A Gas Station with Perks

I'm currently skipping around Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie and have returned to and finished the essay "Simulations and Unworlding: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Philip K. Dick" which discusses Fassbinder’s World on a Wire and the Dick novel Time Out of Joint. I watched the film in question tonight but haven't read the novel. It turns out the novel bit was more intriguing than his notes on the film, go figure.

Fisher closes the essay recounting the end of Time Out of Joint which sees its main character attempt to exit a simulation—in this case an idyllic 1950s American small town shielded from the grim reality of a far-future nuclear war. Signs of life decrease the farther he drives away from his home, eventually leaving only gas stations where full towns should be as the world seemingly breaks down around him: freight trains park indefinitely with no purpose, the desert gradually loses its geological and botanical features giving way to endless sand, “Peeking through a crack and seeing emptiness.”

I remembered a moment from a cross-country road trip my partner and I took two summers ago. We were somewhere in the Midwest—past Chicago for sure, maybe in Minnesota or the eastern part of North Dakota—and had been staring at nothing but rolling hills of cornfields for hours until the fuel gauge light turned on. I pulled off I-90 and came into a town not unlike Fisher's description of Dick’s postwar simulation: Main Street, a corn silo off in the distance, small retail stores. It was mostly forgettable, except that it lacked exactly what we sought: a gas station. I remember asking my partner something like, “How do these people function? They have cars and farm equipment that needs gas. They can’t possibly drive ten or fifteen miles (like we eventually would) to get gas? What town doesn’t have a gas station?”

As I was wondering about this, she was urging me to get moving. She’s suspicious—perhaps correctly—of small towns, having grown up in one and, by extension, possessing an awareness I apparently lack of what they think of outsiders who look like they're from the city.

Why did this bother me so much? Why did I remember it? Maybe it’s what Fisher posits above—faults in the simulation, the result of an incomplete rendering, the fog at the edges of the map. Maybe what I’m really stuck on is the question never answered: what would we have found had we stuck around? What else could have been missing? What would I have seen had I peeked through the crack?

Or maybe some towns just don’t have gas stations. Pretty boring to think so, though.

I have to hand it to PKD, who realized that the last thing we would need to render in our simulation, the thing to ensure reality is intact as all other properties of daily life fade away, is a gas station.

There's an Isaac Brock lyric somewhere in here about how towns are gas stations with a few extra perks.