Sitting on the steps of a grand old social security building in St. Louis with my brother, waiting for my dad to come out. Said to Chris, I don't know, I think I'm just ready for a change. It's like all I've really accomplished since everything happened is piecing my life back together—and that's great, I acknowledge that and give myself credit for that—but like so now I've built up the Lego house and I either want to play something in it or else tear it down and build a new one. He laughed, he totally got it. As we had been sitting there, a great crowd of rough around the edges people had been gathering—maybe homeless, displaced, damaged, dispossessed, all manner of humanity on the edges of society. Periodically they started up rhythms, shaking and banging on whatever was handy, singing or chanting. The lighting was incredible; it was deep under old bridges and viaducts, brick the color of dried blood at night, distant summer sunlight filtering through. On the way there, glimpses of the arch but twisted, multidimensional, warped—from certain places (i said I should remember one of the vantage points so I could go back with a camera—it was highway 171 heading south from a version of downtown) you could see two arches in completely different places, both distorted gloriously. Between the bases of the arch they had done a lot of building—looked like a story book London village. Everything was dense, teeming, shadows and light. It was really another instance of *my* city, you know? *The* city. We had passed an apartment building that was held up by giant hands, cupping it protectively. To get in you walked up steps through the wrist and forearm. On the last ramp around down into this place, I had to get dad’s attention because he was leaning over looking at something on Chris's phone and almost ran over someone who was doing some kind of writhing dance in the middle of the road, wearing gauzy white, standing in a great puddle of accumulated rain water. Where we parked there was a water pipe that had been closed off in 1901. Dad said something about the unusual way that had been done. We had been talking about whether to eat at McDonald’s or a cooler little local place—main disadvantage of the latter was there was no drive through, so you'd have to go in to pick up your food and risk contact with the virus. My brother was about to catch a plane and go somewhere interesting. I was going to take some of his stuff because he didn't have room in his luggage. That's when the Lego thing came up.