nobody can maintain ‘em. There’s pictures; it’s like Mad Max or some shit. People building little tent villages in the drained-out swimming pools, pretending like Michael Phelps never peed in there. Maybe my sister works in one of those; maybe she’s got a little cluster of street urchins, sitting ‘round a fire, reading bedtime stories beside the diving board.” “No,” I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be a swimming pool in Utah.” “Why not?” “It was the winter Olympics, dipshit. And besides, they don’t build stadiums for that.” “Like you’d know.” “What, do you think they built a whole goddamn mountain in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City? Just so those fuckin’ Swedish cheerleaders can come skiing by in their Power Ranger sweats? Doing their fuckin’ backflips? No, D—, it duddn’t work like that.” D— didn’t turn. We just kept walkin’. And so we keep goin’, single-file. And we pass dumpsterville; pass the hazard waste disposal from the medical school; and we start going through the science campus, where all the buildings are these rigid glass trapezoids, hangin’ over the steep hillsides like fuckin’ Elon Monks [sic] lives there or some shit. And we keep walking; and eventually the ground drops around us, and it’s just us on the railroad, with cars driving on the road, way down below. I start gettin' scared, thinkin’ I might fall. And outta nowhere we make a turn, and the football stadium’s looming over us, like this big fuckin’ somber monolith, endless towering concrete. But I don’t look up at it; I just keep puttin’ one foot in front of the other, watchin’ my steps, watchin’ the cars keep goin’ by, way down the steep embankment. And so by the time the high really kicks in; by the time I’m riding that mean steely breeze—kinda gigglin’ to myself—the rail lines have deposited us at a cemetery. And so we go through the muddy Georgia clay up to the iron gates. And wouldn’t you know it? It iddn’t even locked. We step on through and start wandering around in the pale moonlight, like
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MASKS
• SPRING
2021
