Tess Gunty
i.
All this death and I’m just fluttering a scented trash bag. I’m just feeding the cat. Usually, I’m going somewhere. Meanwhile, I feel fine. I Instagram alibis like everyone, post excuses like: I can’t find my fire hose or my diploma, I can’t find my time maker or my policy machine. What’s the first-person plural? I’m so little. I’m no king. Meanwhile, I live like one—even leave the lights on, even get pedicures. Do you have macadamia milk? Degrade me, Mr. Internet. It is important to remember that millennials did not invent the internet—we just took it and ran with it.
Meanwhile, the world is killing itself. We are the world, but not exactly. We are not smart or sellable or lush enough. Meanwhile, I just scream, “Frighten me!” at the mailbox in the lobby, at the walruses on the screen, the calculators at the bank, the podcasts in the kitchen, the algorithms in my pocket, his percussive pulse on the mattress. I want to feel the end. I want the end to feel me.
ii.
Meanwhile, we “fall in love.” We think this will help. It is a pleasure to lift a barbell of tandem neuroses, to soften my hardware and debug his software, to clock no hours of this pink work. We forget that romance is a hospital and so is this epoch, but the teenagers know it. In love, we get plump off a meal plan we can’t afford. Can I just have another? When we feel like being explicit, we say, “Immortality.”
When I don’t like my pasta, Anthony trades me his and I take it. He escorts me to the edge of my body in a canoe, in a garden, in a forest. On a hot night in Key West, we drink a bottle of Prosecco and accidentally browse engagement rings. Ocean salt on our lips. His hand beneath my sundress in the alley. Free cookies in a downpour of fluorescence. The jewelers can tell we aren’t going to purchase anything, but they’re nice to us anyway.
“Don’t do it!” yell the frat boys on the sidewalk.
“Do it,” smiles the man in his 50s.
All this death and my finger’s a size four.
We’re staying with a dying billionaire who likes to shoot the iguanas on his property. The groundskeeper offers to shoot them for him, but he insists. He made his fortune buying and selling companies, and when I learn this, I also learn that wealth will forever remain a tautological language to me. The billionaire’s face is purple, pitted from time and rage and melanoma surgeries. His real kids never visit him although he’s had their names engraved on the doorways of the bedrooms in the guest house, and that’s one of the reasons we’re here. I, specifically, am here because I am in a relationship with someone who is related to someone who works for this man. The billionaire is mean to the toddlers who are with us and has trouble enjoying life.
At dinner, he says that on this island, many people live in boats. “When there’s a hurricane, they just party,” he tells us.
By they, he means everyone who facilitates the hedonism we are here to indulge. I blush. Try to recall the last time I paid for anything.
“And you?” Anthony’s father asks. “What do you do when there’s a hurricane?”
The billionaire pauses over a forkful of salmon, imported from Scotland. Involuntarily, I picture him in a tuxedo, snatching this fish from the paws of a grizzly bear, then pushing the bear in the water. “I go up,” he finally says, absolutely nothing in his eyes.
It takes me couple minutes to understand that when the billionaire says this, he means he rises in a private helicopter, not into the afterlife. When I think about the end, I think about that.
iii.
Meanwhile, I listen to the cyanide inside the mouse and the canary inside the Paris Accord. Meanwhile, facedown on the shag rug, I read the gossip in the Twitter thread. I grip the cash, print the science, phone a friend. Health insurance evades me. I work a lot of jobs and make bafflingly little money. Avoid the dentist, invest in floss. Days of this and then I’m 30, watching a docuseries on all the species I never knew we were cancelling. The scientists publish their findings in dire language. Repost. Repost. Report. It’s a lump in our planet. It’s the fatal mass. We like to watch. Koalas on fire, kid bellies ballooned, grandparents paddling down the street. We like the post.
“Can’t be sure,” announce the whitened teeth on television.
“What’s it gonna take?” we ask each other.
Then we order flutes of feminist champagne and slices of feminist cake. Chocolate frosting mudding our mouths. Glare of sprinkles, hard on teeth. Can I just have. Meanwhile, everything tastes holy. All this death and I’m just licking my lips.
iv.
Who’s the first-person plural? On the backroads, in my hometown, I remark, “It’s fucking hot.” In the passenger seat, Anthony nods. We pass many worlds of corn as I drive. Over here, the eschaton is painless as suburbia, smooth as an engine gurgling gasoline, sweet as steak.
“Lately,” he says, “I see all politicians as hamsters in crowns.”
I know what he means. Me, I call the macho autocrats Junior in my head. We want to shrink our fear. The year she lost to the dumbest megalomaniac was the year I stopped wearing a bra; we all have coping mechanisms, and we use them to furnish our Meanwhile.
“Was it always this hot in October?” I ask. I accelerate at a yellow and blast public radio. Anthony feeds me a fry. A billboard asks us: WHO IS YOUR KING?
v.
Downtown Los Angeles flares like a bouquet of knives around me. Earbuds dispense an interview to my brain, nobody looks at me, I look at everybody. I am walking up Broadway, on my way to the city law library, whole streets blinded by yoga studios and juice bars and human suffering. In the interview, Elon says we ought to use the sun. He says the sun is our friend, says the sun shows up every day, calls this ball of fusion good, says solar can foot the bill—yes, the whole wide bill. I’m paraphrasing. As I walk, I notice that light is everywhere, accompanied by heat, as Elon promised. A hundred and ten degrees, worst air quality in 30 years, and pollution crowds every lung in town. I pass a man sitting against an abandoned theater. He appears to be looking directly at the sun. When he turns to me, it’s like the sky has deposited itself in his irises—they are an impossible shade of blue. All this heat and I’m just offering a bottle of water.
“Lucky me,” he says as he accepts it. “God bless.”
I wonder if the sun can really do all that Elon says it can. It sounds like a lot of work, but I don’t know; math makes me nervous. Some demand exceeds supply—some demands are not to be supplied. Can we just have. And even if solar can power everything, must we ask it to?
When I reach a crosswalk, I glance back and see the man opening his bottle of water. He takes one small sip, then stows the rest in the shade.
vi.
In college, I noticed an epidemic of the word just when young women ordered coffee, even when their orders were complex. I noticed I was one of these women. The world wants us to atone for our requests, soften our consumption with the language of apology—that’s nothing new. We learned this from folktale and mother, from leatherbound men with fish-hooking grins, from online statistics and history textbooks. When I noticed, I vowed to stop.
But recently, I’ve changed my mind. I sit at the beach, surrounded by plastic, my toes obscured in blazing sand, and watch people I love dive and splash in the turbulent Pacific, heat raging in our skulls. As I chat with a friend, I find just all over my speech, and I keep it there, because I think lots of Americans should start atoning for coffee, I think maybe all those apologetic women in campus cafés were on to something, and I think embarrassment is an appropriate national reaction, all things considered. We have been coughing all week. Our phones tell us to stay inside, but we’re coughing there, too. California is on fire, and I just need some caffeine. I tell my friend I will be right back and ask if she wants anything. She doesn’t.
“Can I just have two shots of espresso on ice?” I ask the barista on the boardwalk. Smoke blooms in the sky, obscuring the sun. I hear it has made its way to New York, this smoke. You can see it from outer space.
The barista asks me to repeat myself. “Sorry,” she says. “My head’s all cloudy. What did you say?”
vii.
Meanwhile, in Elysian, over tacos, my friends and I excavate the dirt of our adolescence and compare the evidence. The sun sets, and we see three coyotes descend from the hills, their shadows jagged on the picnic lawn, but we aren’t ready to leave. We discover that men have pressed cigarettes into all of our bodies. Boyfriend, stranger, professor, husband, boss, dad. The end is about that.
The end is about addiction, gross domestic product, my fridge, and our passports. Boys in the yard, a game of fire and gasoline. Boys hurling bombs into their suburban lake. Boys napping with dogs in the shade. Boys with cigarettes, looking for ashtrays. Boys with babies. At war. Can I just have. The end is about four flags, two Amazons, and thousands of branded women. The end is about an island of people drowning as one man ascends above them. Where’d you get your jeans?
The coyotes are closer, now, just a few trees away on the indigo grass. Phone light reveals them to be skinny and honey-eyed, with thick tracking collars locked to their necks. “Weird,” someone whispers. “They don’t hunt in packs unless they’re very hungry.”
viii.
Meanwhile, I plug myself into my phone and eat whatever it serves me. I red-yarn the micro to the macro like a conspiracy theorist. I mistake the charming narcissist for late-stage capitalism, I confuse catcalls for nuclear arsenals, I call too many crises biblical. I’m rude about Baby Boomers. I watch Greta cry. Anthony says that The New York Times podcast is radicalizing me. We are the world, but not exactly. All this death and I’m just photographing deer.
Anthony proposes in Sequoia, but I don’t reply for 12 hours, until the wildfires smoke us out. One blaze in the north and another in the south, and none of it is “contained.” I can’t conceptualize a long time. Eternal contracts make me sweat, make me laugh. We enter the rental car as quickly as we can, to keep the smoke out.
“Yes,” I say after we buckle our seatbelts.
Anthony doesn’t hear me at first, but when he does, he kisses me for what might be described as a long time. Then he flicks on the windshield wipers to clear away the ash.
ix.
The math is easy, the greed is easier. The end is about boredom, amplified content, the infinite scroll, and memes. The end is about the euthanizing Meanwhile. Perfumed, Netflixed, waxed, automated—we’ll be fine. All this death and I’m just googling miracles. A wall around Manhattan. State-sized mirrors. No, here’s an idea: We drop canisters of tree-shit from planes. Boom! Death Valley? Flood it. No, listen. What you do is take a huuuuuge umbrella and open it in outer space. What you do is wait for the tech geniuses to upload their consciousnesses to the cloud and multiply. I’ve got it: ice balloons in the stratosphere! Or maybe just—no more cars? No more cows? No more babies? Almonds? Forget it! Let’s pretend we’re a volcano. Sulfuric acid in the sky. Let’s pretend we’re ice.
I watch the cat chew the shower curtain as I pee on a stick. Not our plan. I don’t even know how to overthrow capitalism. I’m so little, I’m no king. I study my toes. Need a pedicure.
x.
Usually, I’m going somewhere. Meanwhile, I feel nauseated. The end isn’t here yet, but we feel it coming, feel an urge to run. Which is why I’ve boarded a self-driving train, booked a ticket to visit family on a ranch in Tehama County.
Seats away from me, elegant people say, “Weird weather.” They say, “Too much safety abuses its inmates—just ask the fish in the tank, already ideating on his leap out of fluorescence, into absence.” They say, “Extraction economy. Fermi’s Paradox. Fiduciary law. Cognitive lingerie.”
I listen through my hammerhead dreams and the cold, fake air. I wake up and use a lot of demon emojis on the sibling text chain. Chew pistachios, sip decaf from a biodegradable cup. We pass fracking; it looks like Mars. We just need. My friends and I keep finding human ashes at the summits of our hikes. They are chalky, white, thick. Copious. Cracked pottery on rock and wildflower. The body reduces, but what’s left is resistant to erasure, sturdier than you’d expect. And so I am suspicious of biodegradability. And still I can’t conceptualize a long time.
“That’s bananas,” says a man on the train.
Outside my window, cows stand in acres of parched grass, tags punched in their ears, watching us. Their horns are stunning and useless. In my seat, I google prehistoric bottom-dwellers. Degrade me, Mr. Internet, but at least show me things that last. I stare at jawless fish on my phone, their hellish little mouths, until I feel better. I search for images of harpy eagles because they terrify me, and I want to feel something. They eat monkeys.
“Death is not the opposite of fluorescence,” says a woman on the train. “It is the logical end.”
My hand on my belly, I think it would be fun to get lost in all the grapes we pass. Wine, pistachios, coffee—will the life inside me taste them? No one—not even the internet—tells you what do you do, at the end, if you accidentally make a beginning. Meanwhile, I stockpile hearts on my feed. As the self-driving train pulls us up the California coast, the views make it clear that most species are not designed to live in the desert. All this death and I’m just five months pregnant.
“So now what?” the woman asks her group on the train. Someone tells a joke, but I miss the parts that make it funny.
“Stop it,” gasps a man in a gorgeous laugh of donkey brays. “Stop it. You’re killing me.”
We love to bemoan the Algorithm, but the filthier truth is that nothing—absolutely nothing—drives itself.