would like to be from somewhere. I look at this place or that and I think, I would like to be from there. Lots of places I like. I build them in my mind. Mountains. I like the sensation of driving through mountains late at night with a light fog clinging to the bare rocks, patches of black ice on the road. And I like forests. I like the sun made green by fir needles in the afternoon. I walk through the trees and in the distance, through a break in the foliage, I can see grey-green mountains. And I like deserts, especially deserts with mountains. I see them far away when I realize how many different places I've lived. I'm from Cincinnati. But that only means I was born there. We left, my mother and I, before I was old enough to even know what a place was. But I like Cincinnati, from here.

My mother was a nomad. She followed men. I never had the same bedroom for more than about a year. She would meet what she called "the nicest fellow" and we'd pack up and head for his hometown. From Ohio to Alabama to Kentucky to Georgia to Rhode Island back to Ohio. I got to where I was used to long car trips, even expected them. For a long time we owned this beat-up, tan '63 Oldsmobile, same age as me. We might be just going to the grocery but it would seem strange to look out its rear window and not see a U-Haul trailer.

I remember one hot day a long time ago. It's my first memory, from not long after we left Cincinnati. I don't even know where it was. A white sky hung over flat, green, manicured lawns. All around me, low golden brick ranch houses slumped in the heat. I was small. Standing next to a neighbor's car I was too short to look into its windows.

A woman called me—not my mother; it was a neighbor woman. She opened the car door from the inside. Her child sat beside her. She told me to hurry up and climb in—we were late. As I began to get in the woman's child reached over and pulled the door shut on my hand. My thumb left a vivid deboss in the metal edge of the car door. I remember laying on the flat grass as blood dripped down my arm onto my chest. One part of the sky was whiter and harder than the rest. I heard the woman yell at her child. Afterwards, every time my mother and I set out on a long car trip I would remember that woman's harsh voice and her car looming above me. The blue curve of the roof was so far away and it scared me, the car scared me. The distance scared me. It was bigger than I was, and its power over me was its size.

Later, years maybe, there was a hotel room. My mother and I stayed there for three days finishing up school and work while our furniture traveled a thousand miles up the Atlantic coast from Savannah to Providence. I don't remember the room much. There was dark brown furniture and a wide, open closet. We lived out of our suitcases. I remember thinking it was odd to have furniture and not use it. The dresser drawers were always empty. The television picked up stations we didn't get at home. I didn't like encountering unfamiliar newscasters and I didn't like the way the closet was so exposed.

I used to have this habit, wherever we lived, of converting my bedroom closet into an office. I would put a little table and chair and lamp inside. They were always the same. The chair came from a cheap dinette set; the table, an old, cheap end table, had a narrow shelf. The lamp was a gift from my grandmother. It hung on the wall, the light fixture extending out from a wooden ship's wheel. I would put posters up around the lamp. When I was older and was granted a clock radio I kept it in my office too. I really liked my offices. They were always the same, and somehow it never occurred to my mother that they even existed. She never found me when I was cached away inside.

There was one house in Pawtucket, at 21 Finch Street. I was in fourth grade. My closet was too small to make an office, and at night weird black dust would settle through it and coat my clothes. My mother thought I was burning things and discarding the ashes in the closet but I thought the house was haunted. I could hear sounds at night which crept up from the basement. One night I woke up and I could hear my mom screaming. I went to her door and in the dim light coming from a street lamp outside her window I could see the shadow of a man kneeling on her bed, hitting her and shouting at her. I turned on the light but no one was there. She woke up and told me she'd been having a bad dream. I was very glad when we moved away from 21 Finch Street.

But I like 21 Finch Street. I like the way it sounds, like an address out of an old British novel. I like to say that I used to live there, and I like to tell people about the haunt. It's thousands of miles away now. Things that I see up close have a power for me that is transformed when I see them far away. That's why I like 21 Finch Street. But I don't want to go back. I don't want to find out if what I was afraid of so many years ago is still there. Or, worse yet, that it was never there in the first place.

* - * - *

Distance is magic. Sometimes it's black, sometimes it's white, sometimes it's a little of both. I counted up once and I figured out that I had nineteen different bedrooms between birth and graduation from high school. Sometimes the moves were small—just across town, or to the next town over. But in the end it added up to a lot of mileage, a lot of magic.

I lived in Rhode Island for just under two years, part of third grade through part of fifth grade. When we moved there I was amazed at how little grass I saw. Back in Savannah there had been lots of huge yards and tall mossy trees. In Pawtucket there were flat mortared surfaces. But I kind of liked it. There was a harshness to it all, to the endless plains of asphalt, to the perpendicular brick buildings, to the telephone pole trees, but there was also a cleanness and an order to it that attracted me. Even when garbage blew across the street between the apartment buildings I thought it was clean and pure, because the lines were all clear. It reminded me of the hotel room. It would always be there but I was just passing through, and I knew it wouldn't be any different when I left.

We lived at 81 Arthur Street first. The day we moved in some boys came to the door and introduced themselves. I heard my mother's shrill voice: "Sweetie! There are some little friends here!" I don't remember their names, but I remember I was glad they came. Eric, maybe, one of them. Mom and I were a long way from home. I went outside with them, just to bum around. It was cold and dry and I could smell the power plant when the wind blew. We wandered around the apartment complex and they told me about their older brothers. The brothers were in a gang and they would protect me. We climbed around headstones in the old cemetery that bordered the complex—the only grass for miles. Later that day I met the brothers and we gathered together a ton of kids and got up a huge game of Hide-n-Seek. I can remember the smell of cold pavement when I hid under a parked car.

Days passed. I went to school. The older brothers skipped school. I heard that there were lots of gangs and that they fought a lot. Other gangs would sometimes attack little kids for fun unless the kids were under the protection of a gang. I heard about a kid named Jimmy Booth who was a grade ahead of me. He got his cheek cut up by someone's older brother. Later I found out the older brother was my gang. He and others would walk me home from school, or watch a bunch of us play soccer after school in the parking lot outside my apartment building. Every so often my gang would find a fight. The other little kids and I watched.

I didn't use my office much at first at 81 Arthur Street. I was satisfied with the pavement outside. One day me and the kids were playing street hockey when another gang came running toward us. My gang started rushing around, yelling at kids to get back. Someone handed me a long, heavy chain. I started running but I tripped over the chain and by the time I got back to my feet the fight was all around me. A strange older boy jumped in front of me. He had long black hair, and a knife in his hand. I started crying, and when he jabbed the knife at me I swung the chain around as hard as I could. It hit him on the side of the head and wrapped around his face a couple of times. He fell down on top of me and I remember screaming and trying to get away from him. One of my older brothers pulled me out from underneath him.

My gang won. The other gang fled into alleys and side streets and into the dark cemetery. I stood there letting my tears dry. People spoke excitedly about my defeat of the enemy. I was so young after all. The boy still lay there. One of the older guys unwrapped the chain from around his head.

"He's not dead," he said.

"Too bad," someone else said. They took his knife out of his hand and gave it to me. I didn't want it but they made me take it. They told me I had to cut his thumb off. At first I didn't believe them, but they insisted that I had to do it. We were attacked, they said. It was the penalty for violating our territory, loss of thumb. I had the boy's knife—he was only a few years older than me—and it was very sharp. The gang started to grumble when I didn't move. One of them grabbed me on the back of the neck and squeezed. It hurt, I think. Finally I bent down and grasped the boy's thumb and cut it off. He woke up and screamed when I did it, but one of my older brothers hit him on the back of the head with a piece of wood. I started shaking, and then I ran away. I threw the thumb into the cemetery.

After that I spent more time in my office. I didn't play soccer so much, and before long I began hanging around with Jimmy Booth. No one bothered us much. We cut through the sewers to get home from school.

Dry blood stained the pavement for a while. At first I thought it would never go away, but after a few rains it faded. I checked everyday. It wasn't long before my mother decided she didn't like the environment I was in and she moved us to 21 Finch Street. It was in a nicer, quieter, grassier neighborhood. In the end I still felt good about the order of 81 Arthur Street. I was glad of its ability to remain unchanged. I thought of the hotel room, and I knew that if I ever went back to the scene of my crime I wouldn't see my violent mark. It wasn't there. It had faded with the rains and with the power of distance. I only wished I could be so resolute. I realized that I would have to learn to use the magic of distance for myself. Now, years and miles later, I kind of like 81 Arthur Street. It's a good tale.

* - * - *

Motion, moving, we were always moving. I loved it hated it. I screamed at my mother for it. She was a nomad. In my harsher, less understanding moments I think of her as a woman who did little more than follow her vagina. When I think about it more, I know her motives ran deeper. My grandmother was sick and dying when we left 21 Finch Street for our last big car trip, back to Ohio. Mom was the only one in our family who was willing to pack up and go help her own mother. That may not be saying much for a woman who barely sat still long enough to pick out a bit of scenery before she was off again, but it's something I try to remember. Still, it's hard to keep the motion out of my mind.

Over the years I developed a real liking for houses. I lived in a few houses. I could tell they weren't going anywhere, and I liked that. One place I lived in had been owned by the same family for over a hundred years before we bought it. I could tell they had been there. Apartments are different. Their residents change with the tides. I don't like that kind of motion—it's too regular, too predictable. But in the end, looking at 81 Arthur Street, or the hotel room, or Finch Street—or anywhere else—I find I have very ambiguous feelings about everywhere. I don't know what I can claim or what can claim me. That's why I keep moving. That's what I'm on the road to find out. I want to be from somewhere.

I remember things that are always there in the midst of all the motion. A dachshund named Gretchen who lived on pasta, or the ever-present ship's wheel lamp. That lamp could never give me comfort. My office could never be my place of stillness and quiet. Ultimately it was my hiding place, first at Arthur Street; later from rampaging step-fathers possessed of violent intent. But there were other constants: a cheap nineteen-inch color television, a couple of chaise lounges that my mother set up in our various spare bedrooms through the years for us to relax on in the evenings, and there were books. Those were the nice things, spun together in a thread that led around the eastern United States. Mom and I could never get lost; we always had that thread to follow. I liked that.

When I got older it was easy for me to use those items to work my magic. I build up from them. I can see a small room with plants in the window—no curtains—and a small rack of books on one wall. The television has its own stand. Gretchen the Spaghetti Dog is curled up on one of the chaise lounges. It is 81 Arthur Street. In the distance, out the window, I can see mountains. If I follow the mountains with my eyes I see the light change. The plants are gone from the windows. My mother has a macramé hanging there now. The room is smaller. Gretchen is smaller. The television is still on its stand, but the books and lounges are gone, replaced by a battered couch and wall-hung, sepia-tinted photographs of people we never knew. This is Skidaway Road, Savannah. If I keep working I can find Abercorn Expressway and Hunter Air Base, or Covington, Kentucky, or 1634 Sundale Avenue in Dayton. One of the problems with distance is that it blurs things together too much. The farther you get, the greater control you need to make it work. One thing I like though—if it doesn't quite, I can always make mountains.

One last thing I remember. It was in the hotel room. I was in third grade and we were leaving Savannah for Pawtucket. I had this most tremendous crush on my teacher, a lady named Miss Sikes. I was terribly depressed about leaving her. I didn't know how she would make out without me. I decided to leave her something to remember me by. In those last three days in the hotel room and at school I worked diligently on my gift: a tiny book with poems and pictures and a dedication to Miss Sikes on the front. My mother didn't know about it and Miss Sikes didn't know. When I finished I put it on my bedside table in the hotel room so I wouldn't forget it.

The last day my mother and I packed up before we left for school and work. We put things in the car, checked out of the hotel, then Mom drove me to school. Right after school she picked me up and we headed for Pawtucket. I left the gift sitting on the bedside table in the hotel room. On the last page, having steeled my nerve, I wrote, "I love you."

Distance lets me see that a lonely maid who happened to be named Miss Sikes came into that hotel room to clean and found my gift. The same distance also tells me that despite what I thought at 81 Arthur Street, you always leave your mark, even in a sterile hotel room. Somewhere in Pawtucket is a man with no thumb. Knowing that isn't easy. But I know it, and I won't forget it, and someday distance will teach me what to do with that knowledge. And when it does, I'll know where I come from, and where I'm going will be just one more step on the road to find out.

© Bill Cameron