I had never driven in the United States, but of course I couldn’t let that interrupt the flow of things. My friend had graciously offered to let me stay with him - six weeks, two months, a year, as he put it languidly - with no comment on any expectations on my part. I found it hard to believe - surely he’d want me gone within a week or two - but, still, part of me thought maybe I ought to trust him. In any case, I played my part of quiet, modest Brit and planned on arriving without incident, cool and confident, to see what the summer may expose. Thus I planned to fly in armed only with a duffel, his address, and a reservation for a car rental. I already mentioned that I was recently divorced and drifting aimlessly off of start-up funds, but the reality is that, at this time, the start-up was also being liquidated - had been liquidated, in fact, and I was free to do anything or nothing as I saw fit. The company went public, as everyone had hoped, and my savings account blossomed in the stupid way everyone hopes for, but then things went weird: the new owners didn’t think the old guard much mattered, and we were slowly burned out by being asked to train cheap replacements that would, we all noted, doom the company and cause our beautiful stock plans to bottom out. I didn’t much mind - it was work, and not maths, which was all I really wanted to do. I didn’t care how much was in my savings account. I was passionless, but free; I sold my stocks at a comfortable spot and then walked out at my leisure. Zac’s DM was perfectly timed - the truth is that I was equally lonely and bored. The work had occupied me well enough, but as it petered out, I was stuck facing my old inner turmoil - regrets, loss, pointlessness - for uncomfortably more time than I’d like to have. And driving an automatic on the wrong side of the highway seemed a good way to shut out this turmoil again, or at least start to. I shoved my duffel bag in the boot and felt thrilled by the sense of impending death. I careened through the labyrinthian tunnels in and around Boston. My phone screamed inane directions, the timing comically off - I missed every exit it suggested, because it suggested every exit too late. I circled under the city for twenty minutes, trying to get my bearings, gleefully counting the number of middle fingers waved at me within inches of the driver’s side window (16 total) and listening to the worst music I’d ever heard on the local radio. It was a terrifying and belligerent start to my strange new life with Zac in the country and its dumb, metaphorical birth-likeness made me chortle in a way that I imagined Zac would also appreciate. Then, inexplicably, I was out of the tunnels and soaring a highway above the city, and then more quickly than I expected I was on some two-lane bullshit road surrounded by liquor stores, and then just as inexplicably I was driving through a hilly wood. I felt utterly bewildered by this world that Zac seemed to have inhabited without much comment for years, and thus found myself unconsciously assuming the strange chaos inherent to the American pastime of driving around in this part of the country must have been key to the strange chaos inherent to Zac’s stories. It was all so silly - I hadn’t thought of writing in any serious way in over a year, and then my entire trip had been clouded in the stinky fog of literature. The way it burbled in my brain so naturally scared me - some stupid part of my brain was infected by books, and it may never go away, I noted, sadly. The nature of the trip obviously played a role in letting this burbling take hold, as Zac, to me, had always been a central figure in my appreciation for literature as a writer; our friendship started and continued unceasingly on the pretense of being writers, of reading writing, of publishing and editing, gossiping and shittalking the new rags and upstarts, complaining about poor metaphors and lazy plots. We often, I felt, competed in our little chats to see who could confound the other most confidently in our snatches of writing, a mental game of bluff under the guise of artistic creation - I didn’t want to confess this to anyone, let alone to Zac himself, but I always assumed his successful collection was, ultimately, written as an inside joke only I could fully appreciate. The strange gaps in plot, the leaps in logic, the hidden currents that guided the text, I understood, were carefully constructed not as a means of pointing to some deep, poignant truth, but rather to a nothingness, an empty box. His ellisions and quirks were all a smirk and a nod - there was nothing he was trying to say, nothing connecting it all under the surface, and this nothingness was, as far as I could figure, the winning move in our game of creating nothing under the guise of something. Only I saw through this guise, was my assumption, because only I knew of this game.He intimated so much to me in this game, in his paddling back and forth of snippets, in his suggested edits - I saw in his recommendations to disconnect any throughline one could make in a poem of mine a quiet confession of his own goals, and, as a mirror, I believe he saw in my recommendations to do same a similar confession. Our writing for and with one another was a collaboration in nihilism, and while up to a certain point we saw only very limited, maybe more adequate termed laughable, success, his collection had somehow fallen into the wrong hands, or, more cynically, the right hands, and blew apart the establishment, briefly, until the new crazes came to roost, and he could quietly retire to the mysterious country estate I was so bravely seeking out. I grimaced and resolved to not speak of writing - especially his book - upon arrival. The roads I took became increasingly bizarre, secluded, near-overgrown at times. I was shocked to see such a deep forest so close to - it seemed to me - such a large metropolitan area. The American continent confounded me, in spite of my previous travels across it, with its uncontrolled lushness inevitably bound up by strip malls and mansions. I drove for close to ten kilometers on a single-lane road, it seemed, what with how large American cars can be, hoping the whole time that I wouldn’t meet anyone going the other way, partially because I didn’t trust myself to pull to the right side of the road - the right - as opposed to the wrong side - the left - and irrevocably wreck both cars. Not that there was any room to pull over, at times - the tree line ran almost immediately up to the pavement, frighteningly so. It was inconceivable to me that such a road existed, let alone served as a key route of access for any part of civilization. But, of course, after those ten kilometers, the road widened up and the trees plunged away to reveal those inscrutable American facades: Wendy’s, Sunoco, Dunkin Donuts, and countless one-off “marts” and salons and liquor stores in identical concrete slab buildings: FastMart, Shelly’s Styles, Continental Liquor. I wove between massive trucks and vans and fat, spandex-clad cyclists while trying to follow the bleating voice of the GPS and then, of course, ending up again cresting a wooded hill that overlooked yet another glistening, unspoilt lake. Again I felt schizophrenic, bouncing endlessly between the polar opposites that somehow constituted the typical American landscape. I scrolled through the radio as the stations inevitably faded to static - somehow the radio towers cast belligerently complex nets of coverage, fading in and out, popping back up based on the elevation of the road or, seemingly, the presence of a house nearby, or something else entirely unknowable. I listened to only advertisements, it seemed - endless advertisements for the same stupid shit, things I couldn’t fathom anyone feeling a need to buy: new tires for their cars, juice cleanse packets, packaged meat from a local grocery chain. What music I did catch snippets of was familiar and boring, or else seemingly satirical: twangy country singers crooning about sex over sleazy rap beats, or smooth jazz typical of hold music. I was repulsed and confounded and, I think, above all, sympathetic for my American friends, in light of this isolating, perplexing climate. I thought of Cavin, experimenting with internet drugs, buying chili dogs from gas stations, working a job that made him pay for his own health insurance, and his plight made more sense. I thought of Mike, also in a dead-end job, gardening in pots on a little terrace, afraid to tweet anything too personal lest his local legislators find out and demand he resign from his job. I thought, of course, of Zac, and his deep sadness in spite of stupidly profound successes. It all made more sense to me; I was more sympathetic than I had ever been when we talked regularly. I had some brief epiphany, then, as I was pulling into Zac’s gravel driveway, at last: this was what shone through this American literature I so raved about in my youth. Everyone who lived here was fucked, bound up in absurd stupidity from the moment they’re born. I parked and shut off the engine, pinching myself for so stupidly reverting back to thinking of literature just as I was about to see my old literature friend for the very first time in our lives. Even though Zac was made to tour extensively for his collection, things never aligned for us to actually meet. He’d send me the dates for his visits to London, and I’d inevitably be scheduled to fly out to Italy for a wedding, or Belgium for a business trip. It was stupid in an honest way, we’d agreed, at the time -we seemed doomed to never meet under the pretext of publishing, in spite of how much writing and publishing had defined our relationship. Divorces, pandemics, broken bones, weddings, funerals, electrical grid malfunctions, tropical storms, and even a volcano all intervened in our comically tentative planning. We often joked, before his book got picked up for a second run by Penguin Random House, that we only had to mention meeting up for a reading somewhere for tragedy to befall not only one of us but often some whole chunk of the world, if not the entire world. It only made sense to abandon it all and pretend we were simply some original vanguard members of alt lit - loser kids trapped in a flyover state with only the internet to connect with someone and talk about books and art. We didn’t need cocaine parties in Brooklyn to feel like we were doing something in the literary world, even though, by 2021, even alt lit was propped up by Little, Brown and ugly socialites flying from LA to New York. We weren’t a part of it, and it sucked - not us being excluded, I mean, but just the whole scene at the time - but it wasn’t worth shittalking publicly. So I had never seen him in real life, and even online, I somehow never saw a picture of his whole body - he was forever just a couple snapshots, profile pictures, and the errant, joking selfie in a group chat. I couldn’t speculate on his dimensions at all, and so never bothered. When I dreamt of him, which I sometimes did, he took on various shapes and forms borrowed from elsewhere - he’d appropriate my friend Tom’s lanky build, or my brother’s confident gait. In this way he had always seemed ethereal to me, and eventually I came to feel uncomfortable about actually meeting up, independent of the seemingly cursed nature of our attempts; it felt unnatural that we should ever meet in person, or even speak on the phone. He was a little text bubble, as was I to him, he said once, I recalled - I joked, then, that we may as well have been little AIs talking over Twitter. The irreality of one mapped seamlessly to the irreality of us both. I felt comforted by this simpleness of our relationship, after a while - nothing was ever time-sensitive, nothing ever took a frustrating tone, nothing was ever poorly communicated by an errant glance and unexpected chuckle. Our communication and thus our entire relationship had been measured, thoughtful, and leisurely, which felt as refreshing as it appeared, I supposed, tragic, to anyone I could bother explaining this to. As such I found myself surprisingly meek and disquieted, peering up at his dark and overgrown wooden porch from the car. I was unsure how to proceed, whether I should call him or go up and ring the bell or something else. I settled on fussing about the car - stupidly, as it was empty aside from my duffel in the boot - to alert him to my presence, in case he hadn’t heard me pull up out front already. I shut the door with a moderate force, and the sound of it diffused more rapidly than I expected into the woods that crept up to the edge of the driveway. I crunched across the gravel to the back, and as I was shutting the boot, I saw him standing on the porch. Even though I had been trying to draw him out, his presence startled me. I felt unsure what to say, or how to look - I was keenly aware of my face, my teeth, even my eyebrows; I didn’t want to make the wrong impression, make him second guess his invitation, ruin his perception of me through some careless glint in my eye. He was wearing a flannel robe over some faded pyjamas, his hair mussed about and drooping awkwardly around his neck - he’d gone too long without a cut, I surmised - and his beard was lumpy and wiry, uncombed, unwashed, probably. I smiled at the ridiculousness of it all. Hadn’t he known I was coming? Hadn’t he been the one who invited me to stay with him? Had I not sent him my flight information, my ETA? It was insane, and, also, it was something like three in the afternoon. He followed my gaze down over himself, flapping his robe out with his hands in his pockets, and then snortled. “Giacomo,” he called out, his voice raspy and uncertain, smiling widely. I grinned. “Why the fuck am I wearing pyjamas? What the fuck am I doing, Giac? Jesus Christ. Come in. Lemme just put on some fucking pants.”