Driving through the US is a bizarre experience, much more so than moving through it in a large convoy. The amount of open space is disorienting, and, as Jay often points out, it becomes much more so westward, especially in Texas, Nevada, and California. Little wonder why American leftists have always talked about trains the way they do.
They've had to dodge around a few skirmishes, but it's been unusually quiet. All the conflict seems to have been pulled to the coasts by gravity, and the large city centers between have pulled in what's left. The small towns seem to have been left to figure out what to do for themselves. Considering the amount of de-industrialization, water contamination, and soil depletion that's mounted over the decades, that's the way it's always been for a long time now. Jay calls it “rust belt gothic.” Landscapes of corrosion that nature can't quite reclaim, and people have long since extracted the valuable salvage from.
He says that most of California is like that, by volume. Moon had only ever been as far as the outer-edges of the Bay Area, but the state is massive. People think of LA and the Golden Gate bridge, but they're islands in a sea of derelict concrete, old trailers, depleted reservoirs and slab cities. He had told them about this town, decades ago, that had no water. It had all been scammed out from under them to farm pistachios and almonds, and other non-staple foods that weren't supposed to grow in that environment. All magnanimously bringing running water back had done was turn it into a company town.
He says it's gone now, that everyone had slowly evaporated out into slab cities. The power lines had fallen apart, the town had shed whatever social fabric it had maintained, the people had drifted away to other places that were slightly less impoverished and gutted. He had called that town a harbinger.
The way he talks about California reminds them of the way they think of Mars, sometimes.
When the convoy had gone to DC, it had used a more northward route that took them through Nebraska and Iowa. The deserts of uniform agriculture had felt apocalyptic. Landscapes of increasingly-desperate water infrastructure, and huge drone tractors that also reminded Moon of Mars. They had made them think of the automated machinery of extraction built up around the Martian lithium and uranium veins.
The air had tasted weird in a way Moon couldn't pin down, a vague tang under the mulchy agricultural smell. Jay had said it was the fertilizer, that the soil was depleted by industrial-scale monocrops that it could only be farmed via increasingly-severe chemical fertilizers. The corn wasn't even edible, he had said. It was so over-engineered for hardiness and fast growing that it could only be refined into high-fructose syrup, oils, ethanol, and cheap livestock feed.
They had sat at the edge of the deuce-and-a-half that had been converted to a troop carrier, dangling their feet over the light-gray pavement of the road that must have been decades past needing re-paving, and watched the irrigation slowly give way to some gas pipelines. The mud under those had looked particularly toxic.
As moon had watched the pipelines go by, their rotten shadows running into a stream of poison parallel with the road, Jay had told them about being trans in America. He ruminated that there had been these brief, fleeting periods where people like him were allowed to exist in the sunlight, but that it was always provisional, always ready to be withdrawn by the whims of reactionary politics and the need for scapegoats. He said that he wouldn't be the same person, if things were better, that everyone has an image of themselves extrapolated from a hypothetical world where one thing or another had happened differently.
He watched the mud, along with Moon. “But that's just hauntology, I think they call it. Phantom nostalgia. We gotta find other lights to see each other by, until we take that sunlight back. Maybe the ones after us get to be that other version.”
He had been using “we” differently than he would now. They had almost said something, then, but they withdrew and held it inside.
Jay, their tour guide across the American nightmare.
