the spray of a fountain is bound to get wet. That a plain prickle of water beading across the skin on a sunny afternoon, the refracted bend of the skyline caught in its sphere, creates a deliverable shimmer.

 

 

Photo: Terry Evans. Thornton Quarry, Thornton, Cook County, September 17, 2003