I live in a vacuum. Still and static, my hometown fosters the illusion that man has finally done it dominated chaos, arranged nature itself in a tight grid. The sun rises over manicured lawns and sets over placid lakes. In between, nothing changes, nothing grows. It's a self-contained universe whose boundaries end with the turn onto I95 that takes you down the long stretch of No Man's Land, to the city. When my dad returned from Venezuela after my parent's ...