Every weekend, Vicky resolved to dismantle Brown Town. She peeled back the cardboard flaps and rummage through years. She found a stethescope key chain she thought belonged to Hudson, and she tossed it back in disgust. There was a flattened tube of toothpaste, a water-stained box of tissues. Dusty candles filled her apartment with waxy saccharine scents. There was a snow globe from a Colorado airport, a shotglass. Hudson had teased her about those stupid souvenirs. She used to love them but all this stuff made her tired, reminding, reminding, reminding. Inevitably she would close the flaps back up and re-arrange a box or two so as to free up some space. “I’ll just free up some space today,” she’d tell herself. “And that will be enough.”

She resolved to get out of the house more. She wrote her goal with a marker across a cardboard box propped on top of the stove. Get out of here! SEE THE SIGHTS! She made a list of sights she’d like to see.

There was the zoo, and Pike Place Market, where the men tossed fat silver fish like playground balls. The aquarium, the Space Needle, a walking tour of the harbor. There was a ghost tour of a fiberglass sailboat haunted with actors in period costumes. A tour of an airplane manufacturing plant. She imagined the airplanes sleeping there, weighted heavily with tourists’ expectations. There were countless cruises and boat tours, but she had never been on a boat before and she realized that the idea was frightening. Something about being unmoored. She imagined a forest of sea creatures below that deep blue surface, glassy eyes watching, waiting. She wrote Whale Watching?! and Harbor Cruise?! at the bottom of the list.

She picked the Space Needle first. It was cheap and she wanted to see for miles and miles in every direction. She would peer towards the sea, towards China. She would squint south, towards Palomino, where her mother and Roy were in the garden, pulling weeds from brittle soil.

On a sharply cold Saturday afternoon she took a bus (sparsely populated, nothing of the weekday warmth) to the Seattle Center. The tower itself loomed like an upside-down exclamation point over a small park filled with concession stands and children’s rides. There was a merry-go-round with a laminated sign that said CLOSED FOR REPAIRS . Purple manatees and spotted octopuses and pale blue whales were speared on brass posts. A little boy looked longingly through the bars of the fence surrounding the merry-go-round, and his father tugged impatiently at his mittened hand. “Andrew?” the father was saying slowly, as though measuring his patience word-by-word. “What did I tell you? Say bye-bye to the animals. Andrew? Andrew? Listen to me, now.” A small rollercoaster raced loops around a rattling track. Two teenage girls sat in the front seat, rainbow-striped scarves flying out towards the vacant carts behind them. They were laughing. There was a red and white striped concession stand advertising snow cones and a blue and white one advertising funnel cakes. Both were closed, their windows shut tight against dawning winter.

Vicky wound her way over the paved walkways. Her hair was down and she wished she’d worn a hat and gloves. She bought a ticket and rode the glass elevator up, up towards the orb at the top of the tower. She walked the length of the disc, making her way through crowds of Japanese tourists and bickering families. The city stretched far in every direction. She circled around and around. A light rain spattered the slanted Plexiglas windows but there was no fog, and she could see far. Boats and bridges and freeways and lakes and the distant mountains and the bay, blue and flat. She saw buses crawling up streets like wind-up toys and wondered if No Name was on one of them, craning towards the window.

A mustached man in a khaki uniform and a safari hat circled the room with a camera. You paid ten dollars to have your photo snapped and framed in cardboard with I HEART SEATTLE printed in crayonish letters across a background of Seattle skyline. Vicky led the man to the outdoor platform, which was freezing and windy. There were only two other people there, making out in a corner near the railing, their faces lost among hair and scarves. The building rocked underfoot, like a boat, Vicky thought. Her curls flew with chaotic intent and her teeth chattered violently. She would mail this picture to her mother, she decided, one small truth. “It’s freezing out here,” the man said, and then snapped her picture. The sky stretched with gray certainty in all directions.

 

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