The plastic couple had fallen on the ground, one woman and one man in their
Sunday best next to the park bench, curled in fake grass, trapped like
turtles on their backs. Charlotte didn’t know how long they were lying
there. Minutes? Years? Both were one inch tall, shorter with their legs
permanently bent at the knee. A mini-dog looked on. Did it pity them? She
framed the image to include a well-pruned mini-flower pot, and took a photo
with her phone. “What the fuck,” she thought. She posted it to Instagram
with the caption, “Straight people.”

That morning, she’d borrowed her father’s car. Spending the last three days
away from New York at her parents’ house had reignited her anxieties. She
came out to her mother over the phone a few months ago and primed herself
for a confrontation, staging scenes in her head, but no one mentioned it so
she didn’t mention it.

She was trying to finish her book about miniatures. When people asked, “Why
are you so obsessed with small things?,” she’d say it was really an
obsession with parallel worlds. While a bunch of her friends made work
about Second Life or VR, the miniature felt like the tangible precursor of
alternative realities, lanes of concurrent isolation. Friends and former
professors would send her emails, “Have you been to ____ miniature world
yet?” and she’d reply, “No! Thank u / u the best!!” and add the location to
her list.

Thirty miles from her parents’ house, she slid into the parking lot of
Roadside America, purportedly:

The World’s Greatest Indoor Miniature Village

Voted by Road Trip USA as one of the most unique tourist attractions in
the United States

The Enchanted Miniature Land of Yesterday & Tomorrow: ‘You Have To
See it To Believe It’

Its website promised a six thousand square foot display, ten thousand
hand-made trees, and a population of four thousand miniature citizens. When
Charlotte arrived and paid her $6 entry fee, the woman at the desk gave her
a pamphlet and told her “the show” repeated every hour at fifty minutes
past the hour, “so stick around for it.”

“I will,” Charlotte promised.

Crossing into the display room felt like reaching the crest of a rolling
hill. The room’s walls, painted like a landscape painting, extended greenly
into the two-dimensional distance. Her fellow Roadside America patrons,
giants wandering the town’s exterior, walked politely in their modest
fleeces. All white people, she assumed, drove there from the twenty-first
century versions of this town to see themselves reflected in their
miniature static ancestors.

Inside the town’s waist-high plexiglass border, the population hummed with
activity on pause: paramedics wheeled a mini-dying man out of his house on
a gurney, children flew a kite on a front lawn, Kaufmann’s movers unloaded
mini-armoires, mini-dining room chairs, and mini-art deco lampshades.
Downtown, the mini-office workers bustled under a cinema marquee
advertising the film “Boys’ Town.” Each street was a frozen tableau, as if
the past had paused itself and became toy in some sort of reverse Pinocchio
effect. Charlotte wondered why real boys dreamed of becoming heroic
figurines.

Charlotte checked her phone— twenty more minutes until “the show”— and saw
a text from Gina, her roommate.

“Thought u were coming home today bb”

“Made a mini pit stop” Charlotte sent her the photo of the couple.

“LOL that dog” “have u read the Jonathan Swift yet?”

“No” “tried” “can’t read anything that old” “too much Gulliver backstory —
where r the scenes????”

“there’s our new conceptual project” “cut the fat in classics”

“The Penguin Classic Diet”

“Charlotte’s Reductive Literary Hot Takes”

She sat on a bench by the mini-train station and read the pamphlet,
featuring the story of Larry Gieringer and his brother Paul. Roadside
America began when Larry climbed a nearby mountain top and looked down onto
his town, thinking it was small enough for him to carry home. He felt new
perspective and wanted to preserve it, touch it, author it. The two
brothers worked for seven years building models, and when Paul quit to
become a priest, Larry continued on alone for the rest of his life.

Fervently, piece by piece, he whittled at blocks of wood, fashioning
them to his dream—a miniature village. A church, a bridge, a
horse-drawn carriage, a stable, a farm-house—a boyhood dream being
shaped into reality.

Charlotte admired Larry as an outsider artist, but decided boyhood dreams
were her nightmare. She took notes in her phone:

Isn’t it the boyhood dream to see the patriarchy fully realized? Isn’t

Lord of the Flies more accurate than Leave It to Beaver?
Instead of inventing a new world with new possibilities, Larry idealized,
cloned, and shrank his neighbors. She looked at the town’s citizens, all
cast and fixed in one dude’s ongoing nonconsensual livestream.

Slipping the pamphlet into her tote, Charlotte explored the perimeter and
noticed time sliding off its axis: some sections depicted early pioneer
days, other neighborhoods more mid-twentieth century. She looked at the
couple who’d fallen off the bench in the 1930s, while on a nearby hill,
mini-cowboys fought mini-Native Americans in the 1760s, and she wondered
where her miniature Pennsylvanian forefathers would go after the slaughter:
to their 1950s suburban homes or to the Stars & Stripes Saloon, which,
according to its marquee, featured “Beautiful French Can-Can Girls?”

Of course Larry Gieringer’s vision of small town livin’ features war
with people of color and eroticized femininity, she typed. But it
somehow makes even more sense that his depiction isn’t bound to one
historical moment

. Larry’s world slid all of Pennsylvanian history within walking distance,
parallel neighborhoods with people unsure of which period costume to wear,
of turning down the wrong street and becoming their grandmother.

On Christmas Eve, Charlotte had been riding in the car with her mom when
John Mellencamp’s 1980s hit “Small Town” came on the radio. “Oh boy!” Her
mom increased the volume of Mellencamp’s voice as well as her own voice, a
duet. “No, I cannot forget where it is that I come from / I cannot forget
the people who love me / Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town /
And people let me be just what I want to be.” Charlotte mouthed the words,
imprinted in her from childhood, as if the car were driving backwards into
past Pennsylvanias. While her mother drummed on the steering wheel during
the heartland rock instrumental interlude, Charlotte thought about how
one’s ability to be “just what I want to be” seemed highly dependent on
one’s alignment with white Christian lifestyle choices. She considered
pointing this out to her mom, one of the more progressive people in the
town, but she was already sliding into the next lyric, “Well I was born in
a small town / And I can breathe in a small town / Gonna die in this small
town / Yeah, that’s probably where they’ll bury me.” The guitar riff
soared. They drove by condos and a podiatrist’s office.

When a little girl tried to vault Roadside America’s plexiglass border
wall, her mother grabbed her waist, pulling her back towards the mountains.
Behind them stood a greying man. He wore a fleece and jeans one size too
big and looked a lot like fucking Mike Pence. Charlotte imagined Larry
Gieringer as a conversion therapist, creating an Aryan queer-less town, a
town populated entirely by 1 inch tall Mike Pences. Mini-Mike Pence
delivering milk. Mini-Mike Pence walking dog. Mini-Mike Pence beside
mini-Mike Pence on park bench. Mini-Mike Pence dressed as ‘Beautiful French
Can-Can Girl’ kicking leg for audience of applauding mini-Mike Pences.

Just then, the town went dark. Trains slowed and fluorescent sunlight set
as a lone spotlight shone on an American flag painted on the sky. A glee
club warbled through the speakers, signaling to the giant spectators, who
took their seats. Fifty minutes past the hour. Charlotte slid open her
phone’s camera. The town had only two churches yet hundreds of church bells
sang. A soprano a cappella-ed “God Bless America” as the face of white
Jesus merged with the flag, then into a portrait of the family ideal: man
in military uniform, arm around woman, woman holding baby. The sky pinked
as the soprano hit her high note: “Home Sweeeeeet Hoooooome!,” and the town
jerked to life. Trains resumed encircling the inhabitants, a boy’s kite
soared in perfect electric breeze.

“Un-fucking real.” Charlotte stopped recording. She opened Instagram but
couldn’t decide on a caption, thinking that if the show happened eight
times a day, then the sun rose and set on Roadside America eight times a
day, meaning maybe the town wasn’t a relic, but operating years ahead, in
an accelerated, prophetic future.

Lindsey sipped the last of her Green Machine Naked juice through the straw,
conserving her lipstick, as she stood up from her chair in the Queens
Museum Cafe. Charlotte, her old friend from high school, was supposed to
meet her half an hour ago, but hadn’t returned any of Lindsey’s texts. It
would be just like her to bail after Lindsey drove the whole way from
Seacaucus to hang out.

Lindsey was happy to be away from Joe for the day, who Charlotte hated.
“Lindsey, what do you expect? He lives with you, so you’d expect him to be
chill, but his main interest is playing 80s metal with his metal bros, all
of whom have zero awareness. It’s like they’ve been in a Metallica bomb
shelter for ten years. I don’t know how you deal.” Since that comment,
Lindsey had lost interest in her Seacaucus friends and her coworkers at the
middle school and was trying to hang out with Charlotte and her New York
friends more. She read all Charlotte’s essays, and sent her the link to The
Panorama of the City of New York, a mini-NYC, saying, “We should go!!,” but
now, sick of waiting, she entered the exhibit alone, and read the wall
text:

Conceived as a celebration of the City’s municipal infrastructure by
urban mastermind Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, the Panorama
was built by a team of more than 100 people over the course of three
years.

“Even the mini-city wasn’t built in a day!” Lindsey joked to herself. She
was glad Charlotte wasn’t here. She never laughed at her jokes. She stepped
forward and placed her hands on the railing. The city Lindsey idolized and
feared was nothing but a room of toys sprawled at her feet. Lindsey looked
at the bridges she’d driven over that morning: the George Washington and
the Whitestone with their beautifully fluid lines. “It’s like an analog
Google Maps in here,” she thought, and took out her phone, tweeting, “The
mini-New York City is like analog Google Maps #QueensMuseum.”

The scale was such that New York City’s population seemed absent, the
largest city in America depicted as ghost town, the East Village
trafficless, Times Square vacant, like in the opening scene of Vanilla Sky, she thought, which is maybe how Robert Moses pictured
it: empty, pristine, and from above.

It reminded her of “The Shock of the New,” the modern art series from the
1980s she was watching, in which host Robert Hughes talked about Le
Corbusier’s ideal urban plan. Ville radieuse, ‘The Radiant City,’ was never
actualized, only a model in his office, a mini-city of elegant highways and
tower blocks built on stilts whose citizens drove identical cars in
symmetric unison, every citizen equal, sitting side by side on matching
contoured chairs, perfect and surrounded by perfection: no architectural
class distinction, no Metropolitan Opera, no Marcy Projects, only unifying
concrete. Lindsey pictured one Vanilla Sky-era mini-Tom Cruise
sprinting through Le Corbusier’s model, face awash in melodrama, his
handsome confusion upstaging the infrastructure.

Lindsey realized she’d been staring at the one mini-plane flying in and out
of mini-LaGuardia, watching it land, take off, land, take off, following
the path of its wire across the sky. When she looked around, she was alone
with the empty city. “You really know how to clear a room, Lindsey,” she
thought as she walked towards mini-Brooklyn. She took a picture of what she
thought was Charlotte’s neighborhood. She texted it to her with the
caption: “Where the fuck u at, gurlll?”

The last time Lindsey saw her grandparents, she asked how they’d met. They
grew up in neighboring towns in a central Pennsylvanian valley, an area her
grandfather called The Foot. He said, “We were riding in the back of a
truck. They’d go around The Foot picking up kids, high school kids, who
wanted to head to town on a Saturday night.”

“What? How many people were in this truck?” Lindsey asked.

“Maybe like 16 of us? 20? It’s a flatbed truck. So the truck would stop at
the movie theatre in town and everybody else got out, they coupled up, and
I looked over and there she was. We were the last two standing there.”
Lindsey had looked at her grandmother, who smiled and shrugged.

At first, Lindsey had found it funny. “I’m the descendant of The Foot’s
least eligible bachelor and bachelorette,” but when she told the story to
Joe and the guys from the band one night, nobody laughed, so she hadn’t
told the story again.

She looked out across Lower Manhattan and thought about all the absent men:
the Wall Street men, the bridge-and-tunnel men, the craft beer-drinking
men, and all the men like her grandfather who would never go to New York
because of “traffic” and “the crowds,” and she tried to imagine the last
two people in the shrinking world, the bottom of Tinder, Grinder, OKCupid,
Bumble, or that app to find threesomes that she deleted off her phone after
three days. Who would be the last two? She pictured Mike and Karen Pence.

Lindsey had seen an article about Karen Pence in Cosmo, which she didn’t
really read, but followed on Twitter. She’d read the passage aloud to
Charlotte the last time they hung out. “Mike approached Karen after seeing
her play guitar at mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Indianapolis…‘When
I first met Mike Pence, it was love at first sight,’ Karen said in an ad
from Mike’s governor campaign. ‘On our first date, we went skating at the
Pepsi Coliseum at the state fairgrounds. We skated around for a little
while, then he reached over and took my hand.’”

“Normie prom king and queen,” Charlotte had said. “Good find, Lindz.”

Lindsey didn’t say it reminded her of the night she met Joe after one of
his gigs, of how, as she helped carry gear to his Corolla, his mic stand on
her shoulder, he had invited her to a hockey game.

Charlotte watched the man in the fleece regard the town with pride. He
lifted his daughter so she could see above the plexiglass. He indicated
towards the mini-construction workers, and said, “Look at those
hard-working men.” Charlotte walked up beside the Larry/Mike Pence man and
spoke to the daughter. “Don’t trust anything he says.”

“I’m sorry, what was that?” Larry/Mike Pence replied.

“You heard me. This backwards-ass dream of yours is fucking the world up!”

“You know, I grew up on the front row of the American Dream, raised in a
small town in Southern Indiana in a big family with a cornfield in the
backyard.”

“So you can relate to this? Great. I grew up here, in Pennsylvania, so I
get it too.”

“When I was young, I watched my mom and dad build everything that matters:
a family, a business, and a good name. I was raised to believe in hard
work, in faith, and family. You know, Dad ran gas stations in our small
town and he was a great father. If Dad were with us here today, I have a
feeling he’d enjoy this moment. You know, the best thing that ever happened
to me is that 31 years ago I married the girl of my dreams, a school
teacher, an artist. She is everything to me.” Larry/Mike Pence’s wife held
up her hand silently. People clapped. A crowd had gathered. “But regardless
of whatever title I’ll hold, the most important job I’ll ever have is
spelled D-A-D.” More applause. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Charlotte.”

“I have a daughter named Charlotte. She’s a writer too. And you know,
Charlotte, the American people are tired of being told that this is as good
as it gets. They’re tired of being told by politicians in both parties,
‘We’ll get to that tomorrow’ while we pile a mountain range of debt on our
children and our grandchildren.”

He spoke to the crowd, not to her, and she knew the only way to reach them
was through delivering a end-of-TV-episode moralizing monologue of some
kind, but she didn’t know how to speak like that, so instead she said,
“You’re a dick.”

The crowd tightened. Larry/Mike Pence stepped over the wall, amongst his
dream. “You know, Charlotte, it doesn’t have to be like this. In my home
state of Indiana, we prove everyday you can build a growing economy on
balanced budgets, low—”

Charlotte reached her regular-sized arm into the mini-world and pushed him,
and he tumbled into a valley, onto a railroad track. The train approached
as the crowd watched, and instead of running over the giant man, the toy
hit his leg and derailed, skidding into nearby homes, leaving him unscathed
but Charlotte culpable for the deaths of hundreds of mini-citizens.

“Hey!! I wanna make it up to u” Charlotte texted Lindsey. “I’ll b in yr
hood 2nite” “I’m reading at Rutgers” “Could I stop by for an hour???”

With a soundtrack of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” played by Joe’s hands leaking
from the basement and muffled by the floor, they drank Positive Energy Yogi
Tea in the kitchen. Lindsey showed Charlotte a video of the artist Willard
Wigan, who made sculptures of cultural icons so small they could fit on the
head of a pin: Betty Boop or The Incredible Hulk in the eye of a needle.
Charlton Heston the size of half a period. “I have to make sure I don’t
inhale my own work,” said Wigan with a wink. When the TV show host asked,
“How do you keep your hand still to paint them?,” Wigan replied, “I work
between the heartbeats.”

“Isn’t he funny? What do you think?” Lindsey asked.

Charlotte said she didn’t find the work that interesting, but liked how
Wigan hid cultural ubiquity. “It’s like carrying around a Bart Simpson so
small you don’t realize you have it. Like it’s inside me, like a pop
micro-organism.”

“Do you know about the insane amount of little life forms orbiting you,
crawling all up in you? Your body is like 50% little creatures. Most of
what you think of as yourself is actually not you. It’s crazy.”

“Oh my god, so now I’m thinking there’s all these mini-Obamas and
mini-Marilyn Monroes in my bloodstream and my hair and stuff.”

Lindsey made a joke about the microscopic Jesuses floating around inside
her grandparents, then said, “Remember how I told you I couldn’t sleep on
election night?”

“Yeah, you texted me. I should’ve texted you back.”

“It’s okay. But that night, I kept feeling bitten, like when we all got bed
bugs at Girl Scout camp. When was that, like eighth grade? It was like this
consistent gnawing, and I realized that this army of tiny women had
surrounded me like in Gulliver’s Travels or whatever and were eating my
body.”

Lindsey had woken up and walked around the apartment, glancing out the
window at a train sliding across the horizon with so many freight cars full
of objects it seemed to have no beginning or ending, and thought about her
first date with Joe at the hockey game, high in the bleachers.

“Do all those people over there look fake to you?” she’d asked him,
indicating across the ice to their mirror image on the opposite side of the
arena, extras copied and pasted, models for a still-life.

“What do you mean? They’re hockey fans like us,” said Joe.

“But it’s like they’re plastic. Like, one red hat.”

Even when the people in their section cheered, shouted expletives,
proclaimed their individuality, the other side seemed to act only as a
group. And as much as Lindsey wanted to interpret their togetherness as
positive, when “The Wave” swept through the section driving the blob to its
feet, its arms overhead in a collective “Woo!” spreading from seat to seat
in seamless flow, all she felt was fear.