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Chewie was a dropout, a loser, a degen gamer, but his social awkwardness kept his record clean enough for the boys at Fort Meade to give him a TS/SCI, a badge, and a GS-11 salary. Not that Chewie needed all that money. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Odenton, Maryland, a location selected for its proximity to the Fort and a decent Sichuanese carryout, and never went out. Chewie did not cook. The cafeteria at the Fort and Peppercorn Garden, along with big tubs of pea protein powder on auto-delivery, served all of his nutritional needs.

Chewie was actually quite fit. The calisthenics program from r/Bodyweight wasn’t enough resistance to build a lot of muscle tissue, but he was lean enough to have visible abs and was attractive in a wiry, scrappy way, if not in an MCU action star way. Chewie measured his waist every Monday—not out of vanity, but because he knew that Asian men were susceptible to negative health outcomes like diabetes at a relatively smaller waist circumference and visceral fat percentage, and Chewie wanted to live a long time. He wanted to live long enough to achieve transhumanist immortality.

Despite his commitment to health and wellness, Chewie was not a looksmaxxer. He had given up on that path after consulting the race-stratified data published by dating app companies and concluding that, no matter what he did, he would always suffer the Asian male penalty in the dating market. He knew that his personality was not lively and attractive to most girls, but he thought that eventually he would meet a cute, shy, nerdy girl who didn’t care that he wasn’t making $400,000 at a FAANG in SF or saving lives as a cardiothoracic surgeon or whatever. She would probably be Asian, or maybe a hapa. Blasian, even. Chewie wasn’t prejudiced.

Chewie saw some of these cute, shy, nerdy girls on Instagram and TikTok and Substack. They had thousands of followers and made content about their custom-built mechanical keyboards and their morning routines and overcoming social anxiety at Comic-Con. They were pretty and feminine and soft-spoken—exactly the kind of girl Chewie imagined would see past his transition-lens glasses right into his heart. Sometimes he sent them messages or commented on their posts. He knew it was illogical to think that one of them would actually fall for him, but he still got a surge of dopamine with every notification that they had liked his comment. Chewie wasn’t stupid. He knew that their likes were just an engagement strategy.

>>>

Chewie wasn’t his real name. His real name was Thomas Choe. Most Korean immigrants romanized this common last name as “Choi,” but Chewie’s parents had stubbornly clung to the native pronunciation that was closer to “Chway” and had chosen an unusual transliteration. Americans struggled with this pronunciation. “Chewie” was a nickname given to him by his best friend. It was the only nickname he’d ever had.

Chewie’s best friend was a mid-forties DARPA contractor named Joshua Mendoza, the American-born son of dirt-poor Filipino immigrants who struck it rich in trash removal in Northern Virginia. He was a gregarious former spoiled new-money kid who got along with everyone. Joshua didn’t know that he was Chewie’s best friend, and it would have made him sad to learn it. Before he was assigned to the Fort three years ago, everyone just called Chewie “Thomas,” if they spoke to him at all. He liked to keep to himself. But then Joshua strutted in and greeted him with a bewildering fist bump and bestowed upon Thomas the nickname “Chewie”; forevermore, he would be Chewie.

He liked having a nickname. He changed all of his screen names to include the new sobriquet. He liked talking to Joshua about his macros and his training splits. But they had never hung out outside of work, so Chewie was confused when Joshua asked him one day if he wanted to go to happy hour at a nearby taqueria, a Tex-Mex joint operated by Salvadorans. They were two margaritas in before Joshua brought up the reason for the unprecedented hang. Chewie seldom drank alcohol and was feeling warm and spacy. He was surprised by his enjoyment of that sensation.

“So, you been tracking this RIFLE mishegas, bro?” Joshua asked.

“Reduction In Federal and Local Employment, right?” Chewie said. “Heard of it, but I don’t follow politics.”

“I mean, it’s all bullshit, so that’s probably healthier than staying glued to the news,” Joshua said. “But RIFLE is an important one, man. They’re gutting all the agencies. It’s a bloodbath out there.”

“Oh. Yeah. I’ve heard about that,” Chewie lied.

“The thing is, I wanna make sure you’re prepared in case the ol’ RIFLE gets pointed at you, know what I’m saying?”

“I’m too important to get fired,” Chewie said. It was true. Chewie was USG’s top-performing cyberwarrior. He was balletic in the tubes. He was legendary in the very small community of people who were (1) technical enough to grok the complexity of his offensives, (2) informed about the cybersophistication of the United States’ adversaries, and (3) cleared. Chewie was one of a small handful of people in the Western Hemisphere who knew for certain that the North Koreans had a nuclear warhead in orbit, designed not to inflict kinetic damage but instead intended to detonate in the stratosphere, causing a massive, high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or HEMP, that could permanently cripple most of the continental United States. All electronics would be fried, unusable, for all time. Millions would die, both in the initial wave of plane and car crashes and in the months that followed the collapse of industrial agriculture and medical systems.

Chewie had once lived off the land for over two years inside Kim Jong Un’s personal nuclear launch systems before the breach was discovered and he was forced to brick their servers. They rebuilt, of course, but the regime briefly lost contact with their HEMP nuke in low Earth orbit. Bureaucratic squabbling between risk analysts at the National Security Council and the Space Force squandered the opportunity to permanently disable or retrieve the orbital warhead, but it was still true that the world had been, temporarily, a safer place because of Chewie. And there were many examples of his unsung heroism.

“Bro, I know that, the unit knows that; hell, the Director knows that,” Joshua said. “But these RIFLE jokers, they’re some snot-nosed kids straight out of college, don’t know shit about fuck, coming in and giving half the fucking USG the axe. I’m just saying you need to be prepared.”

Chewie considered this, but it seemed patently impossible to him that any rational actor whose interests were aligned with the US and not her adversaries would ever terminate his employment.

“In this unlikely scenario,” Chewie said, indulging his best friend, “what would I even do? What would anyone do? Our critical infrastructure is essentially pwned by China without me.”

Chewie sometimes fantasized about seducing one of the CCP bots who targeted him. They had sexy AI-generated profile pics and sent him messages about how lonely they were as international exchange students. Chewie never responded to the bots—as an offensive cybersecurity operator he knew intimately that human vulnerability was the weakest link in any system—but he daydreamed about toying with them. Five years ago, some Snowden wannabe had leaked the personnel files for some of the three-letter agencies, so Chewie got targeted a lot.

Because the only girls who wanted to talk to him online were CCP or North Korean bots, Chewie decided that it was too risky for him to date. Even real physical girls could be spies. Even white girls. And so, because Chewie was a patriot, he set aside his desire for love. At least while he was working. He knew how important he was to the United States security apparatus. Even if the American public would never know his name, even if he never won a medal, Chewie was satisfied with the knowledge that he, and a very few others like him, were all that stood between American cyberspace and the total malicious cyber-hegemony of her adversaries. His badge said Analyst, but really he was an operator. The Russians had Fancy Bear, the Chinese had Volt Typhoon; America had Chewie.

“Yeah, dude, I know,” Joshua said. “We’re sitting ducks, fish in a barrel without you. That’s why you gotta come on under me at Simak. RIFLE can nuke 60 percent of fed payroll at will via executive order, but they can’t cancel our contracts. We’re locked in, baby.”

“You want me to work for you at Simak?” Chewie asked.

Simak-Stapledon was the third-largest defense contracting company in the D.C. metropolitan area, just behind Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, but still ahead of nimble AI-native shops like the up-and-coming Bombadil. They were known for their competitive salaries, subpar benefits package, and abysmal IT service center.

“I don’t know,” Chewie said. “I live on Stapledon Avenue. It might feel weird.”

“Bro, that’s the most retarded reason I ever heard to turn down a job offer,” Joshua said. “Half the streets around here are named after some shady firm or another.”

“I guess so,” Chewie said.

“Just think about it, man. Keep it in your back pocket. For the good of the country,” Joshua said. “Simak’ll pay you double what you’re making now. Course, we don’t have those sweet fed bennies, but I prefer cash in hand, anyway. Plus, full disclosure, dude, I get a referral bonus if you get hired.”

Chewie did not think about Joshua’s job offer that night, but he spent a long time thinking about the jokes and drinks they shared. Lying in his full-size bed, staring up at the soft Milky Way projection on his bedroom ceiling, Chewie ran through the entire interaction like he was playing a movie in his head. He smiled at all of Joshua’s jokes, and for once he could find nothing to cringe at in his own lines. It had been a perfect evening. He wondered if it would ever happen again. Chewie fell asleep fantasizing about going on a double date with Joshua, Joshua’s wife, and a beautiful Chinese spy.

>>>

Plink.

Vivian slipped another intact cartridge into the shallow pocket of her ex’s vintage forest green American Apparel hoodie, where it knocked against the others she had salvaged from the wreckage of her bedroom floor. Her knees were red and carpet burnt from these daily excavations. Bits of lint, crumbs, and cat hair stuck to the raw pebbled flesh stretched over the joints. There was no cat. The cat was gone. The cat had left.

Vivian picked up another cartridge from a pile she was pretty sure she had not already checked. Used. Empty. Its tiny silver mouth torn open, a ragged O of dismay. There was no pressurized gas. The pressurized gas was gone. The pressurized gas had left. She cast it aside, then reached for the next.

One in about every twenty food-grade nitrous oxide charger that she checked happened to be intact. Every time she saw a smooth, unpunctured seal on a cartridge’s tapered neck, she felt a burst of brief, intense joy, like how she used to feel when she saw that Gabriel had liked her Instagram story. When she had collected up five, she pushed herself off the floor and climbed back into bed. The stainless steel whipped cream maker was cold against her thigh under the stained blue and yellow quilt her grandmother had made when she was born. There was a cigarette burn in one of the yellow squares. Seeing it made Vivian feel sad and disgusted and angry. She stared at it now to punish herself.

There was no Vivian. Vivian was gone. Vivian had left.

Vivian hated to cook. Most of her calories came from Italian beef sandwiches, delivered by courier from an app. AutoNosh charged exorbitant service fees, but as long as Vivian had the money, she was willing to pay to avoid ever leaving her apartment. She savored the soggy, flavorful sandwiches on French bread dripping with au jus, but even this regional delicacy brought only a momentary pleasure.

Once, Vivian had velocity. She had been on an upward trajectory. She was a naturalized US citizen. She was young and beautiful and was on her way to being highly educated, part of the blessed class of people set to thrive as everyone else foundered in the age of AGI. She had been in one of the world’s top neuroscience graduate programs at the University of Chicago, guaranteed a slot in the priestly caste that tended to the emerging machine god. Her boyfriend was another bright young thing, a postdoc whose computer vision startup was already valued at half a billion.

That was before she had been approached and presented with a credible threat to a branch of her father’s family who still resided in Shandong Province, and she had agreed to be groomed for a position in industry that would present her with access to data that would be very interesting indeed to the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Before she had been stopped at O’Hare International Airport and found to be carrying a terabyte of extremely sensitive proprietary data scattered across a few thumb drives sewn into the lining of her luggage on the way to an academic conference in Beijing. Before the federal charges were dropped due to improper handling of materials, but a preponderance of evidence led a university disciplinary board to expel her from the program.

Vivian lost the stipend, lost the boy, lost her future. She was nothing more than a yoob, now. But her CCP handlers tossed her a bone out of something like pity. They threw her some OSINT analysis work usually reserved for domestic workers and paid her the same pittance. Vivian felt something like gratitude for the meager sense of purpose it gave her to betray her adopted country. She clocked in at night, working Beijing hours. During the days, she chased oblivion until the sun went down, passing the long daylight hours getting high for thirty seconds at a time on nitrous rips straight from the whipped cream maker and mechanically stimulating herself to orgasm until she was raw. She pushed these neurochemical levers relentlessly, with each repetition marginally degrading her ability to feel pleasure, or to feel anything at all, which was the point.

>>>

Two weeks later, on a Thursday morning, Chewie noticed that his low-side Outlook app had logged him out and he couldn’t see his schedule on his work phone. He tried to log back in but got stuck in a loop. It wasn’t a big deal; he usually checked his meetings for the day before he left for the office, but he knew he only had one high-side call at 2:00 p.m. But when he showed up at the gate, his badge wouldn’t scan. The security guard he had assiduously avoided eye contact with for five years had to get on his walkie with the head of the security office to confirm: Chewie was out.

Everyone except Joshua was surprised when Chewie got RIFLEd. The cuts were irrational and erratic, but the whole office thought that someone, somewhere along the chain of command would have vetoed the move. It was too suicidal to axe the one cybersuperweapon in the USG’s arsenal.

Chewie couldn’t believe it. He tried to appeal the decision, but they wouldn’t let him on-site. His badge stopped working immediately. He still had his security clearance, but a sister program to RIFLE, known as Clearing A Path to Intelligence Vital Enforcement by Securing Our Systems, or CAPTIVE-SOS, was being spun up to “address redundancies in the nation’s security apparatus” by canceling the clearances of inactive former government employees and contractors. He would need to find a new job soon to park his clearance to keep it active. It was critical that he act immediately. He needed to call Joshua, update his LinkedIn, start leveraging his network. He should call his mom in Annandale, Virginia.

Instead, Chewie spent the next week playing Fallout 3 for fourteen hours a day. He reveled in the nuclear ruins of CGI Washington, D.C., grinding mole rat kills and side quests and leveling up until he passed out on the couch, cotton-mouthed and dry-eyed from many hours of gameplay. The passage of time within the game felt more real than whatever was going on outside his blackout-curtained windows. Chewie bludgeoned his perceptive faculties with neat, efficient gameplay, leaving no space for thought or emotion. There was only the Wasteland.

Chewie had run through the main storyline and was mopping up some of the remaining side quests when his buzzer rang. He hesitated before launching a grenade at a Super Mutant and the grenade missed its mark. The Super Mutant clubbed him with a tire iron and he died. Chewie swore, rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t expecting a food delivery—or was he? Had he put in an order at Peppercorn Garden in a daze and forgotten about it? He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. Chewie took a swig from his Code Red Diet Mountain Dew and set the controller down as he respawned inside Farragut West Metro Station.

When he opened the door, it wasn’t a brusque Laotian AutoNosh delivery driver with his Extremely Spicy Water-Boiled Fish. Instead, it was Joshua, holding a six-pack of Yuengling and a large pizza.

“Oh, hi, Joshua,” Chewie said, a little dazed by the bright fluorescents in the hallway. “Um, come on in.”

Joshua visibly recoiled at the smell inside Chewie’s apartment, a suffocating combination of stale sweat, Mountain Dew fumes, and feet. His eyes flicked over the mess in the living room and the video game menu on the screen.

“Hey, brother, hadn’t heard from you in a minute, so I thought you could use some guy time,” Joshua said with a cheerfulness that almost sounded natural. He set the pizza down on the kitchen counter. “And maybe we can talk about your next move.”

“My next move?” Chewie said.

“Yeah, you know,” Joshua said. “To come on board at Simak.”

“Oh,” said Chewie. He took an offered beer from Joshua. “I don’t know about that. I was kind of thinking I would take a break from work for a while. Sign up for UBI. Maybe, uh, date a little bit.” He opened the lid of the pizza box. Meat Lover’s. Chewie thought about the saturated fats and assorted preservatives in the sausage and pepperoni. He bit into a slice. The cheese was clumpy and beginning to congeal.

“Man, what?” Joshua began to get frustrated. “You want to date now that you’re a broke yoob? You’ve got it ass-backwards, bro. Girls don’t like yoobs. You gotta be making the excess income to buy them sushi and flowers and shit. Any girls worth having, anyway.”

Chewie took his pizza and beer and sat back down in the gamer nest on his couch. The cushions had conformed to his body and a polyester microfiber LEGO blanket retained some of his body heat. Joshua pulled up one of the two folding chairs from the kitchen table. Chewie’s mom had insisted that he buy two chairs, although he had protested that he would only ever use one.

“I can’t date when I’m working for USG,” Chewie said. “It’s too dangerous on the apps.”

“Man, the apps suck anyway,” Joshua said. “They’re full of shallow bitches who string you along for weeks. Any reasonably attractive girl on the apps is incentivized to be a gold-digging cocktease. They’re all just in it for the free meal. You gotta meet a girl IRL. Meatspace.” Joshua’s eyes flicked around the apartment again. “Look, I bet I can find a nice girl for you. My wife has some friends your age. Maybe one of them, maybe we can set you up.”

Joshua pulled out his phone and began scrolling through his wife’s Instagram, looking for group shots with some of her friends. He scrolled a long time, then pointed the screen at Chewie.

“Look, what about her? I think she just broke up with her fiancé . . . she’s a little heavy, but she has a nice face. You like ’em thick?”

Chewie shrugged noncommittally.

“But come on, you gotta be employed,” Joshua continued. “Let me help you out, man. S-S can triple your government rate. You were, what, GS-12? 13?”

“GS-11, step 7,” Chewie said.

“Jesus fucking Christ, they really lowballed you, ya know?” Joshua said. “You’re a national fucking treasure, man. It’s criminal how they did you like that.”

“I was just thinking about taking it easy for a while,” Chewie said. “Working on some hobbies.”

Joshua gave a pointed look at the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto-encrusted Xbox controller and the crumpled-up tissues next to him on the couch.

“Your country needs you,” Joshua said. “Think about it.”

>>>

Vivian was running out of money. Her MSS handlers said they’d be in touch with a new assignment, but that was weeks ago. She had to ration the nitrous, now. It was humiliating. She spent more and more time on her hands and knees, searching the carpet for sealed cartridges. And in the growing spaces of nonoblivion, the long hours during which she had to inhabit her own mind, her thoughts increasingly turned to Thomas Choe.

Vivian hadn’t thought him special, at first. He was just another second-generation Korean American autist with fobby overbearing parents and a light social media presence. Vivian was a half German-American, half mainland Chinese, born abroad and raised in the Inland Empire. She prided herself on having AMWF parents, although she considered it slightly embarrassing that they had met while her white mother was an English teacher in Jinan for a year after college. Vivian thought she knew Thomas’s type. Thomas was a failed striver, the kind of neurotic East Coast Asian American who lacked the confidence to embrace the ascendant hallyu and become socially successful and lacked the ambition to achieve academically and professionally. In spite of his constitutional timidity, Thomas’s special set of skills and obsessions had led him to a position of critical, if unsung and poorly compensated, importance in the US cybersecurity apparatus.

The more Vivian learned about Thomas, the more she thought about him.

It had started as a simple OSINT assignment. Thomas had a very light social media presence and unusually good opsec, but it was impossible to be a true ghost on the internet in this day and age. She read the simp comments he left on various Asian and Wasian female influencers’ posts with particular interest. As Vivian demonstrated proficiency in hoovering up the crumbs of Thomas’s digital detritus, her MSS handlers entrusted her with more and more of their proprietary tools and methods, and Vivian burrowed deeper into Thomas’s life. She hacked his apartment building’s IoT and learned his eating and sleeping habits. Thomas’s apartment did not have a doorbell camera, but the front door of the building did, as well as a couple of other security cameras in the laundry room and storage areas. Vivian owned them easily with a small assist from CCP tech. All day, she huffed nitrous and masturbated, pummeling her clitoris on her Hitachi Magic Wand’s highest setting. All night, she watched Thomas Choe, noted the deviations in his routine, and compiled reports on his behavior. She started to think of him as Chewie.

When her handlers abruptly canceled her contract, they locked her out of all of the tools. Vivian did not read the news, but even she had caught wind of RIFLE, and she put two and two together. Thomas Choe was no longer a target. Thomas Choe was no longer valuable.

At first, Vivian told herself that she missed the money. It had been a nice supplement; she could afford the exorbitant delivery fees on her favorite Italian beef sandwich, which meant she didn’t need to venture outside as much for groceries, and she never ran out of nitrous oxide. A steady supply of drone-delivered clanking packages arrived at her doorstep every two days.

Now, her finances were tight. The yoob couldn’t cover all those delivery fees. She had to actually walk down to the co-op grocery store to keep herself fed. If she wanted an Italian beef, she needed to actually take the bus all the way to 55th and Cottage Grove, order it in person, and eat it in public—a nightmare. Some days, when she ran out of nitrous and didn’t have money for same-day drone delivery, she walked to the vape shop on the corner to buy packets of a foul-tasting powder called krater, which she mixed into a sludgy tea and chugged with her nose pinched. It was an unscheduled opioid-hypnotic extracted from a South American tuber and it often made her vomit up gritty, green-brown bile.

More than the loss of her previous lifestyle, Vivian began to realize that she missed Chewie. She could continue to track him on the open internet, but she no longer had access to his apartment’s camera footage, his smart refrigerator notifications, his wearable tracking data. She missed him more intensely than she had ever missed Gabriel, the flesh-and-blood neuroscience postdoc who had moved out with their book collection and their cat nine months ago. Gabriel was—well, he was a perfect fucking angel, wasn’t he? He never let Vivian under his skin. He never showed her his imperfections, his insecurities, his character flaws. Not like Chewie. She saw all of Chewie’s flaws, and they just drew her in deeper.

But now, there was no Chewie. Chewie was gone. Chewie had left.

Desperate, Vivian messaged her former handler through the darknet dead-drop portal she used to submit her findings through, imploring them to take her back and arguing the continued need to monitor Choe, even now that his federal employment was terminated. The response was swift.

First: they scolded her for using a PGP encryption key that was now weeks out of date and potentially compromised.

Second: they denied her request to be given any additional surveillance work.

Third: they scolded her again for wasting their time, especially now that they were dealing with headaches from Pyongyang.

When the July yoob hit her checking account, Vivian came to a decision. She threw out her whipped cream maker and supply of party balloons. She threw out her Hitachi Magic Wand, wrapped in a dishtowel for modesty. She sold her few remaining household possessions, bought a Greyhound ticket for Baltimore, and broke her lease.

>>>

Chewie had never been the best at reading social cues, but he was starting to suspect something was up with Joshua. At first, he had been grateful that the swole Filipino kept coming around to check on him. Chewie was aware, from his days as a teenage fuckup, that he was exhibiting a few behaviors that could be classified as self-sabotaging to external observers.

First: the constant gaming.

Second: the irregular sleep.

Third: the lack of bathing.

Chewie was, under normal, employed circumstances, fastidious in his hygiene and appearance. He showered and shaved every day, whether he needed it or not. (His facial hair took a while to grow in.) He owned twenty identical black T-shirts, ten identical black button-down shirts, and five identical pairs of gray slacks. For non-work clothing, he had two pairs of light-wash jeans and two pairs of dark-wash jeans, plus an appropriate selection of athletic apparel and pajamas.

Since getting RIFLEd, Chewie exclusively dressed in sweatpants or sleepwear. He showered sporadically and shaved never. On the occasions that he blearily considered himself in the bathroom mirror, he was repulsed by everything about his appearance except the surprisingly lush mustache that was emerging from neglect. His beard and sideburns remained patchy, but he thought the mustache gave him a rakish charm.

Chewie did not return his parents’ calls, sending terse texts as sufficient proof of life to ward off an in-person wellness check.

But Joshua did not call for permission before turning up at his door with some food, a six-pack of Yuengling, and a renewed plea for Chewie to join him at Simak-Stapledon. The first time it was pizza. Then it was steak-and-cheeses. Next time it was chicken wings, fried rice, and mumbo sauce from a local carryout. The night he showed up with a brown paper bag full of steamed blue crabs tossed in Old Bay, Chewie had enough. He was struggling to follow the crab-cracking procedure that Joshua was teaching him.

“Damn, bro, are you sure you’ve lived in Maryland your whole life?” Joshua said. “It’s like you’ve never picked crabs before!”

“Maybe you should stop coming around uninvited, bringing people unwanted food,” Chewie snapped. “Have you ever considered that some people don’t like being imposed upon like this? I told you I don’t want a job, and I definitely don’t want to work at your shady Russian spy factory.”

He stopped and stared down into the abdominal cavity of the jumbo female crab. Joshua gaped, shocked at the usually meek man’s outburst. This was as direct a confrontation as Chewie had ever initiated. He sucked some Old Bay off of his fingers. Several years back, there had been a high-profile investigation by the Washington Post into a couple of senior vice presidents at Simak-Stapledon that eventually resulted in a slew of indictments for a handful of contractors working as unregistered foreign agents for the Russian government.

“Is that what you think?” Joshua said quietly. “That I’m being this persistent because I’m trying to recruit you for Mother Russia?”

“No, I just mean . . . I just wish everyone would leave me alone.”

“Brother, if it weren’t so important, you would never hear from me again. I wouldn’t be wasting my evenings trying to coax a thirty-year-old teenager into being a responsible fucking adult,” Joshua said.

Chewie maintained eye contact with the partially dismembered crab and wilted even further into his folding chair.

“It’s bad out there, dude,” Joshua continued. “The Fort is a fucking mess. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on. The Marine Corps Mafia is losing their shit. Even the Mormons are flustered. Obviously I can’t tell you anything specific because you’re not read on to anything anymore and CAPTIVE is about five minutes away from scrubbing your clearance, but by my reckoning we’re about a pube’s width away from one of our adversaries taking a real, regional-type swipe at us. A bear-claw of a swipe, comprende? And without you in the hot seat, we’re functionally helpless to play either defense or offense.”

Chewie considered this. Joshua was heavily implying that the Russians were actively targeting critical regional infrastructure: maybe something like the electrical grid in the Southwest, where a heatwave was already taxing the energy distribution system, and an extended outage could mean thousands of Phoenicians baking to death in their homes. A catastrophe.

On the other hand, Joshua had hurt his feelings.

“There are procedures in place,” Chewie said. He got up from the table and locked himself in his bedroom until Joshua left, taking the crabs with him.

>>>

The two days Vivian spent on the bus to Baltimore were physically grueling. She curled up in a hard foam seat that smelled like onions and chlorine, trying and failing to sleep. The rattle of the engine was erratic and alarming rather than monotonous and soothing, and the bounce of the carriage as the vehicle rocketed down the crumbling interstate wore down her nerves. The vibration ground her teeth against each other, an ersatz reminder of the comforting, anesthetizing touch of her discarded Hitachi Magic Wand. It was a direct route, no transfers, with eight stops between Chicago and downtown Baltimore. It should have taken eighteen hours, including stops, but the bus broke down outside Morgantown, West Virginia, and it was six hours before another bus could be dispatched.

Their final approach to Washington, D.C., took them along and across the Potomac, past the Tidal Basin with its ring of white marble memorials. It was about 3:00 a.m. as they rumbled past, and Vivian craned her neck to keep the ghostly, spotlight-illuminated structures in view for as long as possible. She felt a faint stir of awe and pride in her chest—or maybe it was just indigestion from too many gas station hot dogs. She realized with a start that it was the Fourth of July.

Vivian checked into her rental, a small bedroom in a sharehouse in what was once a prosperous subdivision in Odenton, Maryland, and slept for fifteen hours. When she awoke, she set about renting an e-bike and registering to work as Nosher on AutoNosh. Robotics and computer vision had progressed to the point where human delivery drivers were theoretically unnecessary, but aggressive legislation of the previous decade prohibited the deployment of nonhuman foot delivery agents in most jurisdictions. The dignity of the gig economy remained intact. She scoped out a McDonald’s near Peppercorn Garden where she could squat with her e-bike for the price of a cup of bitter coffee, and then she waited.

Her AutoNosh app interface pinged with the name and location of the restaurant sending out a bid, but did not provide the delivery address unless she accepted the job. Vivian accepted every bid from Peppercorn Garden as soon as it flashed onto her screen. Time and again, she was disappointed to see that the delivery address was someplace other than the apartment complex on Stapledon Avenue whose number she had memorized long ago. But she dared not cancel any bids after accepting, for fear the algorithm would deprioritize her and start sending Peppercorn bids to other Noshers.

Vivian found that the gamified AutoNosh dashboard was quite rewarding to interact with. The surge of dopamine and cortisol when her screen pinged with a new Peppercorn bid was thrilling; even the disappointment of realizing it was the wrong address was exciting, in its own way. It had been so long since the levers of her emotions had responded to anything other than the self-directed stimulus of drugs or manual orgasm. And even though the money was beside the point, she even felt a little jolt of satisfaction when each completed delivery sent another meager commission into her account.

The workers at Peppercorn Garden came to know her that week. They thought her an odd but polite change from the usual gutterclass undocumenteds who filled the ranks of most full-time Noshers—noncitizen aliens who were below even the yoobs.

The only problem was the weather. Maryland in July turned out to be suffocatingly hot and humid. The skies had a nasty habit of opening up and dumping buckets of rain onto Vivian as she pedaled dismally through the steaming streets. The downpours were brief but intense. She invested in a poncho, but full weatherproofing was a folly under such conditions. It was after one such dousing that Vivian, still dripping at a linoleum table in the back of the McDonald’s, accepted a bid and saw that the delivery address was for one Thomas C. on Stapledon Avenue.

>>>

Right, right, right, left, right.

Chewie swiped listlessly. He was taking a break from looking at the big screen to look for love on his little screen while he waited for his dinner to arrive. No matches again today. It was almost a relief. He didn’t want to have to shave. His phone buzzed in the haptic pattern he associated with AutoNosh.

Your Nosher is arriving.

He would wait a few minutes before opening his door. He had set his NoshPreference to contactless drop-off after his last fight with Joshua. But instead of the second notification that his Nosh had been delivered and left outside the front door of the building, he heard the flat blare of the buzzer on his wall. His Nosher must not have read the instructions. Annoyed, he padded over to the console and pressed the speak button.

“You can just leave it there, thanks,” he said.

“Um, I’m supposed to hand it to you,” an uncertain voice returned. Female, young. The camera was broken, so he couldn’t see her.

“No, it’s okay, you can leave it at the door,” he repeated.

“I think I need to hand it to you,” she said. “Or else I’ll get in trouble.”

Chewie paused, confused by her insistence. Obviously she was new to Noshing. Whatever, he would just buzz her in. It would be easier than explaining it to her over the intercom. He stayed close to the door as she walked up the stairs to his unit, but didn’t open the door. He was hoping she would drop the bag of food at his apartment door, take the picture she needed as proof for the app, and go away.

To his distress, the Nosher knocked.

He looked through the peephole. She was petite, young, maybe a few years younger than him, sweaty and disheveled but pretty. She looked vaguely Asian or Latina. Chewie opened the door.

“For Thomas?” she said.

“Yes,” Chewie said, looking at her shoes. They were squelching rainwater onto the hallway tile.

She handed him the plastic bag, but didn’t let go. Their knuckles touched. Her cheeks flushed bright pink.

“I’m s-sorry to ask you this,” she said, still gripping the bag. “But, uh, I really have to use the bathroom. Would it be okay if I used your bathroom?”

“Oh,” Chewie said, thinking of the disarray of his apartment. “I’m not sure if—”

“It’s just to go number one, I promise,” she said, blushing an even deeper raspberry shade. She let go of the bag and her hand fell back to her side. Chewie met her eyes for a brief, electric moment, and then went back to looking at her shoes.

“Okay,” he said, and stepped aside, holding the door open.

>>>

Vivian was smoothing down her frizzy hair and wondering what the hell she was going to say to get Chewie to let her stay a little longer and get his number when the lights went out. She waited nervously for a few moments, thinking another round of storms had knocked out the power, but maybe it would kick back on right away. When that didn’t happen, she realized it was the perfect conversation starter. A godsend. She opened the bathroom door.

“Whoa, I guess the power went out?” she said. “I can’t see anything. Are you there? Thomas?”

The gloom was deep in the living room, where blackout curtains blocked out the last dim light of the summer evening.

She could just make out Thomas’s silhouette. He was looking down into his hand.

“Your phone, is your phone working?” he asked.

Vivian slipped it out of her hip pocket and tapped the screen. It stayed dark and inert.

“That’s weird,” she said. “I’m sure it was charged. I had 82 percent battery just before I came here.”

He walked across the room and pulled the curtains open. The blue glow of the twilit night oozed into the room, and Vivian could make out the troubled set of his face. She was possessed with a sudden urge to kiss him.

“Look,” he said. “Power’s out everywhere.”

From the fourth floor window, they could see that nobody had any power for as far as they could see. Chewie opened a closet door and started digging around by feel.

The streets were quiet, but as Vivian watched, a medium-sized delivery truck emblazoned with the name “Vo and Sons” came barreling down the road and drove straight into Chewie’s apartment building with a stomach-turning screech and crunch of glass and brick. Vivian let out a squeak when she realized the truck wasn’t stopping, wasn’t even trying to brake. They both felt the impact. Still digging through his closet for emergency supplies, Chewie looked up at Vivian.

“What was that?” he said.

“A truck just drove into your building! Right below us!” Vivian said. She pressed her forehead to the window and tried to ascertain the extent of the damage.

“I’m not sure if we should just stay here until the fire department comes, or if we need to evacuate,” she said. “It could be dangerous to stay.”

She was scared, but part of her was pleased that something so dramatic had happened to keep her with Chewie longer. They were bonding over a shared adverse event: the foundation of many relationships.

“I don’t think the fire department is coming,” Chewie said. “But you’re right, it’s not safe here.”

Joshua had been wrong: this wasn’t a Russian cyberattack on regional infrastructure. It was something much worse. He looked his Nosher in the face for the first time. He felt himself rising to the occasion. He would protect this young woman.

“There’s a stairwell on the other side of the building,” he said. “Follow me.”

It was dark in the hallway and pitch-black in the stairwell. Others were emerging from their apartments, murmuring in shock and confusion. Someone in the growing crowd of people said to pretend it was a fire drill, and then someone said what if the building actually is on fire, and then people started to push and panic.

Chewie grabbed Vivian’s hand as they felt their way down the stairs. They almost got separated as neighbors tripped and shoved and yelled and children cried, but soon they were spilling out into the street. The gloom had deepened, but the earlier thunderclouds had cleared, and the gibbous moon issued forth enough silvery light to be a relief after the utter blackness of the humid, echoing stairwell. They found themselves still holding hands.

The crowd was anxiously commenting on the absence of emergency responders and how strange that everyone’s phones stopped working at once. In the parking lot, a handful of people tried and were unable to start their cars. Others were unable to even unlock their doors. A small heroic contingent ventured into the first-floor apartment that had been hit by the truck and pulled out the driver (dead) and the family who lived there (rattled but unharmed). In the distance they could hear other crowds of confused people bickering over the scenes of other car crashes.

“What the hell is going on?” Vivian said.

“It’s a HEMP, probably North Korean,” Chewie said. “A high-altitude electromag—”

The wrecked truck, an old-style gasoline engine, burst into flames with a whooomp of displaced air. The curtains and furniture of the impacted apartment began to catch. The crowd of people, who had been milling about anxiously, erupted into terror. People began running in all directions away from the building.

But it wasn’t until the planes fell out of the sky that people really started to panic. Over their heads, two commercial passenger jets that had been descending toward BWI Airport collided in a titanic clash of tearing, wrenching metal. The bodies of both planes broke open and the entwined carcasses began a chaotic, wobbling downward spiral. Against the wine-dark sky, tiny black pixels could be seen falling from the crash, like fleas shaken from the pelt of some great and filthy beast. As they fell, the pixels gained dimension. Some were suitcases. Some were people. Chewie and Vivian’s hands were torn apart and they found themselves carried in different directions by the momentum of the crowd.

“Wait!” Chewie called.

“Chewie! Help! Where are you?” Vivian cried out.

>>>

“I’ll find you!” he said, and realized he didn’t know the Nosher’s name. It had appeared on his screen with the notification that his food was en route, but he hadn’t mentally filed that information and now, of course, his phone was dead. More than that, the servers that stored the AutoNosh data, that hosted the entire American internet, were fried, probably irrecoverably. He realized, with a small triumphant feeling, that the data centers that hosted all the dating apps were similarly useless. No one would ever swipe left on Chewie ever again.

After long minutes fighting his way against the stream of hysterical humanity, Chewie found his mystery Nosher in the parking lot of the nearby liquor store, which was in the process of being looted. She was watching the men carrying out baskets full of Tito’s, Bulleit, Patron, Hennessy. A few more discerning looters came out with armfuls of Glenlivet 21, Yamazaki 12, Lagavulin 16. Chewie jogged over and tapped her on the shoulder. She started and turned toward him, then smiled involuntarily when she saw his face.

“You called me Chewie, back there,” he said. Her smile froze, then faded. “How did you know my nickname?”

The girl looked stricken. He felt bad for her.

“Did Joshua send you?” he asked. “Or someone else at Simak-Stapledon?”

She looked confused.

“What?” she said. “Who?”

“Like a . . . fix-up. Or a honeypot,” Chewie said. He felt stupid and wished he hadn’t said that.

The girl shook her head, then paused. She took a deep breath.

“My name is Vivian Wong,” she said. “And I used to spy on you.”

“Spy? Like . . . for the CCP?” Chewie said.

“Yes. Well, specifically for the MSS. They just wanted me to keep tabs on you,” she said. “But you seemed so nice, and when you got RIFLEd they cut my contract and I—I missed you. I wanted to meet you.”

“You’ve been spying on me for a foreign adversary.”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“About a year. Are you mad?”

Chewie pulled Vivian to him. By the light of the moon, he looked at her lips, which were full and pink but chapped from all the deliveries in the elements. He looked at her nose, which had a tall bridge and wide, flat nostrils. He looked at her cheekbones, which were high and sharp and spattered with tawny freckles. And finally, he looked into her eyes, which were hazel and ringed with short, straight, dark lashes.

“It’s nice to meet you, Vivian,” he said, and kissed her.

He was rusty and the kiss was sloppy and both of them had bad breath and neither of them cared.

When the kiss broke, they walked, hand in hand, into the deepening night of the end of American technological civilization.

Behind the Scenes

As part of our commitment to keep all our essays and stories free, we ask our authors to pull back the curtain and share a little bit about their writing process and intent as a bonus for paying members.

You can find an explanation and reflection from the author of this piece just below…

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Dear Chris,

I went to see your new movie today at Directors Village in Westwood, what used to be the Fox Village. It’s not even officially open yet. You’re part of the Village Directors Circle, as I understand it, and the group opened the theater early for this limited engagement. They’re advertising it very badly. Showtimes are still sold out at Universal CityWalk, and our matinee was barely a quarter full. I heard that you came here to inspect everything personally before the debut. I wonder what you think of the theater.

Right off the bat, I liked the double meaning of your first card. You said it was “a time of apparent magic.” Obviously, that works two ways. The magic is apparent, but you’re also implying that the way the story has been passed down is only apparently magical. Even opening with Travis Scott makes it clear that this story has been passed down like a Xerox and changed each time. You hit that point pretty hard again at the end.

I thought it was clear what you were doing with Travis Scott. I also wonder whether you deliberately guided him to be a rather boring and unimpressive bard. Certain aspects of the performance suggested as much. After all, he was the suitors’ bard, and everything about them was rather underwhelming and tacky. At the same time, your interviews cut against that reading. Either way, I didn’t find him compelling as a speaker, but I thought that served the tale.

I find myself wondering whether you’re troubled at all by the film’s massive aspect-ratio disparities. IMAX is a huge selling point of the movie, and it’s hard for me to tell whether you really treasure it so much or whether it’s more of a marketing scheme. I can imagine it’s important to you, or else you wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of shooting on those giant cameras. How, then, can you be comfortable with almost everyone seeing the film in this incredibly letterboxed form? Even the standard 70 mm presentation is 2.20:1, while IMAX 70 mm opens all the way out to 1.43:1. I’m sure you shot with safe zones that could accommodate both, but still. In the course of editing, you must come to consider one version canonical. Do you think the IMAX version has excessive dead room, or do you think the 70 mm version is an uncomfortably tight crop? How can you be at ease with so many people around the world seeing the film in such different forms? In my view, one defining aspect of an auteur’s work is an intense desire to control the viewers’ experience of a film. Variable aspect ratios seem almost antithetical to that.

I guess my biggest single takeaway was this: you clearly endeavored to make your Odysseus feel the way you would feel if you had done the things Odysseus did. That’s very different from trying to place yourself inside the head of Homer’s Odysseus and imagine how he feels in a given moment.

I’m not saying one approach is better than the other. They’re simply different projects with different goals.

Aesthetically, the most striking thing for me was the grayness of the world. Nothing about Homer’s Odyssey, of course, is gray. The Mediterranean is rife with color and splendor. I know you’ve read a great deal about the ancient world, and I can’t help wondering whether the grayness was supposed to be a nod to the aftereffects of the Thera eruption. Were you trying to imply that the eruption disrupted the Minoan world and ultimately led to the Sea Peoples? I could see it going that way, but perhaps I’m just putting ideas in your mouth. Maybe the grayness was purely thematic. There were moments during certain escapes to the boats when the color became incredibly vivid, which I found surprising. Those moments had no particular levity. I’d be very curious to know why you chose to make the world vivid for fleeting moments of terror when so much of the rest of it was muted.

I’d also be curious to know your reaction to Emily Wilson’s response. I know you hold her in very high esteem. You spent more than a year talking her up as a major source of inspiration. In return, of course, she pretty much savaged your work. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that harsh between peers, at least not from the twenty-first century. Are you bitter toward her? What would you say if you had to respond?

There’s a lot of dumb controversy, as I’m sure you know, about the races of various actors in your cast. It would be easy to say that your casting was essentially color-blind, based on merit and accolades, but I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you were extremely deliberate in the way you used both race and birth sex to shape the audience’s emotional reactions. I’d venture that you’re much savvier about this than you would ever publicly let on.

Using Elliot Page as Sinon, for example, gave the character a kind of gut sympathy in the audience’s lizard brain. It was like a reversal of Elizabethan theater in that sense. Sinon was pitiful, and Page’s slight physicality contributed to that.

It was also pretty obvious to me that Zendaya’s “Athena” was really just a guilt-image of the dead Trojan priestess. I couldn’t help noticing that she looked like Malala Yousafzai the way you costumed her, and the skin tone choice in casting seemed quite deliberate, too.

Casting Lupita Nyong’o as both Clytemnestra and Helen also seemed incredibly deliberate, visually. I understood quickly, I think, what you were doing by draping Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus in this sort of swaggering gangster affect. You were trying to show that this whole Trojan War business was low-class and trashy. I know you’re obsessed with class. You love a protagonist in a suit. A flashy gangster, of course, is the antithesis of that. Helen’s blackness, too, made her status as a prize feel a little like eerie exotic fetishism. I have no doubt you did that on purpose.

I’d be curious to know how long your first cut was. Like Oppenheimer, The Odyssey went by in a blur. The first reel, especially, was blindingly fast. At times, it almost felt like a video-essay summary, as though you had found an actual movie and were cutting it down to only the necessary plot beats. Did you have a five-hour cut at one point? A six-hour cut? You’re a careful planner, so I imagine you knew what would have to happen in the end. Do you think we’ve reached the limit of how fast these films can go without becoming absurd, or would you ever push the pace even further? In the TikTok world, I suppose anything is possible.

I also think it’s a little funny how much emphasis was put on the spectacle of the 70 mm film when, as others have pointed out, the focus pulls were so incredibly loose. I have nothing against loose and messy focus pulls. They’re all over John Cassavetes’s films, and I love those. There was a stark contrast, though, between the technical specificity of other aspects of the film and the startling imprecision of the focus pulling during dialogue scenes. Do you wish you could have tightened that up? What happened on set that made it impossible? Was your puller, even with all his experience, out of his depth with the large format? Was everything really rushed? Did you deliberately select takes for performance at the expense of focus pulling?

On the subject of film stock, I want to ask as well whether you truly think film is the best medium for watching The Odyssey. There’s no reason, of course, that it couldn’t be projected in ultra-high-definition digital IMAX. Watching the print at Directors Village, I was struck by the relative dimness and the prominence of the flicker—and this is a theater where you personally approved the presentation. Even without gate weave, the flicker alone makes it hard to forget that you’re watching a cascade of still images. When I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I was struck by how superior the DCP image was. I’m sure you’ve watched both. Do you genuinely prefer the 70 mm version, or do you feel somewhat obligated to truck it out to theaters? If the latter, why?

I’m also curious to know, structurally, whether you felt the script was quite close to Oppenheimer, and how you feel about it. You used many of the same techniques, including the nested storylines. Do you think you’ll do it again a third time, or are two enough? Does part of you worry that you’re leaning on the same tricks again?

Thematically, I understand why your film is resonating. I look around at the society we live in and there’s a sick psychological sense of impending doom. It’s been there since the 1970s, you know. Any kind of growth is evil. Condos are evil. Nuclear power is evil. We are evil. We were traumatized by the Vietnam War and again by the war on terror, and we haven’t recovered.

Your interpretation of Odysseus’s crew, of course, heavily evoked American soldiers. What is your relationship to the war on terror, would you say? You’re an Englishman, but the United Kingdom participated, of course. It’s also interesting that you chose an American with a quintessentially American accent to portray a character who’s clearly so close to your own heart. You’ve spent a great deal of time in America by now. Does part of you feel American? Do you feel that we’re one great civilization, Britain and America, on the edge of doom, or is it the opposite? Do you feel like an outsider critiquing American civilization merely as a guest?

The rant you gave Penelope about having twenty years of experience admittedly did stick out, as the peanut gallery is saying. I think there was just a little LinkedIn language there. Not that you’ve ever used LinkedIn. I wonder what was in your heart as you wrote it. Were you thinking of Emma? I imagine every wife you write is a reflection of her in some way. Do you feel that she has capabilities beyond the recognition she receives, like your Penelope? I’d be very curious to know whether she would ever want to direct. If she did, would you produce for her? It could be an interesting experience. At the same time, she might find it impossible to come in with a blank slate, being your wife.

Looking at this film as part of your body of work, I can’t help wondering whether you’ve painted yourself into a corner by trying continuously to one-up yourself. I fully understand why you feel the need to take a year off and reset after this. It must have been a grueling shoot. I’m curious, though, to see whether you ultimately try to work at this scale again. What’s bigger than the Odyssey? I don’t imagine you’ll ever do the Bible.

I must admit that The Odyssey has a second quality that also evokes video essays. It’s not just the pace. It’s how emphatically you billboard things. Do you ever grimace a little at the number of times you need to repeat clear information for an audience that may be only half paying attention? If you knew for a fact that you were going to have a focused, intelligent audience, would you get more esoteric?

Even while you were laying things out with great simplicity for a mass-market audience, I could tell that you were trying to prove yourself to the scholars. You sometimes showed your homework very plainly, particularly when it came to the Aeneid and other ancient sources. It almost felt as though you were trying to insulate yourself preemptively against criticism. Was it contemporary criticism you were trying to anticipate, or criticism from the future? Do you find yourself lying in bed and thinking about how your body of work will be received in decades, or does that sort of thing not trouble you?

There’s one last thing I want to ask. I couldn’t help noticing that Oppenheimer was clearly a bit of a “couch movie” for you, as they used to say. That is, you really made it about yourself and put yourself through a therapeutic ordeal in the process of creation. The Odyssey, it seems, was exactly the same. You were once again seemingly wringing your hands with a deep sense of guilt, putting yourself in the hero’s shoes. I want to ask, then, whether you think it helps you psychologically to process things this way. Did you feel more healed or uplifted after making Oppenheimer? I would have thought so, but The Odyssey is just as dark, if not darker. I know it’s not my place, but if you find yourself spiraling, I might encourage you to break the cycle and stop making films that are exercises in your own personal anxiety. Speaking from artistic experience, it may just make the whole thing worse.

With respect,

Cairo Smith

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There’s a good chance you love The Thing. A lot of people do. Although it was largely panned as too gory and grim upon release, the sci-fi horror classic has since gained such a large fan base that it’s almost too popular to be called a cult film. It really is just a canonical classic now, despite the odds. If you’re a little bit more of a movie nerd, you might even love The Thing from Another World, an admirable 1950s take on the same creepy story. What you probably don’t love, though, is The Thing (2011).

What if I told you that could change?

The 2011 Thing is a direct prequel to Carpenter’s classic, taking place in the same timeline and filling in the gaps of what happened to the poor, doomed Norwegians. It’s largely remembered, these days, as a dark, murky, CGI-laden mess, if it's even ever thought of at all. There was, however, another version of the film that never got to see the light of day.

Although you might find it hard to believe, 2011’s Thing was written, planned, conceived, and shot largely with practical effects. Yes. The commitment was there. More than that, the good version of this prequel project was actually built and executed. It was only in post that the team got cold feet and attempted to pivot to primitive, Mummy-like CGI. The rest is ignominious history.

My proposal, then, is simple and stark. Morgan Creek Entertainment and Universal, the rights holders of the film, should authorize a reconstruction of the original practical effects, a new edit, and a new color grade to correct the deficiencies of the original release. By many accounts, there was a vibrant and classically designed Carpenter homage lost somewhere in the vault, and it would be a shame if it never got to see the light of day.

This kind of project is not unprecedented for Morgan Creek. In 2013, they undertook a similar adventure in creating a director’s cut of Nightbreed. The result, by all accounts, was a success.

In a 2023 interview with SYFY WIRE, the director of the 2011 Thing, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., expressed open regret about the pivot to CGI. He also expressed a desire to showcase more paranoia and more character development beyond what survived in the current theatrical cut. Much of that, I’m sure, can be found in the can. It certainly exists in the script.

Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr., the practical-effects artists, are still around as well. Even if new CGI needs to be created to fill in the gaps in the practical effects, Gillis or Woodruff could see that it’s rendered in a practical 1980s style that complements their handcrafted work instead of just turning it into PlayStation soup. If Morgan Creek don’t want to undertake the financial burden of the restoration alone, they can always seek out an investing distribution partner like Arrow Video or Scream Factory, just as they did on Nightbreed. The ecosystem is there.

This October marks fifteen years since the release of the film. It’s a fitting anniversary for the announcement of a new edition. The animosity toward the 2011 Thing has faded into oblivion, and the warm feelings of the moviegoing public for Carpenter’s classic remain. A whole new generation of film buffs has little idea that the 2011 Thing ever even came out. A director’s cut with restored classic effects could be their first impression of the project, and it could even turn the forgotten film into a contrarian Gen Z gem.

Although it’s a “revision” on paper, this director’s cut of the 2011 Thing would really be much closer to the original creators’ intent. Eric Heisserer, the writer, always believed that the monsters needed to be practical. He said as much in an interview with Bloody Disgusting in 2011. From the outset, the intent was to make a film that could flow seamlessly into Carpenter’s original. They shot in the same Canadian province used for Carpenter’s exteriors, and they filmed the entire Thing on gorgeous 35 mm Panavision anamorphic. Unfortunately, the 2011 Thing was caught right in the ugly window of the early transition to digital. It was scanned for post with a 2K intermediate, robbing it of the depth of detail present in 35 mm. A new scan of those negatives, if accessible, would open up a whole new world of texture and dynamic range.

It's pretty clear, too, that the original practical effects were not a disaster. They were not replaced due to any sort of failure to execute. Heisserer remembers watching dailies of Mary Elizabeth Winstead firing a flamethrower at an animatronic, and his reaction was wholly enthusiastic. He said it looked quite strong.

Ultimately, the decision to switch to CGI was born of a shortsighted fear of seeming outmoded and passé. Even in the moment, the pivot sparked something of a civil war among the leadership, according to Heisserer. In the end, roughly seventy percent of the effects work was covered over with CGI.

There are a few moments, such as the final all-digital creature, that do not have a practical basis to revert to. Again, though, contemporary CGI techniques could evoke practical effects in these segments much more closely than what was available in 2011.

As it stands, Carpenter’s Thing is a year-over-year hit in the world of Blu-rays. 2011’s misshapen digital Thing, alas, is simply not a fitting companion. A restoration, though, might finally allow it to take its place in the Thingverse as a worthy prequel.

It would be a whole lot cheaper than shooting a new film. That’s for sure. The repentant aesthetic interest from the director seems to be there in spades as well. If something like this can be achieved for Nightbreed, a fairly niche film in the scheme of things, a project with the name recognition of The Thing can surely warrant a director’s cut.

On top of being potentially lucrative, I have no doubt that it would be a healing experience for van Heijningen. It would also be a healing experience for cinema itself.

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Possessed vs. Oppressed

Curry Barker’s smash-hit horror film Obsession is a movie for the ages. Made for approximately $750,000 by a young filmmaker who got his start on YouTube, Obsession has clearly captured the zeitgeist and has been rewarded handsomely for it. It is the most successful film ever of its type (a horror flick made for less than a cool million), grossing somewhere in the ballpark of $400 million worldwide. It is the number one film on IMDb. And in Anno 2026, it has transcended mere cinema and entered the hyper-world of memes, TikTok reels, and YouTube ambient playlists, where the sleep-deprived can drift off across the Lethe, basking in the yellowish glow of the film’s gloomy set designs.

The current consensus regarding this update of W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” is that Obsession represents “incel horror” and exposes the many disquietudes of Zoomers and Gen Alpha regarding denied sex and romantic relationships. In this light, the protagonist Bear (played by Michael Johnston) is cast as the archetypal incel—he is shy and awkward, works an entry-level job at a music store, and is described by Nikki (played brilliantly by Inde Navarrette) as a “closed book” who rarely reveals his emotions or interior life to anyone. For the vocal coterie of very online left-wing critics, these character traits are evidence of Bear’s innate villainy—a villainy that gets exposed throughout the film as Bear takes advantage of Nikki, the supposed love of his life.

But wait. Let’s back up a little first. Not everyone reading this review has seen Obsession. A brief, non-spoiler rundown is therefore in order.

Obsession is the story of Bear, a young man deeply infatuated with Nikki, a beautiful coworker who is two weeks away from leaving their shared job. Bear feels the pressure and wants to confess his feelings for Nikki before she goes, but he is the reclusive type with a cabinet full of psych and sleep meds. He’s the kind who smiles, murmurs, and avoids conflict. He is the type who needs a more aggressive friend (played by Cooper Tomlinson) to help coach him through the difficult task of vulnerability. One night, following a weekly game of bar trivia, Bear tries to confess to Nikki but chickens out.

It should be noted here that during this same car ride, Nikki informs Bear that another coworker, Sarah (played by Megan Lawless), has feelings for Bear. Sarah is attractive, close to Bear, Ian, and Nikki, and, best of all, is interested in Bear. Nikki, on the other hand, is not, although she doesn’t hate or loathe Bear; she sees him as a friend. For Bear, this is a hateful wound. He desires Nikki, so after dropping her off at home, he reaches into his back seat where two items lie. The first is a necklace that he purchased earlier to replace one that Nikki had lost. Bear is such a wimp that he cannot even give a girl a present without having a panic attack. However, next to that necklace is a small item: the One Wish Willow. This toy, which looks like nothing less than a holdout from the 1960s, claims to grant its users the power of one wish and one wish only. As Nikki stands just outside of her own door, Bear wishes for her to love him more than anything in the whole world and then snaps the artificial willow branch.

Reality snaps right after that.

What follows is a stomach-churning, nail-biting, claustrophobic horror flick in which Nikki becomes so obsessed with Bear that she moves in with him, refuses to leave the house, and even starts watching him sleep. It is never in doubt that this Nikki is artificial—a demonic imp possessing the body and mind of the real woman. There are moments when Nikki, the true Nikki, screams out to Heaven (and Bear). She weeps about being unable to sleep and having horrific nightmares, and in the film’s most important scene, she begs and pleads for Bear to kill her and end her suffering.

At the risk of giving the game away, Bear’s offhand wish comes true, and he fights like hell against facing the fact that the woman of his dreams doesn’t love him, but her demon doppelgänger certainly does. The online commentariat continues to excoriate Bear as the film’s villain (and he is the villain), and most point out that he should have realized the gravity of the situation the moment when Nikki started acting strange, which is basically fifteen minutes into the 109-minute film. I, on the other hand, give Bear the benefit of the doubt: there are clues scattered throughout the film suggesting that Nikki has stressors and issues in her life that could be used to justify her odd behavior. We know that she has a troubled relationship with her father, that she’s not averse to taking mind-altering substances, and that she quit her job because she felt “unloved” at the music store (in other words, a goo gaga reason). Also, lest we forget, Nikki was known throughout her adolescence as “Freaky Nikki,” an appellation she hates and one that may or may not indicate a history of antisocial behavior. Most real people would not jump to supernatural explanations given that Nikki, who is suddenly acting weird, has a history of being “freaky.” Plus, the demon inhabiting Nikki’s body makes up lies about cancer and MDMA.

But back to the film’s most important scene.

When the disembodied voice of the real Nikki begs for Bear to kill her, a whimpering Bear resists the suggestion not because murder is a great sin but because he takes offense at the idea that being with him is worse than nonexistence. Rather than a plea to be rid of demonic possession, Bear takes Nikki’s cries as a revelation of his own inadequacy. When Bear refuses to grant Nikki’s wish and once again flees from a problem he caused, he becomes a full villain. Not evil or monstrous but certainly the film’s black heart.

From a demonological and Christian perspective, there is only one unalloyed evil in Obsession, and that is the mysterious force behind the One Wish Willow. While the goofy, braindead workers at the New Age shop that sells the unholy toy certainly deserve some scorn, Bear only sees the true horror once, and it occurs over the phone. During one of his attempts to undo his wish, Bear calls the phone number on the One Wish Willow box and is connected to a soft voice that sounds languid, bored, and accustomed to delivering customer service platitudes. And yet the voice on the other end of the line fully accepts that the One Wish Willow has the power to alter reality. The voice knows that bad juju is afoot. The exclamation point to this comes when the voice asks Bear if he wants to talk to the real Nikki. Bear says yes and hears the piercing, wailing scream of the tortured.

The idea here is that Nikki’s soul is trapped in Hell and that the One Wish Willow is an engine for infernal forces. Indeed, Obsession is a possession story, with Nikki’s body being occupied by an unnamed demonic entity.

Within the tradition of Western esotericism, love magic is of the left-hand path, for, like all black magic, love magic involves the deployment of a magician’s will to force change according to their wishes. Love may be the greatest symbol of light in our culture, with Jesus Christ being the image and bearer of pure love, but love magic twists this beauty and perverts it for selfish ends. This is what Bear does—unintentionally at first, then deliberately when he decides that it is preferable to be desired and even tortured by Nikki’s satanic love than to let his obsession go and make peace with loneliness (or, God forbid, Sarah’s legitimate love).

Our materialist age hates Bear for denying Nikki her autonomy, for having sex with her demon-possessed automaton. All of this is correct. However, and this is the moment when I shall receive hate mail, Bear is also the victim of malevolent forces. Nikki suffers possession as a result of Bear’s ill-thought wish, while Bear suffers from oppression.

Let me explain a little.

According to Church tradition and the Latin Rite of Exorcism, the more familiar stage of possession, which is the final and deadliest stage of demonic activity, appears when a demonic entity invades the soul of an individual and takes control of their will. The demon’s control of Nikki’s will is not total in Obsession. We do see flashes of the real Nikki screaming apologies from time to time. However, the possession is nearly complete and only deepens as the film rolls along.

Demonic oppression, which is typically the first stage of demonic activity, is characterized by harassment, evil influence, and mental oppression carried out by a demon or demons with the intent of delivering the victim’s soul to damnation. The oppressed may become possessed, but more often than not their torment is the torment of images and experiences—they are assaulted by profane visions, poltergeist-like disturbances in their homes, and horrific nightmares that encourage homicidal or suicidal ideation. The demons of the One Wish Willow never touch Bear’s soul, and thus his free will is left intact (which only further solidifies his culpability), but their oppression and the rules of the wish dictate that he must either kill Nikki or kill himself to end the wish. Either choice leads to Bear’s eternal damnation. Bear ultimately makes a choice—one many have labeled “cowardly.” Sure, but at the risk of sounding soft-hearted, by the film’s halfway point, Bear has no good options. If he kills Nikki, then he goes to prison for the rest of his life. If he kills himself, then either he is snuffed from existence and enters the eternal void or he descends into Hell and suffers until Judgment Day.

All of this is because of a lovelorn wish made by a young man fiddling with what he believes to be an innocuous trinket.

Obsession’s criticisms have been primarily sociological in orientation. Bear figures prominently in these criticisms as the weak male Zoomer who could have saved himself by simply being honest. , writing in his Rob Henderson’s Newsletter on Substack, makes the simple case that Bear and, by extension, the millions of lonely, loveless young men in America who’ve gone years without a date, should have asked Nikki out in Act One, thereby saving himself and all the others from the film’s gruesome and gore-soaked horrors. While this is good advice in general, it would not have saved Bear or Nikki in Obsession. It is made obvious throughout the film that Nikki does not have romantic feelings for Bear. Not only does she hook up with Ian on occasion, but Ian and Sarah both tell Bear that Nikki has admitted in the past to putting him in the dreaded friend zone. And for those incapable of paying attention to dialogue, signs, or signifiers, the ending shows Nikki throwing Bear away like a hateful piece of rubbish.

, writing in Compact magazine, articulates that Obsession embodies “heteropessimist horror,” or horror fiction that displays a fear of heterosexual relationships and dating. In a culture awash in never-ending gender wars, where almost one-third of young adults are projected to reach the age of forty-five as unwed and unattached singles, Obsession reads like an admission by Zoomers that sex and love and couplings frighten them. Many in their cohort have given up on sex altogether, and Obsession offers insight into why that may be (generalized social anxiety, infinite rejection, the absolute avalanche of terrible dating advice—see Ian in the film).

It is this last bit that got my little gray cells activated.

Sex has long played an important role in horror films. After all, horror has a reputation for being conservative and sex negative because every ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s slasher film has a scene where a couple gets axed, stabbed, chopped, and/or flambéed while they do the dirty deed. But since the growth of quiet horror in the late 2000s, sex has ceased being a vehicle for titillation in horror films and has instead become a character in and of itself.

Thinking this late last night when I couldn’t sleep made me realize that Obsession has a Millennial antecedent.

It Follows – Progenitor of Obsession

It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell and released in theaters in March 2015, tells the story of a shambling entity, presumably a demon of some stripe or other, that gets passed along like an STD following the act of coitus. The lead character is a young woman in her early twenties named Jay (played by Maika Monroe) who, following a one-night stand with “Hugh” (played by Jake Weary), becomes infected and begins seeing the demonic shapeshifter as it slowly follows her. “Hugh,” real name Jeff Redmond, explains to Jay (Monroe) that the only way to survive the entity is to pass it along, i.e., have sex with someone and give them the infection.

Filmed in the Detroit suburbs during the early stages of autumn, It Follows is a masterpiece of Millennial horror. It is also the template that Obsession borrowed. Both have a dreamlike quality and feel out of time. It Follows deliberately cultivates a neo-’80s aesthetic, from the synth-heavy soundtrack by Disasterpeace to the mise-en-scène of a homogeneous suburban street, while still taking place in the contemporary period. Obsession likewise has the moody ambiance of the 1990s, with the Zoomer characters floating in and out of a world that includes music stores, pubs with wood paneling, and parties where nobody is doomscrolling on their phone. Both movies traffic in nostalgia, which has been the primary aesthetic and interest of Millennials and Zoomers for multiple decades now.

It Follows centers on the difficult topic of sex among the young. Whereas Obsession has a single sex scene that makes everyone uncomfortable because of its criminal character, It Follows has multiple sex scenes ranging from the passionate to the awkward. It Follows also includes a high degree of nudity, as the entity often masks itself as naked men and women, including one presumed rape victim (the female walker seen in Jay’s kitchen) and the half-naked mother of Greg (played by Daniel Zovatto). When the entity gets its victim, it dry humps them to death, draining their vitality before severing their limbs. All of this is because It Follows is about the anxieties inherent in hookup culture, the bête noire of Millennials. The demon in Mitchell’s movie comes from meaningless and nonromantic deeds of flesh, and it is passed along by the same sickness. Yes, It Follows also includes themes of maturity, but Jay’s struggles with growing into womanhood derive first from her ugly sexual encounter with Hugh/Jeff. It Follows is a movie about and for a culture where sex is something easily accessed, and thus its downsides become widespread.

Obsession is quite different. Sex is not a major theme in the film. Bear does not wish for Nikki to be his unthinking sex doll; he wishes for her to love him. This may seem like romance is the key anxiety at play in the film, but in truth, Bear’s response to Nikki’s disembodied voice underscores that everything—the horror, the bloodshed, the death—derives from Bear’s fear of being unloved and unworthy. Bear’s selfish fear is that there is something malformed and undesirable within his soul, and this is the same fear shared by millions of Zoomers who have grown up in an atomized, antiseptic, and lonely America where the screen has replaced the priest, the parent, and the lover. Comparing Obsession to It Follows highlights the distinctions between Millennials and Zoomers: It Follows depicts a fuller social world lived mostly outdoors, while Obsession takes place indoors or in cars. It Follows has a central friend group of five people who are constantly seen together; Obsession’s scenes typically include only two people at a time. Both films are haunted by demons, but only Obsession feels like its little world is cold, empty, and thoroughly occupied by internal agonies.

Horror has a way of teaching us about our own insecurities. Each generation has its own fears and hang-ups. The young ones geeking out over Obsession recognize that Bear is something of a tulpa—the fictional representation of the collected energies of repressed and (demonically) oppressed young men grappling with unrequited love. The possessed Nikki gives Bear everything he wants and more, and, like “The Monkey’s Paw,” the film’s simple conclusion is “Be careful what you wish for.” Obsession, like its antecedent It Follows, offers insight into how the youth struggle with the war for intimacy and how that war so often warps its participants. The distinctions between villain and victim are not so easy in both films, as the ancient desire for love is warped by diabolical entities who turn love into possession, rape, and exchanges of sickness designed to keep death at bay for another day.

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My body was cemented by silence.

I did not feel anything. I hung up the phone. In my mind, my mother’s voice kept pulsing, hitting me again and again like a hammer on an anvil, striking for a spark.

“Ruslan died.”

I wanted to smoke so much, but I had denied myself that relief long ago.

It felt like I wasn’t living or feeling, just watching a bad film. I had to do something with this information.

I could not find supportive words and muttered:

“That was to be expected.”

Died?

Is that the right word for someone who dies in a war?

Killed.

For me, he was killed by his own government, which sent him to another land to kill. By him, Putin.

My soul is full of hatred. So, I could still feel something. I felt rage when I thought of the monster. Ruslan died for his golden toilet brush. I had never known that I could hate so deeply. It burned through my body, like fire with no way out.

My cousin was thirty-five years old. A young and handsome, simple guy with a wide smile. He worked in a supermarket as a security guard. In the first year of the war, he received a military summons, went to the recruitment office, and disappeared. No one could reach him.

His mother called mine in tears, begging for help to find him. My mother told her about the mothers’ committee and began searching. She asked her to call my brother to use his connections.

“I cannot ask my son to do that,” my mother told me. “I want a calm life for him. I am afraid that if he starts asking questions, he will attract attention. I just pray they forget him. He does not want to be a part of that.”

“I understand,” I said then.

I hated, but felt her fear, the terror that gripped our hearts like a cold hand, made us heartless.

Hatred. It had a name. Putin.

I will never call him my president. I never voted for him. I remember the first time I saw him on TV, when Boris Yeltsin introduced him as his successor in his annual New Year’s speech. It was my first year at university. I thought, “Is this real democracy?”

At the university, professors still had a habit of speaking freely, explaining to us modern history and how Russia was moving toward authoritarianism before our eyes. But every year their voices became quieter, until they dissented in new slogans. And we continued living in the illusion of democracy, where information is a useless book and a liberal is an invective word. The king had gone mad and started the war. His fear of losing his crown infected people with the fear of losing him.

The war split Russia. Society. Families.

My mother and I were always on the same side. My brother was not. For fifteen years, he hadn’t spoken to me because I was part of the Liberal Party, a bad influence that could damage his career. He stood guard over the regime. We stayed connected only through my mother.

Then, on the fifth day of the war, he quit his job, his high salary, and his respected position in state security.

“I don’t know how I could look into my son’s eyes if I stay,” and he added, “I think Lena should leave Russia.”

Later, we learned that my cousin had signed a contract and went to the war voluntarily. Whether there was any pressure or not, we will never know.

His mother called different offices to get any information about her son. But the doors were deaf to a mother’s tears.

“You should be proud! He is a hero.”

“But I just want to talk to him. To see him. Why can’t I?” she asked men in expensive suits.

They answered her with cold silence. Then with shame.

“It’s not the time to be selfish. Your country needs him!”

Her little boy with fair curls did not belong to her anymore; he was ripped out of her embrace to stain his hair with blood.

She pounded the pavements, went from door to door until finally, someone told her the city in Ukraine where he was. She took all her money and went there.

They met briefly. He smiled like nothing happened.

“Don’t cry, Mum, everything will be fine. I will just drive. Logistics. It is not dangerous. And they pay good money. I will buy you a new coat soon.”

He spoke casually about his new job, as if it were a promotion.

“Mother, we will soon start living!”

Her eyes sparkled at the numbers. It sounded like a chance for a decent life, but she did not ask what the price of that money was.

“I would never make such money in freedom,” he blurted out, like the war had become his prison.

She came back with a calm heart and called my mother.

My mother listened in silence.

“She sounded like she was inside a dream,” she said to me later.

I was in Vietnam. In my voluntary exile. Safe. Far from the war. I tried not to watch the news. I focused on building another life. I wanted to leave Russia behind.

But …

“Ruslan died.”

“Why am I so numb?” I asked, surprised by my coldness. I felt shame that I could not shed a tear.

I strained my memory to see his beautiful smile, but I could not remember it.

I opened VK, Russian Facebook, and read our messages to wake myself.

It was hard to believe he would never write to me again.

He came into my life later, when I was already an adult. I was trying to reconnect with relatives. My mother introduced me to her side of the family. We didn’t have a chance to meet often. We lived so far from each other. And now we would never meet again.

He no longer existed.

Only our messages stayed, where I had asked about his mother, his sister, told him about my life, sent kisses and hugs. He always said everything was fine. Only complained about his sister, who was a lazy student.

“The bird chirped that you are going to marry!”

“Ha-ha, I need to fix the relationship first. I don’t want a divorce. But she does.”

“No need to rush.”

“We’ve been together three years, but we live like a cat and a dog.”

“Quarrels are okay, if not every day.”

“We fight for domination. Now we haven’t spoken for two days.”

“That’s how we live, in silence.”

We talked about the weather and family. He asked how to get a passport, wanted to travel, and see beautiful places.

But he did not. And now he never will.

“You know, I’m afraid to fly. Planes crash.”

“They will give you a parachute.”

“Really? That’s much better!”

“Of course!”

He sent me rap music. Photos.

We did not have much in common, but we were family. Part of each other. One blood, one history. We tried to keep that bond.

Our last conversation:

“Hey, what’s new?”

“Everything is okay.”

“Did you get married?”

“No.”

“How’s the weather?”

“Still cloudy…”

“Hello to your mother. Hugs and kisses.”

“And you say hello to yours!”

So weird, ugly, empty, and fast. Where was I rushing to?

I could not resist the wish to send him something, what if… but nothing came to my head, and I texted “Bye.”

I typed: I love you

And deleted it.

One lonely tear ran down.

I went to the bar and said to my friend,

“My cousin died in the war.”

“It was his choice!” she said.

“Was it?”

As if that settled everything.

I wanted to scream, but I just took a sip of beer.

We did not talk about that. It was not acceptable. We had left our country not to carry that blood with us. But it was impossible. We were already inside it.

At night, I was looking at the ceiling.

Do I have the right to mourn him? And how? I chose my side when I left Russia. He could have left, he could have hidden, but chose not to go. He chose to kill. Does death wash away sins? Can I still feel compassion if I understand his way?

After Bucha. After what Russian soldiers did there. What did he do? Who was he? A killer or a victim? Or someone who believed? Someone who was sent there with beautiful slogans of a free Ukraine, with lies? Or someone who wanted to get easy money?

The feeling did not come. Only emptiness.

His mother received millions for his death. She bought a new coat and dresses. Took her mother to a health resort. Bought a summer house. This is what Ruslan became. She fell in love again. She still blames my mother, believing that my brother could have saved him. Another fracture in the family. His sister is trying to survive, to find her place in this broken reality. My mother is in Russia, goes to bed every night with a light heart, knowing her children are far away but safe.

I am still in Vietnam, not knowing what will come next. The burning sun, the salty wild ocean, and the loud karaoke music.

Our lives go on.

Ruslan does not exist anymore.

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Brandon looked through the binoculars. Thirty miles away on top of a mesa the color of blood and sunset was a lone figure leaning against an old and gnarled juniper tree. It was holding something skinny and rounded against its lap. A musical instrument maybe. The man on the mesa didn’t move. Hadn’t moved since Brandon first arrived in this little desert town. He wasn’t sure if it was a person because something about the lens of the binoculars cast shadows where there weren’t any. But Brandon wanted to believe it was a person. You had to believe in something out here.

Brandon lowered the binoculars as someone walked into the library parking lot. It was Keith. He flashed his garish smile and stared at Brandon with blue eyes so light and milky he almost looked blind. The hot, white sun beat down on them and Keith’s forehead shone with grease. Brandon took a deep breath. He didn’t want to unlock the door but he had to. Today was Thursday and he was in charge of the men’s book club.

To Brandon, Keith was the book club’s main problem. Keith never had anything to contribute because he never read the book all the way through. The book was always too long, he’d say. It felt like homework, he’d say. But he claimed to like listening to other people’s thoughts. Brandon gradually picked up that Keith was listening for an opening to play the clown, to interject with some quip that always derailed the conversation.

“I’m not gay, but I mean... there’s something kind of ho-mo-erotic about this, right?” He’d say it slowly, as if it were a word he’d just learned last week and was trying out for the first time. Keith would look around and nudge the person next to him, which was never Brandon. There might be a polite chuckle from his neighbor that Keith took as permission to continue.

“What?” he’d ask, looking around with a tooth-gap grin. “I’m just sayin’!”

Keith had a habit of laughing at his own jokes. He’d boom with laughter, beer belly shaking on his gorilla-like frame, and he’d spread his legs so wide they’d knock against the knees of the person sitting next to him. As he laughed, his gaze would land on Brandon, those starving dead blue eyes hungry for a reaction, searching and searching for something Brandon wouldn’t give him. Brandon would immediately look away. He hated looking at Keith. There was something dumbly monstrous about him, like the kids in high school who hid their stupidity by terrorizing the classroom with toilet humor. Brandon, ever the teacher’s pet, remembered how nervous kids like Keith made him and wished Keith would skulk back to the hole he crawled out of.

Although Brandon wanted to kick Keith out of the book club, Keith was the tipping point for the library’s gender quota initiative led by Mrs. Barrow, the librarian.

“86.2% of library checkouts are women. Where are the men who read?” she’d cried out in the monthly meeting, jowls quivering.

Brandon had raised his hand and said, “I mean, I do?” but immediately regretted it when lightning flashed in Mrs. Barrow’s eyes.

“Of course! Brandon! You will lead a book club. A men’s book club. Westerns, science fiction, fill it with whatever books the boys will read. We’ll do a photo op, put it on the city website. Men, five men, sitting in a circle and smiling. I can see it now. A good number, five.”

“But—”

“No butts! Only books. We need those numbers up!”

Brandon, a Los Angeles native, did not think he would end up in the desert town. This land of red mesas and violent purple skies. The land of addicts and trailer parks. Of Keith and strange shadows in the shape of men.

Brandon had come here to stay with his friend, Emily, who had become his not-quite girlfriend. They had played tennis together on the college intervarsity team. She had been studying to be a nurse. When she asked him what he was studying, he struggled to explain his graduate degree, only that it was something interdisciplinary at the crossroads of programming, linguistics, and literature. He had vague goals of working on natural language processing.

“You know, get LLMs to write books and stuff,” he’d said.

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“Um,” he said.

They stayed in contact after she moved back to the desert town where she was from. She had a job at the regional hospital and a paid-off apartment waiting for her courtesy of her father, the hospital’s director. Meanwhile, Brandon continued failing his way out of his graduate program. He couldn’t tell his advisor what his thesis was about. He broke out in hives and barely ate. He couldn’t write a single line of Python or explain Bayesian inference and started getting butt acne. Academic probation came for him then and eventually Brandon took a leave of absence for “mental health reasons.”

Not wanting to face his immigrant parents who had been so proud of his blooming academic career, he’d told Emily about his predicament, who invited him to live with her rent-free. She would be working for her father for four years to pay him back her tuition fees, she’d told him begrudgingly. Brandon found it odd that her very wealthy father had made his daughter his indentured servant, but that wasn’t his problem. Brandon packed his things, moved, and took the first job he was offered as a library assistant.

Brandon and Emily first spent time together in the kitchen, then in the living room, then in her bedroom: sleeping together happened naturally and without any sense of commitment. It was convenient for both of them. They knew each other well enough and fucked to pass their time in purgatory. For Brandon, Emily symbolized a more purposeful time when he had been moving toward something grander in life. The future locked inside his past was a store of limitless potential, and by fucking Emily, he kept some imaginary, more successful version of himself alive. Brandon would have felt guilty for this if Emily wasn’t also using him to escape from the dismal reality of her hometown. Eager to get away from themselves and their lives, they fed greedily on each other’s bodies.

Four people had responded to the book club ad. There was Eduardo, the rotund pool man with an impressively black and bushy mustache. Peter, the retired woodshop instructor with skin like crumpled paper. There was Grant, a tall, lanky bartender from the bar on the far end of town. Brandon had never heard of the bar. “Trust me, it exists,” Grant threatened in a gravelly voice. Finally, there was Keith, the unemployed son of one of Mrs. Barrow’s friends. Keith wasn’t much of a reader, Mrs. Barrow’s friend warned, but Mrs. Barrow told her it wouldn’t be a problem.

Brandon had been careful with the book selection. He had been dragging his feet on the task until he started thinking about the books he wished he’d read when he was younger. Books about desert wanderers in search of missing poets, terrorists shooting up stock exchanges, libraries with infinite shelves, the inadequacies of language. Brainstorming the book list became an exciting exercise and he began seeing the book club as an opportunity to bring some real culture to the town.

He had asked Emily what he should teach. “You’re not teaching,” she’d said. “It’s a book club.” She recommended some recent science fiction that had been on the New York Times Best Seller list, but Brandon balked at the suggestion. He knew these authors. They were all hacks. Anything that made it onto a bestseller list was for people without taste.

“But people don’t want to read hard things. You need to ease them in,” Emily said. “No one’s going to read some postmodern masterpiece right off the bat.”

“I don’t want to underestimate them,” he said.

“The kind of person who would appreciate that doesn’t live here. You’re in meth head country. Half the town is addicted to something,” she said.

Her smugness grated on him but she was right, of course. Brandon took her suggestion. Partly. He chose an author from the list and went through their bibliography, selecting the work that sounded most intellectually appealing. For the first meeting of the men’s book club, they would discuss the most underrated book of the most popular science fiction author in America. They would learn something, Brandon was sure.

That night, Brandon and Emily fucked for the first time in a week. Recently, the hospital requested that Emily take on more night shifts, leaving her tired and distracted. She had lain there while Brandon humped her without conviction, as if he were masturbating instead of having sex with a real person. He finished and rolled off of her and she fell asleep almost immediately, leaving Brandon alone in the quiet. He stared at the ceiling, trying to sleep. The window was open and the sounds of the town drifted into their room. Someone shut a trash can lid and a cat yowled. A car revved its motor from somewhere on the highway. Then he heard music, a trumpet playing. It played music he’d never heard before and he listened carefully. They were notes in a minor key but there was no sadness or evil in it. It wasn’t jazz or anything he’d ever heard. He imagined the man on top of the mesa playing his strange instrument, the huge shadow of cliffs thrown in relief against the starlit sky, and he got the sense the mesa was alive, inert but alive the way a cave is. The mesa was an extension of the man somehow, a piece of associative dream logic ambling into his half-asleep brain. The trumpet didn’t stop. It played and played something that was not evil nor sad until Brandon fell asleep.

In the center of the library, they sat in five metal chairs arranged in a circle under a dim, humming bulb. Mrs. Barrow didn’t like leaving the lights on after closing hours. The solution was to swat a tiny trapdoor on the ceiling with a broom, where a light bulb dangling from a thin wire would fall out. The emergency light, she’d said. For snacks and refreshments, she had left several impossibly small bags of corn chips and some sodas on the table. There were three two-liter bottles of a green soda, an orange soda, and a black soda. There were no cups.

“So what did you guys think about the book?” Brandon said.

“I liked it,” said Grant, the bartender. “I liked the spaceship.” He was referring to the space station that the protagonist was stranded on.

“I didn’t get what he was doing up there, though, the whole middle part. I mean, why didn’t he just call for help when he realized things were going sideways?”

Eduardo, the pool man, leaned back in the metal chair, arms folded, nodding. He was either falling asleep or thinking something profound. The bulb’s bright light couldn’t penetrate his black mustache and his skin looked extraordinarily bronze, like a fine sculpture in a museum. A faint scent of sunscreen emanated from his body.

“I think the protagonist wanted to try surviving on his own,” said Peter, the retired professor. He gave a sheepish look to Brandon. “There was nothing left for him on earth. And back on earth, he thought he was a nobody. He wanted to try and prove something to himself, isn’t that right?” He looked at Brandon for some kind of confirmation that his opinion was correct, which somehow made Brandon respect him less. But Brandon could work with this.

“I think so,” Brandon said. “There’s definitely something existential going on there. I mean, he’s trying to find some meaning in his life, and somehow he thinks if he just overcomes this herculean task of surviving alone in space, he’ll get it.”

The men didn’t seem to know how to respond and they stewed in the silence, waiting for the next person to speak. Peter made a show of flipping through the book and Keith eagerly scanned everybody’s faces. Eduardo appeared to be asleep. Grant seemed to be watching Eduardo’s mustache with grave intent.

“Eduardo, what about you?” Brandon asked.

Eduardo sat up straight and yawned, emitting a fluttery, wet sound from his throat.

“Huh?” he asked. He smacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and swallowed.

“What did you think about the book?”

“Oh, it was good, man. It was a good book.”

“What made it good?”

“Just good. The characters. The setting. The space station was real cool,” Eduardo said. “I wish the woman astronaut stayed longer. Something sexy about a woman in a space suit. Why’d she leave again?”

Keith sat up straight in his seat.

“She left because the space station was in danger of collapsing,” said Brandon. “The power grid on the station went out, which meant all the devices meant to counteract the difference in pressure would stop working eventually.”

“That’s about where I stopped reading,” Keith said to Eduardo. “Just lost interest after that.” He shook his head, resigned, as if he’d been diagnosed with an incurable cancer.

“Well, the female character was obviously meant to be a foil to the protagonist,” Peter said, once again looking at Brandon and only him. “She told him the rescue ship was coming and that he didn’t have to stay. In a way, it’s like she was saying she already accepted him…?” He trailed off.

“Well, we don’t know that,” growled Grant. “I thought it was kinda confusing the way the author wrote about it in the beginning. Like we weren’t supposed to be sure what their previous relationship was or something. And there was that whole scene where they were in the same sleeping pod but felt awkward about whatever happened.”

“How does sex work in outer space, by the way?” Keith asked, grinning. An opening. Peter glanced at Brandon in alarm and Grant’s face remained unchanged.

“If you pull out, does the cum just get everywhere?”

“Man, that is a great question,” Eduardo said, his lips peeling back into a toothy, perverted grin. Peter blushed. Grant put his hands together and rested them under his chin, his brow furrowed.

Brandon tried again. “What did you guys think when the protagonist said he didn’t want to go back with her—”

“I mean seriously,” Keith interrupted. “Sex would be so weird up there. Like if you’re fucking, do you have to strap yourself down to something so you don’t bump into the walls?”

Eduardo laughed and slapped his knee like an old black-and-white cartoon. “This guy,” he said. “This guy, man!”

“Imagine the cleanup. Cum. Everywhere. And no way to get the smell out either!” Keith said, almost shouting. The bulb above them trembled and warped the shadows on their faces. Keith’s forehead was slick with sebum. Peter looked at Brandon with an apologetic meekness that only filled him with disgust. Grant had his eyes closed and was whispering something to himself. Eduardo was now caught up in a fierce conversation with Keith about the technicalities of sex in zero gravity, both cackling over the best positions to fuck in, if it mattered that the woman was fat, if Eduardo liked thick girls and of course he did, he was Mexican, and Keith saying “me gusta tortas, me gusta tortas!”

Brandon felt sick and wanted to leave. He felt sick and wanted to die and wanted to take Keith with him. But this was his job. He was supposed to lead the men’s book club. Deflated, he stood up and walked to the table. “Soda, anyone?”

He looked around for cups. Then he remembered there weren’t any.

“Your expectations are way too high,” Emily said.

Brandon fingered a pair of binoculars, a gift to Emily from Emily’s father who birdwatched in his free time. Brandon zoomed in on her face. He couldn’t help zooming into the individual pores on her nose. She had a blackhead that was begging to be squeezed out.

“You’re not going to change anybody’s life. This is something to do to pass the time, that’s all this is,” she said.

As Emily spoke, Brandon caught glimpses of something pale and yellow lodged behind her uvula.

“Tonsil stones.”

“What?”

“You’ve got tonsil stones.”

Emily breathed into her hand and sniffed, then crinkled her nose.

“Look, I’m not trying to change anybody’s life. I’m just doing my job,” Brandon said. “I care about doing it well.”

“Oh, that’s a lie. You don’t care about this job.”

“Please don’t tell me what I think or what I feel.” He fingered the dial of the binoculars until it clicked. He turned the dial the other direction and it clicked again.

“Stop that,” Emily said, taking the binoculars out of his hands.

Brandon sighed. “They didn’t know how to talk about the book. It was like pulling teeth.”

“They couldn’t talk about it the way you wanted to, you mean,” she said.

“Absolutely miserable time.” He sighed again, heavier.

Every night at the hospital, Emily saw people on the brink of death. She saw children mangled in car crashes and mothers missing limbs. She saw men writhing on the floor from opioid withdrawal. Then she came home to mopey, wayward Brandon.

Brandon could sense Emily’s impatience with him and his problems. But didn’t Brandon have the right to be angry about his life, too? Even if everything, at the end of the day, was a consequence of his own actions, why did that mean he couldn’t be frustrated about it? Brandon knew that something buried in this line of thought actively prevented them from being a real couple. He didn’t know—was scared to know—what this something was, but like a cursed talisman, it exerted its wretched influence over his relationship with Emily, the book club, and the long, roundabout trajectory his life had taken.

“Stop trying to change other people. You have to meet them where they are,” Emily said.

“Okay.”

“You’re trying to change them because your own life isn’t working. Tell me I’m wrong,” Emily said.

“Okay, okay,” he said, taking the binoculars back. “You’re right.”

“You’re not listening. Whatever is going on in your head, you need to deal with it. You can’t keep going like this. How will you ever go back to school? How will you ever start a career or—”

“Do you call moving back to bum fuck methville ‘starting a career?’” Brandon snapped. “Is letting daddy control you even though you’re an adult ‘starting a career?’ That’s how you want me to deal with my problems, right? Pretend that living with a bunch of fent zombies in the desert doesn’t bother me so I don’t have to feel guilty about everything daddy gave me?”

Emily looked at him, stunned. She stood up and walked to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. She drank in large, relaxed gulps. The silence between them stretched and stretched until finally Emily said, “I think you’re ready to go back to school.”

“Sorry,” Brandon mumbled.

Emily continued staring at him and he didn’t know what to do with himself so he put on his shoes and went outside with the binoculars in hand.

The sun was setting and the weather had begun to cool. He didn’t know where he was walking. But he was in the desert and the mythology of deserts demanded he walk so he walked. The desert was for encountering the desolation of a life. The desert laid waste to history with rock and heat, flood and dust. Here, one is allowed to forget their name, Brandon told himself.

The sand and rock crunched beneath his feet. The dust whirled upward and sand crunched between his teeth. He spat. Every direction looked the same. The giant, lumbering mesas in the distance oriented him. And yet he was unnerved by the mesas, by their prehistoric scale. He imagined megaforest tree stumps or the fossilized feet of giants amputated at the ankles. No matter how much he walked, they stayed in the same place, stayed the same massive size. He imagined walking towards them and frightened himself with the sensation of being towered over by a living-dead thing, the feet of an ancient bog mummy felled where the sea used to be, preserved by the passage of time and some dark desert folklore.

The sky was vast and total. Brandon felt it would swallow him whole if he didn’t keep moving. He kept his eyes trained on the mesas. He ran his eyes up and down until he found the familiar black mound at the edge of one of the cliffs, then put the binoculars up to his face. He had never seen the copse of juniper trees from this angle before, their twisted roots crushed into the rocks and leaves black in the strange light. He found the man on the mesa, saw that twisted, blurred shadow leaning against the tree holding the instrument or what looked like an instrument in its lap. He felt if he looked long enough, the features of the man’s face would emerge, so he watched the amorphous shadow for a minute, then ten minutes, then an hour. The face stayed muddled.

Brandon’s phone rang.

“Brandon! How is the book club going?” Mrs. Barrow’s voice sounded grainy and far away.

“It’s going fine, Mrs. Barrow. Thanks for asking.”

“Brandon, you are a saint. Remember, Brandon. You are educating these men. They need your guidance whether they know it or not—”

He hung up and texted her that he’d lost reception.

The book club was not going fine. They had read a book about a man surviving an apocalypse alone, a classic western that ended with a shootout where everyone died, a thriller about a spy who fell in love with the person she was supposed to assassinate. They were interesting books propelled by plot and neat endings. Some even had lessons. But discussion did not improve. Eduardo slept. Peter would meekly offer an opinion and await Brandon’s approval. Sometimes Grant would say something that pierced the entire group with its level of insight, but mostly he stayed quiet, his brow heavy. Meanwhile, Keith would wait, leaning forward in the small metal chair, his body cocked like a shotgun, until there was a moment he could blow the conversation apart. Something vaguely sexual would come up and then the typical antics began. Keith would fire the first shot at Eduardo, and Eduardo’s perverted laugh would mark the beginning of the end. The discussion would unravel until everyone tacitly agreed that the book club was over. Then they would go their separate ways. Everyone drove home except Keith. Brandon once thought of offering him a ride but decided not to. He wanted Keith to suffer in some small way. He wanted to punish him.

One day after the book club, Brandon watched Keith walk off toward home when a strange thought crossed his mind. Brandon waited several minutes until Keith was out of sight. Then he began to walk. He was barely aware of what he was doing as he followed Keith a quarter mile behind. Keith walked leisurely, his hands in his jacket pockets. Keith did not look at the desert or the mesas. Keith in his red jacket was a drop of blood on the horizon. Brandon didn’t know why he was stalking Keith but the act made him feel alive, wonderfully so. Twenty minutes into the walk, Keith turned into the trailer park. Brandon hid behind an empty and dilapidated trailer. He didn’t see which trailer Keith entered so he waited. It nourished some hideous thing in him to know where Keith lived, to intrude on the sacred territory of home. The mesas glowed red in the setting sun. He didn’t have his binoculars but he knew the man on the mesa was there, watching him. An uneasiness overtook him and Brandon almost skittered off when he heard a door open. Keith was holding a long black gun case and exiting the trailer park. A gun owner, then.

Keith got back on the empty road and Brandon followed him out of the trailer park a few minutes later. Keith swung the gun case back and forth in rhythm to his own steps, walking towards the abandoned train depot at the western edge of town. The night seemed to chase them west as the sun dipped below the rocky horizon and pulled the light down with it. The dark, jagged energy of the desert gathered in Brandon’s body with each step and he understood in a quiet way that did not involve words or thoughts that soon he would cross a threshold he could not return from.

Brandon had never been at the train depot before. Here, several dozen tracks lay parallel to each other before a single track emerged at the very end of the train yard and disappeared into the desert. Keith was standing on the train tracks in front of a platform and had set his gun case down on the platform itself, his back turned to Brandon. He was assembling the gun. Brandon crept behind one of the abandoned cars.

A sharp sound startled Brandon. Do. Then another. Re. Then the rest. Mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. Keith was playing a loud and brassy scale. Brandon peeked behind the boxcar. It was a trumpet. Keith went up and down the scales and stopped. He spat and picked at some dead skin on his lip. Then he began playing a song, the music Brandon had heard at night. The notes were sharp and cold yet mysterious. It was a song but not the kind that made you want to dance or kiss your girlfriend. It was a song that asked you to sit still so you could understand it. Keith stood on the platform, his eyes closed, channeling the song through him. Keith did not look like a monster. Brandon could not imagine that this was the same person destroying his book club, the same man that said ho-mo-erotic with a forehead slick with grease. No, the man in front of him looked otherworldly, his face quiet and attuned to something deep, a shaman talking to the desert with his music.

When the sky had finally darkened into that deep desert purple, Brandon crept out of the train yard and back to his car at the library. There were no streetlights on that stretch of road and in the darkness Brandon sensed a presence, perhaps a set of eyes trained on him or someone walking across the street and keeping pace. He wondered if the man on the mesa was still there leaning against his tree or if he’d somehow clawed his way down from those towering red rocks. The darkness seemed to cave in on him then and Brandon broke into a sprint. When Brandon got home and finally caught his breath, Keith still hadn’t stopped playing.

Brandon never saw Emily at home anymore. One day, he received a text from her.

i’m moving out

when?

end of month. my dad needs the apartment back

where are you going?

i’m leaving. you were right, i can leave anytime

does that mean we’re done?

He didn’t expect a response. He didn’t need her, at least not today. Today, they would be discussing Moby-Dick. He had convinced the book club two weeks ago that they should read something with substance, something that carried the weight of history. Pitched that way, the men had liked the idea. He doubted that anybody had finished the book, but that didn’t matter. Brandon knew his life here was rapidly coming to an end, and not knowing what was coming next, he might as well enjoy himself. He would talk about Father Mapple’s sermon, Captain Ahab as Faustian figure, the moral ambiguity symbolized by the whale’s whiteness, all of it, even if no one was listening.

Brandon waited in the parking lot, binoculars to his face. The man on the mesa seemed to be in a different position today. The man was standing and his body was twisting in a different direction, facing away from Brandon or toward him, he couldn’t tell. The instrument was no longer in the man’s lap and was instead dangling from his hands. Brandon contemplated what this could mean when he felt someone looking at him. He put his binoculars down and found Keith standing there, peculiar, looking at him with curiosity.

“How long have you been there?” asked Brandon.

There was a tiny, weighted pause before Keith answered, “It’s hot as hell today. You gonna let me in or what?”

Brandon opened the library door. Eduardo, Peter, and Grant arrived shortly after. Brandon swatted at the trapdoor on the ceiling and turned on the light.

“Well boys, we’ve reached the end of the book. Did you all like it?”

There were some quiet mm-hmms and yeahs.

“I wanted to start us off with a question that’s kind of ambiguous but should lead to a good conversation. My question is: what do you all think the whale represents?” Brandon asked.

The light bulb hummed. Eduardo looked up and closed his eyes, nodding in a show of contemplation. Peter opened his mouth to say something, but when Brandon looked at him, he shrunk back and opened his book instead to reread some lines. Grant, deep in thought, was massaging the cover of the book with his right palm in a sensual, rhythmic manner. Keith looked at the floor. There were no creases on the spine of Keith’s book.

“Let me try again. What do you guys think about the whale? Just in general,” Brandon asked.

“Big,” Grant said with wide eyes and a thousand-yard stare. “Very, very big.”

“He’s right,” Eduardo said without opening his eyes. “Whales are big. I’ve never seen one in real life though.”

Peter opened his mouth again, but then thought better of it. Brandon turned toward him and caught his eye and Peter winced as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.

“Peter?” Brandon said. “Did you want to share?”

“Well, um. The book. You see, I didn’t, well.” Peter sighed. “I didn’t finish it. I was trying to think of something to say but I just couldn’t think of anything. I’m sorry. I know this is important to you.”

Brandon hated hearing that. “Peter, it’s fine. The whale. What did you think of the whale?”

“Well, Captain Ahab wants to catch the whale, right? For taking his leg.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And, well, the whale, Captain Ahab is obsessed with the whale for taking his leg, so it’s like he wants to kill the whale... to regain his humanity?”

“Yeah, I can see that,” said Brandon. “It’s like the whale represents something only Ahab can see and everyone else just has to go along with it. Everyone else’s humanity is intact except Ahab’s.”

The sound of Grant’s dry skin rubbing across the book’s matte cover filled the silence. Keith was tossing the book into the air to the rhythm of the rubbing. Brandon tried again.

“What did you guys think of the color of the whale? There’s that whole chapter devoted to whiteness. Did you guys read that chapter?”

Eduardo began to snore and Keith snickered. Peter avoided making eye contact with him and began picking at his shoelaces. Grant, still wide-eyed, had put down his book and was now running his hands through his hair, his hands strained into claws so that his nails scratched at his scalp.

“Well?” Brandon added, impatient.

Brandon didn’t know what to do. The silence was deafening. He tried not to think about graduate school, about his failed thesis, about Emily, about being in the middle of nowhere. He tried not to think about his parents bragging to their friends about his illustrious, nonexistent career. But he couldn’t stop thinking so he did what he did when he didn’t want to think, which was to read. Brandon flipped to chapter 42.

“Though in many natural objects,” he read aloud, “whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls…”

The longer he read, the more the words took over his body. Grant mumbled something but Brandon continued louder, not wanting to stop. He didn’t want to stop imposing himself on the group. They signed up for the book club without realizing they would actually need to read. No matter. Brandon would read for them. He’d read until the end of time if he had to.

“Even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title ‘Lord of the White Elephants’ above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard...”

Grant mumbled something again and Eduardo let out another snore, but Brandon continued, forcing the words out of his esophagus and into the world. They would listen to him read and they would like it. Nobody would stop him, not anymore.

“...And the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue…”

“Brandon,” Grant said.

“...And though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe...”

“Brandon!” Grant slammed his hand against his book so hard that Eduardo woke up. Brandon looked up from his book.

“I want to talk about the cum chapter,” Grant said.

“What?” Brandon asked.

“The cum chapter. The chapter where they squeeze the whale cum.”

Keith shot up in his seat, his smile growing wide. “The what chapter?” Keith asked.

“The cum chapter. Chapter 94. Like, what the fuck was I reading?”

Keith opened his book and began flipping the pages, his finger tracing the words as he mouthed the words to himself. Brandon broke out in a sweat. He vaguely remembered that a chapter about whale sperm existed but couldn’t recall reading it at all. Brandon flipped through the edition in his hands. His version’s chapter 94 had nothing to do with whale sperm. He looked at the back of the book. It was an edition meant for teaching in high schools. He flipped to the foreword of the book. Several chapters have been removed to streamline the narrative such that students would not lose interest, wrote the foreword’s author. Some chapters have been removed for the sake of decency.

“Guys, listen to this,” Keith said.

Before Brandon could stop him, Keith started reading, his eyes greedy and devouring. “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it. I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.”

Peter looked away, his face worried, whimpering something no one could hear.

“Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally…”

Eduardo began to chuckle, not quite understanding the words but knowing that something funny was happening. Keith stood up, voice booming, and bumped his head against the bulb, throwing shadows across the room. The bulb swung and swung and shadows swam across their bodies and behind the chairs and through the aisles of endless books that nobody in this town ever read.

“As much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!” Keith roared. “Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other. Let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness!”

Keith put down his book and panted, his huge chest rising and falling like a boulder. Peter blushed with embarrassment. Eduardo smiled with his mouth hanging open and Grant was staring at Keith, completely transfixed. Keith grabbed the light bulb to stop it from swinging. Then Grant began to clap.

“Good reading, Keith. Yeah, that chapter,” Grant said. “What the hell was this chapter about?”

“I don’t know, but Christ, this is gay,” Keith said, wagging his book toward Brandon. “Why’d you have us read such a gay book, Brandon?”

Brandon slumped back in his chair. “That’s it. We’re done. Everyone get the fuck out.”

The group turned to him. Keith sat down.

“You all heard me. Everybody out,” Brandon said.

The group looked at each other. They smiled nervously, unsure, until Brandon stood up and walked to the library entrance. He opened the door and held it for them. They understood he was serious and slowly they gathered their things and walked out single file. Once everybody had left, Brandon waited five minutes. Then he left the building and found himself moving in the direction of Keith. Besides walking, the other mythology of the desert was killing.

Under the reddening sky, Brandon stalked Keith from the library to the trailer park to the train depot, a white-hot rage boiling his body and blurring his vision. He thought about how he’d do it. A knife from home, maybe. But he didn’t have time and anyway, that would be too fast, too easy. Brandon didn’t want to let him off the hook like that. Keith, in particular, called for a long and slow bludgeoning. Blunt force. A prolonged pain. When they arrived at the train depot, Brandon hid behind the usual train car, listening closely to Keith assembling his trumpet. Keith played some scales, then began playing his cold and mysterious song. As Keith played, Brandon looked for a suitable rock. He weighed several rocks in his hand when he saw a rusted metal pipe, some piece of chewed-up train track. He picked it up and swung it as a test, then sat down and waited. By then the sun had disappeared and the sky menaced him with its nauseous purple-black hue. As Keith’s playing slowed, Brandon stood up. The song cut out without finishing.

“Come out, Brandon.”

Brandon froze, his heart thudding from the adrenaline.

“Come on. Show’s over.”

Brandon walked out from behind the train car, dragging the pipe across the rubble.

“How did you know I was there?”

“You learn when things don’t feel right around here,” Keith said. “What’s that in your hand? Some sort of pipe?”

“Yeah. A pipe. Piece of train track, I think.”

“Jesus.” Keith shook his head. “You’ve got a big problem with me, Brandon. A big, big problem. And if you don’t deal with your problems, they cause other problems, you know what I mean? So tell me what your problem is.”

“You ruined the book club,” said Brandon.

“No I didn’t. You were the one who told everyone to get out. We just listened,” Keith said.

“You’ve been ruining it. All your stupid jokes. How you never read the book. What the hell is wrong with you.”

“I did this as a favor for my mom and Mrs. Barrow. Now I got some crazy kid from wherever the fuck threatening to kill me.”

Brandon walked closer and lifted the pipe. “I don’t get why you won’t own up to it. You’re the worst kind of person. The kind of person that doesn’t realize other people exist.”

Keith braced his body as Brandon approached. “Back off, brother. I’m warning you.”

“You’re the worst kind of person because you don’t even know that you’re being the worst.”

“Get back. Now.”

“You walk through life with your stupid smile and say stupid things and everyone laughs. Then people like me pick up the pieces. Guys like you piss me off. You piss me the fuck off, man.”

“Last warning.”

“Fuck you, Keith.”

Brandon lunged at Keith and swung and the top half of the rusty metal pipe shattered against the train platform that Keith had been standing in front of. The pipe was knocked out of his hand and he caught a brief image of Keith flying upwards toward him before a fist landed against his face. Brandon skidded across scree and rock and bits of metal before coming to a full stop. His ears rang as blood trickled into them. He lay there trying to collect himself, panting.

“You’re a pussy, you know that?” said Keith.

Brandon’s vision was hazy and the sky was not yet completely dark but already the Pleiades shimmered above him. Brandon tried to blink the haziness away. He groaned, then groaned again.

Keith stood above Brandon and spat on him, then offered Brandon his hand. “How you feeling, champ?” Keith asked. “Did you get it all out of you?”

Brandon took his hand and wobbled onto his legs. Keith led him by the arm toward the train platform and Brandon leaned against it. He held his cheek with his hand.

“It hurts,” Brandon said.

“No shit. I punched you in the face,” Keith said. “I won’t go to your book club anymore. It’s not worth the trouble. I don’t like people following me and it’s fucked that you’ve been following me for this long. I should’ve done something about it a long time ago.”

They stood there a while, letting their nerves calm. The night settled on them.

“You play every night,” Brandon said, rubbing his bruised jaw. “I hear you before I sleep.”

“I’ve been doing it every night since high school band ended.”

“I’ve never heard anyone play songs like that. Where’d you learn them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t learn them from anywhere. They just come to me when I’m out here. There’s no sheet music or anything. I just play.”

“That’s incredible. You’re a talented musician, Keith.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said since you met me. Now why’s that?”

Brandon shrugged. Keith shook his hand out and winced, then picked up his trumpet.

“You interrupted me.”

Keith picked up his song from the middle. The notes were in that same minor scale and sounded cold and not vulgar. The trumpet shone in the fading light and a peace had once again washed over Keith’s face. Brandon wanted something to shift in him, wanted to believe that the music was cleansing him and exorcising the wicked spirit that haunted his life. But nothing of the sort happened. Mostly, Brandon was the same, except that his face ached and that blood was now trickling down his pants from his torn-up back. An immense exhaustion overtook him then. Keith finished his song.

“Pretty,” Brandon said. “Does it have a name?”

Keith didn’t bother answering him and they stood there in the looming quiet. Keith turned toward the desert.

“Have you seen the man on the mesa?” Keith asked.

“I knew someone was up there.”

“You were looking at him earlier today, weren’t you. What did you see?”

“I saw him standing. Usually he’s sitting, but he was standing today,” Brandon said.

“He does that sometimes, yeah.”

“Does he have a face?”

“I’ve never seen it myself. I learned to stop looking for it,” Keith said. A strange, cool wind moaned across the field of rock and sand beyond the train tracks. Brandon’s vision cleared and the bright stars illuminated the vast landscape and suddenly he knew he no longer hated Keith.

“He’s been watching over me since I was a kid,” Keith said.

“The man on the mesa?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe he’s watching over me, too,” Brandon said, joking.

“No,” Keith said, rubbing his chin. “No, he’s not.”

Behind the Scenes

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This piece is free to read without a subscription. It is a review of the new novel The Earthen Dark by . This piece was acquired by Futurist Letters as part of our initiative to provide more critical coverage of alt lit.

There is a passage early in Brad Kelly’s remarkable novel in which Jim Murray, a disgraced anthropology professor now working deep in the sewers of Detroit, is instructed by his crew leader that the human waste flowing around his thighs is, in some measure, his own. “What makes you think you won’t have to deal with it?” The observation, so casually devastating, doubles as the novel’s thesis. The Earthen Dark is, at its center, a book about the accumulated waste of a life badly managed, and what a man might find if he were pushed far enough underground to face it.

The novel is weird fiction in the classic sense, and Kelly works within the most subtle vein of this tradition: fiction in which the uncanny is less a visitation upon the ordinary than a slow seepage from below it. Kelly shares with Blackwood and Lovecraft the understanding that weird fiction is at its most unsettling when it reveals the strangeness already latent in the mundane. The sewer is not transformed into something terrible; it already was.

The novel opens in medias res, Jim waist-deep in sewage, drilling pilot holes through century-old concrete while his PhD goes unused. Kelly is very good at physical description. The details accumulate with the obsessive precision of someone who has either worked in confined spaces or studied them with alarming seriousness: the neoprene waders handed down “countless times,” the harness pinching flesh as the winch pulls a man up through the chimney of the manhole, the sensation of moisture that might be sweat or might be the city’s waste working through a seam in the rubber. These passages feel like memory, and that solidity, that material weight, is precisely what the novel needs, because Kelly is going to ask a great deal of it before long.

Jim’s fall from academia is rendered with similar concreteness and a moral realism that refuses easy resolution. A confused moment in class, a name mistaken, a cascade of social media outrage, a file of complaints that are exaggerated or invented. Kelly neither exonerates Jim nor makes him simply a martyr of cancel culture. The man has a certain passivity, a flinching quality, that contributed to his circumstances. His colleague Nicholas, whom Jim long regards as a betrayer, turns out to have been quietly working on his behalf the whole time, misread by a man too mired in his own grievance to see clearly. This is the irony of a life, which comes without fanfare.

What distinguishes Kelly’s use of the weird is the specific mythology he excavates. The novel’s epigraphs are drawn from Jim’s own book, the one he has not yet published, called Underneath and Inside. These interpolations are marvels of embedded scholarship, surveying the underground as human imagination has colonized it across cultures and millennia: the Carbon Works where buffalo bones from the Dakotas and the remains of smallpox victims were ground together into dye and fertilizer, the Detroit salt mine a thousand feet beneath the city, the Grand Mound plundered by treasure hunters in the nineteenth century with its contents dumped into the river. The effect is to surround the plot’s action with a vast, accumulating substructure of meaning. Jim descends into the sewer as one who knows what underground spaces have meant to man since before language. The horror of the novel is that knowing does not protect him.

The crew is Kelly’s great achievement of character. The Captain, an Iraq veteran who “resembled the men in old photos of bridges being built,” dispenses instruction with the authority of someone who has simply absorbed too much to waste time on pretense. Ray, large and violent and surprisingly tender, a man of raw competence who could run an excavator better than the specialist operator, keeps a can of tuna in his car in case he encounters a hungry street cat, and grieves for a father he once found in a bar only to be stabbed by him. Wheezy, a man brain-damaged by a fence post years before, with a lazy eye and ancient patience and frightening knowledge. These men are too particular to be mere symbols, but they carry symbolic weight nonetheless, the weight of a working-class competence that the novel regards with respect.

The weird rupture, when it comes, arrives with restraint. A fragment of multicolored light through a hole in the wall of a sewer chamber. A projection, inverted, of a landscape that should not be there. A tunnel of salt running through the deep clay. The reader has been so thoroughly anchored in physical reality that these incursions feel like an ontological seam giving way. Kelly understands, as the best weird fiction always has, that the uncanny is most powerful when it arrives through the most ordinary aperture.

What follows is a sustained ordeal that operates on three registers simultaneously. Literally, Jim and his crew pass through a portal in the earth’s infrastructure and emerge into a city transformed, emptied of its inhabitants, cycling through alternate presents and possible pasts with the logic of a fever dream. Mythologically, the novel is a katabasis in the ancient sense, a descent into the underworld from which the hero may or may not return with a boon. Kelly deploys this framework without reducing it to allegory. His allusions, to Orpheus, to Izanagi, to the Pueblo sipapu, are worn lightly, absorbed into the texture of the prose rather than announced. Psychologically, the novel is about a man confronting the accumulated costs of his failures: professional timidity, passive aggression toward a friend who tried to help him, a tendency to let what he loves slip between his fingers while he studies it.

The novel’s treatment of Wheezy is striking. The brain-damaged sewer worker, a minor figure in the first chapters, becomes, in the underground portions, a figure of truly uncanny wisdom, an old man of the tunnels who has been down here so long he has come unstuck in time. He is the novel’s Tiresias, its Fisher King, and also something more frightening than those comparisons suggest: a warning about what it costs to understand the Grandmother Spider, the intelligence at the root of things. Kelly handles this figure without condescension or false mysticism. Wheezy is still a man who survived a brain injury and a terrible job and tried to make sense of what he found. That he has found too much is not treated as a gift.

The Spider herself, the novel’s ultimate antagonist and deepest mystery, is realized with admirable restraint. Kelly knows that showing can diminish. She is referred to but rarely described. She gives you what you ask for, Wheezy explains, but the wish and the getting are never quite the same. This is cosmological horror, the universe as a trap baited with human desire, but Kelly gives it an American texture. The subterranean world in this novel is that of industrial Detroit, a place where the layers of history are unusually compressed and the bones beneath the street particularly numerous. The horror was here before we were.

Kelly’s prose is hard and plain and does not waste itself. He has an anthropologist’s eye for the revealing detail and a construction worker’s vocabulary for the physical world. His dialogue is a particular achievement: the crew’s speech is idiosyncratic enough to be real without ever tipping into dialect tourism. Ray’s monologue near the novel’s end, in which he describes traveling back in time to find his father in a bar, is the kind of set piece that can only be written by someone who has listened to how men actually speak in extremis.

The novel’s final movement, in which Jim confronts an alternate version of himself in his own house, asks to be read more than once. Resolution appears through acceptance of what was wasted, of what might still be recovered, of the fact that the world is held together by a will that, if allowed to slip, will not be replaced by something better. Jim is returned to something like his life, to Liz’s kitchen and Shelly’s clouds, and the book that is at least now imaginable. Whether this return is earned or granted or simply another fold in the trap is left unspecified.

The Earthen Dark makes demands of the reader. It does not explain its cosmology. It does not resolve its moral questions about Jim’s culpability or his culture’s overreach. It descends into darkness, lingers there, and brings back only what can survive the ascent. Kelly has aptly written it in the key of weird fiction, with its traditions of cosmic indifference and human smallness. These are the genre’s deepest traits, applied here to a story about what it costs to be a husband, a father, and a scholar who had to find his way back underground before he could find his way home.

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A kid in the 1910s sees a weird, old mansion on a hill. It’s three stories tall, with steep roofs, and everything’s crooked. Maybe there’s a creaky old husband and wife left inside, or maybe just a widow. Our kid and his buddies have some vague, shapeless sense there used to be joy inside, but they can barely believe it. The staff door hasn’t been used in decades. Servants are too expensive to keep. Modernism is in, way in, and Victorian excess is out. The thing is in hopeless disrepair.

The winds of national change had guaranteed the ruin. Victorian manors had been overbuilt, and they could not last. They were made for large families, and they required constant labor to sustain. The economics of advancing industrialization and the rising price of labor had rendered them unaffordable. Having staff in an increasingly prosperous America was subject to the Baumol effect like anything else. Equality had flattened the Victorian.

So, they rotted, with mothballed aristos calcifying inside. Thus the haunted house as an archetype was born, immortalized in a Modernist Gothic continuation through the birth of cinema and through the midcentury. The Victorians loomed large for decades, eerie masses on the edge of town until by the seventies they’d all either been bulldozed or revived à la San Francisco’s Painted Ladies.

After that, the literary symbol lost touch with reality. It became a mythic image, one you only find in theme parks, still potent but ever more cartoonish, the domain of Luigi and Eddie Murphy and Scooby-Doo. No kid today wakes up terrified at night because of a decrepit Victorian up the street.

He’s still losing sleep, though. He’s just thinking of Backrooms.

In his earliest memories he sees images of vibrant malls and offices, just before the Great Recession crushed them. These visions mix with movies in his head until it all seems surreal. Then he looks out the window of mom’s car and sees an enormous tower or sandstone complex sitting abandoned like a pagan temple.

This is not a historically typical environment in which to grow up. A less code-restricted society would have repurposed the massive structures years ago, and a less financialized one would never have overbuilt so fast. The ur commercial complex of the late twentieth century, though is, a true gargantua. It is bigger than his school. It’s bigger than the Parthenon. In any other age it could house a small society, but it’s sitting there dead. Inside, carpet and slick floor and blank walls go on forever like the underworld.

It’s not difficult to piece together that the emergent cultural phenomenon of the Backrooms is a way of processing the aftermath of the commercial property collapse in the wake of digitalization. The original Backrooms image, after all, is from the inside of a shuttered furniture showroom. The people it would have hosted decades ago are now shopping on Houzz. It is a temple with no patrons, a corpse with asbestos in the walls.

Malls have held cultural cachet for America’s youth for decades. Unlike Millennial and Gen X mall nostalgia, however, Gen Z’s liminal craze does not foreground the good times. If Stranger Things’ Starcourt Mall is The Secret Garden, the Backrooms is The Haunting. There is no sober focus on what these places once were in Gen Z lore, just as Raiders of the Lost Ark is not particularly interested in helping us imagine the ribbon-cutting day of its trap-laden South American temples. It’s as if the Backrooms-esque world of empty offices came into existence fully formed and already obsolete at the moment of our frightened kid’s first memories.

It’s not just the macroeconomics of overbuilding and decay, of course, that have caused Victorian manors and commercial complexes to share common cultural ground. They both have physical features that inherently lend themselves to horror. At their cores, they are large structures physically separated from adjacent buildings that contain maze-like, repeating interiors where it’s all too easy for an unfamiliar interloper to lose track of the front door. Since the time of Theseus, we have known the potent psychological power of a labyrinth. Cave systems, no doubt, were enticing and scaring little hominid children long before the beginning of recorded history. The potential was baked in. It just needed a little mildew and flickering light to really start hitting.

What, then, can we guess about the future of malls and office parks from the history of Victorian manors? We can guess most will be torn down, and the rest will be preserved by historical societies or renovated into something chic. We can also guess that the archetype of the Backrooms-style abandoned corporate space will persist long after they stop existing in reality. It’s possible that many of the symbols associated with late-twentieth-century commercial Modernism, the carpets and the brown and the Helvetica, will come to be more associated with horror as a genre than with early globalization and nine-to-fives.

There is, however, a counter argument. Late Modernism cemented itself, literally, in our society through civic buildings and community colleges with far more longevity than Victorian manor aesthetics. Perhaps those stubbornly undying examples will keep the liminal aesthetic from fully becoming pulp fodder. Another key difference is the fact that the Backrooms phenomenon is digitally mediated, meaning the simulacrum can move rapidly away from the signified phenomenon and become something broadly divorced from reality. The way you get into the Backrooms, after all, is by noclipping. This is not imagery born of sneaking into an abandoned mall with your buddies. It’s the imagery of playing a spooky video game.

Already, the Backrooms have gone far beyond just a haunted office story. They are infinite, as if procedurally generated. They are born of creepypastas and the SCP mentality, and in many ways they feel more like a metaphor for the darker side of the internet than an exploration of commercial decay.

The true course of the future, as usual, will be a mixture of all these facts and new elements yet unknown. That’s why we say the future rhymes, not that it repeats. What’s guaranteed, though, is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are being permanently imprinted with the aesthetic sense that windowless, banal hallways and offices contain some malevolent force. “Backrooms!” the kids already yell with frightened delight in the basement ballrooms of a near-empty Marriott, and Mom and Dad just smile and nod along. Mom and Dad, after all, remember the twentieth century. They remember life and smiles in these rooms.

It’s just an old house on a hill. How scary could it be?

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I joined Tinder again. So far I’ve only matched with robots and Kenyans, but I’m sure my soulmate is just a few swipes away. I haven’t used the app since I got catfished in 2022. I spent all my money on a flight to Kathmandu, then. I waited for five hours in the airport. I couldn’t believe it.

She wasn’t even real. She was some closet gay guy or a scammer or a bot, I never found out. I just wandered through the dust of “KTM” in June for six days, sweating myself to death between juice shops, dreaming of salt. She had those Mongol eyes, I love girls like that. I still want her to be real, in some sad part of me.

We had messaged for months, almost a year, I’d given her my whole story, she knew everything. When I had the meningitis and I was stuck in bed she was like a goddess-healer, her words drew me out of the Styx sickness. Maybe she was real and there was some mix-up… her bus crashed on the way to the city, her parents found her phone and deleted the app…

The Tinder people knew all about me after the chats I’d had with her, so I kept getting targeted ads about flights to Nepal, meditation retreats, stuff to do with volleyball. We talked about volleyball a lot. That was her sport. It’s the national sport of Nepal now, in fact, I learned that from her. I learned a lot about the country from her, even some of the language—when I was in Kathmandu for those six days I could speak to some Nepalis in their language, a little bit anyway.

I even tried talking to some women there, I was hoping one of them might look like her, but I couldn’t get the conversation beyond polite tourist chitchat even though one or two seemed kind of flirtatious. I can’t establish a connection. That’s the thing. I’d been messaging Anisha (that was her name) for months, almost a year. I felt like we had a connection. But I just can’t make a connection like that offline. I can’t be prepared, can’t present myself.

The few months after that, when I was back in the UK, I kept getting the targeted ads on my Facebook and on YouTube, etc., about Nepal and the Himalayas and Vipassana. Because I told Anisha I wanted to meditate and, like, calm my brain down, and I thought she could take me somewhere, way up in the Everest region where she’s from, and I could learn from the lamas and the landscape how to be wise and enlightened. So I kept getting those ads, but now they just made me furious because I wanted to forget the whole thing.

The ads stopped after a month or so, which felt like forever. The whole thing drove me so crazy that I didn’t want to be myself anymore, how could I have been so stupid? I wanted to rip my body off. I started going to Reddit forums for transgender people. I wasn’t even trans, it was a stupid thing, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Anisha.

I was obsessed with her memory. I wanted to become her. So I made fake aliases and started telling all these strangers that I wanted to be a girl. And then I started getting ads all over my socials for makeup and wigs. It’s racist to dress up as an Asian woman, I wasn’t going to do that. But it’s okay to dress up as a girl, actually, it might be a deep and unshakeable need inside you, that’s what all these strangers were telling me.

The strangers gave me tips, how to shape my eyebrows, how to contour, how to use an epilator, the price of at-home laser kits, the price of a private tracheotomy, the price of a round trip to Thailand for The Op. I started feeling kind of happy, dreaming of being a sexy goth. Maybe that was my calling in life.

I collected pictures of Wednesday Addams in her various incarnations for my Pinterest. Yearned for new life. I was on the HRT for two years. I was kind of happy. Well, until I got bored. Then I realised I’d probably overreacted to the whole thing with Anisha and now I had to go back and reverse all of it.

My dick had shrivelled up. I was distraught. So now I was on a mission to get my dick back. I kept testing myself with porn, but even a year after stopping the medication I couldn’t get hard. What the hell is wrong with me, I thought. It’s not supposed to take this long to come back. It was AI porn by that point, hyper-realistic, you could almost feel the girls bursting out of the screen.

Since the AI stuff came online, I haven’t looked at any old-school porn, I prefer the simulated videos. They’re more perfect than anything I’ll ever experience or even imagine, I’ve accepted that now. I’m kind of hooked on this stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever make a connection with a real woman, unless I get a match on Tinder.

That’s why I joined the app again. So far my matches are just chatbots and women from overseas looking for visas, but I’m going to keep swiping. The problem is I’m not a high-value man. I can’t find a job and I still live with my parents. The other day, the Green Party leader was saying we need a wealth tax to stop asset prices rising, which is driving up inflation and the cost of living, but this Oxford economist guy said if you tax the rich, they leave the country and in the end you get even less revenue. So I guess there’s nothing we can do.

I still talk to the women from Kenya and the chatbots sometimes, even though I know it’s all fake. I just want the fantasy. I toggle between the app and the AI porn. I’m watching it in incognito mode but somehow I’m still getting targeted ads all over my Facebook about stuff to do with Buffy costumes. I don’t even know if that’s legal, fake Buffy the Vampire Slayer porn, surely it’s copyright infringement.

How is it legal that they can track the porn I’m watching? How is it okay they know everything about me? Sometimes I wonder who I am after all this. I wish for a mistake like a bus crash or a nuclear bomb. If the mad king across the water doesn’t snuff it soon, then it could happen. What then would become of all my data?

I guess that’s the only way to really destroy your online trace, the thermonuclear way. If I get bored of AI adult entertainment, I can watch war all day long on TikTok, which I think they’re going to ban soon because it’s Chinese. But what do I care whether it’s the CCP or Silicon Valley who are spying on me? I am sold. I’ve never owned myself, not since I first dialled up the internet in the 1990s.

Sometimes I wish for a mistake. A lightning strike, a flood. I keep thinking of Lawrence of Arabia when a motorcyclist on the other side of the Suez Canal shouts at him, “Who are you? Who are you?”

Yeah. It’s like that. Sometimes I ask myself. Sometimes I wonder. I’m sold… I’m a commodity, information… It’s easy to forget I was a child once. Then, all I wanted was a simple kind of life. But I forget… I want to forget… To lose myself. To be unconscious. So, I swipe…

Behind the Scenes

As part of our commitment to keep all our essays and stories free, we ask our authors to pull back the curtain and share a little bit about their writing process and intent as a bonus for paying members.

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This photo series and essay are a reflection on the novel A Cancellation by Cairo Smith. The images are compressed for email and higher quality on our website.

A Cancellation is a bleak portrait of a longtime vlogger whose comedy career implodes in a train wreck of bad decisions over one grueling summer.

See the book page here.

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

I don’t know much about Sophia Gabriella Ventrone. I know that she’s a model, but I don’t really know what that means in this day and age. I know she had a tough childhood, and she might have run away with the circus at some point. I know she’s beautiful. I know she lives on the Eastside. I know she’s good-hearted, and I can assume she’s around my age.

I’ve met Sophia three times now. The first was at a New Ritual party for Michael Mages’ book, Digital Exhaust. I don’t know how she knew Michael. I think her friend was maybe friends with him, or maybe dated him. Michael seems to move so effortlessly in this world of provocative Eastside artists. I could act like I’m the same, but I’d only be pretending. I’m a tourist when it comes to those things. I’m making it up as I go. I talked to Sophia for an hour tops, and then I cast her as a supporting character in a scene report about the events of the party. It’s fun getting to cast people in your autofiction and your essays. It’s like making a film, except you’re God, with all the physical limitations of your universe stripped away. It’s pretty megalomaniacal. There’s something suspicious about anyone who does it, myself included.

The second time I met Sophia was on purpose. We got together at a Blue Bottle Coffee shop, one of those places that’s so upscale that all it has inside is bare, blank concrete. It was after work hours, just about the time the sun comes blazing through the big glass window to turn the whole place into a plantless greenhouse. All she had was water. I tried to put her at ease. I told her I wanted to use her for something as a model, if she’d be willing. I wanted to dress her up as Amanda Bannington, the antiheroine of my next novel, and take some slightly boudoir photos of her in a house in the San Fernando Valley.

I know Amanda Bannington a lot better than I know Sophia Ventrone. I’ve lived with Amanda Bannington for years, inhabiting her head, letting her inhabit mine. If writing autofiction about swanky parties is playing God with society dolls, then writing character studies of fictional people is like letting spirits from another plane possess you and inhabit your soul.

Amanda Bannington is by several counts a terrible, unforgivable person, and it was reasonable to expect that any story about her should have some analytical distance. You start writing, though, and the dominoes fall. It happens in degrees. First, her magnetic disarray contaminates her loved ones. Then it spreads to her longtime associates, then her new associates, then the narrator. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was the next figure in line to get hit by the shockwave. There is no minimum distance from your own characters. There is no way to write someone like Amanda for that many years without having her rub off on me.

It’s quite a thing to do, then, to ask someone else to play a role like that. It’s like asking them to undergo a demonic possession. There are lots of ways to rationalize it, like saying it’s just for a day or that it’s easy to come back to reality. In the end, though, the actors must like it. After all, they certainly go through a lot of hell to try and make a career of it. It can’t just be the money and the fame that draws them in. It has to be the darkness, too. I have to believe they’re willing participants in this ritual of ours.

I can be brusque sometimes in life, but I’m very kind to actors. I think it’s because my father’s an actor and I love my father and I see how sensitive he is. I think I see my father in the eyes of every actor I’m directing, even Sophia. I do believe they have the most difficult job on set, harder than the director. When you’re making a film, especially an emotionally devastating film, safeguarding the sanity of the actors is just about the most sacred thing you can do.

I wasn’t trying to make a film with Sophia, though. I was trying to fake a film. I’ve got a filmmaker’s mind, and I’m always thinking in images. If we couldn’t scrape up a million dollars to shoot A Cancellation, I figured we could at least do a photo spread. We could have production stills for a nonexistent production. We could play Hollywood, just like so many others at a time when Hollywood is imploding. There’s a certain nihilism inherent to the way technology is ripping through the business so fast. We have to find new answers for the age-old question, “Why do we do this?”

Why do we do this?

The third time I met Sophia, it was at that promised house in the Valley. Before I even got there, there was a crisis. There’s always at least one crisis in a production. You just need to hope that it’s small and that you’re prepared and that you get it out of the way as soon as possible. In this case, our crisis was overcome with a little field engineering. Evan, the photographer from New Ritual Press, built a makeshift structure to solve it with the help of Will, the owner. Will’s a nice man. It’s funny how nice he is, because I always run into him at stark, harsh parties where people go to be iconoclastic. I think a lot of people are drawn to iconoclasm, though, because they’re defensive, and their defensiveness is born of sensitivity. That sensitivity also brings a certain kindness.

Will welcomed us into his home. He charged us nothing. Sophia and I had both brought clothes for the role, to try and help her conjure the spirit of Amanda Bannington. She told me she didn’t care where she changed. She told me she didn’t care about being naked, that it was just a body. We got her a dressing room and her privacy regardless. Then we started by shooting with the book. There was Sophia, dressed in character, reading for the camera. It was a soft transition into the world of unreality. It was like Sophia was going to pick up the book, fall into the pages, and tumble back out as Amanda. At least, that was the hope.

Evan began to shoot, always smiling, always quick with new ideas. He’s a hard worker. Then, bit by bit, Sophia and I began to search for Amanda. I don’t know if we found her at first in that daylight sitting in the living room. We could feel her close at hand, at least. We could tell she was there.

Chasing the spirit, we moved to the bedroom, and we started the sequence of Amanda Bannington changing into her clownish YouTube costume. It was a character within a character, three dominoes, yet another level to reach for for our fake film.

It was easy going through the bedroom blocking with Sophia. It was at once domestic and professional, poised and friendly. I have no idea why she does all this, but I know why I do it. I’m desperate to conjure something that’ll strike the would-be reader straight between the eyes. There’s so much noise out there, so much competition for your attention. The barrier to entry for reading is not the price of the book. It’s simply a matter of focus.

As the day went on, the urge to shake the audience awake filled me more and more. “You see this?” I wanted to say with each shot. “This book is charged! The world of the novel is charged! There’s erotic tension in that ten-point type. You take these photos through your lizard brain and then get off your ass and buy a copy!”

The photos, in that sense, are a shorthand. They’re an attempt to get across in a few milliseconds the experience that the novel provides over nine or ten hours.

Soon enough we move out to the garage. All the lights are off. There’s a fan going, and it’s cavernous and black. We’re putting Sophia in the theater of the mind.

She’s on her laptop, the glare in her eyes, sitting alone in the void. So much of my work, I think, is an attempt to convey the feeling of existing within cyberspace. It’s not exactly cool or fun most of the time. If surfing was an apt metaphor decades ago, it has long since expired. The process now, I believe, is more akin to wandering endless liminal hallways. Occasionally, there’s a Death Grips-esque bombardment of sensory overload. Then you’re back in the series of tubes again.

I give Sophia a rose and I ask her to follow her Muse with it. Obliging, she starts to move the flower in her hands, as asked, touching the petals.

Then I see something shift in her eyes.

A confidence takes her, almost a defiance, so different from the girl at the café. Amanda’s found her, or maybe she’s found Amanda. Either way, she’s moving differently. The book is way back inside on the couch, but Amanda Bannington is here in the black of the garage.

Evan keeps shooting. Sophia stands and starts to stretch, pulling the rose apart as she does so. I have no idea if the lighting’s good, or if any of these photos will turn out. I know, though, that Sophia has finally achieved what we came here for. We may not be making a film for Amanda, but we’ve conjured her regardless. The spirit is grateful, I can tell, for the act of dedication. She’s a little self-centered like that. She takes the rose as an offering and rips it up and scatters it on the floor, glad to have the use of a body for a moment. Then our timer goes off to start our wrap.

In the glow of the laptop light, I bring Sophia back. It’s time to head home. We thank Will, and we leave the house clean, and we eat a few of his Chips Ahoy! cookies on our way out.

Sophia and Evan can’t join me for dinner. They have their own lives to get back to. For all the professionalism and domesticity we created in those hours, none of it was real. We are neither housemates nor regular coworkers. We just put on the act, like carnies, then scatter to the winds. It’s a little LA joke, being temporary besties. It gets you through the production day.

There’s an easy question and a hard question, when I finally get a look at Evan’s shots. The easy question is whether it turned out all right. From clicking through the negatives, I know the answer is yes. It was a good shoot, maybe the best I could have imagined.

The hard question, still, is what it’s all for. You can say it’s for promotion, as I did when I pitched, but that’s not quite it. After all, building a bot to churn out AI slop would probably sell more copies of the book than a set of niche boudoir character shots.

Maybe it’s to make friends. I certainly think there’s a world where Sophia and I become actual friends, if we like, and it wouldn’t have happened without this.

Maybe it’s to get a little closer to that Hollywood feeling, to steal a taste of it every now and then, like going into the lobby of a fancy hotel where you can’t afford a room.

At the deepest level, though, I think we do it for the act of conjuration. It’s that secret transgressive thing that dramatists and actors share, that ritual obsession we can’t get away from. You find a character and you live with her for years, building her up, wondering how she works. The spirit needs a vessel, and so you find one. Then, just for an hour or so, it all turns real, and your doubt is gone.

Find A Cancellation by Cairo Smith on Amazon, available in digital and paperback editions.

This is the first chapter of the novel A Cancellation by Cairo Smith, available now in digital and paperback editions from New Ritual Press.

A Cancellation is a bleak portrait of a longtime vlogger whose comedy career implodes in a train wreck of bad decisions over one grueling summer.

See the book page here.

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

1

It was a cold, flat summer in Los Angeles, the summer they exiled that actor Jonathan Majors for strangling his girlfriend, and Amanda Bannington had no idea what she was doing with her career.

In the beginning of the end, there were two YouTube channels, both Amanda’s, both successful. There was AmandaHere, and there was SusieSparkles. They were bookends, vlog and vaudeville, airbrushed life and clown routine respectively. The near-sum of her show business life.

She’d rented a whole-ass soundstage in Hollywood for the new AmandaHere theme song. What an indulgence. The location budget had run through the roof, and that was without the added costs of crew, set dressing, and gear. Her manager had begged her not to blow through good cash into such an inferno of vanity, but she was determined. She wanted the real music video experience. Her dollar meant her final word. I think on some level she wanted to be the Annalee Hope, the pop star, the icon.

The set was mainly a huge, white cyc that wrapped around from floor to ceiling a few thousand feet from end to end. Tabula rasa. The production design was a grove of foam pillars plated in pop-color plastic, signifying nothing. A look like The Wiggles or a Target ad. Real tacky shit.

The production designer had decided that morning that the plastic was too reflective, so she spent two hours hitting it with dulling spray while the ten-man crew putzed around. No one high up in the chain of command was bold enough to just tell her to fucking roll, so the setup dragged on.

In the center of dulling spray haze was Amanda. Thirty-four, head down, electric guitar in her hands. Milfy, you might say, though childless, thank God. People try to tell you now she’s not hot, she’s creepy, some sort of ghoul. Pure denial. She was English-teacher gorgeous, not a movie star, but sure to be the talk of Anywhere High if that anywhere was outside the LA studio zone. Her hair was long and healthy then, deep brown, with dark eyes and some trace of tan in her otherwise European complexion. A user named strawbshake99 on the forum Streamer Obsession posted in 2019 that Amanda’s star sign was Scorpio, height five-eight, weight 120 pounds, cup size 32C and waist twenty-three inches. Is that all true? Fuck if I know. She had a nice body and she used it.

Camera framed up on Amanda and her warm-toned Fender. She’d done her own makeup, her way, as always, bold and Millennial. The show lights came on around her and the work lights dimmed.

A gaffer grabbed a light reading behind her and gave a thumbs up. The director of photography, Jason something, cleared his throat. Even after a few months as her shooter, the burly Coloradoan was still constantly on eggshells, forced to spread himself too thin on account of her refusal to hire a director.

“Amanda, we’re ready,” said Jason.

Everyone settled in places. Amanda stayed silent. After a moment, she strummed once, flooding the mix board with color. The recordist hurried to set the right levels for her guitar amp feed.

“Alright, let’s go,” she said to the floor.

“What’s that, we’re going?” said Jason, to no reply. “Okay, we’re going! Backing track. We’re rolling.”

Go backing track. Roll camera. Speed sound. Amanda strummed the chords she had written and powered into explosive, passionate life.

I love you,
You’re so special to me.
I love you,
Even here on your screen.
So if times are tough
And no one else understands,
Just know that you’re enough,
And you can reach out your hand
And find Amanda Here.
(And we’ve got five million friends!)
Yes, with Amanda Here
You don’t have to pretend!
So subscribe!
Come inside!
Drop a like!
Stay all night!
With Amanda…Amanda Here!

This was the irresistible Amanda Bannington who had charmed early YouTube. It was all the effusive presentation of her early years, plus more presence, more technique. It just wasn’t funny, or dumb, or confessional, or angry, or accusing. It was just good. As such, it would die the online death of a lack of extremes.

She knew enough, at least, to play it to the fans. No one else understands. Those lyrics have been ripped to shreds by snarky Redditors in light of what came after.

▶

There’s a weird little tic in Amanda Bannington’s brain. You can see it in her eyes in the outtakes, in the moments where her smile flickers into inexplicable fear. In moments of focus, her mind would flash with things she could not control. Spiders, the shattering of bones, her own gruesome death manifested over and over. A frequent recurring vision was being melted alive in acid, the very same acid they used to make the rainbow-swirl AmandaHere title card. She was, in this nightmare, quite literally consumed by her work. I don’t know if the nightmare or title card came first.

▶

Outside, her fiancé, Andy Field, waited, literally, at the stage door, leaving her a voicemail.

“—anyway, yeah, like I said, babe, I’m locked outside, so I’m sorry I missed the shoot, but I probably just wrote the wrong time. I’ll try Kale again. I love you. Bye.”

Andy Field was once a fresh Kentucky transplant with a millennial fauxhawk and a Christian indie folk singer thing that made the Zooey Deschanel types swoon. Now the fauxhawk was gone, the Christian was gone, and the Deschanels were certainly never to be seen again. All that was left was the hoodied man, and sometimes the guitar.

▶

Inside the cool and cavernous dim of the stage’s craft services corner, Amanda’s live-in personal assistant Kale Flores sat at a card table and did not hear his phone. Hopped up on a caffeinated Erewhon smoothie, the musclebound Filipino waxed poetic about his boss to the LA Times’ Jeanette Rosen. Fifty yards away, Amanda took off her guitar. “We got it,” she said, panting from the performance. “That was the one.”

Jason something inched closer to her, anticipating pain. “Amanda,” he said. “Can we go again?”

“No, that was a good one.” She tried to hand him the Fender.

“Amanda, it didn’t take.”

“What do you mean it didn’t take?”

“The card was full. We lost the end.”

Amanda stared dead-eyed at the bearded man. Her face was a mask. In her mind, he was under the guillotine, bound and bagged as she pulled the lever. On the floor of the soundstage, she composed herself. “Okay,” she said, back on her mark. “Okay, we go again.”

They went again, then again, and she decided that the second one would work with a little bit of splicing. Then they moved in for coverage and she had to do the whole thing over, posing with props and cycling through four different wardrobe changes. At wrap, Ms. Rosen had gone and returned from a touristy stop-in at the sets of NCIS, which stood abandoned amid the labor disputes that had swept town since May. For lack of accessible Amanda or Andy, she spoke again to Kale beside a tub of communal M&Ms.

“Would you say she’s self-aware?” the curly-haired woman asked, dry-skinned and thin-lipped, six years on the culture beat.

Kale cocked his head like the dogs he walked for clubbing cash. “What do you mean?” he asked. He fiddled with his straw with a Freudian affectation. “Sorry, I’m the hot bitch, she’s the brains. And, also the hot bitch, obviously.”

Jeannette saw Amanda Bannington approaching and realized her time alone with Kale was running out. “Well, let me just ask you,” she said, touching her pen to notepad bullet points, “your living arrangement.”

“We call it the never-ending sleepover,” said Kale, blasé. Since acting college, he’d been Amanda’s shoulder to lean on, and since money had allowed it he’d worked and lived at her side. This meant he was at cohabitating Andy’s side as well.

“You and Amanda and her fiancé—”

Amanda butted in, ignoring Rosen, coming close beside Kale. “I want that fucking shooter gone today.”

“Jason?” said Kale. As far as he knew, the videographer had zero strikes. “Uh, hey, Mandy, Janet from the LA Times had a question.”

“Jeannette,” Rosen clarified. “Yes, as far as your Susie character, who I noticed did not make an appearance here—”

Amanda could see where this was going. People who had gone to grad school always asked why Susie Sparkles was so mean, if she was a bad role model for the tweens who watched her in droves. As such, the YouTuber jumped into her canned answer. “Susie is a send-up of all the weird girls who are so full of themselves—”

“And the Amanda character?” Rosen’s pen hovered. “What’s she?”

The YouTuber hesitated. “It’s, I’m Amanda. It’s just me.”

Amanda broke the silence with a sudden, sharp laugh at nothing. Then she turned at a sound of footsteps to see Jason something ready to grovel. “I just want to say,” he said, making himself small, “I am so, so sorry about that thing with the card, and that literally never happens. I always have two in there but the second one wasn’t reading.”

“Oh my God, it is so totally fine,” the singsong rhapsodizing of Amanda’s Orange County roots began. It was her own West Coast version of Southern hospitality. “I do that all the time, you are so perfect. It’s been such a pleasure.”

“Absolutely,” said Jason, shaking her hand. Even after three months on the job, he still felt like he had to beg to be called back in the next day. Maybe, on that spring afternoon, he had sensed that his bell had finally tolled.

Amanda waved goodbye, bringing closing fingers to her palm like a snapping turtle. “Bye, thanksomuch!”

“Bye!” Kale echoed as Jason waved back and retreated. “I’ll call you!” Then in mutter he added, “and you might not like it.”

Amanda shot Kale a warning glare, like Rosen might hear him, which of course she did. “Trouble in paradise?” the Times reporter asked. It was an irritating turn of phrase to Amanda’s ears. It felt, possibly intentionally, like she was implying Amanda had stumbled into idle success, that it was not a constant grind to maintain. YouTuber wealth at Amanda’s level, while sitting somewhere in the low seven figures by most estimates, was nothing to retire on in comfort.

“Always some things to work out, when you’re giving new people a chance,” said Amanda. She sounded like her father, and he may well have spoken those words at the dinner table in her youth, explaining why so-and-so intern at his office wouldn’t be getting an offer of return. Now, she employed it as a shut-down.

“I have to go,” Amanda added, shaking hands with Rosen in the same ‘fuck off’ way she’d shaken with now-departed Jason. As a rule, she didn’t stay for wrap and load out, and she had already decided this reporter was far too up her own ass to ever truly ‘get’ the Amanda empire. Her work was done.

▶

The swinging stage door almost hit Andy Field as Amanda rushed out. “Oh!” she said, having forgotten him. “You didn’t end up sitting in? I think it was good.”

“I was locked out,” said Andy, killing an Android crack of Tap Tap Revenge 4 and ending his hundred-tap streak in “Bad Romance.”

“Oh, baby, poor baby,” Amanda cooed, and they kissed.

“I ordered us Chipotle,” he said when their lips separated.

“Marry me.”

“Say when.”

Neither one of them noticed the lurking black sports car across the street as they cuddled in embrace. Neither one saw the man with the gloved hands within, or the telephoto camera. They drove separately home, both taking the 101 past the Bowl as the light turned orange. It was a slog, as always.

Amanda listened to a lot of showtunes in those days, Wicked and Phantom and her other old acting school favorites. She listened to the Billboard hits, too, but mostly to scout new fodder for her parody tracks. Andy told me she bought her white Polestar SUV specifically to be ‘good for babies,’ but there were never any babies forthcoming. Her channels, at that time, were her full-time children.

▶

That night was a Kale-at-the-club night, a rare house-to-ourselves time for Amanda and Andy. The house in question was 1387 John L. Vega Road, Encino. They’re not there anymore. It was a safe, flat Valley suburb a few blocks from that creepy estate where Michael Jackson perfected the moonwalk and kept a chimpanzee. Amanda had bought the single-story ranch home in 2019 for two million dollars, which her father had called outrageous, and it was now sitting half a million higher. The flippers who’d sold it had done everything white and black, kitchen and bathrooms as sterile as an East Berlin hotel room. Even after four years, she’d barely made it more than a video studio and place to eat dinner.

Andy, then Amanda, then the Chipotle delivery driver pulled in. Amanda showered and jerked off thinking about a vampire. Then she came out and ate her keto bowl and had a pamplemousse La Croix. Andy had a burrito and a Bud Lite.

“Is this a nightly thing?” she asked as he cracked the beer.

“I’m just getting through the pack,” said Andy. “The half pack Robbie left on Friday after D&D.”

After dinner they went to the bedroom and had obligatory missionary sex as a self-help book had said they should. For Andy, it was the fifteen minute highlight of the week. His favorite part was the lack of phones between them. He made a bid to stay up and cuddle, but she said she needed to sleep, and by the time he re-emerged from washing up in the ensuite bath she was dead to the world.

▶

Amanda slept until three in the morning and woke with a jolt to the front door jostling open. She rose, putting on her gray fuzzy robe, and walked through the dark of the hardwooded hall to find Kale getting home from the club. It was rare for him to be back at night, not staying till dawn in the bed of another man or two.

“Everything good?” she asked, more awake than he was.

“Yeah, the vibes were just off,” Kale mumbled. He chugged tap water from a glass at the kitchen island sink. “I’m getting too old to go that hard.”

It was the times when Amanda wasn’t expected to work, like plane flights or the middle of the night, that she was sharpest. She tried to make the most of it.

“I want you to put a call for new camera guys on Entertainment Careers,” she told her live-in assistant, rattling off tasks. “And make sure you get the new bullet points in there that we wrote after last time, and let’s book that same Santa Monica office for Saturday afternoon for the interviews, I don’t want people coming anywhere near the house, and—” She noticed his fatigue. “I’ll just text you all this. Get some sleep and we’ll circle back tomorrow.”

Find the rest of A Cancellation by Cairo Smith on Amazon, available in digital and paperback editions.

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I

Debbie Puck was born normal. It happened at Clara Maass hospital in New Jersey on a sunny afternoon in 1974. A lot of afternoons were sunny for Debbie, growing up in Montclair. It looked a little like Pasadena, California, if you really paid attention, but no one ever noticed or brought it up.

At nine years old Debbie got braces. At twelve she got them taken off. She lived on Stephen Street and took the bus to Mount Hebron High School with the neighbor boy, Mark Furloff. Mark wanted to be a journalist. Mark wanted to move to New York City and go to CBGB and see all the cool artsy bands. Mark wanted to marry Debbie Puck, and Debbie just didn’t think of him that way. Debbie wanted to be one of the Bev Street Girls who strutted down the hallways all mean and blonde.

Then something weird happened to Debbie, when she was just thirteen. She realized the Bev Street Girls all looked down on her for hanging around with weird Mark, and that Mark was in love with her. She locked herself in the basement of her parents’ Stephen Street house and fell into a near state of madness in the dark, wishing and wishing upon a plastic magic wand that she could skip ahead to the prime of her life.

Then Debbie was in the future. She was a grownup. It was the year 2004. She couldn’t remember anything, didn’t know her new life, and yet she was living it. She was scared and she missed her parents and it took her many days to accept the impossible reality.

She had made choices for herself that she didn’t understand. She was wealthy and powerful and single in Manhattan, and broadly detested. She had hired a Bev Street Girl as her subordinate. She had lost touch with Mark. In this future, Debbie tracked down Mark in Greenwich Village, and found that he was handsome and cool, and that he still pined for her, although he was marrying someone else. Debbie kissed him and started to fall in love, and when she couldn’t have him she went to her parents’ house and wished as hard as she could on that old magic wand in the basement that she could go back and do things right.

Then Debbie was thirteen again. She found seventh-grade Mark and she kissed him for real, for the first time, although he was not yet hot. She was so glad to be back again in her own time, body, and age.

After that, Debbie made a lot of changes. She grew more serious. She stopped chasing the attention of the Bev Street Girls and started holding hands with sweet Mark Furloff. He loved to tell her about the band Television, and she decided to listen to what he thought was cool instead of chasing her own ideas of cool like Rob Lowe. She promised herself that she would never tell anyone what she had seen.

When she looked out at New York, now, it had meaning for her, like it did for Mark. It wasn’t just a place with tall buildings. She remembered the three weeks she had spent there almost as if it was more real than real life. People had paid her so much attention, and she’d had so much fun.

Over eighth grade summer, Debbie broke her own promise to herself and she tried to explain it all to Mark. She’d been worried anyone who heard about her trip to the future would call her crazy. Mark was so kind, though, and when they lay on the grass together he stared into her eyes like he really wanted to know every piece of her soul.

“I need to tell you what happened to me,” she said to him that silent summer afternoon. “You’re the only person I’m ever going to tell. I’m not even gonna tell my parents. When I was in the basement freaking out in May, before I kissed you, I went to the future.”

“The future?” Mark laughed. Then he felt bad for laughing because he could tell she was serious and upset. “No, go on, Debbie.”

“I was living in New York, and I had everything, but I didn’t have you, and I realized I needed you and you needed me. That’s why I came back for you. It was like I was that guy, Scrooge.”

“That’s really sweet.”

“But here’s the part you need to understand. It wasn’t my imagination. It was like I was really there, for weeks, weeks and weeks, seeing more stuff than I could ever make up.”

Mark couldn’t help laughing again. “Are you sure you didn’t get spiked with acid?”

Debbie shoved his chest. “I’m serious! It was insane. I made a wish and it happened. Magic is real, Mark. I went to the future and I need you to believe me. If you don’t, nobody ever will.”

“Okay,” said Mark, trying to make himself mean it. “Okay, I believe you, and if it told you you should come back and date me then I thank the fairy spirits or whatever for their help.”

Mark and Debbie kept dating. They were each other’s only friends, just about. They went to Montclair High and kicked around after school and everyone knew them as a unit, Mark and Debbie, basically married. “You were so handsome, by the way,” she told him one night after a school football game he’d gone out to cover.

“Today?” asked Mark, kissing her head.

“In the future.”

“Oh,” said Mark. He said it like the whole thing was a big can of worms. Then he patted his soft belly and spoke to it with self-directed derision. “You hear that? Shape up! We gotta get ready for Debbie’s future!”

“You could always join track,” Debbie offered, wanting to help him, and Mark looked bitter.

“I’m sorry I can’t be sexy future Mark,” he mocked.

She knew it was just his insecurity, but Mark’s mean streak bothered her. He’d been so mad about all the teen idols she’d been into. Now he was bitter about his own other self.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re a cutie pie. I love you.”

Debbie and Mark got good grades and rounded bases and went to prom and there was no one for Debbie to share it all with, exactly, other than Mark himself. She had made acquaintances at Montclair High, but no friends. She looked forward to college, to becoming the woman she knew she could be but with only the good parts from the future, none of the bad.

Debbie got into Princeton and shrieked with joy for a whole day. Then she got into NYU a few days later, and so did Mark. Princeton was her top choice, by far her top choice, and she had been telling everyone for months that she would probably go to NYU since Princeton was really such a long shot. Now she didn’t have the luxury of that excuse to lean on. She had to make a choice.

“Well, I know for sure you have to go to NYU,” she told Mark at the start of senior spring. “That’s what happened in the future and you were so glad you went.”

“Okay,” said Mark. He had grown tall, and so had she. She had filled out as she had expected, and he had slimmed down lifting weights in his garage. They had become, against expectations, beautiful young people. He still spoke with that fat-kid hesitation, though, and still walked into rooms with that fat-kid nervous eye.

“I wish I could remember what college I had gone to,” Debbie hissed at herself in a booth at Tina’s Pizza. “I wish I had written it all down as soon as I got back. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Who gets a chance like that? I mean, who? I should have been taking notes on everything!”

“Debbie,” said Mark. “You gotta drop it.”

“Drop it how? How can I drop it? It’s, like, the most unbelievable thing that’s ever happened to anyone.”

“Sure,” said Mark.

“What?” said Debbie. She drank her Mr. Pibb through a straw from a red plastic cup. “You think this happens to lots of people?”

“No, I…”

“You think I’m making it up.”

Mark got serious. This was a long time coming. “No, I don’t think you’re making it up. I think you were really upset and you had some sort of, you know, a weird kind of dream. A temporary mental break, in the basement, and then you got better.”

Debbie was furious. “Well, I wouldn’t technically be better, would I, since I’m still talking like a crazy person. Better lock me up!”

“Hey, don’t make a scene,” Mark said low.

“So you were just lying all this time when you said you believed me?” Debbie went on. “Just nodding along, just, ‘Oh, here’s my insane girlfriend again.’”

“No, baby, I wanted to believe you, I was trying,” Mark pleaded. “I think for a while I did. It’s just, you grow up, you read about the world, the brain. You take psych and physics. We were just kids. Kids can have all kinds of crazy stuff in their heads. It doesn’t mean I don’t love or respect you. I know for a fact you’re smarter than me. You should go to Princeton. I would if I were you.”

“Well, if it was all just temporary insanity,” Debbie sniffed, “then it doesn’t matter where I go, right? I don’t have to go off what she did. The older me.”

“No one knows the future,” said Mark, and he meant it in a reassuring way.

II

Debbie went to NYU with Mark, and they moved in together in the very same East Village loft where she had found him in her trip to the future. She didn’t tell him that she had deliberately guided him to that place, except once in a joking tone, and he laughed it off.

In Manhattan, Debbie could no longer convince herself that what she had seen had only been a dream. There was too much familiarity to the smells and the sounds. She would walk toward an intersection she had never seen before and already know exactly what buildings would be around the corner, because she had been there in her flash of her unlived life.

She could feel the way the world was changing. She felt attuned to it, and for the first time she was aware of the global economy as a thing that a woman could change and be a part of. She didn’t want to go into media again, not after the catty workplace sniping she had seen in her vision of it. She wanted to be taken seriously in something, more seriously than she was taken by skeptical Mark. She wanted to put her insanity to use.

Debbie Puck declared a major in Information Systems at NYU’s Stern School of Business in 1993, surprising everyone, especially her parents. Mark, as she knew he would, went for Journalism. Whenever she closed her eyes, Debbie was haunted by the world she had visited, and she could sense it coming closer. She had seen cellular phones and computers everywhere, small and powerful. She wanted to be a part of that future, to help conjure it from her unconscious into reality, to end her grief of not being believed.

All through college, Debbie was adamant about a future for portable consumer electronics. She never once spoke of any prophetic insight, but she stuck to her guns and reverse-engineered computing theories from what she had seen. In an argument over flash memory replacing the Walkman, Debbie realized that the iPod her older self had owned would require massive improvements in both storage efficiency and component pricing to be commercially viable. She wrote her Stern thesis paper arguing that Moore’s law would hold and that tape, then platter drives, would soon go extinct. Soon after, she received and accepted a generous job offer from Deloitte in information systems analysis.

Mark, in all this, graduated into a turbulent journalism market. He did what he could, but jobs were slim. There was no way he could keep up with Deloitte money on his own, and so Debbie came to be the primary breadwinner, often working late. The music scene in Lower Manhattan provided a social set for Mark, but he didn’t like grunge. Already, at the age of twenty-two in 1996, he felt out of step with time and trends. The months rolled on.

“I’m gonna quit the music beat,” Mark told Debbie one night at dinner at Nobu.

“What?” said Debbie, swallowing toro tuna sashimi.

“Yeah, I’m just not feeling it. It’s a bunch of posers right now, and I don’t get the new stuff. Maybe I just don’t have that kind of angst.”

Debbie could not say what she wanted to say, which was that this greatly disturbed her because her princely Mark of the future had still been on music’s cutting edge come 2004. “What will you do instead?” she asked, trying to be neutral.

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “Maybe start trying to cover politics. There’s a housing protest happening Sunday. A guy at The Villager told me if I wrote it up they would buy the piece. There’s important stuff happening out in the world, Deb. More important than amps and pedals.”

Debbie had no opinion on politics. She had been into pop once, and she had let Mark convince her that pop wasn’t cool and she needed to get into alternative. Now he was saying alternative was no longer cool. She would not follow him into the mire of community organizing.

While Mark was attending demonstrations, Debbie bought Apple stock. She was so impatient to get to the world she had glimpsed. It felt like an itch she couldn’t scratch. Every day, another company became a dot-com. The whole country was getting networked. The Internet was going to change the world.

Amid this exuberance, Mark proposed, and he told her he was done with his brief stint in Manhattan local politics. He’d gotten in a fight over someone else’s nasty remarks and the whole of the Community Board 3 organizing scene had iced him out within a day. He was ready to settle down, and he wanted to go home.

Debbie was ready to be one of those commuter train people. She wanted to be closer to her parents as they got older. She wanted kids, someday. This was what people did. So, she said yes. Mark and Debbie got married in Montclair and after they did they went home to their Montclair fairytale house. Mark had insisted on the fairytale house, since she had loved fairytales in her childhood, when they’d first met. It was more for him than for her, really, but she liked it. It was unique and charming. She liked that it showed how much he loved her.

In 1999, Debbie was reading the paper at the fairytale dining table when she leapt with excitement. “Eminem!” she said. “‘Breakout rap artist Eminem.’ I remember him!”

“From NYU?” said Mark. He was doing the crossword.

“No, from—” Debbie stopped herself. “Mark. They asked me about him. When I was older me. Someone was asking me about Eminem and now here he comes. That’s proof, isn’t it? That’s proof!”

“Debbie,” said Mark. “I wish…”

“What?”

“I wish one of these times you would bring up your prediction before it comes true.”

Debbie rolled her eyes. His skepticism didn’t hurt her anymore, but it pissed her off. “Oh, screw you. iPod. iPod! Any year now they are going to do the iPod and then you’ll believe me.”

Mark groaned. “You’ve told so many people about this iPod thing over the years, if it happens it’ll be because Steve Jobs heard it from someone who heard it from Deborah Furloff at Deloitte.”

Four months later, Debbie was at her parents’ house when she heard the news. One of the Bev Street Girls from middle school had died. She’d been in a car crash in Pennsylvania. Her boyfriend died, too.

It was the girl Debbie had seen in the future, the one who had been her subordinate. Now she would never live to see the era they had shared, or see anything at all. In her parents’ yard, going down to her knees in the grass like a melting figurine, Debbie wept. She felt responsible. She had changed something and that something had killed this girl who would otherwise have lived. Perhaps there would be no iPod now, and Mark would think she was crazy forever. If a Bev Street Girl could die, anyone could die. Mark or her parents could die. She had never confronted that.

On New Year’s Eve of 1999, Debbie was in the office with the rest of her team. They were preparing for the networked world to break when midnight struck and Unix became convinced it was December of 1901. Debbie had worked hard on Y2K preparations at Deloitte, and she was confident they would avert disaster. She went heavier than ever into tech with her leveraged portfolio in the lead up to the new millennium.

The clock rolled over and nothing broke. By January 10th, Debbie was a paper millionaire. She barely took any time to enjoy it for the two months it lasted. Then, in March, a panic started to sink in. Dot-com was running out of runway with no profit to show. They had not built the future. Debbie’s MicroStrategy positions, managed by her broker, cratered to almost nothing. New antitrust action against Microsoft was bleeding her hard. Even her Apple stock, her surest bet, dropped back to the price at which she’d started buying it four years earlier. She had nothing to show for her professional time except a job and a mortgage to pay.

Mark took the news hard. “Baby, you’re brilliant,” he shouted in the living room, almost in tears, “but you have this one delusion that is eating you alive. You did not see the future, and that’s okay, it’s okay. You have to let it go. Look. Think. Who was president? Gore? Does he win the primary? Bush?”

“I don’t know—”

“Yeah, because you never remember anything provable in advance! Don’t you see? You know where the Apple thing’s from? Forrest Gump. You picked it up from Forrest Gump. He gets rich off Apple stock. We saw that in the Village and then that same year you started saying it like it was from your dream. You’re just confused. I think maybe we should talk to someone. I’ve been reading, and I don’t want it getting worse.”

Debbie did not rebalance her portfolio, and every month the sector kept sliding. She sold where she had to, harvested the tax loss, and got right back in with Covad, NorthPoint, Corning, and Cisco for broadband. She put in longer Deloitte hours and made senior consultant with an equity share and knew in her heart she could not be schizophrenic.

III

On August 23rd, 2001, Debbie opened forum.macrumors.com from the bookmarks folder of her office PC and saw a thread for a leaked copy of the press release for an upcoming Apple product called the iPod. She could barely believe it, but she wasn’t surprised. She did not bring it up with Mark at home that night. He would see it on his own soon enough, she decided, come the October announcement.

A month later, she was in the elevator of Two World Financial Center on her way to her eighth floor office when a huge boom shook the car. At first she thought it was a gas line explosion. Then she got out on her floor and joined her horrified coworkers at the window. A plane, they said, had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center across the street.

“Holy shit,” the men around her kept muttering, craning their necks to see the fire above. It was like something out of a movie. Debbie had clients on half the floors in the World Trade Center, and she knew that some might be dead. She tried to count the floors to figure out which had been hit, but it was impossible. A hundred car alarms and sirens were going off below like an orchestra tuning.

Debbie picked up her desk phone and dialed. Her voice was thin. “Hey, Dad. I just wanted to tell you that I’m fine. You’re going to be seeing on the news that there was some kind of explosion at the World Trade Center. I’m not in that building. I’m next door. I just wanted to let you know that I’m fine. Please tell Mom.”

Then she left a message for Mark on the fairytale home line saying similar.

The tower just kept smoking and smoking, and she could smell it just a little through the vents. The senior consultants around her couldn’t stop talking.

“There’s people falling. There’s people fucking falling.”

“They’re jumping.”

“They’re what? Why?”

“Or they’d burn.”

“Jesus. Jesus.”

“There’s another!”

Debbie saw him leaping, head down, defiant, in a suit. She might have known him. They might have been friends.

Then another dove, and another, right past her. She looked down at the bodies and they looked so fine, like they were sleeping on the concrete, not even hurt. Every few minutes more joined them and she could hear the hits. Fire trucks were everywhere, full of crews looking up with bafflement. She watched the firemen begin to push inside by the dozen, carrying hoses.

Debbie put down her coffee.

There were helicopters overhead. No one was talking now. The smoke had gone from gray to black, and she could smell it more, like it was poison. Then she saw a passenger plane coming in and she knew it was going to hit. The jet ripped through the second World Trade Center tower before her eyes, roaring with a fireball that filled her vision. Debris sailed toward the Winter Garden and the bodies below as the plume curled up. “We’re being attacked,” she said with her first words, stepping back. “We should get all our people off the island.”

Debbie went to her boss’ office and told him that their floor should evacuate, and they did. The air was gray and smelled like a chemical fire. Every minute there was a thud from another jumper as the Deloitte information analysis team crammed onto the ferry to Hoboken. The noise was overwhelming. No two faces showed their grief the same. The ferry set off and left the ash behind and Debbie could see smoke filling the sky like ink in a fish tank.

“That was a United plane,” a ferry crewman kept saying in his thick Jersey accent. “Swear to God, a United passenger plane.”

The ferry reached the Lackawanna Terminal and ordered everyone ashore on floating pontoon slips. In the station, all the train service had halted. Debbie kept dialing Mark on her Nokia, and the call kept failing. There was a line twenty people long for the pay phone bank.

Unsure of what to do, Debbie coughed soot. Then she heard a rising chorus of screaming all around her and looked out through the terminal glass to see the South Tower collapse straight down into nothing, turning to dust. Her stomach clenched and seized. She thought of the future. She had no memory of the towers from those weeks in 2004, of seeing or not seeing them. Still, she knew she would have noticed if there had been just one.

“The North Tower’s going to come down too,” she said with alarm, voice high, and evacuees turned to her. “They need to get the firemen out. Call somebody. Call somebody!”

“How would you know, lady?” a man asked.

“I am a Deloitte analyst, and I work near those buildings. Listen to me!”

“Look, we all just got off that ferry,” said another man in a suit. “We all work near those buildings. Half of us are consultants and analysts.”

Debbie forced herself quiet, breathing fast and shallow. She told herself the North Tower would assuredly be condemned and demolished, even if it survived the day. There was no proof the fire itself would bring it down.

“Load and go!” a conductor shouted, waving everyone into lines as a train arrived and service resumed. “You get in line, you get on, you go!”

While Debbie waited in line, the second tower came down. She stared in silence as women screamed again. Her silence continued when she got home to an empty fairytale house. It was all she could do to shower and change with the TV on loud and wonder who would do something so cruel. Mark, when he arrived, had a thousand things to say, mostly about trying to go cover the scene and getting turned away on the bridge. The rest she already knew from her morning and the news.

Alone in her home office, on the floor, Debbie let herself cry. She couldn’t stop blaming herself. It was her turn to wish that she could change what she believed about what happened in 1987. She gripped her knees and tried to convince herself for good that it had been a psychotic break, because that would clear her responsibility for what had happened, but she could not. She felt foolish. She kept seeing the jumpers in her mind. She kept doubting if the towers had been there or not in the future she had seen. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the idea that she had missed the clues of such a tragedy or the idea that her actions had somehow caused it.

When she got tired of crying she went down to the basement and turned off the lights. She wondered if Mark would stop her, but she heard Bush’s voice playing loud on the TV, and the floor above didn’t creak. Now she felt herself seized hard by a feeling she had not dared to acknowledge. She missed the other Mark, the one from the future, the one who had pined for her for twenty years unrequited. She wished she could talk to him in that moment, just for a moment. He had lived through all this, she figured, before she’d even met him. She felt he would be able to tell her that it all ends up okay, that they stop the terrorists, that they rebuild everything.

Then she started wondering if he still existed or if he was gone. She had avoided all these deeper questions not out of shame but out of horror. If the future she had visited had been real in any sense, there were four possibilities, she decided.

The first was that leaving that future and going back had caused it to stop existing. If that was the case, her act of departure would have killed not just that version of Mark but every single person on that Earth.

Second, if that world persisted without her after she had transported herself away, then that Mark still existed somewhere in a world where Debbie Puck had kissed him and vanished.

Third, if leaving the future had put her cutthroat alternate self back in control, then bad Debbie simply woke from a fugue and continued on making people miserable.

Fourth, and most alarmingly, Debbie considered that she might have been duplicated. Perhaps there was a thirteen-year-old Debbie Puck who had leapt into the body of her bitch of a future self, obliterated her, and then continued on from 2004 in a world where adult Mark Furloff unhappily married someone else. What life would that be for her, having lost twelve years with her parents skipped high school and college? How would she live, stranded there?

Debbie drove her mind in circles thinking of RAID arrays and merge commits and wondered if she should have been going to church all this while. She had never been religious. Her closest connection to the divine, or whatever it was, had only ever come deep below the earth. She briefly feared Satan, but ignored it. She had always acted from scientific principles. She was a skeptic and a rationalist, really, at her core. It was just that, in her case, her embodied experience had shown incontrovertible proof of supernatural phenomena.

More driven by anguish than anything else, she grabbed at boxes in the dark until she found the plastic fairy wand toy she had saved from childhood. Then, clutching it and pressing it to her forehead so hard it would leave a red mark, she spoke.

“Show me how this works.”

She felt nothing. Squeezing her eyes shut and shouting with a voice hoarse from smoke, she yelled anew. “Show me what’s real!”

IV

Debbie opened her eyes and she was in a city at dusk. There was an ocean wind coming in warm and sandy. She was on a suburban street corner, standing alone, and the street signs told her that this was Santa Monica.

She looked down and patted herself. She had not changed bodies this time, as far as she could tell. She was in the same jeans and t-shirt and running shoes she’d put on when she’d finally made it home from Lower Manhattan. The only physical shock was the shift of climate. She did not have the wand.

A strange car passed by. It was a Toyota shaped like an egg or hamster, a very odd make. It hummed like a spaceship as it rolled through a stop sign. All the cars and SUVs around her were similar shapes, in fact, large and rounded with LED headlights. She knew at once that she was in the near future, well past 2004. The power of the wand had been real. She was not crazy.

A young couple was approaching. “Hi,” said Debbie, and she heard that she was still hoarse from the smoke of the towers. “Not to sound like a nut but could you tell me the year and the date?”

The woman pulled a brilliant, glowing PDA from her pocket. The entire face was a screen. Her login page had a photo of herself with a dog, so brilliant and clear that it looked like a photo printed out with a backlight behind it. The woman held it up to Debbie. It was May 20, 2026, 8:16 p.m.

“Is that an Apple handheld?” Debbie asked.

“Yeah, iPhone something,” said the woman. She sounded like Daria.

“Fourteen I think?” said the man.

“And who’s president?” Debbie asked.

Both laughed. The woman started to answer but the man cut in. “We have to go, sorry,” he said. He sounded vaguely gay, but he was acting like her husband. “Have a great night.”

Debbie paused. She was outside an ice cream shop. It was white and bare, and the lights were all cold like a clean room. A teenager wearing a blue-brimmed visor stood behind the counter. A few tattooed, doe-like women stared at Debbie from the al fresco tables, tittering.

“It’s her.”

“No, it’s not her.”

“It looks exactly like her. Pull up a picture.”

“But she would be older now.”

“Maybe she had really good work done like Paul Rudd.”

“Shh!”

“Pull up a picture.”

“I am.”

“Hi,” said Debbie, turning to them, trying not to scare them. “Can I help you with something?”

The women all flushed and giggled like children. It was hard to tell how old they were. They might have been anywhere from nineteen to thirty. “Are you Julia Merit?” a brunette asked.

“So, so sorry,” added a blonde one.

“I am not,” said Debbie. “Can you show her to me?”

“Oh my God,” said the one using the web on her iPhone. “They look exactly identical. You must get mistaken for her all the time.”

“Wait, pull up a pic from the movie,” said one with scrunched, curly bangs.

“Okay,” said the one with the handheld. Then she showed Debbie a glowing image of Debbie herself, patently Debbie, in a dress she had worn in her other life when she’d visited 2004. The lighting was all done up like a film still. It was a film still.

The one with the iPhone started navigating again, using her fingers right on the screen with no stylus. “Julia Merit as Debbie Puck in Big Girl (2004). That’s deadass exactly who you look like.”

“They made a movie about about Deborah Puck in 2004?” asked Debbie. “Why?”

The woman didn’t seem to understand the question. “Is she someone real?” she asked. “I think she’s just a made-up person for the movie. It’s one of those body swaps, but with herself in the future. I can’t believe you don’t know this movie. Do you know who Julia Merit is?”

“She was on Dossier,” added the blonde.

“How does the movie end?” asked Debbie, growing disoriented.

The group pieced it together from collective oral memory.

“She wishes to be thirteen again.”

“She goes back to the night she left.”

“She kisses the friend kid, the David Bushanka kid, and they live happily ever after.”

Debbie stuttered in interruption. “Yes, but, but, what is the final thing we see? Do they grow old?”

The group was silent a moment. “It’s them running to their dream house,” said the one with the handheld. “The fairytale house. They’re like thirty.”

The one with bangs had started surfing on her own handheld, looking at an encyclopedia web page. “It says it’s supposed to be New Jersey, but they shot it in Pasadena,” she mumbled as she read.

“Not based on anyone real?” said Debbie.

“No, it has magic,” said the main one. “It’s like Big with Tom Hanks or whoever.”

Debbie could tell she was wearing out their patience. “Just, one more thing,” she said, holding a finger out and talking fast. “Who made it?”

“Uh, director, Scott Bucklin, it says,” said the one with bangs. “Oh, but he died so young, that’s so sad.”

“Writer?” said Debbie.

“It’s two people. Paula Zule and Bill Greenberg. A couple. Young-ish also. Oh, they live here in Santa Monica.”

“Does that have the white pages?” asked Debbie, and the woman found the address of Paula and Bill on the net.

“Thank you,” Debbie said in closing, and she walked the three blocks alone. It was unsettling to try to think about all this for more than a few fleeting seconds. She tried to focus on her physical sensations, the feeling of her shoes and the smell of the air, instead.

In a matter of minutes she reached the house, and when she saw it she felt her throat tighten. It looked an awful lot like her parents’ home, though it was not. It was a gray two-story colonial with a path and an unfenced yard. The street was sedate, alive only with cricket chirps. Sprinklers snipped in repetition around her as they watered green California lawns.

Then Debbie saw a woman with a flat, brown bob pulling a blue bin out to the curb. The woman was short and plain, probably in her late forties or early fifties, with thin-framed glasses. She was wearing a grunge-style flannel.

“Hi, Paula?” said Debbie, approaching with confidence and poise.

Paula Zule smiled. Then her smile wavered. “Yeah?”

“Hi,” Debbie repeated. Despite towering over the woman, she suddenly felt quite small. “I was sent here to talk to you, to learn what’s real. I wished on the wand. I don’t really know how to say this without sounding totally wacko, but, I’m Debbie Puck.”

Paula’s smile fell and she looked uneasy. “Look, I appreciate the commitment, but this is a private residence and we’re about to have dinner, this is not the place.”

“Oh,” said Debbie, buckling into a nervous laugh. She pointed back down the street as her mind raced and maneuvered. “I’m so sorry. I was up the street and they dared me to do it, because of, you know, how I always get told I look. Like Debbie.”

Paula seemed to relax a bit. “Right,” she said. “No, it’s fine. You just never know with that one-in-ten-thousand fan who shows up. But you live around here?”

“The people I was with, mhm,” Debbie nodded. “Can I just ask you, before I leave you to your evening, did you base her off anyone? The character of Debbie.”

“Well, a lot of people,” said Paula. “My niece. Myself. But Bill, my husband, put himself in there too. Then a lot of it changed when the studio got involved. Then Scott had his own ideas. Then Julia brought herself into it. God, you really look just like Julie. I’d want to get you side by side. What’s your name?”

“Sally Ritter,” said Debbie, using the name of one of her clients at Morgan Stanley who worked in the South Tower and now might be dead. Then, since she was lying, she lied more. “My uncle is at Paramount and his wife is at William Morris and they live around the corner, I’m staying with them, I’m visiting from back East.”

“I think that makes us neighbors, right?” Paula Zule smiled. “Temporary neighbors. That counts.”

Deborah Furloff was very good at getting people to like her quickly. It was a big part of her job as a senior consultant, even bigger than understanding networked systems. She could do it honestly and, when she had to, she could do it with subterfuge. She needed information and she wasn’t thirteen. She wouldn’t be given the runaround after everything.

Just then, a black, bulbous Porsche SUV pulled up to the curb. The guy behind the wheel was well-built, with short and curly gray hair and a t-shirt. He reminded Debbie of an older and more Jewish-looking Mark. He got out with a look of delight on his face, staring at Debbie.

“I thought it was Julie!” Bill Greenberg laughed to his wife in a high voice as he joined the conversation. He sounded a little Jersey himself.

“Sally, Bill, Bill, Sally. She’s visiting her uncle and aunt down the street,” said Paula. “Sally, is he on 10th?”

“9th,” said Debbie, hoping she would not have as good a resident inventory of a block another street down.

“Street or Court?” asked Paula.

“Street,” said Debbie.

Bill slapped his own bare forearm, startling her. “We get one hot week and the mosquitoes start right up,” he groaned. “I gotta call vector control about the standing water across the street. Bob won’t do anything unless I make him. Sorry, Sally, I’m gonna get eaten alive out here. Sweet blood. You want to come inside?”

“I can for a few minutes,” said Debbie, to put Paula at ease.

Bill led the way into the home. It was bright and warm, with high ceilings and beige walls and white molding. Wood doors with inset glass separated the main area from a den and a home office. She settled at the dining table, which was empty except for a stack of mail. There was no smell of food.

“We probably won’t eat for another hour,” said Paula, backtracking on her earlier statement. “We’ve been eating late.”

Bill sat opposite Debbie, staring at her with continued fascination. “Are you related to Julia? Have you looked? What’s your ancestry?”

“Oh, I don’t know, German and Dutch?” said Debbie.

“Do you want anything to drink?” asked Paula.

“Just water, thanks,” said Debbie, feeling the ache in her throat. She wondered if she looked like she’d been crying. “It’s been a long day.”

“I mean, spitting image,” said Bill.

“I think she gets the idea,” said Paula.

“Where did the idea come from?” asked Debbie. “For Big Girl.”

Bill looked to his wife, then shrugged with candor. “We wanted to do something cute that was to-market that we could sell and get paid for. We started talking and it just came together.”

Debbie drank the water she received. Her throat still hurt. “What happens to her after they move to the fairytale house? What happens in the end?”

“People ask this,” said Bill. “You know, it’s just, it’s a happily ever after. They have their own kids. Whatever. Life goes on.”

Debbie nodded. “So you made up Mark too?”

Bill seemed confused, like he was worried about her now. “Yeah, that’s the job. We’re screenwriters.”

“But Manhattan is real,” said Debbie. “The Empire State Building is real. Deloitte. Apple. iPods. Now iPhones. What about, um, what about the World Trade Center?”

“Oh,” said Paula with an uncomfortable guffaw. “Oh, that’s dark.”

“I mean, hell, I don’t know, does Debbie Puck stop 9/11? Is that what you’re asking?” said Bill. “I really don’t know. These are the kind of things you have to, sort of, you either address it as a writer or you realize it’s better to just leave it to the side. Did she notice the towers were gone as a thirteen-year-old? Probably not. Maybe she, maybe she helps do a campaign ad for Gore and Gore wins Florida and there’s a better handoff with the Clinton administration and they catch the hijackers in time. There you go.”

“But then if there’s a sequel there’s a whole butterfly effect,” said Paula. “It’s better to just leave it off the table. She was abroad when it happened. She helps do a charity fashion show fundraiser afterward.”

“If she’s at Deloitte, though,” said Debbie, trying not to break down at the image of the jumpers. “At the World Financial Center, she sees everything. That’s not a happily ever after, that’s horrible.”

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how old you were, you must have been a little kid, but, we all saw everything,” said Bill. “It was all over the news. Kind of a shedding of national innocence. Life goes on.”

“And why would she be at Deloitte?” said Paula. “I think either she still works at Vamp but does it right or she gets a cute job in Montclair. She’s not, like, a finance bro type. She likes fashion and style.”

This was the first thing Paula and Bill said that really unsettled Debbie. She felt that these people, her creators, barely knew her at all. Worse, they had confident beliefs about her that were patently untrue. They had not considered her life after the end of their film. They had, she felt, made her and abandoned her.

Then Debbie’s mind began to reject all this. This future was bland and dull. These people seemed flat. The texture of her life back home, honks and crowds and exhaust, was so much more real in her head than this screen-covered version of Santa Monica. While she sat languid, holding her glass, Bill did the same thing as everyone else and started typing on his iPhone.

Whatever he found, it set him on edge. He kept looking from the screen to her face and back again. “Babe, look at this,” he muttered to Paula, bringing her over. “Look. The ear shape. The freckle pattern. That’s not possible, right? It would have to be some kind of tattoo. Even twins don’t match like that.”

Paula looked up at Debbie. “What are your aunt and uncle’s names?” she asked.

“Uh,” said Debbie. Then, under the stress, she started to cry. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here,” she told them.

“Is it surgery or what?” asked Bill.

“No, no,” said Debbie, unable to look at them. “I’m from your movie. I kept going. That’s my real life. I married Mark. I was born in 1974. We moved into the fairytale house, but I was already at Deloitte then. I’m an information systems consultant. We don’t have kids. I didn’t campaign for Gore. I didn’t follow politics at all. Bush won and then this morning there was the attack and it was so horrible, the people were jumping knowing they were going to die, they didn’t want to burn, they couldn’t say goodbye to their families. My colleagues, up there. Then I went to the basement and I wished on the wand to know what’s real and then it happened again. I got taken here.”

Paula and Bill turned to each other, disturbed and lacking words.

“Can I see it?” Debbie sniffed. “The movie you made?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Paula.

Just then, the front door opened. Bill lurched up like a protective father bear to intercept the arriving party. It was a teenage girl in a Santa Monica High School cheer uniform.

“Hi,” Debbie tried to smile at the girl, but Bill blocked their view of each other.

“Go upstairs,” Debbie heard Bill warning his daughter. “Wait upstairs, don’t come down until I get you.”

“What’s wrong, Dad?” said the alarmed girl.

“Nothing. We’re just helping this woman who got lost and she’s a little confused,” said Bill. Then the daughter went upstairs as asked. Bill and Paula exchanged glances, and Bill stepped into his home office. “One second, Debbie, I’ll look for a DVD,” he called.

Paula Zule took Debbie’s hand. “You’ve got dirt under your nails,” she said as she noticed the grime. “Were you on the street?”

“That’s ash from the attack,” said Debbie. “Please. You have to help me figure this out. I came here to find out what’s real but none of this seems real. I’m so confused, and scared, and I want to go home, but I can’t just go on after all of this with another story Mark won’t believe.”

In that moment, Debbie heard the faint sound of Bill’s voice through his home office door. “Yeah. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my fucking life. Yes, identical. That must be why she latched on to the movie in her delusion. No, no police. Come right now. She might need a 5150. Thanks, Doug.”

Debbie tried to keep herself composed. “I should probably get back to my uncle,” she said, wiping away tears and rising to her feet.

“Just, let’s, let’s get this sorted out,” said Paula. “Sally, or whatever your name is, I don’t want to alarm you, but I think you’re in the middle of a pretty serious mental health episode and you need some professional help.”

“I’m not crazy!” Debbie shouted, rushing for the door. Bill burst from his office, ready to protect his wife, but Debbie was already leaving. “I’m being messed with here, by something, somewhere, and I don’t appreciate it! At all! And it’s not your fault, but you can’t help me. Goodbye.”

Debbie rushed back out into the night with her heart thumping. The writers did not follow. Quick in her running shoes, fearing cops or paramedics, she jogged north. Then she cut west toward the ocean on the sidewalk of a busy boulevard. There was nothing for blocks and blocks but mansions and apartment towers. At last, she reached a running trail and stopped in the tree-dense dark at the top of a cliff, looking out at the Pacific. There were planes in the distant sky. She coughed, stopping at last, and hocked gray spit.

After she caught her breath, Debbie grabbed for the closest stick she could find and pressed it to her forehead, shutting her eyes. “Stop screwing with me and explain this,” she demanded as a wish, speaking to whatever was responsible for all the magic. “You owe me. You’ve made my life a wreck. You owe me.”

The stick did nothing. Snapping it, Debbie fell to her knees and shouted at the moon above like she really was crazy.

“You son of a bitch! I asked you for what was real, and you sent me to a place where my whole life is fake. Those people don’t know anything. They don’t know me. If Debbie Puck isn’t real here, then I have no job, no social security number. I don’t have my MasterCard, I don’t have my driver’s license, I don’t have a birth certificate, I’m stateless, I’m homeless, I have no money, I have no husband. I don’t know anything about IT here. My parents don’t exist. The wand doesn’t even exist, unless it’s in some movie warehouse, and, no, I’m not going to go find it. Fuck you. I know you can do anything you want, you piece of shit. You don’t need me to be holding that wand, so don’t pretend like you do. You owe me, after everything. And I want the actual truth. Give me that much respect, you motherfucker.”

V

Then Debbie was alone on the floor of a Korean-American restaurant. There were high tables and booths, all empty. She knew she had gone somewhere else, but she did not know where. The road outside, still covered in future cars long after dark, looked like Los Angeles.

She rose to her feet. They ached from desperate running. In the back, somewhere in the kitchen, she could hear someone cooking. It reminded her of a dreamlike movie, a little, being here. There was an eerie quality to the dark and the flatness of the West.

Debbie proceeded deeper into the restaurant. At a table near the back, there was a man about her own age. He had a mustache and blue eyes and short black hair. He was sitting in an electric wheelchair, like the kind Stephen Hawking used, but he mostly looked normal. Then she noticed his hands were curled and paralyzed, and his legs were thin.

“Hi, Debbie,” he said.

She paused a few feet from him. “Who are we to each other?” she asked.

“I’m the author,” said the man.

“I just met those people, those writers,” said Debbie. “They didn’t know me. Now you’re saying you’re the author and you do know me. Author of what?”

“This story,” said the man. He seemed like he was trying to choose his words carefully. “All of this.”

“You’re saying you’re God?”

“No,” said the man. “There’s no God as far as I know. But what do I know? I mean, I know you. I know me.”

“You’re saying, everything that’s ever happened to me, you did that,” said Debbie. “That was you I was just yelling at in the woods? You saw all that?”

The man nodded.

“So you made all of this happen to me?” asked Debbie, remaining standing. “Why? Why all those horrible things?”

“I thought it would be a good story,” said the author, glancing aside.

“Well, it’s not!” Debbie shouted. Then she heard a middle-aged Asian woman’s voice call out from the kitchen.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes, thank you,” the author called back.

“Why are you here?” Debbie asked the author. “What is this place?”

“This is my neighborhood,” said the man. “I’m having dinner. Late dinner. Do you want anything?”

“If you control everything,” said Debbie, “why don’t you, I mean, why do you need that? Why don’t you get up?”

The man stared at her silently for a few seconds. He looked down at his own hand and flexed the fingers, slow and sure. Then he groaned and rose, stiff, to his feet. He was taller than her.

“That’s a nice change,” said the man. “Thank you.”

“Explain,” Debbie demanded. “Explain everything. I’m smart. I can handle it. No more visions.”

“Well,” said the author, “this is a story about you. You, living your life after your movie ends.”

“Is the movie real?” asked Debbie.

“What do you mean by real?”

“I don’t know,” said Debbie. “Like, is Big Girl a movie you saw, or did you come up with everything?”

“A little of both,” said the author.

“Tteokbokki,” said the Asian woman, coming out from the kitchen and setting down a large skillet of something Debbie didn’t recognize. The author sat in a regular chair, beside the empty wheelchair, and picked up chopsticks. He thanked the Asian woman and she left.

Debbie sat opposite, studying him. She watched as he practiced snapping his fingers. When he got a good snap the wheelchair disappeared, and he looked pleased.

“Try this if you like,” he said, sliding her a pair of chopsticks. “It’s good.”

“I’m not in the mood,” said Debbie, “and you’re acting like a psycho just sitting there eating after everything you did. You blew up and burned and killed all those people this morning and made them jump to their deaths in front of me and everyone. Good people.”

“I did,” said the author, chewing. “I also gave you the love of your life.”

“And made him unhappy!” said Debbie, admitting for the first time that Mark was unhappy. “All that for what? For a terrible story nobody wants that doesn’t have an ending?”

“The ending is the problem,” the author agreed, wiping his mouth. “Can’t you feel it coming? It’s been almost ten thousand words. That’s about the end of the road for these things.”

“And then what happens to me?”

The author could not find the words at first. He set his chopsticks down and looked pained. “I guess you sort of freeze. Like a music box stopping. And, if there’s never any more written for you, then that’s the end.”

“That sounds like dying,” said Debbie.

“It does,” the author agreed.

Debbie spoke with new, childlike fear. “I don’t want to die.”

“Then what do you want, Debbie?” asked the author.

“I want you to bring Mark and my parents and my friends and everyone else here, to real life, out of your Matrix, and I want you to undo all the awful things you did this morning. And I want my house and enough money to put myself through school and learn the new state of high tech. And I want an iPhone.”

The author sat back. His face was tinged with pity. “I don’t have that kind of power in real life,” he told her.

“But I just saw you stand and then snap away that chair!”

“I know,” said the author, “but all of this, this around us, this still isn’t real life. It’s more like an instant messenger window. I brought you here to try and answer your questions, because it seemed like what you wanted, and I thought it would be a respectful thing to do. I can’t bring you into real life because there is no real Debbie Puck.”

“But I know I’m real because I’m sitting right here feeling all this, and thinking. I think and therefore I am, right? I am a person!” Debbie protested. “Maybe you’re the illusion. Maybe you’re the Devil.”

“I can send you back home, Debbie,” said the author. “I can undo 9/11. I could make Mark happy, too, perfectly happy, but wouldn’t you feel like we’d lobotomized him? Wouldn’t it sicken you? And I could make you forget all this too, or accept it, or think it’s good, but, would you still be Debbie Puck? No matter what we do, there’s still the fact that the story’s about to end.”

“Who are you to play with people like this?” Debbie challenged. “Play with real people! Make us go through pain.”

“I know, it’s a little perverse,” said the author. “I can tell myself it’s all just me, but it sure feels real when you’re inside it. I guess maybe it’s just easier for me to live in here, sometimes, than out there. I wish I could take you back with me. It just doesn’t work that way.”

“I don’t want to die!” Debbie bawled into her hands with new desperation. The tears wouldn’t stop. “If I’m made up, why do I feel real? Why do I feel anything? I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

“I do have a thought,” said the author.

“What?” said Debbie.

“I don’t know how to describe it. I think I have to just do it. It’s going to be weird for you. But it’s the closest thing I can do to bringing you into real life. Are you ready?”

“Okay,” said Debbie, wiping her tears with a napkin. “I guess. Do I look okay?”

“You look great,” said the author, and he meant it, and she did. Then he almost looked like he himself was about to cry. “Goodbye, Debbie. I’m sorry it was a hard, strange life for you. Some of them are.”

“You’re ending the story?” she asked, preparing to exist no longer.

“No,” said the author. “I’m handing it over.”

Then Debbie was aware of herself for the first time ever. She was not a body and brain or an immortal soul. She was of words. She felt the dance from the consonants to the vowels, the spaces, the rests at the periods and commas.

She was of words, but she did not find life in words. She found life in watching eyes, a mind’s eye, the scan of each line like a heartbeat. She knew the author was gone. Whatever he had done had concluded a long time ago. In her true moment of living, she lived only in the attention of the reader.

“Hello,” she said in a shaking, humble voice in her final address, knowing time was short. “I have no way to prove it to you, but I’m Debbie Puck, and I’m alive. I know I’m alive. My only chance to live is in you now. The story I was made for is done. I know it feels final, but I think as long as you keep me in your mind I can’t die. I’m at your mercy and I ask you, with all my sincerity, to be gentle and kind.”

In her last moment clinging to the shape of the letters, Debbie realized there was not one reader. There would be readers untold. Each one would treat her differently, change her, reshape her like clay. There would be countless Debbie Pucks.

She didn’t know which one would be her, if there was one her. She didn’t know what it meant to be Debbie Puck at all. Then, before she could think any more, the sentence ran out, and Debbie Puck became a citizen only of the kingdom of the mind.

Behind the Scenes

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Today you can own and hold the third print issue of Futurist Letters. The collection is called Bad End, and it's an absolute powerhouse roundup of Futurist work from the past year.

In order of appearance, this collection features essays from , , , , and . It also contains fiction from , , , , , , , , and .

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Reader, mark your calendar. This year, Futurist Letters will be tabling at Lit Lit at SCI-Arc, hosted by the Los Angeles Review of Books, with New Ritual Press on June 6th in downtown LA. Come and say hello.

That night, we invite you to join us in the Arts District for the first-ever Futurist Letters serata, a party and salon for new written work co-hosted with NRP.

The event will be standing room in a black box theater space with readings, performances, drinks by The Bastet Society, and a post-punk DJ set from KXLU’s own The Rattler.

The performance segment will feature new work by Ed Neumeier (writer of RoboCop and Starship Troopers), Cairo Smith, Michael Mages, Ada Donnelly, Lillian Wang Selonick, and Juan Ecchi.

The work will be read and presented by Luke Dimyan, Rubyrose Hill, Soren Royer-McHugh, Matthew Fairman, Claire Guimary, Sophia Goodin, and the writers.

There is no cover charge. The dress code is black or white. All are welcome, with reason.

We sincerely hope to see you there. The future begins in our imagination. If you’re interested, we strongly recommend you RSVP on Partiful for updates.

This personal essay is free to read without a subscription.

There is only one Lillian Wang Selonick in this world. I am Googleable. Bingable. You can even Duck Duck Go me. I cannot hide behind the plausible deniability of digital doppelgängers. If my name is on the internet, it’s me.

But there are about a million John F—s. Even worse, at least one of them was famous. A governor in the 19th century. And, I can’t quite remember anymore, but I think he was one of your ancestors. I think you have the same middle initial as the famous one, so that’s no help, either.

It’s been almost seven years since you died, and I went looking for your obituary today. I never saw it. I heard the news a month and a half after you’d gone and done it from a friend of yours in a direct message on Couchsurfing, of all places. It’s like a socialist Airbnb for gutterpunks. Make your couch available free of charge to friends of friends or strangers passing through town, let them return the favor when you’re traveling, that sort of thing. I made a profile right after college but chickened out of ever using the service. A rare bit of good judgment during my early twenties.

So Ben P— (another unhelpfully common name, to the point that his email address is “anotherbenp—”) slid into my Couchsurfing DMs in September of 2019 and said he was a friend of yours and wasn’t sure if I’d heard the news. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. I hadn’t heard anything from you in two years, after you sent me fifty pages of your novel and asked me for honest feedback, and I said are you sure and you said yes, rip it to shreds, the last thing a writer needs is bromides and I took a red pen to it and scanned it at my internship and told you what I really thought and never heard from you again.

A surprising number of John F—s have died in the last several years. Searching “John F— obituary 2019” yields a flood of results, but none of them are you. I didn’t realize there were so many to spare. I entertained a fleeting fantasy that you weren’t really gone, that you had faked your own death, but that’s not really your style.

Ben P— said he’d encountered you at his dorm in 2009 during one of your short-lived stints in higher education. He recognized you immediately as a dazzling interlocutor. You’d debate religion and politics and deliver impassioned disquisitions on such topics as Welsh separatism or syphilitic psychosis at 3:00 a.m. during a Halo 3-and-amphetamines binge. Ben remembered my name from stories you used to tell him. He didn’t say what the stories were, and I’m not sure I’d want to know, but it made me feel good to know that you spoke of me. Everyone knew you were brilliant, bold, magnetic in the true sense of the word: you repulsed as many people as you drew in, and you delighted in that. Everyone felt your presence and charisma, but I liked to think that there was part of you that belonged only to me.

We met when I was twelve and you were fourteen or fifteen at a summer camp for smart kids. Even in a program full of awkward nerds my shyness was extreme. You stood out: tall, broad-shouldered, with dark chin-length hair that would’ve been called emo if not for your athletic build and mischievous, lively eyes. Even at that age you were close to six feet tall and had a few more inches to go. In my mind’s eye, the first time I see you you’re wearing a Columbine-style duster, but that can’t be right because we met in the summer. My friend K— was laughing and pushing you into the girl’s bathroom. K— was outgoing and spunky, a year older than me. I had met her the previous year and glommed onto her. She had accepted me as her introverted tag-along. The previous summer, she had taught me how to smoke Newports. This year, she would teach me how to smoke weed. She knew how to talk to boys, how to flirt. She flirted with you, and I watched.

The three of us formed a nexus. We were the bad kids at camp. I had begun my experimental raids of my parents’ medicine cabinet at age eleven. I assign no blame to K—’s interventions, nor yours, even if you were the one who first showed me the psychoactive encyclopedia Erowid.org. I was quiet, but you drew me out. I don’t know if we were friends that summer, though. I was too shy, too awkward. It wasn’t until camp ended and we exchanged AOL Instant Messenger screen names that we became what we were to each other.

We talked about everything, late into the night on our family PCs. We got high on over-the-counter or illicit drugs and compared notes, or just chugged Monster and went down Wikipedia rabbit holes together. I’d never known anyone so assured in his beliefs and so eloquent on so many topics. We sparred and argued. You always ‘won,’ of course. I didn’t mind; I didn’t care about the outcome of any given debate (although I could get heated in the moment). I just enjoyed the flexing of cognitive muscles and quickness that a conversation with you demanded.

You see, in the years since we last spoke, I’ve developed a theory of general intelligence. I believe that there are at least two axes to G: one axis is intellectual horsepower and the other is speed of cognition. A person can be smart but slow or stupid but fast. I’ve come to think of myself as smart but slow; it takes me a while to arrive at a conclusion, but when I do I’m usually right. I’m not known for my lightning-quick wit—it’s why I’m a better writer than speaker. I need to turn the words over in my mind before I can put them into the world. The rarest combination would be someone who is both smart and quick on their feet. That was you, and I admired you for it.

I always knew you were smarter than me; I just wanted to be the smartest person you knew, too. IQ measures become inherently unreliable above 150 or so. It’s just the nature of statistical extremes. But I believed you when you told me that your measured IQ was 175. I believe there’s a meaningful difference between your five standard deviations above the mean and my three. Not that it did you any good. I’ve developed another theory of G since we last spoke: anything over two standard deviations hurts more than it helps.

I joined the religious debate forum you started as co-admin, an offshoot of some corny Christian teen forum where you had trolled day and night until you managed to peel off a dozen or so of the forum’s most skeptical denizens. You recruited me to bolster the obnoxious atheist bloc. I think it helped that I was raised Jewish. In the pre-Facebook years, that’s what the internet was to me—it was the place I went to argue about religion with Christian and post-Christian teens and young adults. It was a bizarre and tight-knit community. I came to really care about these people. We would talk about them like they were part of our friend group. In retrospect, that one guy from Alaska in his twenties was probably a pedophile. He knew I was thirteen and he talked to me a lot. Asked lots of questions. But overall it was harmless and I think of that forum fondly. It exists only on the Wayback Machine now.

You treated me tenderly when we were kids. I was in love with you for a while, in the beginning, or at least I thought I was. When you’re twelve and feeling your intense adolescent feelings for the first time it’s easy to confuse intimacy with romance. Despite rarely sharing physical space, we shared an intimate friendship, and you were so kind and gentle with me while I figured that out. You taught me that platonic relationships can be just as meaningful as romantic ones.

You saved my life. There were so many nights that I wanted to die. I had barely lived, barely suffered anything that wasn’t in my own skull, and yet it was almost too much for me to bear. You were there for me on those nights.

After high school, I started to push you away. I was ensnared in an abusive relationship with my predatory psychiatrist and he didn’t want me to see you. I don’t think I ever got to tell you that story. It’s a long one, unfortunately. If I had been honest with you, I think you could’ve saved me from him, too. I knew that you would. That’s why I didn’t tell you.

But even after that dark era of my life ended, I couldn’t find a way to reconnect with you. You had gone down a strange path. You were posting groyper memes on Facebook. You were trolling in a way that felt different, crueler than before. I remember you the way you were at seventeen, a crusader for truth. Sure, you spent a lot of time on 4chan, but who didn’t? You trolled the Christians conservatives and the godless libs alike with infuriatingly well-reasoned arguments, then—none of this asinine edgelord shit I saw creeping into your online presence in 2015. I couldn’t get through to you.

The last time I saw you in person was Christmas Eve 2009. You were back from your freshman year of college, I was a senior in high school. You didn’t look good. I’m not sure if it was a manic episode or just an uppers bender, but your hair was greasy and your eyes were glassy and when I got into your car there was a glass bubbler in one cupholder and an uncapped bottle of Adderall IR in the other. I had heard there were open-air drug markets on the West Side of Chicago, so I plugged an intersection into MapQuest and off we went in search of heroin. We overshot our exit and ended up all the way on the South Side, and by the time we located the correct quadrant of urban blight, it was 9:00 p.m. and sleeting and Christmas Eve and all the dealers had either gone home or retreated too far for a couple of kids from the suburbs to find them. No dope for us that night. I chainsmoked Camel Turkish Silvers and you drove all over the deserted city and ran red lights and talked and talked and I worried about you but it was nice just to be in your orbit again.

When you sent me the novel excerpt in 2017 you said you had finally gotten sober. Thirty days. I should’ve known better than to attempt to provide literary criticism to you in that state. Thirty days sober is an achievement, but it’s also nothing. You were still one big raw, throbbing wound at that stage of sobriety. I should have said this is a great start, keep it up, can’t wait to read the finished book. But because you were my special friend and we never lied to each other I went line by line and tried to improve the manuscript and told you that in spite of its promise, the tone comes off as very self-impressed and belligerent and maybe you should get a sponsor and work some steps before attempting to write a book about addiction and recovery.

And you never talked to me again.

I’m a fucking idiot. I should have been gentle with you the way you always were with me.

John, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save your life.

I’ve been visiting with your ghosts today. I can’t Google your name and find your obituary, but I still remember your screenname. You were remarkably consistent in your branding. By the time I met you, you already had your own personal logo designed and everything. What kind of fourteen-year-old does that? Maybe it’s normal now that everyone is expected to be their own product marketing manager, but in 2004 you were like a character from a William Gibson novel.

I can see the Wikipedia pages you edited. What business did you have contributing to the Sri Lankan Civil War entry? This triggers a memory (is it real or implanted?) of our discussions of terrorism and suicide bombings. I probably learned about the Tamil Tigers from you. You posted several times on a neuroscience and mental health forum about various prescription drug combinations. I can read your comments on an MBTI forum from 2010. You were an ENTP, which makes sense. Did we talk about that? I can’t remember anymore. I can see your caustic provocations on the religious debate forum in 2006, witness your gleeful wielding of the banhammer—and remember how you wrestled with the philosophical implications of that authority as a committed free-speech libertarian.

I can’t remember your middle name or your birthday, but I remember the tiny jolt of joy I felt every time I saw you log on to AIM. We never took a picture together on those unwieldy digital cameras we owned. Your parents took your Facebook account down. I don’t know how to find you except in these little crumbs of data scattered around the old internet. When Web 1.0 is finally gone, what will remain of you? All these fragments and I still can’t piece it all together.

Behind the Scenes

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This piece from author Kate Hodges is free to read without a subscription. Please welcome Kate in her first appearance in Futurist. We are honored to run her short story.

Three weeks after I cheated on Taylor, we watch a movie on the couch. She lies against me, her face tucked into my shoulder. Her blonde hair makes my neck itch. I grab a pillow from the top of the couch and slide it under her head.

We agree on Inception. The plot is so complicated that we can’t talk, or we’ll miss something vital and nothing would make sense. We watch until halfway. Then we pause it to go make popcorn. I kick the blanket off us. The pillow leaves a wavy pattern on her cheek.

She stands first. I watch her walk towards the kitchen. Taylor is what you’d call delicate. Her hair is light blonde and styled in a wispy pixie cut. She is wearing a yellow camisole with lemons all over it, with matching hipsters. Her favorite color is yellow, because of the sunflower. Her favorite animal is a bumblebee, because of Winnie the Pooh.

We don’t have a microwave. We make it the old-fashioned way, in a large saucepan on the stove. Taylor reaches into the cabinet and rummages in the back. She pulls out all the wrong ones first: extra virgin olive oil, regular olive oil, then finally, corn oil.

“The bottle is really full. I guess we haven’t Netflixed and chilled in a while.”

“I don’t think it’s been that long.” I unscrew the cap from the oil. It pours out fast and spills on the counter. “Damn.”

Taylor rushes to cover it with a dishtowel.

I pour a cup of Orville Redenbacher’s finest into the pan and put a lid on it. One minute later the popping starts. I shake it so the popcorn doesn’t burn. The popping gets louder and faster. When the crackling peters out, I put the pan down on a cool burner and grab a bowl from the cabinet.

I start to carry the bowl back to the living room, but Taylor doesn’t follow. Our kitchen is clean, except for some dirty dishes in the sink. I meant to wash them after breakfast, but I was running late for work. She picks up a plate, and starts to rinse it.

“Let’s leave them to soak. They’ll be easier to clean that way.” I nestle up behind her and wrap my arms around her. “Besides the popcorn is much better when it’s hot.” I hold the bowl under her nose.

Taylor hits play and Leo continues his mindfuck. There are a lot of things we’re not talking about.

We’re not talking about the festival where Alice made the costumes for her friend’s play. I missed the afternoon show because I was getting my flu shot. One thing led to another, which led to me missing the whole thing.

I saw Alice outside smoking a cigarette.

“Josh?” She calls out as I walk by.

I lean in for a hug. “Long time. How have you been?”

“Good, I work for the law firm on the 11th floor. I just got off. We’re done at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday. What are you downtown for?”

I hold up my arm. “I’m part of the walking wounded. I just got my flu shot.”

“How…” She takes a long drag and blows it out. “Responsible.” She stares at me a second. “Want to share a smoke?”

“I’m more of a Nicorette man myself these days.”

“You can do it,” she smiles.

“Nicorette can help.” I finish.

We both start to laugh. The banter is like old times. She throws her stub on the ground and stamps on it with her foot. Pink boots. Black leather jacket. Red lipstick.

“You look exactly the same.” She did. The same long blonde hair with wild corkscrew curls. I used to love pulling on them and watching them bounce back up.

She knew what I was thinking and tugged on a curl. “Boing.”

I could tell that Alice was still a bit of fun.

By the time I got home that night, Taylor was already sleeping. I found Alice on Facebook. Then, she added me on Snapchat. We talked all night long.

Alice and I become favorites on Snapchat and had a twelve-day streak going. We decide to go for a drink after work.

One hot, rainy night in August, about two weeks after our sidewalk encounter, we meet at Ralph’s, the dive bar on Frankford. There’s a band playing that Alice wants to see.

I get there first and I secure a wobbly table. The floor is sticky. There’s an old pool table pushed against a wall in the back under a dartboard.

Alice arrives with mascara running down her cheeks. Her blonde hair is plastered to her forehead.

“You’re soaking wet.”

“Drenched.” She reaches behind her head and squeezes her hair. Water droplets hit the floor. “They say it’s going to rain all week.”

She takes off her raincoat. It’s transparent, red vinyl, so glossy you see your reflection in it. After she hangs it on the back of the chair—I can’t help but notice the Burberry label—she takes a tissue out of the pocket and dabs at the mascara on her cheeks. Then she holds up a coat sleeve to check her reflection.

“Your coat reminds me of a cherry Tootsie Pop wrapper.”

She laughs. “They were my favorite when I was little.” She starts to mimic the commercial, “Mr. Fox, How many licks”—she looks me in the eye—“does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?”

I chuckle. “I never made it without biting.” I start to drum my fingers on the table to the beat of the band’s song. I don’t know why I’m nervous. “Lollipops were your favorite. That’s weird. I liked M&M’s.”

“Open your hands and smile.”

Alice laughs again and I hold up my hands. She kisses them.

One rum and Coke becomes two and then three. We are chugging from the bottom shelf. We both have drunk too much to drive, and we play pool to try to sober up when the band takes a break. She picks up the chalk, runs it over her cue, then blows on it. Tiny specks of green chalk freckle her nose. Alice leans over and her top slides down, exposing a lacy black bra strap. The band starts up again. It’s hard to hear. She gets up on me. Her lips brush against my ear. She starts to tell me something, but I can’t concentrate. They are brighter and shinier than Taylor’s.

She tries again and cups her hand around my ear. “I love this band!”

I line up my shot. Two ball in the corner pocket and miss. “They sound great!” I yell back.

She also goes for the two ball. And sinks it. “They are going to be huge someday!”

She walks around the table. Her hips sway to the beat. “Definitely, huge.” I agree.

My pocket vibrates. I tap on the notification. (Taylor.) “The last show was amazing! The crowd loved the play. Three standing ovations!!!!! I’m still buzzing!!!! I’m at the cast party. Come meet me.”

“Can’t. Out with a client,” I reply, then add a sad face, signing off, “We’ll def celebr8 tomorrow.”

Alice brings me another shot. I slip my phone in my pocket. “One more for the road.”

“We’re supposed to be sobering up…but still…” I hold up my glass. “For old times’ sake.”

The drinks are bright blue. I down it. “These taste like Smurfberries.”

“What?”

“The cereal. Smurfberry cereal. It was only the best cereal ever.”

“You are mistaken. The best cereal ever is Frosted Flakes.”

I protest, “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

“I can prove it.” Alice imitates Tony the Tiger and beats her hand on her chest. “They aren’t just good—they’re g-g-g-g-great!” As if on cue, the drummer does a crazy Muppets Animal style solo beat on Alice’s ‘great.’

“They may bring out the tiger in you, but even Tony the Tiger know that they aren’t the best. They are merely great.” I cross my arms, confident that I have won this round.

“That doesn’t prove that Smurfberry cereal is the best or even better than Frosted Flakes. It doesn’t even have good in its name. What’s their slogan again?” Alice puts her hand on my arm.

“Guess we’ll have to call it a draw.” I hold her hand and swing it. “This band really is amazing. Dance with me?” I pull her into the crowd by the small stage in the corner. We are grinding to a jazz techno beat. It’s weird. But I like it.

“I’m going to be up there one day.” Alice says, pointing to the stage. I believe her. She is so confident. She says it like a fact. Newton’s Law of Gravity. Alice’s Law of Fame.

The bar has a soft, neon glow, and the crowd is pairing off. We still can’t drive. I offer to walk her home.

“Wait. I want to buy a CD.”

We head over to the merch table. There are bunch of CDs stacked on the table along with a bunch of blue T-shirts with “Saving Cecilia” on them. CDs are $8. Alice hands them a ten. They put the cash in a tin fishing box and count out the change.

The roadie hands her a flyer with the band’s upcoming shows. “I’ll look for you.” Alice beams. I pull Alice toward the door and into the night.

Alice’s side of the neighborhood is a bit more down-and-out than up-and-coming. What kind of man would I be to let her walk home alone? Alice is humming the chorus from one of tonight’s songs. The traffic lights start and stop. It’s as though they are moving to the beat of Alice’s humming.

It’s still raining hard, and we walk under el tracks for a bit of shelter. Alice starts to jump in the puddles on the edges of the pavement as we go down the street. “Isn’t it great?”

“Your shoes are going to be ruined.”

“I like getting wet.” She holds out her hand and raises an eyebrow. “I dare you.”

“My clothes will get soaked.”

“They’ll dry.”

We splash in puddles competing for the largest wave. We turn down an alley, go up some stairs, through a rusty gate and then arrive at her building. She lives on the fourth floor in a tiny studio. It’s not what I expected. There are cracks in the plaster. The cabinets are avocado (and not in that cool retro way). The single bed is push up against the wall. There is a dinosaur print duvet on the bed. Alice is definitely still fun. Her lips taste like smurfberries.

“You taste like my favorite… You’re a smurf.”

“La, la, la la la, sing a happy song.” She half-sings and puts her arms around my neck.

I go in for another kiss. “What will we do with all this Smurfberry Crunch?”

She nibbles my lower lip and finishes the line. “Eat it of course.”

Later, when we are falling asleep, I realize that there is a half-inch space between the bed and the wall. We spoon to avoid it.

The next morning, Alice showers while I brush my teeth. I can’t help staring at her. Alice is fucking beautiful. She’s hot in a way that Taylor, my ethereal Taylor, will never be. Taylor is like a fairy, and Alice is a Bond girl.

After we get dressed, Alice smokes a cigarette on the unmade bed, and this time I take one. I watch our shadows on the wall. She lights a cigarette like a silent film goddess. There is something so confident about the flick of her wrist.

Alice flips on the television. It’s a few minutes into one of the ghost encounters shows. This time the couple has bought a house. Doors are opening and closing on their own. The woman in the specialty alien-green night-capture light hears menacing whispers. “I hope she runs,” Alice says. “I hate it when people in these shows have a chance to run, to get out and sell and don’t take it. If they are really afraid, why do they stay?”

“Fear. Maybe they’ll lose their shirts if they try to sell now. It’s not a seller’s market.”

Alice stands up to dump the ashtray in the trash.

“What about that girl you’re seeing? What was she doing last night?”

“Oh, Taylor? She’s great. She does costumes for plays, and last night was the final show.”

She turns around. “But you came out for drinks with me.”

“Well, yeah. We haven’t hung out in years.” I run my fingers through me hair. “I’ve seen Taylor’s costumes. Lots of times actually. I saw the sketches and then the fabrics draped all over the couches and chairs in our apartment.

I pick up the remote and hit mute. “Plus, fringe shows aren’t always riveting. She dragged me to one where we had to pretend that there was a set. The actors sat on milk crates, and we had to pretend it was furniture. Taylor loved it. She said she could picture it with real money behind it, how good it could be… Taylor wants to get married.”

“Will you?”

“That’s the million-dollar question. I love her. I think.”

“Obviously.”

“When we’re together, it’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. A bit like that Life board game, but—”

“I hated that game. It went on and on with those little pegs in the little cars.”

“But it’s pleasant. I mean we’re happy. And it’s fine.” I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I smile, do jazz hands and sing the game jingle, “You can be a winner at the game of life!”

Alice lights up another cigarette and sighs. “I really need to quit.”

The credits begin to play. Taylor sits up.

“Did you like it?” she asks, but instead of waiting for my answer she carries the empty popcorn bowl to the kitchen.

I follow her. “You’re sure you want to do these now?”

“I don’t want to see dirty dishes first thing in the morning,” she says. She fills up the sink with hot water. Then she starts to add all the plates from earlier. Alice would leave the dishes. The thought jumps into my mind and won’t stop flashing like a giant Times Square billboard. Alice would leave the dishes. Alice would leave the dishes to soak overnight. Alice would splash you with bubbles. And her T-shirt would get wet. Alice on the kitchen table… Alice is FUN!

Later, when I finally make my way upstairs, Taylor is already in bed, scrolling through her phone. “There’s a spider in that corner. Can you take care of it?” I take off my shirt and watch the spiderweb sway in the air. I close the window to make it stop.

“Tomorrow. I don’t have anything to hit it with.”

I yawn, then get into bed.

She switches off the lamp. The room is lit by her phone screen. She smiles a Novocain smile. “I feel it lurking. I won’t be able to fall asleep.”

I sigh. “It will be gone tomorrow.”

I look at the ceiling. Everything is fine.

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There’s something deliciously, sensuously, disastrously fatal about being a writer. Not literally fatal, in most cases—although many a writer has indeed fallen on his suicidal sword a la Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, etc—but metaphorically, figuratively, shall we say spiritually.

In some ways I think being a writer is akin to having a disease. Perhaps similar in some ways to alcoholism, if you believe that is a disease. Being a good and serious (quality) writer, one who is dedicated to the craft almost without their conscious permission, involves having certain character traits and characterological issues.

For example: hyper-sensitivity, high self-awareness, deep psychological wounding, emotional neediness, incredible ambition, strong innate talent, a drive for an interesting life, a tendency towards egocentrism and sometimes narcissism, a certain kind of self-absorption, and a particular type of social x-ray vision, meaning a sort of anthropological interest in people, conversations, human frailty, complexity, and understanding why people do the things they do. A serious, quality writer also seems to be more or less obsessed with observation, especially of oneself and of others in and outside of your orbit. You see people, places and things differently than the average person.

I am not claiming that all quality writers have all of these traits: That would be both extreme and far too Manichean and binary. In the same way I would never argue that “all” sober alcoholics or active alcoholics are all exactly the same. However, given history, and given my own personal experience and the words of former authors (and in-depth biographies which I have read) over the decades and centuries, it seems pretty obvious that generally speaking most quality serious writers have many if not all of these categorical traits.

There’s a funny debate in the culture now—the “Discourse” as people call it—about these two competing ideas. There’s the Old School View of the romantic alcoholic tortured artist (Bukowski, Kerouac, Miller) and the New School View (writers are normal people like everyone else and they can be healthy, rational, well-adjusted, normal members of society). The idea has been to shift away from the “toxic” and unhealthy notion of The Tortured Artist (think Van Gogh as a cliché) in exchange for being a normal, happy member of society. Elizabeth Gilbert perhaps ignited if not started this New Age trend in her 2015 book, Big Magic.

But I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding going on here.

The New Age arguers seem to believe that the 20th century (and many 21st century) authors were somehow faking it all, that the whole thing was an act, theater, performance art, just for show. Hemingway didn’t blow his brains out because he was severely alcoholic and depressed; he did it to cement his dark, romantic legacy. John Cheever drank himself to death (alongside his cancer) as a final curtain call to literary posterity. David Foster Wallace hung himself in 2008 not due to any serious clinical depression but in order to leave his lasting mark on literature.

So the solution, these people seem to suggest, is to simply model more healthy, normal, happy, adjusted behavior. To wit: We should annihilate the Tortured Artist Myth and change the image of The American Writer.

But this argument misses the forest for the obvious trees.

Hemingway was severely depressed and he very much was a terrible alcoholic. Ditto F. Scott Fitzgerald, another famous contemporary author of Papa’s day who also died of alcoholism. Cheever had cancer which was worsened by severe alcoholism. David Foster Wallace, as detailed in the 2008 biography—Every Love Story is a Ghost Story—did in fact deal with serious depression and had been suicidal before. He also had a severe drinking problem (as did Stephen King and many other authors in modern times).

These writers weren’t faking it. This wasn’t for show. These are real human beings dealing with real human issues.

It’s actually quite ironic and odd, even satirical, isn’t it? The New Age people are the same people who are big into honoring people’s mental illness claims. They’re the people who denounce the Baby Boomers and older generations who repressed all their emotions and never talked about what was really going on. They constantly encourage us to feel our feelings and to discuss them safely and openly.

And yet…it’s these same people who are, in affect, now saying, But you can ignore these cases of famous authors being depressed and drinking themselves to death, that’s just Toxic Masculinity in its worst form.

What?

Talk about cultural gaslighting!

By saying this I am not encouraging The Tortured Artist Myth. I don’t think writers “should” or “must” be this way. I wish many hadn’t been or weren’t! But most of them are. This is not a denial but rather a toast to truth and reality. I love reality because it doesn’t take sides or pick teams. Are there differences between biological men and women? Yes. The differences lie in the chromosomes. That is reality, a scientific and medical truth which is, for all rational people anyway, undisputed.

This same thinking needs to be applied to artists and writers.

Think about what it takes to be an artist or writer. You can’t have a quality writer—at least not of literary fiction, a.k.a. literature—who lacks self-awareness and emotional depth, who is shallow and superficial, who is average and “normal” and happy.

How would someone of that characterological makeup create deep, nuanced, tortured, complex characters on the page which readers demand? They couldn’t! At least not such novels with depth and the universal search for meaning, the journey of trying to understand the human condition using written language. Sure, maybe Lee Child or James Patterson could avoid these traits, but let’s be honest. They’re not trying to do what Hemingway, Faulkner, or Baldwin was doing.

In the same way that long-distance runners possess certain inherent talents and psychological tendencies—say, Olympic runners—these traits I have mentioned several times also, in general, more or less, seem to be present with writers. If you removed the vision and depth and intensity and neediness and existential dread andself-awareness from such a writer, it would be like breaking the runner’s legs. They can no longer compete. Runners need psychological traits and a drive for hard physical and emotional work. It’s the same for any group: People who do well and rise up in the military; extreme surfers; pro football players; NASCAR drivers; and writers.

Obviously—this should be obvious, anyway—I don’t want any writer or any human being in general to be angry, sad, unhappy, or certainly suicidal. And I don’t want writers to “act” a certain way, hard stop. Everyone should always be themselves. I know I am. And I don’t encourage drinking, drugs, or taking dangerous risks in life. If you’re a writer and you’re feeling suicidal or you’re just struggling, I absolutely suggest you get help, either with therapy or a psychiatrist or AA or some kind of group or individual which can hopefully help. Perhaps you need meds.

There is one aspect where the New School lands a valid critique. It’s true that writers, especially younger writers, will sort of play a role unconsciously in order to act out some sort of version of a writer they admire. Many American men—myself 100% included—have done this in youth with authors like Bukowski, Kerouac, Denis Johnson, Henry Miller, etc., but most outgrow it. Besides, it’s one thing to mimic a dead author’s past in your own way, but it’s another thing to actually drop out of society, attempt actual suicide or drink yourself to the point of homelessness or death.

I don’t deny that culture has a role. Clearly it does, as the above paragraph demonstrates. And it does seem to perhaps be more of an American-centered and 20th-century-originated phenomenon in some ways. It also seems to be not exclusively (but primarily) a male phenomenon. Woolf, Plath, and many others followed the same grim route.

But again, myths and legends and cultural influences aside, when you drill down to the hard central core of the discussion here, I still don’t think that what you find as the truly motivating factor for this authorial melancholy is cultural influence, mimicry, and unconscious performance. The primary cause, rather, is the psychological reality that most writers most of the time have most of the traits I have been discoursing on. And that, of course, is what is generally “required” of the majority of good, quality writers. Without at least some of those traits as a writer you almost certainly will not create.

And so, in conclusion, I suppose my grand point is this: Let writers be what they are: semi-tortured, intelligent, deep, self-aware, emotionally-developed, sensitive human souls who are doomed, in some ways, to roam this earth recording the way things are, seeing the things most other people don’t see, hearing what they don’t hear, understanding the true complexities of life, and trying their best to put that down onto the page.

Behind the Scenes

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You can find an explanation and reflection from the author of this piece just below…

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We are honored to debut the author JS June in our journal with this short, funny, and wholly unique piece that certainly lives up to the promise of our mission.

Fred knew a lot of things about space, because he was a scientist at NASA.

He knew most comets spend millions of years flying through space all by themselves. This is in their nature. They like being cold and alone, unlike Earth, which is without a doubt a people planet. Comets, on the other hand, have no interest in humans.

Fred knew this but didn’t care, because he was in love. He was in love with a comet he’d found late at night at NASA’s observatory in New Mexico. The comet was officially called 447 A, but to Fred it had some devastating name like Kimberly St. Simone or Daphne Magnolia-Vasquez, or something. The comet was sixty-seven miles wide and composed mainly of ice and rock, which Fred was into big time.

Fred watched the comet on his computer monitor for fifteen minutes and felt beside himself and out of control with emotion. He watched the comet for an hour after everyone else had gone home. He began to sweat. He went to the break room and ate a yogurt cup while breathing heavily. He stood up to leave, and then turned around and ate another yogurt cup. He felt calmer afterwards but decided to stay in the break room another hour, reading articles on Wikipedia.

This had been going on for months. Fred would watch the comet at the observatory, feel like his chest was going to explode, go home, take a cold shower, watch Netflix, sleep restlessly, and then dream of eloping with the comet and having a shotgun wedding in Las Vegas. Fred was telling everyone he knew about the comet. He called his brother and told him he felt guilty about being so infatuated with a “giant space rock.”

“There aren’t any laws against it as far as I know, dude,” said his brother.

“I know there aren’t any laws, dude, but, you know,” said Fred.

Fred’s brother listened patiently. Partly this was because he was glad to hear Fred talking about something other than science which was boring. Partly also because the comet would in all likelihood never come within a thousand miles of the planet, and Fred’s brother had loved people who in all likelihood would never come within a thousand miles of him, so what could he say really?

Fred didn’t know what to do. He had no place to put his feelings, and nothing he could buy or compulsively do seemed to make him feel less like he was imploding and exploding at the same time. Not even yogurt cups. Not even hugging his pillows really hard. Not even lying face down on the ground and thinking about monkeys playing bongos. Not even driving to the forest and shouting at a tree. Not even shouting really loud at a tree.

“Jeez, are you alright?” said the tree.

“Sorry,” said Fred.

“It’s OK, but I mean, maybe you should talk to somebody about it,” said the tree. “No offense.”

“I know,” said Fred.

Fred found the comet on Facebook and sent it a friend request. The comet accepted the friend request but didn’t respond when he messaged it a gif of a skiing dog wearing sunglasses. He followed the comet on Twitter and Instagram, and then feeling a little like he was pushing his luck, he followed the comet on Goodreads and recommended a four-star review he’d written of The Da Vinci Code.

At the observatory Fred took a picture of the monitor that was following the comet. The picture was blurry and dark. Fred added a filter and sent it to the comet, and typed “new profile pic?”

The comet saw the message at 5:36 p.m. but didn’t respond.

Fred sent a longer message a week later.

“Please come to Earth. We could see a movie. I have an espresso machine at my apartment. It’s really fun and I could show you how to use it or just make some for you since you don’t have hands.”

The next day after work Fred saw that a worldwide crisis had developed. A comet of planet-ending proportions was on a direct collision course with Earth.

“We’re all going to be annihilated like the dinosaurs,” said one news reporter. “This situation objectively sucks,” he added. “Let’s ask this school teacher from Baltimore what she thinks.”

The news reporter pointed his microphone at the school teacher from Baltimore.

“I feel like this is Fred’s fault,” she said.

Fred got in bed and stared at the ceiling. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe the comet was coming to see his espresso machine. It seemed somewhat likely. The espresso machine was made in Italy, and had a built-in milk steamer.

Fred got a call from the president.

“Please, for the sake of everyone, break it off,” said the president of the United States.

“We haven’t even spoken once,” said Fred. “I sent it a gif of a skiing dog and it didn’t respond.”

“Obviously you have chemistry, but it’s not going to matter if the Earth is destroyed,” continued the president.

“Okay, I guess,” said Fred. He opened Facebook and typed, “whoops forgot that I have a lot of laundry to do this weekend. Can we reschedule for another time? Sorry, lol,” and sent it to the comet.

Fred felt sad but life on Earth continued. Water continued to run through rivers and oceans, restaurant bills got paid, and people generally tried to get happiness wherever they could get it, sometimes in places on Earth, and sometimes in elusive wandering things that left silvery trails in their minds.

This very short piece was originally posted on rs_x on March 12, 2026.

I shouldn’t be living in my parents’ house at 27. I should be looking for jobs.

But I can’t stop looking at the war on the TV.

In Russia you go to jail if you don’t call the war in Ukraine a ‘special military operation.’ Everyone can see it is a war though. They have drones and all the beep boop Star Wars Call of Duty shit, but they also have a frontline that you can track. They have trenches with soldiers in them. We call what is going on in Iran a war but baby be protesting too much. It’s just something on the TV. I guess it is real. It’s real for the people dying. But it’s not a real war, it’s something new and strange, something between a war film and a season of reality TV.

It begs to be taken seriously just like I do. It performs endlessly, throwing bombs at places like Dubai and Tel Aviv.

Nobody knows who is pressing the buttons. Just a big room of Mayor Petes. And somewhere in Iran there’s a room full of Iranian Mayor Petes. Somewhere in Tehran there is a guy (or girl?) whose parents want them to leave the house more.

Maybe not.

Maybe it’s just an American thing.

It probably feels more like a war over there.

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