They come out after the rain.

The bums and hookers and thieves and addicts have been hunkered down indoors all day and now the rain is gone and the streets fill up again downtown on the east side.

We turn down alleys gleaming in the dark night under the street lights and under the full moon.  The shine kicks up a subtle glare that intensifies the shadows and the light.  We ride blindly and fearlessly.  Far ahead of us, we see people glance our way and then walk quickly away.  From a distance they don’t know who we are or might be, and they act cautiously.

We ride by dumpsters and discover people crouching down behind them doing whatever their business is.  We don’t ask.  We don’t stop.  We are just passing by.  This is not our stop and never will be, we hope.

We go by a tall skinny man slouched against as wall, legs slightly buckled beneath him, his trunk curved over to sustain whatever frequency his taut body is adjusted too.  He has the sensual grace of a martyr, the sexuality of a victim.  His whole being is focused on his hand – his arm – his elbow – as he raises it slowly as a gesture of sacrifice, or an offering, and lowers it again while he inspects it closely.  It is the beginning of his aria, the curtain has raised and the music has not yet begun to build.  It begins with his gesture, his inspection.  This is the centre of his world, from here he will explode outwards or implode inwards under the pressure of that moment consolidating into a frozen slice of time while he stares utterly focused on the poignancy of the moment.

He doesn’t move as we brush past him.  He doesn’t live in the same world as us tonight.  He is many miles away – past Edgeland.  He flies by jet.

But Edgeland itself has broadened its borders tonight.  It extends all across the city tonight,  There is much voodoo here – conditions are right.  The superstitious lie low.  Perhaps this is why we pass un–impeded.  No one mutters at us, no one calls out or throws things long after we have passed by.  There is no bravado tonight, just small people scurrying out of the way.

We travel through entire neighbourhoods of dreams tonight.  For blocks, every house houses a dream or a nightmare from the past.  Everything is familiar.  Though my childhood was spent thousands of miles from here, every house I recognize from some dream decades past.  I remember escaping from that house over there, and running down the road past those other houses.  I remember a moment of some ancient infant dream when I looked up and saw the silhouettes of that row of houses towering over me.  Edgeland has spread over entire neighbourhoods tonight. Entire communities have pulled the covers of the night over them, and thus drawn Edgeland over themselves.  It settles like a fog and lies still in small valleys and dips in the road.

We speed faster and further into neighbourhoods made meek and cautious by the silent and relentless spread of Edgeland over the city.  We are energized by the anticipation.

We ride by a house that I remember from a dream years ago.  We were in the living room avoiding a murderer elsewhere.  I remember running to the house next door.  But that is not the house next door, and neither is it the street the house was on – it is just the house, stuck in storage, filed away on a quiet street in some insignificant backwater part of town.

We escape fast and bright city streets busy with cars speeding from one place to another, to long lost roads that curve around old communities, roads on the outskirts of wherever.  These are the roads where the local crazy person made his solitary home for dozens of years, shooting his shotgun at errant boys looting apples from long gone orchards, roads where mysterious un-witnessed deaths occurred late at night, roads where neighbourhoods end and nothing begins again.  These are the roads where nobody goes except to be unseen.

We cross the railway alongside and behind wooden warehouses and factories, passing figures hunkered down in stairwells.

We enter into new neighbourhoods, into alleyways.  Alleys are the back way into people’s houses, riding down an alley is like peeking under some matron’s skirt – it is rarely interesting and rarely surprising.  People keep their back alleys more protected than their front lawns.  There are fences and sheds blocking the way into the houses.  Trees and bushes obscure the view.  There is nothing more than garbage cans and piles of refuse in the back alleys, but somewhere along one we pass a fence decorated with hearts and notes written by children.  Somehow, out of all of the back alleys in this city, some children and neighbours have beaten down the fences and formed bonds across the backyards.  This is the white hot epicentre of a living neighbourhood.

Now, of course, the alley is empty, and the paper hearts sag wetly and the written notes have become ink-smeared. These hearts are drained and limp and  bloodless.  This too is Edgeland now.

Further away, we hit a street called ‘Victoria’, and it is appropriately full of Victorian era houses, but in the most hideous variations.  There are small minimalist ones, and boxy cubist ones.  Cardboard houses stand limply, with fold-over tabs slipped out of slots – porches sagging away from houses, bits of the eaves hanging down in a parody of gingerbread.