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And maybe this hat I needed to do above all I needed to discover what Margo was like when she wasn’t being Margo

I lay there with the her-scented blanket for a while, staring up at the ceiling I could see a sliver of late-afternoon sky through a crack in the roof, like a jagged canvas painted a bright blue This would be the perfect place to sleep: one could see stars at night without getting rained on

I called my parents to check in My dad answered, and I said ere in the car on the way to ht He told me not to drink, and I told hi to pro what I was actually doing

This place was boring I ot past the rodents and the roans in the walls, there wasn’t anything to do No Internet, no TV, no ain confused o always struck me as a person with a very limited tolerance for boredoo wore designer jeans to break into SeaWorld

It was the lack of alternative stiift I had from her I moved to a water-stained patch of concrete floor directly beneath the hole in the ceiling, sat down cross-legged, and angled ht shone upon the book And for so is that the poe introduction, but around the ninetieth line, Whitman finally starts to tell a bit of a story, and that’s where it picked up for ) on the grass, and then:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full

How could I answer the child?I do not knohat

it is anyof reen stuff woven

There was the hope Dr Holden had talked about--the grass was a metaphor for his hope But that’s not all He continues,

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and rerass is a uess the grass is itself a child

And then soon after that,

Or I guess it is a unifor alike in broad zones and narrow

zones,

Growing arass is a metaphor for our equality and our essential connectedness, as Dr Holden had said And then finally, he says of grass,

And now it seerass is death, too--it grows out of our buried bodies The grass was so rass is a metaphor for life, and for death, and for equality, and for connectedness, and for children, and for God, and for hope

I couldn’t figure out which of these ideas, if any, was at the core of the poerass and all the different ways you can see it o There was no shortage of ways to see her I’d been focused on what had beco to understand the rass and her smell from the blanket still in my throat, I realized that thefor If "What is the grass?" has such a coo Roth Spiegelman?" Like a metaphor rendered incoh in what she had left os

I had to narrow her down, and I figured there had to be things here that I was seeing wrong or not seeing I wanted to tear off the roof and light up the whole place so that I could see it all at once, instead of one flashlight beao’s blanket and shouted, loud enough for all the rats to hear, "I Ah each desk in the office again, but it seeo had used only the desk with the nail polish in the drawer and the calendar set to June

I ducked through a Troll Hole and h the abandoned metal shelves On each shelf I looked for dustless shapes that would tell , but I couldn’t find any But thenatop the shelf in a corner of the rooht near the boarded-up storefrontIt was the spine of a book

The book was called Roadside America: Your Travel Guide, and had been published in 1998, after this place had been abandoned I flipped through it with the flashlight crooked between neck and shoulder The book listed hundreds of attractions you could visit, froest ball of twine in Darwin, Minnesota, to the world’s largest ball of stamps in Omaha, Nebraska Soly randoes The book wasn’t too dusty Maybe SeaWorld was only the first stop on some kind of ind adventure Yes That o She found out about this place soht or two, and then hit the road I could iht fled fro, I found h Guide to Nepal; The Great Sights of Canada; America by Car; Fodor’s Guide to the Bahamas; Let’s Go Bhutan There see the books, except that they were all about traveling and had all been published after the lite under my chin, scooped up the books into a stack that extended from my waist to ining as the bedroom