What I Loved

of Luv,
    The She-Monster & Co.
    It was May Larsen who told me that she had overheard Mark and Giles say they were going shopping, and she was the one who gave me directions to the mall only blocks away. I should never have left the hotel, but the prospect of sitting in the lobby, perhaps for hours, under Mrs. Larsen's vigilant eyes seemed impossible. I wandered out into a small walking street, an area that had been renovated according to new American standards of quaintness. I looked at its attractive benches, small naked trees, and a shop that advertised cappuccinos and lattes and espressos. At the end of that street I took a left and soon found the mall. When I walked through the door, I was greeted by a mechanical Santa Claus sitting on top of a display case. He bent forward and gave me a stiff wave.
    I'm not sure how long I was in that place, strolling among the racks of limp dresses and colored shirts and plump down jackets that looked much warmer than my own wool coat. The tinsel and fluorescent lights seemed to shudder above me as I peeked into one store after another. Every one was a familiar franchise with outlets in every other city and town in America. New York City has these shops, too, and yet as I moved from the Gap to Talbots to Eddie Bauer, expecting to spot Mark and Teddy behind every towering pile of merchandise, I felt like a foreigner again. The chain stores that shine in the empty plains of middle America are swallowed whole in New York City. In Manhattan their clean logos must compete with the fading ads of a thousand dead businesses that never took down their signs, with the noise and smoke and litter in the streets, and with the conversations and shouts of people who speak in a hundred different languages. In New York only the obviously violent person stands out—the bum smashing bottles against a wall, the screaming woman with an umbrella. But that afternoon as I saw myself reflected in one mirror after another, my features looked suddenly alien. Surrounded by the inhabitants of Iowa, I looked like a gaunt Jew wandering through a mob of overfed Gentiles. And during this bout of an incipient persecution complex, I had other thoughts of graves and their stones, of Giles's dead mother, of the pronominal pun—Me too/Me 2—and of Mark parading as a woman in a blond wig. All at once, I felt exhausted. My lower back ached, and I looked for the exit to the street. I hobbled past a plastic bin overflowing with bras, felt nauseated, and had to stop. For an instant I tasted vomit in my mouth.
    After I had eaten a tough steak and a basket of french fries, I returned to the hotel, and May Larsen handed me another note:
    Hey Leo!
    New locale: the Opryland Hotel. Nashville. If you don't come, I'm going to send Mark to my mother's. Your friend and admirer, T.G.
    There are nights when I'm still wandering the hallways of the Opryland Hotel, still taking elevators to a new level and walking through jungles that grow under an arching glass roof. I pass through miniature villages that are meant to resemble New Orleans or Savannah or Charleston. I cross bridges with water running underneath them, and I ride escalators up and down and then up again, and I am always on the lookout for Room 149872 in a wing called the Bayou. I cannot find it. I have a map and I study the lines the young woman at the desk drew to help me find my way, but I can't understand them, and my bag with next to nothing in it grows heavier and heavier on my shoulder. The pain in my back moves up my spine, and everywhere I walk I hear country music. It's piped in from mysterious crevices and corners, and it never stops. The phantasmagoric interior of that hotel can never be separated from what happened to me there because its nonsensical architecture echoed my state of mind. I lost my bearings and, with them, the landmarks of an internal geography I had counted on to guide me.
    I had missed the last plane out of Iowa City and ended up spending the night. In the morning I flew back to Minneapolis and boarded another plane for Nashville that afternoon. I told myself and I told Violet over the telephone that it was the threat to Mark implied in Giles's note that forced me to continue the chase. And yet I knew that my methods had been ridiculous. I could have seated myself outside Mark and Giles's hotel room in Minneapolis and waited for them to return. In Iowa City I could have done the same. Instead, I had left a note in one place and idly