Edgewood, Churchville, and Aberdeen, Maryland to New York City, September 18, 2016

★★ Down below the hotel window in the gray morning, out past the borrowed car, an old man in shorts stood smoking and staring out over the empty access road. Sometimes the shape of the sun glimmered whitely through the clouds. The air was dense and uncomfortable to be out in. Past the massed flashing lights on the right shoulder of the highway, off in a ditch among the trees, the eye could find the shine of chrome and then the white of a detonated and sagging airbag. A lightweight, presentable churchgoing sweater felt heavy. The light increased. Cows switched their tails. Little purple flowers hugged the ground in the field at the crest of the hill, and purple grass heads floated above. The front lawn was dry and hard underfoot. A mourning dove hunkered down in the birdbath, breast in the water. Some full sun made its way through the leaves for a while. Out on the interstate again, a cloud of dust floated off to the right, where another car had just left the roadway and the nearest cars in the slow lane were coming to a stop. The state troopers said they knew and were on their way. Now clouds thickened up ahead, now clouds glowed; neither made much difference. A few drops of rain ticked on the windshield, but only a few. In the twilight, up in New Jersey along the Turnpike, a man balanced on one pale leg in the beam of a police flashlight. The city air was as stifling as the air in the exurbs and the country had been.