I’m a nobody. He’s a somebody. I don’t mind.

When Frankenstein decided to leave the Oklahoma community for the southern border, an emergency mission of mercy in the company of his consort—a battle-ready woman with a good mind for business and handsome pecs strong enough to keep anybody in line—I took his place as in-house fixer for the commune. They told me to get stuff done while they fornicated and Bible-thumped, often with recording devices turned on.

Not much got done. The place was busting up. Too many despised each other when they weren’t fornicating. It was like the country that way. Each faction did what it could to humiliate the others. The Oklahoma Hill Country faction called me to a meeting once and made me wait for hours. Nobody showed up. No whips, no chains, no torture device. Nothing like that. Just abandonment.

Without Frankenstein to keep a tentative peace in place, self-appointed bigwigs in the community thumped their Bibles with a vengeance. Uncle Faust grabbed his bald head with both hands, screamed to the skies in frustration and disgust—“Fuck fuck shit piss goddamn!”—and quoted Mark Twain to the delusional ones with the regressive cortexes. “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me; it is the parts that I do understand.”

They screamed back at him “Abraham this” and “Isaac that,” gibberish about taking all of us from up north to the mountaintop to slice us open, sacrificial lambs in God’s name. “Abraham and Isaac?” Faust said. “A guy takes his kid to the mountaintop and plans to stab him to death? That’s a homicidal psychopath in anybody’s language.”

“You can say that again,” I said, and we packed our bags. North Dakota nice, we call it. Everybody in Fargo tells me Tulsa is paradise on Earth, with honest law enforcement, clean streets, and good work to be had—Woody Guthrie country. I don’t tell them otherwise, since I didn’t live in Tulsa itself, just in the hill country with a group of Bible-thumpers. All I want in the world is to do some good. So Tulsa is still on my pilgrimage map, still someplace to try when I need a change. When some yahoo tells me Tulsa is paradise, though, I wink and smile. “Is that the way it is?” I say. “If you go down that way, do it in a convoy. Dangerous days to travel alone. Don’t take any guff from the swine with their Bibles.” That’s good advice I gave them. Tulsa’s not the shithole Faust says it is—he’s prejudiced because Bibles and attempted murder in the name of Abraham give him a rash—but it’s no paradise, either, I can guarantee you that. No place on Earth is paradise. But then again, I’ve never been there. Not yet, anyway.

Nothing in America is a paradise, not anymore. It’s just a place to get up each morning and do something to stay alive. Unless you’re Frankenstein or Faust, who have a mission to instruct, improve, and entertain. “I’ll give you a good laugh,” they like to boast. And often they do. “Want a laugh?” It’s one of their catchphrases. Not much to laugh about these days. “Want a laugh? Come listen. Come see.”

Back in Fargo, punch-drunk after the commune, I rented a beat-up one-bedroom flat a short bus ride from the bombed-out civic center. I lived next to an alt girl whose actual God-given name, she claimed, was Cinderella. “Call me Cindy,” she said, smiling. We had a smoke now and then, but she came and went according to a clock in her head whose workings I never figured out. You’ll hear her story by and by.

It was autumn. The hawk of winter was on the move and would descend soon enough with a swoosh into the upper Midwest. But it was Indian summer, and that meant everybody was outside, mingling during the latest pandemic, many of them refusing to wear masks or keep their distance.

Faust and I settled into our routines while we waited for Frankenstein. While Faust went about his business, I sat and thought deep thoughts in a dark room to keep my mind, which is on the spectrum, from dissolving into a pudding of panic and waited for Frankenstein’s soon return.

We worked on logistics. It would be a kind of talk show, we decided. Like the old days, Faust said on Skype. Frankenstein, preparing to leave the border but still tending to children in cages, flickered in and out of view on the monitor like a wraith. He looked grizzled like a town drunk, but his bright eyes were sharp and clean. He gave a thumbs-up, the nails bright with rainbow-colored lacquer, one of his trademarks, but uncut and gritty from hard labor.

He disintegrated into static. A wraith, indeed.

“How’d he decide on that name?” I asked Faust.

“Frankenstein, you mean? He used to have a car that was made out of body parts, or body parts made from an automobile, or a broken body put together with duct tape. Or something like that. Am I making any sense?”

I let it go. It was too much for me. I went home and drew the curtains to collect myself. Darkness helps me think. The light can be good when I need stimulation, but too much light and my brain burns.

In Fargo I wore tattered jeans and a shirt with a hole wherever I went. I wore an unzipped winter fleece whenever the hawk of winter waved its wings just to let us know where we were at. The shirt had a caption on it: “Stay Positive but Don’t Test Positive.” I often wore a wool cap to hide my big ears.

It was a grand day, warm and brisk, when Frankenstein returned dressed in jungle camouflage gear like an Army Ranger. He even packed heat in a holster on one hip; the pistol made a dent in his jiggling belly. He was made of fiberglass or plastic and not flesh. He winked at both of us when we came up to give him a hug and help him with his duffel bags, but held out a hand to keep us back. “I might be contagious,” he said. “Give it a few days.” He smelled like the border—a mix of scat and cactus, of eucalyptus rot with an efflorescence of javelina piss baked into his skin. He had the shakes. He didn’t look too good. He’d have to fake it. If he could. I began to have my doubts.

They didn’t rehearse. They had faith in their long game. “We always go long, never short,” Faust liked to say. In his glory days, Frankenstein had interviewed everybody from Vice President Taylor Swift in the days before she became a politician—when she was a singer who starred in the musical remake of the movie Fargo, now officially classified as a national treasure—to Dan the Man, a stumpy, bald-headed cynic who loved to mock others. His own talk show, Bumper Cars, had gone bust when he developed his own affliction, not Tourette’s but something that resembled it—an epidemic on the Northern Plains for a time—and went haywire on the airwaves. As for Faust, he had played with a limping Tiger Woods before the crippled golfer’s assassination, and as a young man had drunk mescal with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. “Nice guy when he’s in the right mood,” he liked to say. “He threw a mean curve when we played sandlot ball.” Then he hitched his star to Frankenstein, and the rest is history.

On the day of the show, the bus I took smelled like a urinal and perspiration and rotting potatoes. The clouds promised rain or snow. The temperature was dropping; I wore a dark fleece for comfort and camouflage. The big-bellied bus driver, chain-smoking through a soiled mask with a round hole in it for the cigarette, disregarded his “No Smoking” sign. He wore a green-and-yellow shirt that said “BISON” in big letters. The bus seats were slit. Filthy fibers of cotton stuffing clung to my shirt and filled the bus with a wet, soiled stink.

The streets were quiet until we got downtown. We rattled past a bank. I saw the glint of marble floors. Helmets on square heads, lots of automatic rifles. It wasn’t a bank, I realized, but a bar that had once been a bank. The bus ground to a halt, its brakes on their last legs, and stopped a block past the bar at the burnt-out hulk of a building that had once housed the local newspaper, now defunct. The driver, in no hurry, stared at a gang of punks dressed in red jackets with decals of fire-breathing dragons. “It’s a great day to be a dragon!” they shouted in unison. They were beating up an old codger with his own cane; he was so stooped that he tried inching away from them like a crab.

“Spring training,” one of the punks shouted toward the bus, as if challenging any of us to intervene. “This is it for the old coot!” Coot, I thought; I haven’t heard that word in a week of Sundays. I made a note of the word. The punks dragged the coot along, his body limp but twitching spasmodically. “You can’t do this to me!” he croaked. “Don’t you know who I am?” His mask had been torn asunder, and blood spittle streamed down his face. The leader of the pack, with a swastika carved into one lobe of his shaven head, faced the bus—none of them were masked, of course—and curled his arms to show tattooed skin and muscle. He held out a branding iron; I could see the swastika burning bright. It was the new symbol of what we were all about, another reason some of the world treated American borders like prison walls.

Near the civic center, the curbs were cluttered with fast-food rubbish and small fires burning in the chill as the forsaken homeless tried to keep themselves warm. A man about my age, his chin bouncing on his chest, rode an adult tricycle in circles, shouting, “What’s good for the goose is good for the baba ghanoush!” The civic center itself was a wreck. Piles of plaster, air that tasted of mold and mildew, beggars holding out their cups but cringing at any sudden move. The governor had approved legislation that authorized any legal to shoot any illegal or indigent for any reason at all, so long as it was videotaped for required broadcast on local news.

Inside the arena, the air was electric, pumped full of intravenous drugs, offered at the door. The drugs promised immunity and allowed masks to be removed. Contrary, I kept mine in place and sat on a metal chair, my phone in my hand so I could communicate with Faust, who would wear an earplug onstage. A stoop-shouldered man with snow-white hair tapped my shoulder. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “the guys with berets? They cops?” There were lots of them near kiosks that sold booze and drugs. They had on green berets and red armbands. A few carried rifles. Some were dressed like Vikings.

“No. They call themselves Militias,” I said. “Vigilantes, but sometimes they keep the peace.” Contemptuous, he pointed at people across the aisle on plyboard bleachers who wore costumes: men and women in hoop skirts, ex-vets in battle fatigues with big placards: “SUPPORT THE RIGHT TO ARM BEARS.” The vigilantes with the berets and the purple Viking helmet with horns looked none too pleased. “No, I mean them hooligans,” he said.

I smiled. This had to be one of Faust’s pranks. “Hey,” I said, “I’m on your side. Thumbs-up, buddy.”

“Fucking A,” he said, and popped me a crisp one on the shoulder that would hurt for two weeks. He told me his name. I told him mine and tightened up when he asked the inevitable question. “Heimlich? How that spelled? What it mean? You can save me if I start to choke?” I said anything that came to mind, secretly smug. Ninety-nine percent of the men in today’s America have a sperm count too low to make babies, especially if they’re unvaccinated; he was clearly one of them.

The production crew placed the guests on the sagging plywood stage. An end-of-the-world prophet. An impressionist in whiteface and rouge with a neon tattoo implanted in his chest: THOU SHALT, it read. A senile mystic with a turban covering his baldness—the whole world seemed to be going bald—and an oxygen tube in his mouth. It was the geriatric ward, the last of the boomers making a stand. Thank you, boomers, I wanted to shout.

But refrained.

The show started on schedule, but lights flickered and squeaking swamp fans stopped and started. Faust hurried on stage using crutches, one of those guys you admire because you know that before his arthritis turned his fingers into claws, he could play any instrument, including the tuba, but now he had the affliction of the body and the mind. He told us that special generators installed for the occasion provided absolute insurance against power failures.

“Hello, Fargo!” he shouted. He cupped a hand to one hear. “Let’s hear it, Fargo! One. Two. Three: WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS GOOD FOR THE BABA GHANOUSH!”

The ones in the crowd who recognized the signature sentence went wild.

“Fucking A,” I said into my phone, set on loud volume, and saw him jerk at the sound but then laugh and stare out, searching for me and pointing an index finger my way as if it was the barrel of a gun.

Some in the crowd threw apple cores and even rotten eggs at him. The place was half full. All age groups. All status brackets. A suit here or there. Lots of team shirts and letter jackets. Some waved American flags. Some used sound makers that manufactured loud Bronx cheers.

Shots rang out.

One winged Faust in the foot. He screamed “Fuck!” then gave it up and motioned to the mystic with the turban and oxygen tube to warm up the crowd. A crew member came on stage with a first-aid kit.

Some of the berets and Vikings made their way into the audience and startled the complacent shooter, who apparently thought that anything goes. They approached him from behind, grabbed him by the shoulders, disarmed him, and dragged him to a fate that I didn’t want to imagine. Later, it wouldn’t surprise me if his mortuary pic showed up on the internet.

The mystic was a contortionist. He threw a tie-dyed sheet over his back and limped across the stage carpet, pretending to be Faust and gurgling incoherent omens into the mike.

“Boot out da bum!” somebody screamed. The mystic lost his temper, walked to the impressionist with the neon tattoo on his chest, and spit in his face. The impressionist waved, forgetting in his hipster senility how to move his arms, and accidentally slapped himself in the face, the gesture sufficiently comic to keep the angry patrons in their seats. Faust, his foot now bandaged by medics so practiced they could work the front lines of the latest brushfire war, brushed the gob of spit from the impressionist’s painted face. He wagged a finger at the mystic. “Fucking stop it! Where’s your decorum?” Then two goons in funny skirts waddled from backstage and dragged the mystic away, just in time for Frankenstein to make his entrance. “WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE,” he shouted, “IS GOOD FOR THE BABA GHANOUSH!”

I couldn’t believe this was happening in Fargo, North Dakota, where courtesy was once king. Frankenstein himself didn’t look too good. His head twitched from the residue of a minor stroke that had occurred earlier in the week. He was also contagious, so he wore a double mask that covered part of his baba ghanoush beard. He tried to do one of his classic monologues but forgot what he was saying and hid behind his mask and beard as if it was a shrub. “These lights,” he muttered, nervously arranging notes.

“What the hell?” I said into my phone. This was not the Frankenstein I knew and loved. “Get him off the stage or bring him a glass of water,” I said to Faust, who didn’t appear to hear me in the hubbub. Or had he lost his earpiece in the fracas?

The place was filled with screaming human primates baying like hyenas; it reminded me of the tournaments where two or more fighters go at it until only one stands. Frankenstein knew what had happened to that rock star—what was his name, the one with the hair that never stopped?—who came to sing in Fargo but was literally torn to pieces when his voice froze up at the wrong time.

An egg splattered near the desk in the middle of Frankenstein’s monologue. The monologue wasn’t funny. I said so into my phone. Faust pointed at me and nodded to show he could hear. The egg wasn’t a joke, either, though the audience broke into guffaws. Better than a bullet in the foot. Faust cut the whole thing short, limping up to Frankenstein and pulling him to his seat behind his desk. It made me mad. Even the Boss would have problems with a crowd like this, if the Boss hadn’t developed Parkinson’s and could still sing.

“You fuckers!” Faust screamed in a frenzy. “Cut the crap right now! THIS IS BABA GHANOUSH TIME!”

I stood and screamed to let him know he had my support. “Hey, Faust, my man! I’m with you, man! Remember the Paradise Intentional Community!”

He startled at that and squinted into the audience. I made a fist and held my arm up high. He did the same. A portion of the audience joined us. It was a moment. I won’t forget it. It was the penultimate time I would see him alive.

The mystic had bombed. The impressionist was senile. Frankenstein introduced the prophet, an authentic muscle man. He wore faded Levi’s and a T-shirt without sleeves, so you couldn’t miss those ancient biceps as gnarled and strong as tree roots, like an old surfer with skin leathery enough to make into boots. He flexed his arms and featured the word on the tee. COURAGE, it said. Girls in nothing but G-strings came onto the stage and danced behind and around him, as if this was a performance by the late, great Pit Bull.

“Throw out da bum, I said!”

The two security guards on stage exchanged glances. They were unarmed and worried. One searched for the berets and the Viking helmets, who were still outside doing whatever they were doing to the guy who’d shot Faust’s Achilles tendon.

“I’m a goodwill ambassador,” Frankenstein had said, explaining why his security was unarmed. “Ambassadors don’t pack six-shooters.” I wondered what he had done with his pistol; he might need it. Enough is enough. We all know what happened to the rock star. How many national treasures can we afford to lose?

I hoped the prophet would be good, because the crowd was going ape. The prophet raised a hand for silence and cocked his head at a weird angle. He held out his chest. You could imagine him standing in a thunderstorm on a mountain in Tibet. He formed a temple with his fingers and bowed to the audience.