valentin finds a mcdonald's and eats a mcmuffin with orange juice, there's a large crowd of customers, some hold leather bags, others carry backpacks over their shoulders, a girl plays with money, 2 students hold hands, a man with a sprawling white beard carries a tray of coffee, pancakes and syrup—valentin thinks he should have ordered coffee too, he doesn't drink much of it but he arrived at the hotel late yesterday and he needs extra energy—after not talking to him for a week, rene kissed him goodbye before he left for the airport and gave him a play slap on the face and told him to take the time that he needs, that she'll still be there and pregnant, and to stay away from other women—rene's intensity could be too much at times, in his first week in the new world she dragged him into an affair where he wasn't given much of a choice—here in kansas city he escapes the neighborhood for a while, maybe he gains perspective on this messy roller coaster ride—he supposes he could have kept his home, fended off rene, and focused on going to work and untangling the basics of his predicament—but instead he treated the new world like a playground, with an instant girlfriend and now an instant new family, all instant, his old family vanished in an instant—according to his internet search his sister trudie lives in kansas city on 312 radio avenue, that will be his first destination, mcdonald's is on radio avenue, so he finishes his meal and takes a walk—maybe he should have travelled to new jersey to search for trudie's house there, where she lived in the old world, but from memory he wasn't sure where it was, he'd never been there, he'd written the address down at one time in his old world phone, but just about everything either disappeared from the phone or was irrelevant—so he thinks his best bet is just to take a walk based on an educated guess, remove himself from the virtual world of investigation and hit some pavement, go old-fashioned, and maybe he'd run into something—the walk down radio avenue starts with that mindset, he checks his phone briefly to make sure he's heading the right direction, he's now walking under the bridge of what appears to be a hospital, and now he's passing a muffler shop where someone has tied a cat to a pole, now he's passing through a park where he sees a man about 30 years old sitting on the cement base of a yellow egg-like sculpture, his suitcase standing behind him, maybe he's been dropped off by the bus, from wherever like oregon, he's thumbing through his phone not looking up, maybe he's looking for someone too on the internet, that he's woken up to a strange new world as well, searching for his family like valentin—until now it doesn't occur to valentin that other people may have woken up into this world one day like him—he should get himself onto twitter, instagram, linkedin, facebook, youtube, tiktok, medium, goodreads, google blogs, whatever he can to get the message out there that he's around, that he's entered the wormhole and come out fairly ok, to make him findable to old-world friends, colleagues, family or even enemies who have entered the new world like him, and are looking for anybody familiar—he thinks to walk a couple laps around the path in the park, just to get a feel for the city, and he'd like to procrastinate from entering the dark and likely dirty freeway underpass ahead of him, maybe ask the guy with the suitcase what he's up to, who he's looking for, but no he should act efficiently toward his goal, his legs will only have so much life in them and he really doesn't know how much farther he needs to walk, the map dot on his phone is wandering randomly, making its own path independently of him, likely tall buildings interfering with the signal—he enters the underpass covered by a spaghetti of freeway ramps and hears snoring, coming from under a collection of tarps just a few feet away from him, someone sleeping there—rene has started snoring more since she became pregnant, he doesn't understand why that would happen, he'll have to look it up—the path diverges some in the underpass, it's not just a straight road through, he needs to make sure he keeps following radio avenue, he thinks the last addresses he saw before entering the underpass were around 150 and going up, previously he passed by a bunch of stores, he thinks on the other side there will be houses, all this would have been easier if he took a taxi or an uber or even a bike, but his impulse after eating was to just go for a walk, to let himself think—like about how rene is at work right now, stewing over his choice to leave, worried that she's made a mistake getting pregnant with a man in his fragile mental condition—after exiting the underpass, valentin finds as expected rows of homes, full garbage cans placed on the curb at the ends of driveways, a woman on the sidewalk waiting for a small black dog on a leash to finish pooping, the engine of a motorcycle he can't see screams in the distance ahead of him, a garbage truck also unseen chugs and squeaks—he worries he's lost the path of radio avenue, the street appears to enter a vacant lot of grassy cement, a car still could drive through but doesn't seem like it should—but yes he finds the lines of tire imprints where drivers might pass, and he can only assume that he's still on radio avenue, so he'll continue straight on—the small black dog has finished, the woman cleans up, she's tying the dog bag and she notices valentin walking toward her, valentin returns the gaze, searching for some familiar trait of trudie—