The past is a magic trick as simple as a slight of hand. Pick a photograph, and — wait — they’re alive. They’re all alive. How did that happen? Which part of the ear did you reach behind to do that?

The past leaks into the air in wide green founts here in the heart of Kansas. Hordes of insects (“was bugs,” they’re called) that feed on currents of magnetization emit every summer what they’ve stored throughout the year, and given the theorized agelessness of the magnetized currents, there is no telling what will eddy back into the present, who will sit up in the middle of a wheat field as if the time they spent in the other world was no more than a nap, be it Genet making do in Nazi-thronged Paris, spotting starch-white shirts carrying a table full of food into the woods and disappearing between the closing ranks of bark colonnades, dirt-faced kids in soup-lines by the law office reaching the front and muttering, “Dip down, damn it,” as they didn’t want the broth, but the globs of meat clumped at the bottom …

A clogged airline traffic-controller’s map of loosed daffodil whites and aphid-sized insects criss-crossed over the open air.

One of the topics of conversation in town that morning hung around the fact that The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, Mananas Argentinas, Mornings with Kerri-Anne, Cafe Puls, Dia Dia, Canada AM, Gente Como Tu, DR Morgen, Aamu-TV, Telematin, Mokka, Sybil and Martin, Reshet on the Morning, Omnibus, Zoom-in Supper, Hot FM AM Krew on 8TV, Hoy, ASB Business, Morning with Hum, Fox i Prijatelji, La Miranda Critica, BBC Breakfast Time (where — interestingly enough — Nick Griffin got an even worse grilling), Primera Pagina, and Morning Joe had all consolidated their programs into one single morning broadcast in a single studio in NYC, how big the couches have gotten, and the weird visual kerfluffle that occurred when they all decided to throw to their “local weather” and ended up with what very much looked like Zach Galifanakis pointing at a spinning globe in the kind of book-ladden study that demanded smoking jackets and saying, simply, “This.”

The General Store is where a majority of the conversations took place. The porch is made of decent enough oak. You can mail your letter, drink your coffee, and take your time. No one running any place. No one rushing you any place.

Newspapers hang from a giant wall behind the man in charge and Mr. Joe (that’s the man in charge) would take the kind of spike you used to pick up trash on the highway, matador the morning paper, and then float it down towards the morning reader so they could take it with them to read in the store, fold it underneath their arm, take it home with them, or hope that it trailed along a few steps behind like the neighborhood cat and then read it with a mug of coffee or tea, or take it down to the lakeside docks, where those with a less-than-solid grip braved the possibility of having it ripped out of their hands and sent off to the eventual Missouri.

“Manchester United has been playing in a black-and-white newsreel kind of way.”

“Too true, Mr. Joe. The polo shirts masquerading as jerseys don’t help that aesthetic hunch of yours either.”

A guitarist was lost in a field. It’s sunrise. He had his guitar with him, and – for a moment – he didn’t know how to carry it – over the shoulder, dragging it along by its neck as it carves as path through the dirt: who knows? Leave it against a tree and walk around.

There are four radio stations marking the corner of the town, one plays New Orleans stuff (Tuba Fats, Jimmy Reed, Frankie Dixon, Elmore James, Evan Christopher), one Botswanan (Segametsi,Western and Solly, Muhurutsi), one for buskers, and one that had been taken over by one DJ who had barricaded himself in the building, had food and goods delivered to the door, and played Elvis, Dylan, Ellington, Cage, Ives, Copeland, Guthrie, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizell, Miles Davis, Coltrane and countless more on a constant loop, calling up other artists in other countries and hectoring them to come over to the States. “When are you coming to America? We’d love to have you. When are you coming? I know a lady who can get you in.”— and in the way a weather vane spun atop the tip of a farm house, these stations — each marked by a different form of architecture — slowly rotated across the town limits, lurching guardian cogs buried in the clockwork of the American earth.

Owen Bellows, lost guitarist, Italian, born in Big Sky, Montana, raised in an ex-pat community of Rome, so when introduced himself as an Italian-American-Italian, no one quite appreciated it the way they should, or so he thought, isn’t lost, but is indulging in something he’s always wanted to do: go to an airport, stare at the departures and arrivals, the comings and goings, and pick a destination based on that alone. It’s why he’s here.

Gary Antin was the mailman. Every day, he would cover 3/4ths of his route as quickly as he could, then pull into the town library’s parking lot as quickly as possible to take a nap. He tilted his shoe at an angle and watched an ant crawl into and out of its shadow, and then … Ka-thunk.

An old friend of his — old in that he recalled her giddiness when she said, “I did my first double-park the other day!” or how she could only shower in the basement one fall, the upstairs one being broken and too expensive to immediately fix, and come Halloween, she was locked outside the house, and had to pretend to be the victim from Psycho while she waited with trick-or-treaters for her parents to open the door — had sent him a polaroid and a letter. The polaroid was a young kid with a typewriter on his lap. Next to him, a sign. It read, “Poems: $1.” On the back: “This could be you.”

He woke up and started the car up again. One of the radio stations was next. He moved the gear-shift accordingly, and it made that sound, like this rumbling box that made its way from mailbox to mailbox was a Model T that managed to rip open an envelope and pull its ‘car groin’ all at the same time.

Passed a swath of rose campion. Throw it up on the set of an imaginary Japanese technicolor film. Like a set of purple jax from a game of marbles stacked atop each other. Passing over a bumpy patch of road, he lipped his coffee cup to avoid taking the styrofoam plunge.

“See this? It’s a bowl of surgically removed ant brains. I want you to eat it. Now! Quick! Okay — spit it out and stab it with this knife!”

Owen Bellows had met Hunt outside the General Store. He had overheard him say to the men on the porch, “You know — if you try and decapitate Chiquita Banana … and you miss, it might actually be good for you,” and it caught his attention. Hunt then began introducing him to a rapid-fire variety of homeopathic cure-alls — much like the ant-stabbing above — that left Bellows trying to determine what, exactly, Hunt was trying to cure.

As for me — well, we had been hugging the road for a while, but Sally and I ran into a bump a little way’s back and now my engine is doing its best impression of a steam-engine train that I’ve ever seen (choo! choo!), my wife’s wandering barefoot down in the grass, and I’m breaking out the maps to see if I can get us out of here in a safe and timely fashion.

Off in the distance satellite dishes are strewn like marigolds. Low-lying, warped fences frame balanced rocks. I apologize for my accent, by the way. I know it’s a barn-whistler. Thought I was on 130 after taking a turn off I-80, but it doesn’t look like that at all. I hear that plenty of trains run back and forth through the land around here, but I haven’t seen any yet.

My wife’s wearing jean shorts cut in such a way that I can see the beginning curvatures of the ass. She hasn’t kissed me since we pulled into a gas stop outside the Devil Towers and I went into the bathroom and came out with a moustache for the first time in my life. Hand to the all-something, that’s the honest truth. She said it looked like something between Rhett Butler and Gregg Allman, or a slightly bushier Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil (or a moustache officer on his way to stop someone from committing moustache), of whom and which none she approved. My first thoughts while clicking the razor on the edge of the sink was the overwhelming compulsion to buy a pack of cigarettes and begin a spoken-word rendition/recitation of “You Are My Sunshine.”

“Why don’t you come on over, Bellows? We’ve got coffee, apple crisp …”

“What is your house, Hunt, the county fare?”

“Yeah, you can milk a goat for a ribbon and lead a sad donkey from room to room. Why don’t you want to come over?”

The way into town wasn’t long. My wife and I were surprised by that. I was fine with this. I felt like an egg balancing on a moon balancing on a kitchen counter-top around her, and that was fine. That was mighty fine. A garden snake was staring down a discarded silly straw.

The house was already filled with guests when Bellows arrived. The driveway: a ribbon attached to the bottom of a Chinese lantern — lengthy, traced lightly across the land. A microwave dinged, and a child said, “Now who could that be?” and walked off toward the front door. A tray of drinks went up and over their heads and onto a candle-studded balcony where a guitarist sat prostrate on a rug guarded by a belly-up dog who kept trying to distract the musician, who was in the midst of singing —

Good morning, Irene.
Irene, good morning.
Sorry ‘bout what I said
‘fore I went to bed.
Good morning, Irene.