After we arrived in Michigan, I holed up for weeks in the backyard bunkhouse and slept on a moldy cot. The bunkhouse was no more than a shed, repurposed decades ago by my father in his teenage attempt to escape his father. I sprayed so much Raid keeping the wasps at bay that my lungs ached with a chemical burn. The wasps were relentless and territorial and, during daylight, forever hovering.
To get away from California, my father had decided we would spend the summer on a small island near Detroit, in my grandmother’s house, where he’d grown up. In January of that year, 1997, we’d watched on the news as houses near Sacramento had succumbed to a great flood: Aerial shots showing miles of still, muddy water. Hundreds of shingled roofs peeking just above the surface, like pods of whales coming up for air. That March Biggie Smalls was murdered four miles from the dull LA neighborhood where we lived. A couple of weeks later authorities loaded dozens of bodies into trucks near San Diego after members of a comet-obsessed cult committed mass suicide. They had each been tucked into their own little bunk bed, belly up, like children. “Jesus, fuck,” my father said. “I need to get you out of this state.”
