I entered the room and felt immediately at home. Knowing three people before starting put me at ease. One of them was a theory-head, but that didn't matter. We had had common experiences in the academic underclass. Another was the ex-partner of a good friend whom we would see the next day. I didn't know how to ask her if they were still together. They were not together, as it turned out. I asked her about him over a sandwich made of fresh ingredients, including slices of fabulously ripe tomato. Where did such tomatoes come from in Detroit in early April? Florida, probably, of course. Before answering me she ordered just what I did. Then she spent most of the time complaining about racist colleagues who meant well. While she blustered about her department I thought of you in Marfa, Texas, and about art in an unlikely place like that. I hoped you would call me from there, but I knew finding a phone would not be easy, and you don't yet own a cell phone. We called A-- in Ann Arbor. When we got there, he sat in a chair in a certain way, a way that made him seem like Trostky in Mexico, receiving visitors warmly but really too busy with his writing and thinking to entertain whole-heartedly. Yet his heart is whole. It seemed a fruitful conversation, though there were only a few points of real congruence. They are both of the left, but what you can you do when radical languages share so few words. There were two Mike Golds, not one. At least we implicitly agreed that we should all order fish at that place. We drove back, wondering about the future of the left but not talking about that, listening to Detroit Techno, which we agreed made the highwayscape seem even more horizontal than it already appeared.