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This is the place to see America, not down there, where the show is almost over. After college, I crossed the country with a girlfriend, loading a Subaru wagon with beer and sleeping bags and flipping coins to pick that day's state highway. The girl was sheltered, the daughter of two professors who'd consulted with campus colleagues on her upbringing. No TV. A multilingual reading list. She hungered for mini-golf, for roadside farm stands, for wicked stares from old-timers in greasy spoons. She read On the Road as we drove, declaimed the thing. I knew I was being used -- her native guide -- and that she'd drop me once the trip looped back to her parents' cottage on Nantucket, but I wanted to show her something she hadn't seen.

I failed. Nothing there. That America was finished. Too many movies had turned the deserts to sets. The all-night coffee shops served Egg Beaters. And everywhere, from dustiest Nebraska to swampiest Louisiana, folks were expecting us, the road-trip pilgrims. They sold us Route 66 T-shirts, and they took credit cards. The hitchhikers didn't tell stories, they just slept, and the gas stations were self-service, no toothless grease monkeys. In Kansas, my girlfriend threw away the book at a truckstop Dunkin' Donuts stand and called her father for a ticket home. She's a Penn State sociologist now, raising her kids the same way she was raised, and I doubt that she's thought twice in fifteen years about our hoboing. No reason to. The real America had left the ground and we'd spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin.

-- Walter Kirn

Anyway, that's how it should have worked out.  But I looked back.  I couldn't help it.  It's not like I didn't know my Bible, all that pillars-of-salt stuff, but when you're someone's daughter that she raised by herself with no help from nobody, habits die hard.  I just wanted to make sure my mom hadn't broken her arm or cracked open her skull.  I mean, really, who the hell wants to kill her own mother by accident?  That's the only reason I glanced back.  She was sprawled on the ground, her wig had fallen out of reach, her poor bald head out in the day like something private and shameful, and she was bawling like a lost calf, Hija, hija.  And there I was, wanting to run off into my future.  It was right then when I needed that feeling to guide me, but it wasn't anywhere in sight.  Only me.  In the end I didn't have the ovaries.  She was on the ground, bald as a baby, crying, probably a month away from dying, and here I was, her one and only daughter.  And there was nothing I could do about it.  So I walked back, and when I reached down to help her she clamped on to me with both hands.  That was when I realized she hadn't been crying at all.  She'd been faking!  Her smile was like a lion's.

Ya te tengo, she said, jumping triumphantly to her feet.  Te tengo.

-- Junot Díaz

But first we would have to establish a regular schedule for family conferences, in which we could sit down to discuss our needs quite openly, so we could plan for disaster accordingly. For instance, we'd need to determine the sorts of things that might maintain our morale, such as the playing of Old Maid and Parcheesi. In later sessions, we'd need to assess the psychological pressures we'd face due to sickness, confinement, and rationing, and to reach at least some tentative accord as to whether we should shoot our family dog for reasons of sanitation. Finally, we would even need to decide what we would do if one of us should die, and to determine if we felt it was necessary to arm ourselves against our neighbors, including the women and children.

-- Richard McCann

The performers alone seemed to possess energy -- even though most nights it seemed they were expending it on perversely obscure works, performing everything but the music the composer was famous for -- as if, given the fact that this was a free concert, they might as well play music they couldn't elsewhere. Often the pianist or violinist asked the composer -- a professor he or she had studied with -- to stand and bow after the premiere of some sonata. At almost every concert, however, no matter how irritating, there was one piece -- sometimes only a passage -- that made you feel you'd done the right thing in coming here; that someone else (the composer) had understood, had known, your grief, that life was worth living because of music. At the same time, this music, or piece of music, also made it clear that you had been fooling yourself in attempting to go on with your life; that what had happened to the person you loved you would never get over; that you still carried it with you; that it lay beneath all things; and only this music -- these few notes -- recognized that everything else you had been doing, and would do, to fill up the time was meaningless. Then the passage ended, and you looked around, at the other people listening, and finally the solitary young man a few rows in front of you biting his nails, or the man next to him looking at his watch.

-- Andrew Holleran

What has lent Mr. Gingrich' written and spoken work (or, as he calls it, his "teaching") the casual semblance of being based on some plainspoken substance, some rough-hewn horse sense, is that most of what he says reaches us in outline form, with topic points capitalized (the capitalization has been restrained in the more conventionally edited To Renew America) and systematically if inappositely numbered. There were "Seven key aspects" and "Nine vision-level principles" of "Personal Strength," Pillar Two of American Civilization. There were "Five core principles" of "Quality as Defined by Deming" (Pillar Five); there were "Three Big Concepts" of "Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise," Pillar Three. There were also, still under Pillar Three, "Five Enemies of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise" ("Bureaucracy," "Credentialing," "Taxation," "Litigation," and "Regulation"), which might have seemed to replicate one another and would in any case have been pretty much identical to Pillar Four's "Seven welfare state cripplers of progress" had the latter not folded in "Centralization," "Anti-progress Cultural Attitude," and "Ignorance."

-- Joan Didion

Beyond each game, he sees another, and yet another, in endless and hopeless succession. He hits a ground ball to third, is thrown out. Or he beats the throw. What difference, in the terror of eternity, does it make? He stares at the sky, beyond which is more sky, overwhelming in its enormity. He, Paul Trench, is utterly absorbed in it, entirely disappears, is Paul Trench no longer, is nothing at all: so why does he even walk up there? Why does he swing? Why does he run? Why does he suffer when out and rejoice when safe? Why is it better to win than to lose? Each day: the dread. And when, after being distracted by the excitement of a game, he returns at night to the dread, it is worse than ever, compounded with shame and regret. He wants to quit -- but what does he mean, "quit"? The game? Life? Could you separate them?

-- Robert Coover

In January there were poinsettias in front of all the bungalows between Melrose and Sunset, and the rain set in, and Maria wore not sandals but real shoes and a Shetland sweater she had bought in New York the year she was nineteen.  For days during the rain she did not speak out loud or read a newspaper.  She could not read newspapers because certain stories leapt at her from the page: the four-year-olds in the abandoned refrigerator, the tea party with Purex, the infant in the driveway, rattlesnake in the playpen, the peril, unspeakable peril, in the everyday.  She grew faint as the processions swept before her, the children alive when last scolded, dead when next seen, the children in the locked car burning, the little faces, helpless screams.  The mothers were always reported to be under sedation.  In the whole world there was not as much sedation as there was instantaneous peril.  Maria ate frozen enchiladas, looked at television for word of the world, thought of herself as under sedation and did not leave the apartment on Fountain Avenue.

-- Joan Didion

We were speeding past scorched brick walls, gray windows, back porches outlined in suns, roofs, and treetops -- the landscape of the El I'd memorized from subway windows over a lifetime of rides: the podiatrist's foot sign past Fullerton; the bright pennants of Wrigley Field, at Addison; ancient hotels with TRANSIENTS WELCOME signs on their flaking back walls; peeling and graffiti-smudged billboards; the old cemetery just before Wilson Avenue.  Even without looking, I knew almost exactly where we were.  Within the compartment, the sound of our quick breathing was louder than the clatter of tracks.  I was trying to slow down, to make it all last, and when she covered my mouth with her hand I turned my face to the window and looked out.

The train was braking a little from express speed, as it did each time it passed a local station.  I could see blurred faces on the long wooden platform watching us pass -- businessmen glancing up from folded newspapers, women clutching purses and shopping bags.  I could see the expression on each face, momentarily arrested, as we flashed by.  A high school kid in shirt sleeves, maybe sixteen, with books tucked under one arm and a cigarette in his mouth, caught sight of us, and in the instant before he disappeared he grinned and started to wave.  Then he was gone, and I turned from the window, back to Kate, forgetting everything -- the passing stations, the glowing late sky, even the sense of missing her -- but that arrested wave stayed with me.  It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I'd have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.

-- Stuart Dybek

Death is now walking in a greater than usual hurry in this country.  Your prediction those many years ago is now coming true for me.  The impulse to kill has spread from the cities, where it had been contained and promoted as an aberration, and has fled to the suburbs and to the small towns.  There are now armed standoffs, sieges, revenge killings, moral-dandy killings, bombings, suicides -- every possible expression of twisted and perverted passion.  The corporate focus on the externalities of this madness, the institutionalization of its form as normative, is a certain sign that this country is going through the nervous breakdown you once predicted.  But obscured by the blaring details of public deaths are the imprints of the much more mundane private ones.  News comes each day of friends who have died or who are dying.  A close friend in Chicago has recovered from one form of cancer after a regimen of chemotherapy only to find that another form of the same disease has taken up residence, a life of its own, in his pancreas.  Another close friend in the Northeast has had the very same cancer and the very same treatment, but the growth has only been arrested, and has been diagnosed as lingering in his cells, biding its time, until it is again strong enough to make murderous assault on his life.  He writes to me that his friends have advised him to take a leave from his regular job and learn, after a full lifetime devoted to work, to smell the flowers.  He offered the same advice to me.  I wrote back to him that both of us, like all other people, had come into this life lured by the promise that we would eventually be able to smell the flowers.  I told that he and I, like everyone else, had been badly misinformed.

-- James Alan McPherson

Permian got the ball, stalled, and punted.  Carter got the ball, stalled, and punted.  Permian got the ball, stalled, and punted.  Carter got the ball, stalled, and punted.  Permian got the ball at its own 48-yard line.

There was a minute and fifteen seconds left.

It had stopped raining and the field glistened under the flood of the lights, looking like an empty skating pond.  For a moment everything seemed stopped in time. There was a strange sense of detachment in the air, as if no one was there at all, just these two teams having it out with such relentless bitterness, and the rain and the cold temperatures made everything seem fuzzy and out of place.  There was no glory here, no pomp, just the raw-boned sound of bodies crashing into bodies.

The Permian fans were on their feet, yelling with an urgent poignancy.  The season was slipping away, the fabled cry of "State in eighty-eight!" that had been etched on the backs of cars and scribbled in yearbooks a minute away from becoming a failed dream.  The rain-soaked hair of the cheerleaders looked lifeless.  The band, sitting in an upper corner of the stadium to escape the rain, played its familiar marches, but the music seemed muffled and miles away.  And yet there was still the chant.

"MO-JO!   MO-JO!  MO-JO!  MO-JO!"

Fingers were crossed.  Eyes were raised to the dull gray sky.  In the cavernous stadium, the cheers seemed distant, tinny.  But still there was hope, because there had to be.

That was the very point of it all.

-- H.G. Bissinger