Painting by Michael Harrington for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

I live with my grandmother in a town called Laskerville. The town was created a hundred years ago when they dammed the Sassusquanatt River. It’s a pretty town—just what you would think. What does it look like? Out the front door of my grandmother’s house you can see clear up the riverbed ten miles to the edifice of the dam, rising pale and inarguable like a cliff. And below it all these ridiculous lives in a deep ravine. There are houses all around ours. In that respect…