There is the paper factory. And the dog food factory. And the beer factory.

I had asked, What are the major job position fields in this town?

She repeated, job position fields? And I knew I was not speaking correctly.

She is driving me out of this town, away from the job factories, to where there is only flatness. I learn that here the great winds relentlessly scour the landscape, winnowing everything to pure form. The trees are silhouettes—stripped and wrung. Even the stones fold. The land is soft, I am told, it is a land accustomed to yielding.

I have come to this town because I have been told there are answers here. I have been instructed to investigate what has transpired and to see what is possible. In my studies I have learned that the immovable is only an illusion. For instance: all soil comes from stone. Even the giants of the earth, buried deep down, end as grit and mud. I want to tell this woman, who is now speeding past homes and sheds, about the duration of stone, about its lithic indifference to time, its hidden malleability. I have spent a lifetime telling others about the small similarities that can be found. People I have met incidentally in my travels, people I have sought out. It is always the same. I ask these people I encounter: would you like to know something about the life of the land? And I continue even when I receive no answer.

I rephrase the question: What is it that people do in this town?

The woman driving me around does not repeat the question, instead she looks in the rearview mirror at me and lets out a long noise of contemplation. A thunder noise, a prairie noise. People, she pauses, people do what they do. And I think, perhaps this is a place where the doing is uncomplicated. Or, this is a place where the doing is secretive. Either way, it is a place I do not know at all.

Out the window there is more of the same—wheat stalks shivering and uninterrupted plains. The light is leaking away in the distance beyond the fields and I find myself blurring, becoming elemental, in the dark of the car. I cannot manage so much ambition.

I ask the woman who does what she does because she is a person of this town to stop off in the next field. We are in the far-stretches, where there are only silos and gridded crops. The woman does not understand my request and asks for clarification. She does not see how a field might end, and because of this tells me nothing can come next. When she says this, it makes sense to me suddenly, this undifferentiated land. The woman goes on. She tells me she will make a compromise, she will take me to a famous spot, where there used to be another town. It is older than everything else, she tells me.

When we stop, I cannot see the significance. Here it is, the woman tells me, the ancient metropolis. I only see a grassy hill. Is it that hill?, I ask. She corrects me without malice: it is a mound, not a hill. It was built by ancient people, she continues, each person scooping up some soil and placing it ceremoniously in a pile over hundreds of years. You have to imagine this, she tells me, the ancient town was once both larger and more vital than the current town. I point just in front of us, interrupting like a child: the ancient town is next to the new town's dumping grounds, there are old mattresses and crushed oil drums, seagulls circling overhead. She nods but does not want to linger. There is a smell of burning not far off and the air is heavy.

In the town I am from, a town very far from this soft land, the buildings accrue upon one another. Newer buildings are sutured onto the older ones as if there is no time, or need, to remove foundations. There is a cafeteria on the old block I grew up on, a block with roving dogs and women sitting still in long shadows. The man who has always worked behind the counter of the cafeteria is in charge of very little: the cash register and the basement. And even in the basement there are very few things this man is in charge of: an old chair and table where the people of my town were tortured, and a rock with the Colonel's name carved into it. The man charges the cost of coffee to see the basement, taking pleasure in the sibilance of desaparecidos. As a child, I sang it over and over again in my solitude. A lapidary word, a word carved into memory, made from syllables that expand and crack under pressure.

I ask the woman driving me around the service highway that cuts through the ancient town what the people were like. The woman thinks about this for a moment, never taking her eyes off the road. She says, the people in the ancient town were content, even though they lived primitively. And I think she is telling me they were content because they were simple, that they did not yet know about job factories and unfulfilled desires. I do not think this is true, but I do not say anything, as I do not yet know how people in this town, ancient or new, disagree with one another. Instead, I watch the grass covering the ancient town move in waves.

There is nothing left of the ancient town’s center plaza, it has been replaced with a museum, which the woman has driven me to so that I might understand for myself who these people might have been. The woman drops me off just outside, explaining that here is where I might find some answers. And I can understand why she thought that. Inside the museum there are men returning from the hunt and women breast-feeding. This is what was done every day, the placard says. There are racks of animal pelts and fish stewing in pots and a huge canoe.

In a dark room, there is a large map detailing the ancient territory: municipal buildings, market squares, dense housing enclaves, all drawn schematically in pale relief. A dramatic reenactment of what might have been. The land the map covers, the very same land that is just outside of the museum, is exhausted now. It is land that has been unbuilt many times since the ancient town collapsed. But here it is pictured in its abundance: ripening fields and large fires, homes set among foraging animals. The map invites viewers to look out at the plains and imagine the contours of the ancient town for themselves, to see what has been destroyed and forgotten according to their own ability.

I engage a mannequin, whose arms are raised high, forever about to throw a heavy rock down. I press a button, and a scratched voice comes through the mannequin’s chest telling me of the daily toil to secure food and harvest corn, how now she is working the mill, which will provide for her family. She invites me to stay for dinner, though I am not sure how this will work since she is behind glass and I am yet uninitiated. I watch her as the lights dim on her scene, moving on to illuminate some mannequins chasing one another around a fire, while others stretch hide and strip grass.

Near the reconstructed shell burial, I consider the myth of the map. In the myth, the land is abstracted, evacuated of life. These mannequins form a map, and I another. I tell them, the only way to understand each other’s life is to become interred within it. There can be no dioramas, no scripts. To live it out minute by minute is the only way have an accurate representation of it. We are at an impasse, the mannequins and me. There is no longer anything left with which to describe what has been lost of my old life, my ancient town, what has disappeared. But the body remains, and this I believe they understand. The body of the land, my own body full of stones and clotted dirt. Um corpo desconhecido, sem ligações. My body, folded in on itself. And so no, I tell the mannequin with their rocks and hides, I regret I cannot stay for dinner.

Outside, I see the woman is still sitting in her car. I join her and we continue moving through this softening prairie land to the work site where I am expected to diagnose the town’s ailment. It is a parcel of land where an old factory sits, the fluids draining out of it like a corpse, entering into the soil, seeping into the water. I have been told by officials that the fluids are contained. That the areas of the town where the fluid first bubbled up have since been evacuated of people and shrubs and animals. There are people dying still, the woman tells me, as an afterthought.

On the way to the site, the woman points out the window and says there, there is where the grasses are being left to go wild and free and this is being done for the health of our town. And I think, yes this makes sense, this planet is covered in grass and water and rocks and this is all very healthy.

For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.