She asked what kind of place South Dakota was.
We exchange students were seated among a group of English learners in a pub in Shinjuku. The high schoolers had gone home, and now it was the instructors and the college students pounding unlimited drinks at 3000 yen for two hours. Some unspoken desire tingling under the skin of each group had pushed us quickly into familiarity. We were teaching each other dirty words in our native languages. We’d played a game: pair a mode of transportation and a type of meat for ero-comedic effect. (Think: Beef train, kielbasa bicycle, pork plane.) A couple of the women there were obviously interested in at least two of the men each, and that meant one was clinging to my arm asking questions.
I was still in love with a woman who was never really going to love me back, so it didn’t disappoint me too much when the answer I gave resulted in her shifting affections to another guy by the end of the night.
South Dakota. What was there to say that wasn’t covered in the box of souvenirs my father had sent for such cultural introductions? The postcards of mythological jackalopes and Sturgis rallies packed with Harleys. The card featuring Mount Rushmore on the front—and the bare butts belonging to those famous faces, sketched in cartoon on the flipside. I had told the students during the language practice session about the agriculture and the Black Hills I had never seen. I showed them a photo of hunters I knew standing behind a line of downed pheasants. I did not show them the pheasant poker chip, proclaiming SOUTH DAKOTA: BIG COCK COUNTRY, but it seemed, at the present rate, that my neighbor, amorous with diluted cocktails, might just pluck it from my pocket.
I didn’t tell her about my last memory of the place: a truck bed overloaded with deer carcasses. I didn’t tell her about the Mexican woman down the street whose Christmas decorations danced and dazzled the town’s eyes toward epileptic seizure. I didn’t bring up Pioneer Days, the local homecoming ritual, Prince and Princess sporting faux-native buckskins and cowboy hats. I didn’t explain that on my old street, you passed three distinct economic classes from trailer to mansion. None of that really occurred to me at the time because my home had never meant anything at all to me except a flat, dull place I wanted to escape.
What I said, being too young, too earnest: “From my dad’s house, it’s a ten-minute walk to the end of town. One minute, you’re passing ordinary homes, then you hit a highway. Past the highway, it’s power lines and corn fields and blue sky forever. So, you stare a while and turn back. That’s what South Dakota is like.”
The group got quiet. A few people made boilerplate remarks. A server came around to gather glasses and take drink orders. My face was hot, and although the conversation sputtered and wheezed to life like a rusting Ford on a January morning, I could not find my way back in.
The woman slipped her hand in mine, slid in closer. She was beautiful and older by a year and although I’d thought I wanted everything new to happen to me in Tokyo, I also wanted to get away. I couldn’t trust the way she was melting all over me, and that’s how I knew this heat between us couldn’t really be about me. She was looking at something else.
“But when you got to that field,” she said, “couldn’t you keep going? I mean, the world does keep going.”
The conversation had roared back into full power without us. Cornstalks rustling in the breeze.
“You know the world exists out there, somewhere,” I said, lifting my glass for a sip, then tiring of the taste and putting it back down. “But you can’t really believe it, somehow. When you’re standing there, it looks like the fields and sky just go on forever. And maybe they do.”
James Sullivan has split his adult life between the Midwestern US and Japan. He lives in Minnesota now and is writing a novel. Find his recent work in Fourteen Hills, Inscape, and XRAY Literary Magazine and follow @jfsullivan4th