A few days ago, I had lunch in Phoenix in a large, air-conditioned building, not unlike the large, air-conditioned buildings I’ve frequented in New York City or Los Angeles or Lincoln, Nebraska, though once here, in Phoenix, we like to call it wasteful. Phoenix feels, in the two months I’ve been here, to be the realest place I’ve ever lived, where the US reveals itself for what it is—precarious, violent, colonial, hanging on a fraying electrical grid.
On a 120-degree day, I walked by a major institution’s development office, outside of which is a wall of trickling, decorative water, surrounded by palms, wondering how everyone was so calm. Wasteful, sure, but also soothing these little fountains, these sprinklers, like the calm, practiced face of a flight attendant as someone threatens to pull open the emergency door. These gestures say there might be no visible water here, but we can bring it, and we can bring so much we don’t even need to watch what we do with it. I mean, I saw, for the first time, the fear behind such waste.
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