There are SNSes I want to write, about The Stanley Parable, about Sanctum 2, about notions of game and narrative in conventional short fiction. But I really can't make it happen. I can't get my head around it in the time permitted, so as an apology, I'm attaching a portion of the opening chapter of Look How Big I Drew This Dog.
What follows is Distant Plastic Trees:
The interstate highway system was conceived of by Dwight D.
Eisenhower during his presidency, not his stint as Allied Supreme Commander.
It spanned the center of North America’s mass, criss-crossing an entire
continent east to west and stretching north to south from border to border.
There are 47,182 miles of highway spanning the United States, enough road
to nearly wrap around the circumference of the planet twice. Considered in its
entirety the interstate highway system was the single most expensive public
works project in American history.
I was born in 1984, six years before the interstate highway system
was ostensibly finished. I’ve driven cross country twice alone, and twice
again with partners. I’ve seen the bristle of humanity at the edge of the
Grand Canyon, the sunflower fields of North Dakota, the Indian Territory of
Southern Montana, the peaks of the Rockies and the passes of Coeur d’Alene.
Every time I make the drive from coast to coast construction seems to pop
up and delay the trip. Spokane will be channeling traffic through two of
five lanes through its heart in order to provide adequate space for workers to
tear up road and lay down fresh asphalt in its place. Mountain passes in
Montana will be closed to a single lane while gravel is scattered across the
roads by men and women, their sex made indistinguishable by the protective
layers they wear, the bandannas they tie around their faces to keep out the
dust.
*
Four years pining, three trying to burn the memory of you out of
my skull and leaves me where exactly? Where I started – stunted,
isolated, justifiably infuriated at myself. I’m even on a highway again –
just like the first time I realized, without a doubt, that you’d never touch me
again. You managed to ruin the highway system for me – just thought you
should know – hope you’re proud of yourself lady. Biggest fucking public
works project in history and I can’t enjoy it for a single fucking second
because every time I look at a road sign – every time I take an exit or floor
it and swap gears with that sweet ass rhythm I think of you and your eyes and
your mouth all fixed on the road and where are you now? So close and so
far you might as well be on another planet.
The last time I was in the Twin Cities I spent most of my visit
dreading the possibility of seeing you. I had no idea where you haunted
now – it wouldn’t have been any of the places we used to go together. But
all the same I danced around campus cautious that I might see you – kept my
vision tunneled in Mississippi Market and spent three hours/beers at the Blind
Pig half listening to conversations, mostly wondering what it would be like to
see you suddenly pop up there with your new boyfriend on your arm. You’d
walk on his arm now – that was a new you trait – because the old you was dead.
Which makes you two people: you and your memory.
All the same the idea of making small talk with you or him or you
and him both – which is far more likely – I recall how he operates – was a shit
prospect – enough to make me want to just crawl back into bed – never leave the
guest bedroom that Anna and Josh had set up for me. And yet – even with all that – because of all
that – I spent the whole stretch of highway from Saint Paul to Milwaukee thinking
about you – your lips - your breasts – your smile when I went from lips to
breasts – back to lips – and then to your groin – teeth playing their way down
your belly to the sweet spot – where fabric met skin – where my teeth feebly
grasped and then my tongue pressed me downwards to your covered sex – to your
open thighs and then my mouth rested – you arched your hips – rocking
them upwards and then – you smiled again as the tension dissolved and the fire
went from sparking and catching pine branches to embering evenly – falling into
something we could both enjoy all night – alternating position – switch every
once in a while so we could share the heat that came from facing the fire.
*
It seems to me the interstate is constantly under construction.
*
My car, Jenny, is a Toyota Tercel. She was constructed in
1994 in a place called Toyota City. I assume this was simply a
serendipitous coincidence.
I bought her from a very nervous Turkish man in Saint Paul.
I found him on the internet, in the early days of these things, and
arranged through emails and phone calls to meet him in a parking lot. My
mother drove me there in a rental car. She waited on the street as I
drove gingerly through a series of factory parking lots, office complex entryways
and back roads just south of Minneapolis. After fifteen minutes I knew
that this was the car for me.
Three days after I met the Turkish man in the parking lot, after
my mother had flown back to Massachusetts, we met up again in another parking
lot. This was one was to a bank. I entered the bank adjacent to the
parking lot with the Turkish man and, as he twitchily watched, withdrew two
thousand seven hundred dollars from my savings account. Then
we re-entered the car and the Turkish man drove me to a department store in
downtown Saint Paul.
When we arrived he led me through aisles of children’s clothing
and women’s underwear until we reached a breach in the wall of the department
store, similar to the entrance to a changing room. We stepped through it
into a tiny space that consisted of folding chairs against two walls and a
plexiglass window on another. The third wall was a stunted thing with a
table pressed against it and ancient waiting room magazines scattered across
its surface. There may have been a Highlights in the mix.
The Turkish man and I sat and waited our turn behind a smattering
of Midwestern archetypes of humanity before we were called up to a window,
where a bored looking African American woman took a piece of paper from the
Turkish man, briefly assessed it, and then changed the name on the piece of
paper from his to mine.
At this point, my relationship with Jenny became official.
After the title was changed the Turkish man told me he needed a
ride to work. He worked at a Tuxedo rental shop an hour south of Saint
Paul. As we drove there the Turkish man told me all of the amazing things
about this car. The brakes, he said, were good, perfect really, just
changed. The steering, perfectly aligned. He implored me to take my
hands off the wheel and see if the car drifted, just see. I silently
declined, drove past the outlet stores and steak houses with big green signs
and tinted glass windows, and left him outside of a shop with a sign that had a
bowtie in the middle. Then I drove back up along access roads,
shamelessly grinding my gears as I shifted up and down in traffic, driving,
really driving, on my own for the first time. During the forty-five
minute long drive home, I stalled Jenny’s engine five times.
Jenny has gotten me across the country three times now.
*
I lied when I told you about the Turkish man telling me to let go
of the wheel while I was driving him to his workplace. Really, while he
was driving me to the department store the Turkish man, flush with the joy of
his impending sale, announced he was going to show me something and then let go
of the wheel to prove how steady Jenny’s drive shaft was. Her path never
wavered down the long even stretch of I-94.
This kind of lie is commonly known as a “white lie,” for its harmless
nature and relative insignificance. Generally people agree that white
lies are harmless, and make conveying information easier in general.
This particular white lie was about automobile safety.
*
I am a bad liar.
*
When we pulled up to the motel – the only thing outside of the
school in that shitsmack town - you pulled a nasty one on me. You said it
would be fine if we only get a room with one bed. It was an invitation
without being at all inviting – a reminder of what we used to do in those sheets
– so I spent the extra money and got us separate beds and apparently snored
terribly the whole night – so bad you threw a pillow at me – and then the next
day there was never a trace of you wanting to fuck me – which is a shame
because I still haven’t had sex worth noting in my parent’s house and as bad as
things got between us there was never a moment where sex wasn’t good – or at
least interesting. The black tar stretched out and I drove and drove and
drove and you napped and napped and looked so fucking pretty I could’ve driven
the car right into a concrete divider and ended the whole thing and I’d be
happier for it for having lost myself and you at the same time and dying with
that memory of your lips in that flat dumb frown – like you were trying to
solve a puzzle or something – in the midst of sleep. Stumped. You
looked stumped. You never looked that way awake.
*
I grew up in Massachusetts, a child of the 90s. I spent my
days running through neighbors’ yards, digging holes through the bottom of sand
boxes, pretending sticks were guns and swords. These were not activities
exclusive to Massachusetts.
I spent my days indoors, plopped in front of a television or
tented underneath a comforter clutching a book. I spent my nights,
many nights, too many nights, tented underneath comforters with books. I
ruined my eyes this way.
*
Weeks after I bought Jenny, I drove her up to your house,
following your father. I didn’t know how to work her headlights. No
one had ever told me how to properly flip between high beams and standard
headlights, so I spent most of the drive with my hazard lights on. When I stepped out of the car your father
leaned into my car and showed me how to properly change headlight settings.
Later, over dinner, he offered to check some of the basics of my
car to be sure that it was safe for you to ride in. He used an air gun
and a lift he had in the garage next to the house you spent high school in, the
garage he’d built himself, to lift Jenny up and look at the bits of her that
helped her go and stop and do all of those lovely things cars do. After
about thirty minutes underneath her, he brought a small gray thing that looked
like a hard, curved blackboard eraser over to me. Most of the eraser bit
had been worn away, edging close to its steel backing.
“This is a brake pad,” he explained. “It’s just about worn
down. You’ll want to get this changed.
It isn’t too expensive.”
I nodded and thanked him. I was really happy to know what a
brake pad looked like.
*
Your father telling me about the brake pad revealed a
not-so-white-lie that the Turkish man had told me. By telling me that
Jenny had new brake pads, he convinced me that I wouldn’t need to change them
for a while.
Maybe he did this because he was worried I’d subtract the cost of
new brake pads from the money I was giving him for Jenny. Maybe he really
didn’t know that the pads were old. Either way, if I hadn’t found out
he’d lied, the brakes might not have worked, and Jenny wouldn’t have been able
to slow down when I needed her to.
I know, after driving across the country four times, the
importance of slowing down when you need to.
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