A pale elderly man, outsized in height and girth and sporting a ducktail beard and polka dot ascot, stands onstage. A sealed deck of cards is nestled in his left hand. In his right, he holds a cane. It is October 9, 1985, Hollywood, and he is a guest on The Merv Griffin Show. An iridescent curtain shimmers behind him. “We’re going to do a little card cheating,” he says. His voice, that voice, glitters on the audience like sunshine on an ocean. In their lives outside this TV studio, they are cashiers and claims adjusters, nurses and grocery store managers. They are harried and bored. The luxurious baritone of this man’s voice transports them. It’s not just the tone and resonance, which are rich and full; it is what his voice confers: confidence, intimacy, a spring of well-being. What do the rumors—he’s impossible to work with, prone to rants, washed up—the obesity, and the embarrassing wine commercials matter? Face to face, he is irresistible. They settle into their seats. They give themselves over like children.

“And if the boy dies? Who will be blamed?” Yu Ming says when Li Wei asks him. The men are talking on the porch of their dying business venture, Lucky Jade Dragon—herbal medicine, general store, and Chinese labor contractor all in one. It is the eighth lunar month in the Year of Ding-You, or, according to the American calendar on the wall inside, September 1897. The bare eastern Oregon hills stretch endless around them. It is a landscape so desolate and vast that it still holds the power to thri

John was not so arrogant as to believe the cancer couldn’t return, but he had taken steps. He moved from the crush of New York City to this slow Southern town. He quit his job as a homicide reporter, where he had chronicled the strangulations, the beatings, the stabbings, the shootings, and even the jumpers, for his beat included suicides, too. He had spent so much time around cops that people with something to hide took him for one and gave him wide berth on the sidewalk; either that, or their mouths started forming excuses even though he hadn’t asked them a thing. John

The room I’ve chosen is blue. Or it was once blue. They painted everything—the walls, the ceiling, the doors—a robin’s egg blue, but the paint has deliquesced in the last forty years. It melts from the walls to reveal white plaster in shapes of snow-covered continents. Neglect, rain water dripping from cracks in the roof, and bay water seeping through the foundation have left their marks.

The make-believe of Disney World seeps beyond its boundaries fifteen miles south of downtown Orlando and into the city’s bars and restaurants. As patrons walk through those establishments’ doors, they find themselves in a Western saloon, circa 1860, or a jukebox joint from the 1950s, or at King Arthur’s Round Table. As their eyes adjust to the interior darkness, they see can-can girls, greasers, or knights in silver armor. Dreamlike, they walk onto an elaborate stage, out of time, out of place,