The next morning the sky was clear and bright—a high midwestern sky. I cleaned the snow off the Subaru using the broom with the sawed off neck—a very advanced snow-removal tool that my father, a self-proclaimed expert at removing snow from cars, had personally fashioned for me. While checking out of the motel I asked the old woman behind the counter how far it was to the Ohio border. She started to laugh. “The Ohio border? You passed it about a hundred miles back that way,” she said pointing a crooked finger towards the Interstate. She sucked noisily on a wedge of grapefruit, then she grinned a predominantly tooth-free grin at me. “Son, you spent the night in the great state of Indiana and didn’t even know it.”

She unfolded a map on the counter and raked a yellowed fingernail across it, showing me where I was. “You’re here,” she said. In the chaos of the previous day’s storm I’d somehow managed to drive all the way across Ohio and a quarter of the way across Indiana. It didn’t make mathematical sense and I told her as much.

The woman leaned across the counter and turned her cataract-afflicted right eye towards me. “Strange things happen in these storms that blow off the lake,” she said. She tapped her fingernail against a Polaroid thumbtacked to the wall behind the counter. It showed a regal-looking collie with a red bananda tied around its neck. She told me that the dog in the photo had once gotten lost in a lake effect snowstorm—a famous 1988 storm that had made national news—and somehow wound up three hundred miles north, in Michigan. “No one knows for sure how Taffy got all the way up to Portage,” she said. “But I know. I know that the storm took her. Carried her all the way up there. Just like it carried you right here to my front door yesterday.”

I remembered the moment from the previous day when everything went white around me and I couldn’t tell if I was driving on the road, or if I was alive or dead. Maybe something truly unexplainable had happened to me out there. Since I was a boy, I’d always read books and magazines with titles like Weird Tales and Eerie. All my life I’d been half hoping—and half dreading—that something genuinely weird or eerie would happen to me, that I’d have a great story that I could tell people at dinner parties that would give everyone a chill. I pictured myself untucking my napkin, leaning away from the table and, over the top of a bank of flickering candles, saying, “You know, something strange happened to me once in a snowstorm in Ohio, something that I can’t entirely explain…”

That’s when a dog suddenly streaked across the motel parking lot. It stopped and looked at the old woman and me through the front window. It had a bird in its mouth. The old woman hustled over to the front door and threw it open. “Bad Taffy! Bad! Taffy, you drop that bird and get in here!” she shouted. “Come on, now! Drop it!”

The dog could not have looked less like the dog in the Polaroid. It wasn’t even the same breed—this dog was a terrier-boxer mix of some kind.

The dog stared at the old woman indifferently for a beat. Then, the bird still wedged in its jaw, it bolted in the opposite direction.

I squared the bill, then telephoned Samantha from the lobby pay-phone, letting her know that I would be, according to the old woman’s calculations, in downtown Chicago in less than four hours. “Everything is ready for you,” Sam said over the phone. I had no idea what she meant by this, but I liked the sound of it. After being on the road for five days, the idea of arriving at a place where everything was ready for me sounded terribly appealing. I got behind the wheel of the Subaru and fishtailed my way out of the snow-clogged motel parking lot. “Taffy” chased after me, barking at my back bumper for a couple hundred yards until I reached the Interstate onramp.

I saw the city of Chicago long before I reached it. Before leaving New York, Phillip, who was fond of dramatic readings, read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” out loud for me, which included the description of the city as “the hog butcher of the world.” From a distance, it looked less like a hog butcher and more like a gathering of small, high-powered mirrors. I sped towards it underneath a cloudless sky.

As soon as I entered the city limits, not unlike New York, I felt menaced by everything. A poultry truck practically ran me off the road. Cabs honked. When I made a mistake and tried to switch from the left to the righthand lane, I set off a chorus of howling honks and a chain-reaction of middle fingers. I white-knuckled the steering wheel. I realized that my New York State license plates revealed my identity as a foreigner, and the good people of Illinois, I soon learned, had no patience at all for foreign drivers, a point which was driven home for me when a bald man pulled up along side my car, carefully turned down his window and said, “Go back to New York, asshole!” Then he turned up his window and drove away.

I found a parking spot on Sam’s street. I walked up to the front door of her building realizing that once I rang the buzzer to her apartment, a new me—call him “Chicago Scott”—would be born. Whatever was going to happen to me in Chicago started now. I paused, taking a brief, quasi-religious moment to acknowledge this fact. Then I pressed the buzzer. Bzzzt. A few seconds later, Sam was coming towards me through a series of glass doors. For some reason I always forgot how tall Sam was. She was the tallest girl I’d ever known.

She also had surprisingly broad shoulders for a girl. For years Phillip had maintained that Sam wasn’t a girl at all. “That girl’s schwanz is bigger than yours,” he’d said. “Look for an Adam’s apple. I’m telling you, it has to be there.” He’d also pointed out Sam’s penchant for turtlenecks in college, which she wore even during the more temperate months of the spring semester.

Sam gave me hug on the front steps of her building. She told me that she was happy to see me. Her arms were muscular, and for a half second I was terrified that she was going to give me one of those lift-up-off-the-ground hugs. She was not wearing a turtleneck, a fact which I would be sure to point out to Phillip the next time I spoke with him. Instead, she wore a fitted sweater that had a large bow tied in the front. I was typically dense when it came to girls, but after spending three days with Phillip, I felt I could read the inherent symbolism of the bow. I’m a present for you that is waiting to be unwrapped—that’s  what Phillip would claim the bow meant.

“Let’s go upstairs and get you situated,” Sam said. As she talked, my eyes involuntarily wandered down to her throat, where I searched for the Adam’s apple that I prayed would not be there.

Goddamn you, Phillip, I thought. Sometimes you make everything so terrible.