Since I was a child, they’ve told me the city’s edges don’t exist. Keep on walking, they said, you will never find the end. The city is endlessly building itself, expanding into the darkest corner of whatever there is to find outside of Sundew.

I get out at subway station #394, which is lined with specialized test shops (MRI, CT, CAT scan, X-ray, ICP, a whole job offers one of these tests for 15$, or 10%, if you ask nicely) set up like those psychotic health resorts of the 90’s. To get to the station’s exit, you have to pass by all of of ‘m, and then there is a labyrinth of exits. Exits, exits, exits… That’s what it’s like being in this world, isn’t it? So many exits you’re completely paralysed with fear to take any at all. I walk up the stairs, which are littered with magnets, maps, little bracelets and empty noodle boxes. I reach the street. The sun over Sundew is looking beautiful today. Then there’s enormous seven-storey stretchy clouds covering the city, in purple, orange, and pink. An awful smell of hot sulphur in the air. A dead rat hanging from one of the lampposts. This is exactly how I remember the area around subway station #394. I know this whole city by heart, although I haven’t even seen about 1% of it.

I was born in it, and, because there is no other city that exists, I have never been outside of it, although I am grateful for the liberties we have, and the civil rights, and all the companies that serve us, and that we’re able to serve. There are so many ways for people to attain happiness, or at least general comfort, such as filing into an inflatable cocoon under city bus windows, or playing chess on the roof of St. Bartholomew's Basilica, or taking a private drug dream ride over the roofs of the Antibiotici Per Eccellenza resorts & hotels. 

I take a turn, toward l’Avenue d’Europe, one of the main streets in the city, which is lined with graceful palm trees and living statues of the goddess of electricity, Penumbra, with shiny hand-carved rubies in her hands, paid for by generous state subsidies. The side streets of this glorious promenade are filled with the stench of stale grill-burnt meat and cardboard in the summer heat, old, rusting exercise machines and the steady nudging of ancient, wobbling feet. This isn’t where I need to be. I don’t need to be anywhere. No one needs to be anywhere. Keep on walking, they said, you will never find the end. But there has to be a way to slip between the cracks, a way to get past all the cicadas calling for help, and get past the nightmare of the sun that is the night. We’ve all heard stories of the outposts. City walls that are festooned with wooden representations of anthropomorphic martyrs, including a lion and a mongoose, standing on a tall pile of flesh, bellowing and clawing at each other until the iron plate around their necks rips. And the city gates, which have allegedly never actually opened, studded with portraits of the forebears of the city's founding families, and inscribed with iconic, long-destroyed Californian landmarks such as Richard Nixon’s birthplace, Walt Disney’s statue at Disneyland and The Pony Express Terminal in Sacramento. But after all, those are just myths. Stories one cannot be sure of. It did take us hundreds of years to become the way we are; from tiny dispersed conglomerations of fifty family companies, to large corporate conglomerations that sometimes just have one or two personalities. 

I’m afraid of getting a sunburn, so I decide to get an iced coffee. I look for a Dunkin’ Donuts, but can only find a Starbucks. As I enter, I find a crying woman next to the front door with her elderly mother at her side. I feel my heart sink when I notice the American name carved on her forehead, 'Caroline Mahony’. I go to the worker girl and get a soy milk cloud macchiato with a berry hibiscus cold brew and a banana. “OK.” The worker girl says after I’ve already tapped my credit card onto the little screen. By the barista-counter sits the famous Italian podcaster and professor at Creative Souls University, “Anna Schiavone”, trying to have a worthwhile conversation with the Starbucks staff. “Do you know,” she says, “there are an increasing number of students who have been coming to therapy because of their malaise in believing they need to change their violent, abusive behaviour.” The barista is too busy to notice her talking. He keeps calling out customer’s name after name after name. “Pietro! Marchand! Baron! Dasguetta! Steindorf! Murcielago! Kathy!” That’s enough. I leave.