Dom's Portland is the former home Dominick Corvaisis revisits as he begins retracing a journey associated with a missing and frightening part of his past. Its familiar apartment and university campus offer him tangible points of contact with the person he used to be, but not the emotional recovery he seeks. The city therefore serves as both a point of departure and a limit: it can bring the past into view, yet the answer he wants lies beyond it, on the highway.

Setting and Earlier Departure

More than eighteen months before his return, Dominick had left Dom's Portland for Mountainview, Utah. The later account makes the old apartment and university campus his landmarks for reconstructing that departure, linking the city not merely to an earlier residence but to the beginning of the route he must now retrace. Familiarity gives the search a practical shape: he can return to the streets and buildings from which he once set out, even if their meaning has changed.

The route itself was never a direct passage from the city to Mountainview. Although the most direct way began by taking Interstate 80 north, Dominick had gone south on Interstate 5, following a roundabout itinerary that included a stay in Reno. He had scheduled several days there to research a series of short stories about gambling, which explains the detour in the earlier journey and gives the present reconstruction a concrete sequence to follow. Dom's Portland is thus the beginning of a geographically legible trail whose purpose has become far less ordinary.

The Decision to Return

On Christmas night, Dominick tells Parker Faine that he plans a long drive: he will fly to Dom's Portland, rent a car, and retrace the journey he made the summer before last, continuing through Nevada and part of Utah toward Mountainview. The proposal is not presented as a holiday or a casual return to old surroundings. Parker immediately recognizes its connection to Dominick's earlier sleepwalking and asks whether he has begun sleepwalking again.

Dominick says he has not, though he expects it may happen that night. He explains that he has thrown away the drugs he had been taking: they were not curing him, and he had concealed that he was becoming hooked because he feared the experiences associated with sleepwalking even more. Now, two anonymous notes have persuaded him that the problem is not simply psychological or confined to himself. Their presence changes the meaning of the trip. Going back through his old geography becomes an investigation prompted by evidence he cannot explain, rather than an attempt to revisit the past for its own sake.

Arrival and the Old Neighborhood

On Sunday, January 5, Dominick flies to Dom's Portland and takes a hotel room near the apartment house where he once lived. Rain is falling hard, and the air is cold. Apart from dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spends the afternoon and evening at a table by the window, looking out at the rain-lashed city and studying roadmaps. He repeatedly reviews the journey he made the previous summer and is about to make again. The window and maps frame two kinds of orientation: the city outside is immediately present, while the route on paper points toward an experience he cannot yet remember clearly.

The next morning, he drives a rented Chevrolet around his old neighborhood. The heavy rain has stopped near dawn, but the sky remains cloudy, a dry-looking gray like a burnt field. He passes through Portland University, stopping repeatedly to let familiar scenes stir memories of his former life. Then he parks across the street from his old apartment and looks up at its windows, trying to recall the person he had been when he lived there. The stops make the neighborhood a series of prompts rather than a recovered homecoming: each familiar place can call up the past, but none guarantees access to it.

What the City Can and Cannot Recover

Dominick can remember the timidity with which his earlier self faced life, but those memories have no intimacy or poignancy. He can see those days again without feeling them. That distance carries a double force: he fears what may have happened to him on the road, yet he also fears the possibility of becoming the old Dominick again. The neighborhood makes that former self visible enough to contemplate, but not close enough to inhabit.

His conviction that something terrible happened during the earlier journey produces a contradiction he cannot resolve in Dom's Portland. He believes that something monstrous was done to him, yet the experience also brought an unmistakably positive change in his outlook. The same event seems to have been both terrifying and beneficial, filling his dreams with horror while leaving him changed for the better. Familiar streets can establish who he was before the journey; they cannot explain how fear and improvement came from the same ordeal.

Departure for the Highway

Dominick concludes that the answer, if it can be found, is not in Dom's Portland but on the highway. He starts the Chevrolet, leaves his old apartment behind, and sets out looking for trouble. Rather than taking the direct northbound route, he follows the earlier detour south on Interstate 5, holding to the path associated with the summer he cannot fully recall. He keeps to the slow pace of that former drive, when he was towing a U-Haul trailer, and stops for lunch in Eugene. In the small towns along the way, he watches for something that might unsettle him or connect the present journey to the unexplained events of the past. Nothing does before he reaches Grants Pass shortly before six that evening.

The city’s narrative function is defined by this departure. Its apartment and campus give Dominick a way to measure the difference between his former and present selves, while his inability to feel the remembered past prevents the return from becoming a simple restoration. Dom's Portland starts the search, but it cannot complete it: the route onward, with its specific detour through Reno and across Nevada, is where he believes the missing explanation must be encountered.