Last night I dreamt the Pacific was boiling.

I had walked barefoot down Highway 166, following great ghostly pillars of steam through Guadalupe, past migrant farms and moon-drenched murals depicting life en la frontera.

When I reached the coast, the ocean had mostly burned away, and on the barren seabed lay Detroit, all in flames.

At my side, then, appeared my dying grandfather. “We built all of this, you know,” he said, waving his hands across the fiery landscape, and through the smoke I could see the the old spoke pattern of the main roads. Jefferson and Woodward, Gratiot and Grand River, Michigan and Fort, all spiraling out like some giant Indian medicine wheel.

(One more wheel from the Motor City.)

My grandfather, he used to draw cartoons for me back when I was a bored kid sitting in church. He drew me these characters that looked like they walked out of some 1930s pulp magazine. They sported black eyes and bandages and smoked big cigars and pipes. And I loved them, these riotously hideous characters.

I come, you see, from a long line of artists and architects, fine woodcraftsmen and painters. They really did build Detroit. Old Cass Tech is ours, the city’s high school for the gifted, its architect my great grandfather. It’s from him I’ve often thought that I inherited my restless longing to be surrounded by strange, pulsating genius.

I did not think, however, that my grandfather would ever see his beloved Detroit again, as frail as he had become. I longed to take him down into the city one last time, so I steadied him with my arm and nudged him forward. The streets crunched with beach sand beneath us and the power lines were strung with kelp. All around, ash rained from the sky and we saw sharks swimming in city fountains.

I led him slowly by the arm, step by slow, pained step. We had walked barely 100 feet before he doubled over and I started sobbing, scared that the journey I had taken him on was, in fact, killing him.

“Bobby McG! Bobby McG!” I cried, whimpering the Janis Joplin inspired nickname I had given my grandfather. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?!”

It was then that I noticed a curious thing happening. My grandfather’s scant white hair was multiplying into dark curls that mirrored my own and his frail physique was morphing into the cut build of the undefeated Army boxer that he once was.

My mouth had fallen agape and before I could shut it, ol’ Bobby was doing some kind of tapdancing shadowbox right down Griswold Street and I had to break into a jog just to keep up with him. We tapboxed all the way to the Guardian Building, its upper floors belching flame, where a corpulent body lay in its revolving doorway. I knew, in that intuitive way you sometimes do in dreams, that this was my great grandfather, the architect who had collapsed and died in the very entrance of a building he had helped design. They say his corpse was beaten black and blue by the revolving door before medics could arrive.

(I sometimes wonder if his hand trembled with eerie prescience as it hovered over the draft table.)

He rose from the ground as we passed him by, deathly pallor draining from his face. He fell into step behind us and started singing in that great Irish brogue of his and it was as if his emerald voice called more to us.

From the shadows of an algae-covered tramp steamer came my grandmother’s mother, the Romanian immigrant who family legend says was actually a gypsy and purveyor of deep magicks. Her mind had begun to slip by the time I was born, and all I remember is her raising her weak body out of bed to grasp me by the arm and whisper urgent Romanian to me. She did this every time I saw her, this strangely ageless woman who both terrified and fascinated me, but no one would ever translate her foreign utterances for me.

She, too, fell behind us and we marched and marched down Detroit’s avenues and boulevards, calling more from graveyards and houses and sunken Spanish galleons. The Native American likenesses on the Penobscot Building even stirred to life and stepped down from their granite carvings and gilded doorways to join our parade of forebears. It was me and Bobby McG joyously leading an army of those who came before us. Rum runners and entrepreneurs, artists and immigrants, American Indians and righteous workers of the underground railroad. They were all with us. Our people, our blood, dancing through the flaming streets of the Midwest’s very own Atlantis. The line behind us was so long now, I swore that the end was nothing but microbes backstroking through the primordial ooze.

We paraded on, on, on into the night, skipping through urban tidepools and enormous whale ribcages until we came to a vast, moonlit desert where the Detroit River should have been. I started hopping up and down with excitement, certain that adventure and the fruits of endless planning must wait beyond the horizon. My grandfather, however, had turned pale and quiet, and I knew then that our desert crossings were meant to be vastly different journeys.

“I’ll stay here with you,” I said. “We can find everything we need here in the city.”

An emphatic NO! seemed to rise up out of the city itself, bouncing off skyscrapers and collapsing fire-weakened buildings. We had to go.

We had to cross the desert. And I became so scared then, scared of losing this man. This man who drew me pictures and taught me how to walk. The man who gave me my curly hair and my ridiculous underbite. And I wanted nothing more than for him to not be afraid.

So I took his hands in mine and slowly started step, step, stepping back and forth, back and forth.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing, that’s all that Bobby left me, yeah,
But feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
Hey, feeling good was good enough for me, hmm hmm,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McG.”

And we danced, danced, danced onto the desert sands, over jellyfish and bleached coral reefs. And when we looked behind us, all we saw were the smiles and nodding encouragement of our vast assembly of ancestors.

“La la la, la la la la, la la la, la la la la
La la la la la Bobby McG.
La la la la la, la la la la la
La la la la la, Bobby McG, la.”

A wind came roaring across the desert, then, whipping up sand into a great wall that obscured the city, but I heard, above the din, a mighty Irish voice joining mine.

“La La la, la la la la la la,
La La la la la la la la la, hey now Bobby now Bobby McGee yeah.
Na na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na na na na na
Hey now Bobby now, Bobby McG, yeah.”

I knew with a quiet certainty, then, that it was time to let go of my grandfather’s hands. I stood upright, smiled warmly and saluted. “At ease, soldier.”

A wall of swirling sand separated us, a giant manta ray gliding past us on its current, just as day broke over the horizon.

I awoke with a start, and I knew, two thousand miles away, somewhere deep in Michigan’s Irish Hills, one Robert McGrath shuddered awake as well, the desert still waiting for us both.

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