A quiet unseen but felt from the ground up is muting our footsteps, tucking itself into the corners of rotting houses, tightening around reeds of Johnson grass that blanket a decade’s worth of blighted lots. Unsettled ground. A pulse that’s flat-lined but the host is still blinking.

Ghosts walk the perimeter of a Brad Pitt housing project. Camaros park on paved driveways, geometric buildings all on stilts with slanted roofs and patch-worked paint jobs in obnoxious modern fashion. Out of sight a high school band marches through the streets, banana trees grow where sidewalks end. No stop signs, no garbage cans, skeletons of churches that ask to be left alone.