~5.4~

Her first steps down the dark passageway were hesitant. She looked over her shoulder to see if her guide had stayed to watch, but she was already gone. Well, she’d come this far. She’d paid the women $250 for leading her to a courtyard that was both open and “interesting”… she’d also specified “safe”, but the woman named Marnie had explained that those terms were mutually exclusive, to a degree.

She hadn’t mentioned “dead spots”, though, until they were right outside. Ping pong metaphor or no, the term sent a shiver down her spine. She would have liked to ignore that feeling, to brush it aside, but it had been such feelings that had led her to this spot.

The growth of her interest in the city had been like her progress down the passageway: slow, halting, and unsure at first, until she’d reached a sort of tipping part inside her heart, and then there had been no looking back.

It had started with the magazine in her dentist’s office, left behind by some other patient who didn’t want it anymore. She was no fan of architecture, but it had stood out as so different from the other, more typical offerings scattered around the end tables that she’d picked it up and flipped it open, and there they had been, the magic words, reproduced large and italicized in an offset box: “Jericho is every city.”

She’d felt something numinous in those words, like there was something huge and profound and secret and true lurking behind them. Jericho is every city.

She thought she’d heard the name before, but then it was hard to say if it was the same Jericho… any name from the Bible was bound to crop up all over the place, especially in America. Jericho was no exception. Once she read the piece, though, she was primed to recognize it. When the news talked about America’s crumbling manufacturing base, they showed stock footage of Detroit but they mentioned Jericho, too.