No, it was not a sweep. Charles could let it fly over him. He had not made a sound.
He was an empty tent in a cluttered tent. He turned his sleep-puffed head, and the laundry remained. It always would. The voice could pass him by.

Christie had shown Charles pictures of the California governor, Newsom, a man named Gavin with hair to match, shoveling someone's entire life, from tent to tube socks, into a dumpster. As he worked, the governor smiled.

Was this it, the sweep? He didn't care anymore, but the voice wasn't gruff or official. This wasn't a demand.

He decoupled himself from the memory foam, did an awkward half-sit on the edge of the mattress. Milky afternoon light washed his tent in a dying eggshell blue. His lower back pulsed, stitched and sore.

Dreams die in the dawn, and it wasn't even dawn. Look at him, sleeping away the afternoon. 
"Hello! Is anyone here?"
A woman's voice somewhere outside his tent, he did not recognize it.

Charles woke, snug and lost, toasted and woozy, brow asweat from the propane heat. He thought he heard someone yelling, but not his grandmother. She had hollered in the dream, his grandmother, his mother's mother, but the flecks of it, the glints of image and emotion, they rushed away as they do.

He was six and afraid of the dark. He was 12, and his cousins made him pull his penis out of his pants. He was 22 and alive and free, driving an automobile he owned with the bank. He was 52 and still in the woods.
He would not come get it. He did not want it, pointed word, it could be anything.

He had done something in the woods, and now his grandmother called and called.
"Charlie!" she yelled. "You get out of there. Come get it!"
But he would not and could not.

His grandmother was angry, though he could not understand her words, and she wasn't his grandmother, yet she was. She called to him from her back porch, and Charles was a boy, yet he wasn't a boy, he was Charles then and Charles now.

He would slide into the other side of dark, the other side of his brain, the part that did not know real life, that created miracles, that resurrected his mother, his Aunt Jeanie.
He was so close.

If only he could stay forever in the haze of near sleep, of after-sleep, the sleep of sleep. He would like to sleep the sleep of sleeps, the sleepiest, the steepest.

He could just go wherever the train went. He wouldn’t have to think anymore—he’d let the train make all the choices, and Charles would just watch America roll by, purple mountains, all that, any color of mountain, a simple tan midwinter hill, he'd stare it all in, dissolve into it.

He didn't need clothes. He needed sleep. He needed—
But could John have truly jumped a train?  The dust-storm girl with her pinky pink hair, she did it all the time. If she could, why not John? Sure, he was a geezer, but why not? Why not Charles himself?

There was nothing here for her even if John came back. And would he? Charles, oh, Charles would never return. He wished the city would finally sweep, clear out the tents, like they warned every three months. He wanted the destruction. He wanted the dirty laundry to disappear.

The tent glowed with a pale blue light, gift of the winter sun filtered through the plastic, and he shut his eyes against it, wiggled deeper into his polyurethane depression. Begone, thoughts! But they would not leave him yet, only in sleep.

Sometimes he thought about asking if she could get him a job at Walmart. Could he wear one of those smocks? Push carriages out in the parking lot?
It was too much. No.

Everybody smelled. Some people just had showers and running water and money for deodorant. Some people had jobs. If Frankie did it, couldn't he?

His indolence had defeated it, mashed it down so far it would never bounce back. That's why they called him big boy, he guessed.

He wasn't saving the propane anymore, and the warmth prickled his skin. He'd lie in this excess. He slipped into the bag, rolled into the permanent depression in the mattress, the most notable mark he had made in the world: the cavity of his body shaped in viscoelastic polyurethane.