The Air-Conditioned City 

I drove down to Austin to drink Lone Star and see my college pals, or at least that’s what I said when anyone asked. In a more serious, reflective sense, I drove down to Austin because I wasn’t sure how much longer Austin was going to exist. I saw the news story on the shuttering of Amarillo, and even though I’d never once been there during my years in Texas, the idea of an entire town disappearing spooked me. Well, disappearing made it seem like it was a natural process and not state-sponsored destruction.

When I told my wife I wanted to drive to Austin, she laughed in my face. I asked if she wanted to come with me; she’d never been there, had never lived anywhere outside of Minnesota. She only laughed harder, saying “Why would anyone go to Texas?” as she made scare quotes in the air, as if Texas weren’t even a real place, just an idea, and the idea of a post-apocalyptic wasteland at that. I was annoyed with her when I left. I had always maintained to my liberal friends that red states were worth saving, that they were full of creative, dynamic, and often progressive citizens doing their best to muddle through.

I maintained my stance, but on the long southward trawl down I-35, I began to realize that the news reports on the massive upheaval of the southern United States had not done justice to the worlds between the Texas where I came of age and the Texas that existed today.

It started during my first stop at a gas station after crossing the state border, where I had to drive into a garage stall in order to fill my tank. It’s not that I wasn’t grateful to stand in the cold blast of air conditioning; the convenience store was attached to the pump garages by a short, indoor hallway. The outside temperature was somewhere around 90 degrees, even in November. Minnesota was in the 50s right now. I could hear my wife telling me that I was silly to even consider a trip to the south. We hadn’t gone further than Kansas City in ten years, not even in the colder months.

From the gas pump, I could watch as the other garage stalls opened and closed, never allowing a customer to stand inside with the door open, where they might be hit with a blast of Texas winter, which felt much more like a Texas summer. Still, November had been practically a summer month during my four years of college, though I winced to think about what it must be like in August.

“How long have the gas stations been like this?” I asked the attendant when I got inside, a youngish man with stubble and lines around his eyes.

He shrugs. “I dunno, man. I mean, I remember outdoor gas stations from when I was a kid, so. Couple decades, I guess.”

It had been twenty years since I graduated college, so that made sense. By the time I left Austin, the city had already begun transforming into an unrecognizable landscape. They’d started, by then, constructing the downtown tunnel system, causing an obnoxious amount of construction traffic. I’d seen pictures of the completed project, the tunnels spanning a ten-mile radius, always expanding, swallowing up more of the city and even some of the surrounding suburbs. It made me want to avoid Austin at all costs; if every outdoor space had been gulped up by air conditioning, could it really be the city where I’d stumbled to and from dive bars on the Drag, reveling in the warm night air?

“When does I-35 start…you know…” I made a gesture with my hand and the gas station attendant scoffed.

“That monstrosity? You’ve got maybe ten more miles.”

I spent the next ten miles appreciating the dusty Texas landscape, the simple lanes of traffic, ten going north and ten going south. I could see ahead where the road widened; I braced for impact.

The governor of Texas, who loved to make regular appearances on the news station that my wife turned on to – quote unquote, see how the enemy thinks – bragged regularly about the endless I-35 expansion project. There was never a time when underpaid construction workers weren’t baking in the heat, toiling to create another lane of traffic. All of the little towns between Dallas and Austin, Austin and San Antonio, had been demolished years ago. It was just freeway now. Turtles all the way down.

I couldn’t even see where the lanes ended. The number was in the low hundreds, certainly, and somehow every lane was still packed with vehicles. There were more gas-guzzling pick-ups here than I’d ever seen in Minnesota, which had been true twenty years ago but seemed almost garish in its stereotype now. It made me nervous, being in that sea of cars, unable to make out anything else but the horizon line. My wife would tell me that I’d gotten myself into this mess.

Austin still had suburbs, but they’d clustered into the largest population centers, building up instead of out. Urban sprawl had been Austin’s game when I’d been there, and now they took the Manhattan approach to make room for I-35. When I was about two miles from the city limits, the tunnels started, long and dark, light fixtures on each side of the long corridor of vehicles upon vehicles. No more sunlight. I was sure that was a relief in the high heat of summer, when the humidity seeped into Texas’s every orifice.

My map took me to a parking garage that said I was just outside of the UT campus, though I had no idea how I was supposed to tell. All of my landmarks were gone, or at least invisible to the naked eye. It was just the empty tunnel system now. Air conditioning within air conditioning.

This was supposed to be what cities like Atlanta and Miami were like now, too, but I’d never lived in Atlanta or Miami. I had walked to class from my shitty little apartment on the Drag, even in the sweltering May heat. The Tower would chime, a beacon in the center of campus. I’d look at it and think to myself that’s where that guy shot all those people. Most of my friends hadn’t known about the shooting. I wondered if any UT kids knew about any of Austin’s history today, if they knew which bars Townes Van Zandt or Blaze Foley had played in. If they knew those names at all. Austin wasn’t so much a music city these days; why would anyone choose to move to the south?

I exited the parking garage through a glass door marked UT CAMPUS – NORTH, and at long last, I found the sun again. I stood on a familiar city street, the northernmost edge of the Drag, and it almost looked how I remembered. A scattering of coffeehouses and taco joints, of burger chains and head shops. It was crowded with young people, with students, even, who chatted as they walked south to class, backpacks hiked up on their shoulders. From here, I could see the top of the Tower, encased in a glass dome.

We were all in glass domes, of course. Each building, each walkway, arching up over us, a solid six inches of plexiglass between us and the sun, which shone down on the walkways of Austin with fierce indifference.

The glass started downtown, and had slowly expanded outwards, or so I read in The Atlantic a decade ago. UT had been the next bubble of Austin’s landscape to be transformed by air conditioning. The kids who passed me weren’t sweating, weren’t out of breath, not like I could get trying to hoof it from the LBJ School on the east side to Parlin Hall on the west side. The kids probably didn’t know any other world but this one. They’d always lived inside encased air conditioning. Maybe they remembered the unforgiving sun from their childhoods, before rural Texas was abandoned and the population was shunted into urban areas in the name of progress, in the name of keeping everyone cool. Except for the guys out expanding the freeway.

I walked north, in the opposite direction of campus, toward Mini Mouse. Gary had told me, when I texted to tell him about my trip, that it was the only one of our old haunts still around. The other campus bars had shuttered through the construction process, when the campus had been a ghost town for three years.

Mini Mouse, a ramshackle house covered in Christmas lights, had its own glass dome over the patio filled with graffitied picnic tables. The Christmas lights had lost some of their charm; the whole place had. I ordered a Lone Star for eight whole dollars and asked if there was a band playing tonight; the bartender looked at me like I was a crazy old guy, unable to fathom the current state of affairs.

I met Gary and Elizabeth at half past six. They arrived with beaming smiles but apologetic eyes. They were both from Austin and had nowhere to fall back to when the south started disintegrating.

“It’s horrible,” Elizabeth said as she drank a cocktail twice as expensive as my beer. “Look, yeah, maybe it’s better than trying to beat the heat. Folks die all the time out on the outskirts of town after the tunnels end, especially in the summer. But it’s so –”

“Soulless,” Gary finished her sentence. He drank Lone Star, same as me. “No one wants to go out. Why do we even have the domes if everyone is just going to stay locked in their houses all the time?”

We weren’t the only people at the bar; there were a handful of college-aged kids and young professionals, but not nearly the crowds that Mini Mouse had drawn when I was in undergrad. Even then, Austin was long past its prime.

“Are we in the death throes of the city? Or of Texas in general?” I asked, because no one would know better than them. I certainly didn’t, from my lofty vantage point in the upper Midwest. Elizabeth and Gary exchanged a look, and both took a drink.

“There’s a certain allegiance to Texas,” Gary acknowledged, “but Austin is going to be I-35 someday, and it’s looking like that day is coming in our lifetimes.”

“There’s no Austin pride? No one who will fight for it?” I took a drink of my own, trying not to feel guilty that I’d never shown all that much pride in it. I usually avoided the subject of living in Texas if anyone asked.

“Of course people will fight,” Elizabeth said, though she looks nauseous at the suggestion. “But they’ll lose. Austin’s population has gone up because of the rural Texans need somewhere to go, but it doesn’t have any cultural cache anymore. There’s no real arts scene, no new music.”

“Austin was countercultural, then it was mainstream, and now it’s irrelevant,” Gary said, practiced, like it was his go-to line whenever anyone asked about this particular subject. I was sure that for anyone actually living here, the daily conversational grind always included predictions of Austin’s grim future.

“Even the college town aspect is disappearing,” Elizabeth pointed out, gesturing at the handful of other bar denizens. Only two other picnic tables on the patio were occupied. “No one wants to go to school here. They want to get out of Texas. They leave at the first opportunity. No offense.”

She shrugged at me, but I deserved the bitter tone. I came to UT through one of their scholarship programs targeted at out-of-state kids after their enrollment numbers started plummeting, as the weather and politics raced to see which could provide worse living conditions. I’d been desperate to be in anywhere but Iowa and took the deal.

“So why stay?” I looked between them. “I mean, Gary, you could get a job anywhere. Every major US city needs nurses. They’re dying for nurses, sometimes literally.”

Gary finished his Lone Star. “People need help here, too. We have the resources to leave, but most folks don’t. They still deserve quality healthcare.”

“Sure, but – there are other nurses.” I felt stupid as soon as the words came out of my mouth. Gary and Elizabeth both had careers that actually benefited mankind. I sold medical devices to hospitals for too much money. It wasn’t completely useless, but I certainly wasn’t changing lives. The designers of the devices might be, but I just did the marketing.

“I can’t do my work in another state,” Elizabeth interjected, “so it’s not really worth thinking about.”

Elizabeth represented injured workers suing the state of Texas. I could have pointed out that she could represent the workers of Washington or Vermont just as easily, but I knew to keep my mouth shut. Texas was committing far more atrocious crimes toward its communities.

“We’ll retire somewhere else,” Gary said, cutting the tension. “That’s when it’ll be really unlivable here anyway. Austin will stick around dying for another couple of decades. Soon enough, the fucking glass won’t be enough to keep the heat out.”

The three of us all glanced up, as if on cue. There was a bird – probably a grackle – standing on the glass directly above us, maybe ten feet over our heads. Some bird species had become endangered recently, too many of them suffering through the heat, but the mighty grackle lived on.

The grackle took off a moment later. The birds probably missed being able to interact with humans and the food scraps that they left behind.

“Look at the bird shit,” Elizabeth laughed, pointing at the smear of white that the grackle had left behind. “How long do you think it’ll take to get a cleaner out there?”

“Longer and longer these days,” Gary explained to me. “The domes are constantly smeared with the foulest stuff. They used to get cleaned every night. Now it’s more like every week.”

“Maybe that’s the problem with today’s generation,” I joked, still keeping an eye on the black spot flying overhead, not quite swallowed up by the unrelenting light. “A bird’s never shit on their heads.”