The City of Columbus appears in William Stanley Milligan’s story less as a single continuous setting than as a point of return, a public street, a nearby landscape, and a place of medical care. The episodes connected to it range from a journey Billy never completed to encounters undertaken by Philip, Ragen, Kevin, and Arthur. Together, they make the city a practical center of movement and consequence: a destination on a discharge itinerary, a place where political leaflets changed hands, and a regional hub for both illicit business and treatment.

A Homeward Destination and an Interrupted Route

On May 1, after a month and a day in the Navy, William Stanley Milligan was discharged under honorable conditions. He received his pay and an airline ticket to the City of Columbus. The ticket framed the city as his expected destination after an abrupt end to enlistment, but the route home was interrupted before he got there. Traveling from Great Lakes toward O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Philip learned that two recruits on leave were going to New York City. He abandoned the airline ticket and joined them on the bus, drawn toward a place he believed he came from but had never visited.

That detour gives Columbus a particular narrative function: it is the return point set down by the institution, but not the destination chosen by the personality then in control. The city matters in this episode through an unrealized itinerary. The discharge arranged a direct passage back; Philip’s decision redirected the journey toward a different imagined home. Columbus is therefore present as a concrete destination even while the action turns away from it.

Street Politics and an Urban Encounter

The city becomes an actual public setting when Ragen stops in Columbus for dinner after returning from a delivery of marijuana to a car dealer in Indiana. As he gets out of his car, he sees an elderly man and woman handing out Communist Party leaflets while several people heckle them. Ragen asks whether they need help. When the woman asks whether he sympathizes with their cause, he identifies himself as a communist and refers to having seen slave labor in factories and sweatshops.

The man gives Ragen a stack of leaflets describing the Communist Party’s philosophy and criticizing United States support for dictatorships. Ragen then walks up and down Broad Street, placing the papers in passersby’s hands. A routine stop for dinner thus becomes a public act of political distribution. The contrast is pointed: Ragen has just completed a drug delivery, yet in the city he takes up a cause through direct, visible contact with strangers. Columbus supplies the street and the crowd; Ragen turns that brief encounter into purposeful action.

The City’s Outskirts and a Public-Health Concern

The surrounding area also draws characters whose aims are far removed from the city’s street life. Kevin asks Gordy Kane to introduce him to a drug connection because he is prepared to deal drugs full-time. Kane calls back with directions to Blacklick Woods, near Reynoldsburg, east of Columbus, where Brian Foley is to assess him in person. Kevin follows the instructions to a location near a culvert and arrives early. When a Mercedes eventually appears with two men, and someone remains in the back of the car, Kevin becomes uneasy and wonders what he has entered. The outskirts here are not merely a route out of town: they are the chosen setting for a private test of trust and access to a criminal enterprise.

A separate journey gives the region a sharply different meaning. Arthur checks the signs on Sunbury Road, works out from a highway map that he is near Hoover Reservoir, and recognizes that he has reached a place he had long intended to visit. He has been considering whether sludge accumulated against the dam since its construction might provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes. His proposed investigation is modest and concrete: collect scrapings, examine them under a microscope at home, and inform the authorities if the area is infested. The episode places a private, methodical concern for public health within the same broader geography that Kevin uses to approach a drug contact. The region around Columbus accommodates both concealed dealings and an effort, however small, to identify a possible hazard to others.

Columbus as a Place of Medical Treatment

The city also enters the story through institutional care. While in Lebanon prison, Milligan has difficulty sleeping and complains of frequent vomiting and blurred vision. On October 13, Dr. Steinberg orders that he be taken to Central Medical Center, Columbus, for treatment. The transfer brings him to the city because his condition requires medical attention, though the account distinguishes his psychological difficulties from the physical diagnosis later made there.

After ten days in Columbus, doctors discover a peptic ulcer. Milligan is placed on a Sippy ulcer diet and then returned to protective isolation in Lebanon. The visit therefore offers treatment without changing the larger conditions of confinement: a specific medical problem is identified, but he goes back to isolation and learns that he will not be eligible for parole until April 1977. Across these episodes, the City of Columbus is neither simply a home nor a place of release. It is a node in a wider system of travel, work, political encounter, criminal access, and institutional treatment, with each arrival shaped by a different personality and a different limit on what can happen next.