THE NOWHERE PLACE There is a stretch of Highway 63, about 200 yards long, that runs from the massive Minnesota-shaped sign inscribed 'Thank You for Visiting the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes' to a simple white plaque that bears a timid 'Welcome to Iowa.' In the only full sentence he uttered during the summer he was six, Edward named the space between the Nowhere Place. Still fields filled with prairie grass and wildflowers lined the road. There were no houses there, and no people. No movement. Each time we passed through I would look for deer or squirrels or even a stray cow from a neighboring farm; but there was none. There were insects here. I knew because I could hear the ceaseless, metallic hum of the cicadas. But this did not comfort me. Insects can survive atomic explosions, poisons and plague. It made sense they would exist to defy nothingness. "We're nowhere now," Edward would announce gravely as we entered. "We aren't anywhere in the world." He came to this concept early. Still mostly silent then, he sat behind me, staring out the window. It was I who pointed to the signs and read their messages aloud as we hurtled past. I was marking our progress, proving my competence as a driver. You see, I have gotten us out of Minnesota. And forty seconds later: Look now, I've managed to reach Iowa. Matthew, asleep in his booster seat with his heavy melon head lolling to one shoulder, did not hear me. He was happy, rocked by our movement, tucked away in warm, storybook dreams. But Edward, ever watchful, never sleepy, took the simple, square facts I gave him—we have left one state. . .we are entering another—and deconstructed them. In the elaborate folds of his brain, these truths fractured until their crystals of reality came apart and floated free. He worked them, like one of his thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, and discovered they fit together to make a completely unexpected shape: We were, briefly, lost to the world. We were nowhere. For a long time, Edward was fascinated with the Nowhere Place. Later, when he spoke regularly but in a halting way, he would ask if anyone lived there, if we could move there. Occasionally, he would tell other people about his desire to live in Nowhere—his grandparents and random children he met in the park who would look at him quizzically and then run away. Edward seemed to take comfort from the fact that there could be an actual lack of place. A tiny country stranded in the Midwest that he might call his own. Because even then Edward knew, as I did, that a human being can be knocked off the continuum of this ordinary, sweaty, oxygen-filled existence and into the locked stillness of nowhere. It can happen in a second, simply because molecules, dust funnels or ideas configure in a certain way. I shared my son's obsession with the Nowhere Place, feeling daring each time I drove the distance and successfully reclaimed solid ground. I came to believe it was our momentum, traveling sixty or even sixty-five miles an hour, that anchored us and kept us safe. And that if we were to stop between the signs, all three of us might just tumble out of the car and out of our lives, into a nameless expanse of space.