Sprawl

Here's a work of fiction I wrote (exactly!) two years ago and forgot about. "Internet lit" with the ankle-weights of national specificity.

It’s the sort of prescription I find dumb in a boiling hot way, so I held him to it: If America were just one continuous suburb, with no cities or rural stretches to speak of, we’d be a real country. Full of real, continuous people. Not so polarized, between one another or inside of ourselves.

In order to get anywhere with my ZoningUnderstander#2783, you had to believe him when he told you polarization was the only wrong thing in the world. So I did that. I made myself balanced: I marshaled the peaks and valleys of my essence and spread them flat. Speaking in literal terms, he liked that my breasts were on the smaller side, he actually said this was independent of his great-plains fetishism and latent ephebophilia—he promised and I took him at his word.

During our Discord calls he’d share his screen with me, open up Google Streetview and shepherd me down all the detours and dead ends of rural Virginia. He’d come upon an empty lot somewhere nice, grainily sunny, acutely milkweeded, and he’d tell me this is where our house would happen to be someday. And then the next day he’d come upon a different lot, say our house could be there instead if fate preferred. Of course it wouldn’t really matter where we ended up, because—weather notwithstanding—everywhere in America would look the exact same, housing more or less the same model of people.

Whenever our conversations lulled I would turn on the front camera, lift up my shirt. I thought, forcefully, to myself: there are too many miles between us, the thousand-and-change of them must be evenly redistributed. All the couples of America should have to leave room for a ghostly third, while slow-dancing, or while bracketing and being bracketed in bed.

For the two-and-a-half months he enjoyed me, I mostly kept my questions at bay, but at one point I did make the mistake of asking what would happen if the population grew. In order to maintain an evenness of density, we would have to bulldoze and rearrange every single residential area in the country, right? And I imagined the people would put both of our heads on sticks for that. Or maybe their wives’ heads, just to make us feel sorry for inconveniencing them. So I suggested in some mythic feat of love we could have pulled it off telekinetically—beamed all the houses in question into a great holding place in the sky, then lowered them slowly and quartered them away one by one. He said he hadn’t thought of this before, somehow, and he told me to lean back, imagine his warmth and his weight, imagine it new.

Whenever he Discord-fucked me I would close my eyes and splinter myself across America: bits of gray matter in Fayetteville, graftings of skin in Sedona, showers of plasma on the parts of Colorado no one visits. The maps say Colorado, but east of the Rockies it’s really just Kansas to me. For a minute then I’d stopped believing in borders altogether, at least the way they’re drawn right now. Because to me it’s always been Kansas out there: all grass and no altitude, no depth.