From "Palestine" No.1

Their feet stumbled down snowy slopes, and crested little knolls and hills. Now and again one of them spat, making a little dent in the snow that tufts of grass also pushed through. They were coming closer to the most built-up area of the neighbourhood, and as they once more gained the grey main road the buildings began to loom up ominously around them. They were dark-windowed and grey, marked sootily from years of traffic fumes and only washed by rain. On either side these hulking tower-blocks stood, many of them disused and vacant. Here and there were boarded-up windows and gaping doors. But there were also, as they progressed, windows lit by cheering yellow light and sometimes mysterious twinklings of red light in attic rooms. The architecture of most of the buildings was sparse and industrial, as if they were nameless factories, office-blocks, high rises. As their feet crunched through snow M and Robert grew used to craning their necks to see far above them. Now they began to see tenements and brownstones, run-down and shut-up. In this part of the city most of the buildings seemed to be great dark granite office-blocks, that at night became giant monoliths of silence, and that looked down, as if despairingly, on M and Robert wandering below. Further away, against the horizon, they could see the great sleek skyscrapers of steel and glass.

M knew that they were traversing the perimeters of the Chicago suburb called Palatine, nicknamed Palestine. This was a fairly bland and unobtrusive little town, an outgrowth of the great lakeside conurbation of Chicago. M liked the place, the quietness of it, and often came here to drink, and sometimes just to think. He always called the place Palestine, and for him the name had a cheery feel, biblical, almost Christmasy. Just like the great familial mass of suburbia that lay beyond the place where the towering high rises began. Pacific blandness of the mid-west, that great land holding its Illinois like a vast plain of sleep. From the dull roofs of the suburbs, you could transgress the limits of the great city at night itself, with all its dark towers and endless secrets sleeping by the lake.