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traffic. Tormented by the desert wind and heat, the tower’s wooden exterior had begun to splinter and crack, the once proud yellow and blue color scheme reduced to variations of a washed out brown. Recently, someone had tagged the side of the building with white graffiti, spraying an asterisk in a circle over the decaying tower façade. As Campbell moved closer to the symbol, he was struck by two observations: The paint was still fresh and the job had been done in a hurry.
    A fire escape ran up the back of the yard tower. Campbell trudged to the top of the ladder, then pulled himself onto the roof. From this new vantage point, the abandoned freight yard seemed to extend for miles in every direction, a sprawling industrial relic from a different America than the one he had just fled—dozens of different tracks converging upon the yard from every direction before melting into one massive primary track that ran into the building upon which Campbell now stood. Long dead signal lights constructed beside each track stared back at Campbell. Once upon a time, this freight yard helped subdue an entire continent. Now the continent was exacting its revenge.
    Campbell found it difficult to imagine these tracks ever carrying freight trains. Yet, this yard had been a thriving commercial hub; the sheer amount of discarded freight was stunning. Burnt-out boxcars seemed to litter every track, some turned onto their sides, others merely left in the middle of the rails, their doors ajar. Other cars, which Campbell thought were called container cars, had been broken into, their steel bellies breached by some kind of welding tool, their cargo looted long ago.
    The sun was now dropping below the horizon, lighting up the entire yard like a pinball machine, the dying sunlight bouncing off every half-buried piece of industrial treasure: steel, iron, and glass asserting their presence with unexpected majesty. As the wind whipped through the mechanical mass grave, it unleashed a mournful whistle. Looking down at his feet, Campbell noticed he was standing on top of another graffiti asterisk, also inside a circle and made with the same hurried strokes as the one grafted onto the side of the tower. A chill swept through Campbell and he wished the massacre he now surveyed was the result of a nuclear holocaust or some great plague; some brand of biblical disaster—real Book of Revelation shit. Instead, the dead eyed signal posts staring up at him were simply the result of neglect, of “number crunching” at some inaccessible corporate level, and of the blunt fact that the world was no longer what it had once been.
    Not that Campbell had ever been a sucker for nostalgia: An Ivy League academic—Princeton for undergrad, Harvard for his Ph.D.—Campbell had long considered himself beyond any cheap addiction to cultural revisionism; every American neighborhood in the 1980s wasn’t a fucking John Hughes movie. No time in the past was ever as good or pure as those living in the present recalled it to have been. He understood that change was not only inevitable, but the very means by which species bettered themselves. But despite his deep disdain for those who pined for some make-believe past, Campbell had been unable to shake a sneaking suspicion that here, at the end of the American century, something was going very wrong.
    Accompanying this nebulous, nagging dread was a growing disillusionment with his self-styled role as a man of science. Campbell was brilliant and, for a long time, he had surrounded himself, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps not, with men who made sure he never forgot this fact. But as the years began to tumble away, acclaim bred arrogance. The partnership he had joined into with Morrison—that was designed to cure America. Now he wasn’t so sure he didn’t help poison her. Campbell suspected there wassomething necessary, something vital about the materials left to rot in this industrial depot; they had once formed the foundation of