IRL VPN
Patrick never fit in, so he fit out. Wherever he was, he was and was not. Touching down for holiday in Berlin, he started to feel divided, so he changed his Virtual Private Nationality to Korean.
Annyeonghaseyo, he greeted the Germans. Tuning out “Bauch Beine Po,” he strolled the streets singing to himself: “Gee, gee, gee, gee, baby, baby, baby.” He insisted on kimchi, not sauerkraut. He smuggled his own soju into Oktoberfest. He screamed his throat raw at the Rosé concert, delighted by her Aussie accent, the copy-pasted American pop stylings, the platinum bleach blonde hair that belonged to nowhere, and a face that was Korean, though you could be persuaded otherwise.
Patrick ostensibly occupied the body of an American. Familial records lost somewhere in the Ellis Island shuffle, he was unstuck in identity. A plastic Paddy then—take the plastic, leave the Paddy. And where most Americans took the idea of the melting pot metaphorically, Patrick melted.
“Patrick, we’re Irish American,” his mother pleaded. “Could you just try the soda bread?”
“Spasibo,” he said, colluding with the Kremlin.
“We hid our German ancestry during the war, but this is too much.”
「全然わかんねぇんだよ。」he answered in a voice his family could not recognize as one of them. He clicked his tongue at their incomprehension.
Patrick fell in love with one nation after another, but when he’d carry that love elsewhere, people could only take his love for the other side as an affront. The most cosmopolitan progressive would recoil, at least in their eyes, and after the hundredth national identity adopted and introduced stateside, Patrick recognized the common snag in their regard: What, we’re not good enough for you?
While he dated a few women of “liminal identities,” the pain of neither being quite this or quite that enough, they eventually looked to him monochrome, and he to them a lunatic.
The last of them watched him over the dinner table—scooping her long-labored tagliatelle alla bolognese into a tortilla and topping it with cilantro and a squeeze of lime—and rose to leave.
“¿Qué pasa? ¡Lo siento!”
“You think the world is just at your command, but you’re not even here. You’re nowhere.”
These words stuck with Patrick, and for weeks, he was twisted. He couldn’t sleep, body couldn’t pick a time zone. His thoughts were a Babel of confusion. He couldn’t even stomach any tapas or cheongfun.
So not to be nowhere, Patrick concluded the only way to be was everywhere. He set himself to universal randomized location, vanishing from his apartment in—well, the location didn’t matter.
Patrick ceased to exist as a plastic man, but you can still see his afterimage in every major city in the world. A flash here and there, like a stranger in the crowd who, for just a flicker, looks the spitting image of your dead brother—if he were born somewhere else.
~
Sympathetic
after Italo Calvino
In the middle of the crossing, having become just one among thousands of scrambling bodies, I became aware of too much.
I stopped and pulsed. Felt every ventilation. A middle school science lecture I’d ignored in favor of the curve of my neighbor’s lower lip came rushing back with painful clarity: I could sense the precise level of carbon dioxide in my blood. What once had been totally unconscious—regulated by involuntary nervous systems—now felt as sharp as gagging down a fly. My pulmonary vessels widened, then narrowed, as if I were reflexively clenching my hand. My bronchial tubes tingled. I could detect individual red blood cells, considered naming them, and swooned at the web of capillaries in which they danced. Then they rocketed back out, in directions that seemed entirely random, for a purpose they’d never know.
I found myself gasping, sweating in a clot of humanity. “Wait!” I shouted at the people flying on their way. “Where are you going? Do you even know why?” People gathered around me, gawking at my meltdown. But I had to tell them, warn them about the nature of the paths they were on. This flash of insight, though, was too hard to put into words, and people only laughed. They turned their phone cameras my way, but even with 48 megapixels, they couldn’t detect the truth: “Don’t you see we’re all just being pushed around at random?”
The moment the words left my mouth, the concrete reality of what I’d just understood vanished. I felt a little silly for having been so worked up.
But some in the crowd agreed. They had their own explanations for the paths we’re pushed down: corporations or governments or this shadowy group luring us along, or the other one holding us down. They all sounded equally plausible and ludicrous at the same time, yet none mapped just right onto that feeling. I collapsed to my knees, overwhelmed and defeated.
“We aren’t going at random,” one woman said, lifting me up. “We all have destinations in mind. It’s just a matter of making your own destiny.” The words rolled off her lip like a TED Talk.
I liked her idea. It didn’t fit the feeling at all, but it was a notion I preferred.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” I said. “I must have been confused. Or sick. Everything just felt wrong for a second.”
Calm but not entirely settled, I made my way amid snickers as the onlookers uploaded my incomplete revelation to the cloud.
Making one’s own destiny. I’ve tried to live by that.
But sometimes, I still wake heart pounding, gasping for air. I hang my head, hug my shoulders, and try to breathe my own way, to control just one thing. Only moments before, I was tossing helplessly in an endless tunnel of blood, curving toward the intersection of the heart.
~
Jim Sullivan is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, You Start Missing Everybody (Cornerstone Press 2028) and the literary sci-fi novelette, Harboring (ELJ Editions). His work has also appeared in Cimarron Review, New Ohio Review, Third Coast, and Fourth Genre among other publications. Originally from South Dakota, he has lived throughout the American Midwest and Japan and now resides in South Carolina. Connect on socials @jfsullivan4th.