Phil looked up from his menu and noticed the Amazon warrior queen towering over their table at the very moment that he was deciding on the shrimp salad sandwich on toasted sourdough with a side of Henry Thiele’s house-made dill pickle, and a chocolate milk shake. She was big, blonde and wore a blue costume that covered her from head to toe. An absolutely gigantic hand gun was holstered at her side on a wide black leather belt that held all sorts of other stuff – bullets and a bunch of other black leather pouches holding god only knew what else. She was looking down at the two of them with what seemed to Phil like curiosity. He tried to remember whether Herodotus had described Amazons as being hostile to men, or friendly. George was standing next to her, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his dripping wet hands held up in front of him like a surgeon who’s just scrubbed in.

The Amazon warrior queen spoke down at them. “Time for y’all to tie it up outside, gentlemen. Lunch is over.”

Quinn and Phil looked at each other then looked at George. George smiled encouragingly and said, “It’s coo’. She gonna open the front door for me so I don’t have to touch it. Pretty gracious, ask me.”

The Amazon warrior queen stared at George and said crisply, “We’re way past the point where you making nice helps any.” Then she looked down at Quinn and Phil and pointed to the table. “Be sure to leave a nice tip.”

Outside, Quinn read the headlines of the Friday Oregonian in its vending box next to the entrance while Phil watched George and the Amazon warrior queen talk in front of a police car. Then the Amazon got into the police car and drove it away. George walked back to Quinn and Phil. “She suggest we lunch at Quality Pie.”

“What the hell happened in there?” asked Quinn.

“Public health conundrum. Eatery that stylish, facilities should be set up better. Speaking as a public health expert.”

“To Quality Pie!” cried Phil and began walking down Burnside, snapping pictures, assuming Quinn and George were behind him, while Quinn and George began walking down 23rd toward Quality Pie, assuming the same of Phil.

People who are tripping can – some of them – exude a level of such obvious innocence and beneficence, that situations which in any other context might seem awkward or uncomfortable or even creepy, instead seem like harmless fun. This is why Phil, who was snapping filmless pictures of interesting-looking people he passed on the street, sometimes standing directly in their path so that he’d have a chance to focus properly, did not get shoved to the ground even once or prompt anyone to call for help. In fact many of his subjects, especially the couples, posed for him, or mugged for him as they walked past.

Naturally, the reciprocated playfulness wasn’t all due to Phil’s own traits. He did his part to select the right people to play with. With some it was their aura: a bright, vivid aura is a sure sign of a potential playmate. A weak or dim aura’s emanator may be perfectly nice but is unlikely ever to be in a play-with-random-strangers sort of mood. In other cases, the sidewalk itself would do the choosing by tilting just a fraction of an inch – nothing you would really notice if you weren’t attuned to that sort of thing, but just enough to coax the chosen pedestrian a step or two closer to a passing encounter with Photographer Phil.

One woman with a particularly colorful aura – royal blue on top of her head with a vibrant orange sphere over each shoulder – walked out the front entrance of Powell’s City of Books, singing to herself. It was “Walk on the Wild Side.” She got to the chorus just as a small and gentle ripple went through the sidewalk, causing her path to nudge just slightly toward Phil. She sang doo d-doo d-doo d-doo-doo-doo… She was short, favored curves over lines, had the blackest, straightest hair possible this side of the East Asian genome, very white skin and lipstick of a color that Phil thought would look great on a Lamborghini Diablo. He clicked the shutter and advanced the filmless film as she walked up to him. She took the camera from his hands, lifted its strap off his neck and began taking pictures of Phil while she sang. “Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets, lookin’ for soul food and a place to eat.” Months later Phil would confess to Yuri that it was at this exact moment that he had fallen in love with her, and Yuri would reply that she hoped it hadn’t been quite that simple.

Phil begged a cigarette from a man walking by, went and leaned against a street light and tried to remember how Jean Paul Belmondo had stood with the cigarette dangling from his lips in “Breathless.” A few more snap shots and she handed the camera back to him, singing “Hey honey, take a walk on the wild side, and the colored girls go doo d-doo d-doo d-doo doo doo, doo d-doo d-doo d-doo doo doo…” She smiled, gave a little girl scout salute and walked to the corner and crossed to the other side of Burnside.

He watched her until she disappeared into the sea of people, all walking on their own sides, wild or otherwise. Then he all of a sudden experienced the light dizziness that comes from perceiving in an instant that you’re somewhere other than where you thought you were. The dizziness comes from spinning around, the head whipping back and forth, trying to figure out just where it was that the place you thought you were had, in an instant, got off to, and how the place you apparently were instead had mysteriously come to be here. Not only was NW 23rd and the Quality Pie that lay upon it nowhere to be seen, but neither were Quinn and George.

Phil was happy to be wherever the universe placed him, particularly because said ‘wherever’ happened to be in the black haired girl’s path. But he thought that Quinn and George might start worrying that he was lost and possibly scared. He decided that he should try to forestall that worry for their own peace of mind. He didn’t know where they were in order to do the reassuring, but he thought he knew who did know, or who at least could quickly find out. He found a phone booth, called the police, asked to speak to the officer who had just been at Henry Thiele’s. And was surprised to learn that police do not stay at a police station waiting to be called to solve crimes the way that firemen stay at a fire station waiting to be called to fires. Instead, police must drive around in cars all day. He would just have to improvise. If Quinn and George were walking down 23rd, he might be able to call a pay phone which, if they were walking by when it rang, they could answer and he could let them know he was alright.

He dialed information and explained his plan to the operator. She seemed sympathetic and Phil told her that she had a very nice speaking voice. But she couldn’t supply him with a list of pay phone numbers and locations in Northwest Portland. He hung up and felt that he was out of ideas. He looked at the pay phone’s key pad, wondering if the combination of letters and numbers held any information that might be useful. Absently, he dialed a random 800 number while he wondered what he should do next. The sound of the call going through startled him. “Medford Discount Tires. How may I direct your call?”  Phil panicked and hung up. Then it came to him: this is what “toll free number” meant! It meant you didn’t have to put in the 10 cents.

He dialed randomly again and got a recorded message from Oregon Title about being away for lunch and how much they would like to return his call. He left the pay phone number, saying it was nothing urgent. Another number, another message, but this one talked about having satisfied customers throughout the greater Newark area. Newark! How far out could you get? Within half an hour he’d reached a mail order business in Deerfield, Michigan and a paint manufacturer in Alabama. There was just a whole lot going on out there, he realized. A whole lot. There was a vast universe of commercial activity, much, much more than any one person could ever learn about, no matter how many 800 numbers they called. When he thought about the scale of it all, it made him feel a little small. Not small in a bad way but small in the way that anything at all is small when compared to the whole great gigantic everything.

He started walking. All around him were buildings full of offices, and at that very moment many of them were doubtless receiving calls on their own 800 numbers from people scattered all across the land. It was fascinating to be a part of it all. He walked down to the Saturday Market at the foot of the Burnside Bridge, and found the area deserted. He immediately began to list out all the plausible reasons why the usual Saturday dense crowds of people weren’t there. He dismissed plague and extra terrestrial invasion as plausible, but too unpleasant to contemplate. He then considered that it might not be Saturday. But here he was, standing right in the middle of the area that held the Saturday Market, so logically it had to be Saturday. He decided that the best reason he could imagine would be that everyone had gone somewhere else because something extraordinary, something truly wonderful, something life-changing and life-affirming was happening a little further south, maybe at Lovejoy Fountain or the Park Blocks. And maybe the throngs of people had gone there to be part of it. Plausible, he thought. Then it came to him in a flash that not only were all the people missing, but the dozens of food vendors and craftsmen from the Saturday Market were also missing. If whatever was happening was compelling enough to cause all the vendors in all the booths and tents to just pull up stakes and head for the action, then this was not something he himself could blithely ignore. He began walking south, looking for a stream of people to follow, hoping he wasn’t going to miss too much.

It felt good to be a part of something big. But no, not just part of something big, but part of everything big, everything vast, everything connected. Everywhere he looked there were connections. He was already a part of the vast continent-wide network of telephonic commerce, and now he was also a part of a spontaneous southward-migrating cultural event, a part of the comings and goings of this busy downtown afternoon with the streets all connecting, the lights red then green then yellow in a block-by-block choreography, street blending into street, wires overhead humming, cars and buses moving across the landscape like wildlife, impossible to predict and yet orderly. And a sidewalk that suddenly tilted up just enough to set him walking west toward Broadway.

It was as he passed the JJ Newberry’s department store that he again remembered the interrupted lunch. It wasn’t that he was terribly hungry. But the realization that he was a part of a larger network of activity made him conscious of the need for nutrition. He walked into Newberry’s and looked around. There was a candy section just inside but there was something much more appealing sitting on top of a glass counter on the opposite side of the store. The sight of it lifted him from his food-as-fuel frame of mind to one of intense craving. It was a glass-enclosed ferris wheel made of stainless steel wire, maybe twice the height of a hamster’s tread mill. The top of the glass enclosure had heat lamps and the bottom of the enclosure held buns and napkins. The ferris wheel went around slowly and silently and was carrying with it a dozen of the most mouth-watering hot dogs that Phil had ever seen.

And standing behind the counter was the black haired woman. She held a spray bottle full of blue liquid and a roll of paper towels. She cleaned the glass counter top while she sang doo d-doo d-doo d-doo-do-do… The name tag at the top of her white work apron said “Europa.”

She glanced up as Phil walked to the counter, looking surprised. “Kodak Boy! Is this serendipity or careful planning?”

For Phil, this was the obvious question, and it brought him up short. In a dense web of intricate connections, how exactly had this particular connection been made? He started to think about it but was almost instantly overwhelmed. Far too many possibilities. He realized that he was staring into space, looked at her and couldn’t think what he ought to say. Also his mouth was watering so much at the sight of the rotating hot dogs that exercising the muscles of speech would make his mouth hurt. He fell back on “What’s happening?”

She appeared to consider the question. “Everybody tells me it’s a gerund, but I’m not really sure. I was a music major.”

At this moment – and at any other moment since he had welcomed the new day with a mushroom breakfast – Phil’s mind was not correctly tuned to this particular style of kidding. It was like an FM radio trying to receive an AM station. If Yuri had sung her response in pig Latin, or had offered to dance with him, or just started laughing, he would have been fine. He wouldn’t have had to think about what to say to this vision in a Newberry’s apron. So he simply assumed that since the conversation had started he could keep it going by talking about something they had in common. “I think I’d like one of your hot dogs.”

“Oh.”

“With mustard and relish if you have it.”

“Really. I see. Well.  I mean, I’m sorry, but no.”

Phil looked around. “Are you closing?”

She giggled. “It’s the middle of the day!”

“Then, why…?”

She seemed mildly startled at the question and furrowed her brows. “Well, just look at them.”

“I did look at them. I want to eat one.”

She looked at his face. “I see you wear glasses.”

“Yes,” Phil said slowly and hesitantly as if he were responding to a trick question.

“Give them to me for a minute.”

“My glasses?”

She stuck out her hand and Phil placed his glasses in it. Then she cleaned the lenses with the blue liquid and a paper towel. She held it up to the light, looking for streaks and then handed them back. “Now step up to the case and take a closer gander.”

Phil examined the hot dogs as they rotated on the ferris wheel beneath the heat lamps.

“Look at those things,” she said. “Mummified. I bet those same hot dogs have been rotating around inside that hot glass case since the Kennedy administration. If I allowed you to eat one of them, you’d regret it. Maybe not right now, maybe not a minute from now. But soon, and for the rest of your day.”

“Well, but see, the thing is, I didn’t have breakfast and then my buddies and I were just about to order lunch, when this Amazon…”

“Listen, would you care to know how I come to be working here? I mean here, as opposed to, say, at Freddy’s or at Meier and Frank.”

Phil wondered whether if he said yes with no hesitation, and listened attentively to her story, she might relent on the hot dogs. It seemed worth the risk. “Yes,” he said, looking over the hot dogs so that if she did relent he would be able to quickly point to the one he wanted before she changed her mind.

“Yesterday I spent the morning filling in applications everywhere downtown. Wherever you go it’s pretty much the same soul suffocating work for the same demeaning pay. Until I got here and got a look at this hot dog display. That was when I realized I could have soul-suffocating work, demeaning pay and a sense of greater purpose. I thought if I could save just one person from a Newberry’s hot dog my inner Sisyphus would find peace.”

Phil sighed. “Peace is good.”

“So’s a decent meal, Kodak Boy. You’re the big winner here.”

“I guess I could try to find Quality Pie.”

“Oh! Have the cocoanut banana cream!” As he left she called after him. “Someday you’ll thank me!”

After a half dozen blocks in a direction that might or might not have been taking him closer to Quality Pie, he came to a small florist shop. This time, the subtle tilt of the sidewalk didn’t escape his notice. He let it carry him across the threshold and into the parallel dimension that existed within – different air, different temperature, different smells colors, shapes. He was wondering if he needed a passport or should at least have purchased a ticket, when a man who was either in charge of the parallel dimension or exceptionally helpful to its visitors asked him what he needed. He said he needed something for the girl behind the counter at Newberry’s – the one with the black hair and the red lipstick.

The dozen Lamborghini-red roses under his arm earned a lot of smiles as he headed back toward Newberry’s. Yet more connections: everybody’s got the same kind of heart. From everything he’d learned that afternoon while plying the great network, he was confident that the street he was on – named Washington, which was actually incredible, since that also happened to be the name of the founder of the entire interconnected nation! – that street was ultimately connected to the street that Newberry’s was on. That much he was sure of. He just couldn’t quite say how. Newberry’s could be anywhere at all. Which was a little disheartening until he calculated that while it might be anywhere, it actually was somewhere, in one and only one particular place, and that seemed a lot easier to deal with. Maybe it was just a matter of perspective.

With the roses under one arm and his camera held to his eye, he walked along, navigating through the view finder. As he walked, he started singing softly. Doo d-doo d-doo d-doo-doo-doo… And there was Newberry’s. And there was the black haired girl, standing just outside the entry way, staring down the street. Her eyes were red and her cheeks wet with tears. She sniffled when Phil walked up.

“What happened? Is there something I can do?”

“I got fired,” she said and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket.

“Why? How?”

“They said I spend too much time talking to the customers and I don’t get my work done. But I’m a hard worker – ask anybody! And then this one guy came up after you left and said something about the hot dogs and I told him that no one should eat them.” She sniffed and wiped her nose again. “But it wasn’t a customer. It was the store manager but this was my first day on the job and I didn’t know who he was and now I don’t have a job any more.”

“Wow. I don’t know what to say.”

She shrugged. He held up the roses. “I bought these at a florist.”

“They’re nice.”

“As a matter of fact, I bought them for a girl who’s an ex-Newberry’s employee. Has an unusual name – Europa.”

She smiled and sniffed at the same time. “Eurie.”

He gave her the roses. “Yuri? You mean like the Russian boy’s name?”

She started to shake her head, then stopped. She smelled the roses. “Yes, like the Russian boy’s name.”

“Well, Yuri, I could tell you about some pretty amazing connections I’ve learned about today. But here’s a new one: you are in need of a slice of cocoanut banana cream pie from Quality Pie. And I need to find my way to Quality Pie, but trying to get there by myself hasn’t been working out so well.”

So they set off together up Broadway, more or less in the direction of Quality Pie. And the Lutheran girl sang doo d-doo d-doo d-doo-do-do… doo d-doo d-doo d-doo-do-do…