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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Behind the Scenes

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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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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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Our prior planned discussion of Star Wars Episode IX: Duel of the Fates by Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow, and Alex Doucette has been indefinitely postponed. Apologies to all who were looking forward to the episode.

This piece is free to read without a subscription. It is a review of the novel Berserker Club by . This piece was commissioned by Futurist Letters as part of our initiative to provide more critical coverage of alt lit.

Berserker Club is a novella about metamorphoses. The TL;DR of it is, a bunch of freaks in a compound plot against the government but end up turning on each other, not without the aid of a sci-fi serum that turns them into Jungian hell golems. It’s kind of like Monster High, if you’ve seen that…

Okay, it’s not really like Monster High. But it is about metamorphoses. Not the classic Ovidian kind or the Kafkaesque, existential kind, but something messier. Confusing. The very discombobulation of the book’s characters, transmogrified by the powerful Berserker Juice into archetypes of their own psychic innards, is reflected in the reader’s own disorientation, a reaction to the sensory assault and repeated shock which Osborne’s book liberally metes out to us. It’s a disorientation which, I have to admit, I’ve grown unaccustomed to. There was a time, when I was in my halcyon era, that I would have lapped up Berserker Club like a vampire dog hungry for blood. Body horror was my bread and butter. I loved a good shunting;^[1] The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was just a Tuesday. I’m different now, and at times as I read this exploitation drunken dream, I had to sigh out loud, ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ Literally, I mean—you’ll know what I’m talking about when you read the opening scene’s intestinal… no… I won’t even describe it…

Whether or not Berserker Club pushed my buttons, though, matters little. The author knows what he’s doing, and detonates the payload with severe accuracy. The work may not win with timid men like me, but for those who can still sit through Ichi the Killer (2001) or Tokyo Gore Police (2008) without having to contact an AI therapist afterwards, Berserker will be nothing less than a curl-up comfort read. That said, I’d wager the novella’s central themes are strong enough to intrigue those who are a bit less au fait with shlock and dismemberment, and for those who appreciate a well-paced plot regardless of the subject it’s likely to entertain.

Stylistically, Osborne is taut, cinematic, at times pulpy. His world draws on video games, memes, country music, conspiracy theories and a syncretic gumbo of mythology, all the while set in a scorched and vivid southwestern Oklahoma where the book’s cast of separatist militiamen are secretly encamped. A chief influence is Tokusatsu, a genre of Japanese film we might best describe as Power Rangers having a manic episode.

There are shades of Waco, Ruby Ridge and McVeigh in this underworld of radicals planning a terrorist insurrection, but the exact lineaments of the characters’ extremism are never spelled out. Osborne is thick into the action before we get a chance to ask any questions, and the premise is, anyway, a vehicle for the exploration of a timeless quandary about the contradictory powers of narrative.

Indeed, Osborne’s motley cast of extremists are portrayed as a collection of people who have brought themselves to a dark place by telling themselves the wrong stories in the wrong ways. Their terror plan is borne of a desire ‘to control narrative, to defeat death, maybe to conquer the world,’ as confesses its mastermind, their leader Whitmer. There is another vision, another possibility for storytelling, however, which the author allows us to glimpse—one grown organically from ‘the soul connections of family and friends’ rather than technologised control-freakery.

This vision is expressed in several vignettes: it is described in one of the camp member’s reminiscences of childhood, it is explained in the sermonising of Native American animal spirits, and it plays out in the dreams of one especially ambitious jackrabbit determined to revenge himself on human beings. Berserker dramatises a war between what Osborne describes as the ‘louder…weaponized stories’ of modernity and these deeper ‘soul connections’. This struggle animates the book—an apocalypse in the true sense of revelation, as its guts and gore slide away and leave us with a stunned sense of shock at modern men’s foolish need for control.

The mutations Osborne narrates play out our culture’s anxieties; among these warped butterflyings, one of the novella’s most arresting visions is that of a mutant monster which the psycho militia member Jody becomes—a kind of fast-flickering TikTok scroll of a horror, phasing in and out of different fixed forms in a rapid jump-cut sequence of undiscipline. After taking the serum, Berserker Club’s characters become grotesqueries of what they were in life, and Jody, who had been a conspiracy theory-obsessed doomscroller, mutates into a nightmare embodiment of the fragmented and frenetic style of attention that the contemporary web induces.

“Depending on what’s going on deep down inside of them, well, that’s the story they become,” Whitmer explains, he the demented toxicologist behind the so-called Berserker Juice. Osborne describes how Jody “had become a kind of shifting emergence. Where armor and spikes were one second, there would be a lion’s face or a katana or a series of crystals the next.” When the monster is described as a ‘shifting mass of Story’, the word takes on the connotation of Facebook and Instagram’s so-called ‘Stories’. It’s in the battle between this hobgoblin of hyperlinked consciousness and another suprabeing—the young man Luke who is reborn by the agency of animal spirits from the forest as the ‘Revenant’—that a cosmic conflict between different kinds of stories is bloodily played out. In reply to Jody’s ravings, the Revenant rebukes him, ‘that isn’t a story’. We might well agree: can the dissonant algo-rhythms of the internet really be understood in terms of story? In the battle between a young man transformed into a spirit of vengeance by ancestral nature deities and the frenzied “shifting mass” of “the Jody creature,” Osborne explores the collision of the unfinished and disordered jumble of the internet with humanity’s oldest traditions of storytelling. Indeed, Luke, now “the Revenant,” would know what real, deep stories are about. As the Crow Spirit who enacts his change of form explains:

All men are born in the image of the Spirit…and so they carry a sliver of Spirit within. But all men are also born of the Demiurge, and that shadow travels with them. So anyone who drinks Whitmer’s Juice becomes an archetype of man’s own making. Not a creature of the forest, not a true being of the Story…just a hollow mutation, starving for control, violence, and violation.

It is difficult not to hear the echo of ‘White Man’ in the name ‘Whitmer’ and as the “balance of the land” cracks—is rent asunder—in Osborne’s novella, the anxious haunting of American settler society is animated as a Grand Guignol battle between mutants engineered by a madman in a bunker and the animal spirits of the forest.

The Revenant’s battle with the shifting mass of story known as the “Jody creature” is one among the book’s several meditations on the power and perils of narrative. In Berserker’s most slickly unpleasant transformation, Osborne examines sexuality and power and their links with the human desire for narrative. This metamorphosis sees Miller, an undercover FBI agent obsessed with online catfishes, get turned into the “Semen Demon,” an insatiable explosion of ejaculate desperate for sex. Determined to fuck any and everyone in sight, the Semen Demon is a coagulation of Miller’s worldly desires, the story of his life turned up to eleven. Just as the phantasmatic conspiracy theorising of Jody’s life precursored his becoming a living infinity scroll, the undercover agent’s addiction to online love-chimeras seeds his rebirth as an angry sex god, a parody of the unproductive fetish-sexuality of the internet, a creature of porn and transnational romance scams. The white demon’s sexuality is only violent, only about control. The semen demon is Osborne’s Goya painting of modern tech’s phallocracy, its pure Will to Power.

Amidst all this, the author mirths about our oversaturated, cannibalising mediasphere with its relentless reboots, franchises and spin-offs: to destroy the cum god, the character Girard pours Berserker Juice into Miller’s severed pinky finger. “There’s one thing that will kill a Story faster than you can imagine,” he says. “Sequels.” So Osborne riffs on the way stories that become detached from nature, from soul connections, are not only evil but boring. They lose whatever enchantment they might have had, becoming mere copies, heartless spectacles in the age of mechanical reproduction. “That’s my sequel?…It doesn’t even look like me,” the Semen Demon protests. Shape without form, the sequel has only a “surface resemblance” to the original, Girard explains. As stories go through the churn of commercial reproduction, they lose their spirit, their substance.

At a deeper level, Berserker Club plays out the conflict between human creative hubris and the transcendent: on the one side there is Whitmer with his power juice, and on the other that stream of story which is the humming of nature itself. Like Shiva dancing the universe into being, reality is at base a game, a kind of story, in Osborne’s vision. Thus in one scene two siblings are described as playing an ‘infinite game…until the end of time’, one not reducible to the human narratives, those stories we create in the effort to make sense of and control life. Rather, we are played by the infinite cosmic game, rather than mastering it—we have to ‘let it be’, and ‘ride that current’, Osborne suggests. Thus in its gory interrogation of this theme, Berserker Club must stand as a tale for our times: when we walk towards the brink of artificial superintelligence, what argument do we have against the transhumanists unless we stake our faith in the power of a story which we humans do not tell, program or compute, but which sings itself through us?

Osborne’s philosophy of story is reflected in his own literary approach: he allows a world to grow organically, in thickets and shrubs and accidents. This gives his book a spontaneity that keeps the reader questing and moving in an uncertain landscape. In the tangle, though, he offers us embers of hope, nearly put out; the novella has a humming moral undertow in the vision of a better kind of story, one built on spirit and “soul connections,” utterly unlike the domineering violence of the militia monsters. He delineates a conflict between these soul bonds and the “slow abuse of louder stories, weaponized stories,” a metaphor that comes alive in the novella’s machine gun-wielding metamorphs.

In a crucial flashback scene, Osborne shows us how stories can be rekindled in the wreckage of technological devastation, a strange optimism. Two teenaged brothers have fled from their home as it is destroyed by a tornado. Wrenched away from the video game the older brother had been playing (nature fighting back), they hesitate together in a newly shattered universe. There the older spirit of story makes its return. “So what we do we now?” Cameron asks his brother:

Luke crouched down on the sidewalk and picked up a handful of acorns and twigs. He held them out to his big brother. “We invent a game.”

This sense that a new life can be built again in the wake of the depravity produced by untrammelled techno-hubris reverberates in the book’s closing images of an honest man delivering a rescued dog, Daisy, to the now-dead Whitmer’s estranged family. In Berserker Club, we are not given redemption. But we are told that if there is hope, it lies with the acorns, the twigs, and the daisies.

Hope springs, then, even in such a blood-drenched, Tokusatsu Western.

^[1] Shunting is something rich people do, according to the 1980 movie Society, dir. Brian Yuzna.

This piece is free to read without a subscription. It originally ran in Hyun Woo Kim’s personal publication Requests of Literary Exile. We are honored to run it here.

The story was conventional. It was also overly melodramatic and obscene. César de Hoz pondered whether he should read Aleksandr Yusupov’s story again. In Yusupov’s manuscript, César had already left some marks on the parts that should either be revised or removed. One of them was a scene where the story’s main character, Dolores, had sex with Don Camilo. She was being choked, her moans muffled, while her infant son Diego was asleep in the same room. Without doubt, Yusupov’s description of Dolores’ small breasts, which he likened to plums, had to be erased. The more serious problem was the scene itself. A mother was not supposed to be seen engaging in a sexual activity next to her son.

César raised his head. A clock hung on the wall, next to a small oval portrait of San Martín in a military uniform. It was a bit past seven in the evening. He had to leave soon and wanted to get the work done before heading out. Rubbing his eyes, César took out a cigarette. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

Dolores believed that Don Camilo would financially support her and her son, but he was simply taking advantage of her. As Yusupov had briefly stated in a note attached to his manuscript, the story had its morals. It was an instructive tale for young girls of the city. The story’s publication could be approved after some edits. The inappropriate liaison between Dolores and Don Camilo could be implied just enough, not overtly shown. It could work the same with her relationship with Juan, Diego’s father. Nevertheless, something felt out of place. Yusupov was no radionovela scripter. His new story was not what César would expect from him.

César was about to begin working on a note for Yusupov when the writer’s last published story crossed his mind. It was a brilliant piece, whose main character and narrator was Cardinal Isidore of Kiev. In the story, the cardinal was trying to write a letter to Pope Nicholas V to report on the Fall of Constantinople. Having managed to escape from the pillaged Byzantine capital by taking off his cardinal’s robes and dressing up a corpse in them, Cardinal Isidore hesitated to write. What difference would his writing make when the Queen of Cities had fallen into the hands of the Mohammedan infidels? And who was he now to write, a shepherd who had left his sheep and run away, disguising himself as someone other than a cardinal? Before proceeding to further reminiscing and writing, the cardinal asked himself: But what difference will it make if I don’t write?

“Aleksandr, you son of puta!” shouted César, standing up and thumping the desk with his fist. His weak left leg trembled, and the cigarette dropped from his mouth. It left a burn on the first page of Yusupov’s manuscript. César grabbed his cane and stomped around the office. He could not get back to his seat out of anger. How could he fail to notice it? Cardinal Isidore stood for the writer Yusupov, and behind all those rich historical allusions and Modernist explorations of the human psyche, Yusupov was asking himself in front of the reader what use his writing had while he was living in disguise.

César’s left knee hurt. A handful of bullet fragments were still in there. Every moment his knee hurt, César wished that he had killed the guerrilla on the spot. People still called him Capitán De Hoz, but he was no longer a capitán. Now, being the only discharged officer in the city who knew Juana Inés was not some whore’s name, he was working as the censor of a state-run newspaper. A part of his job was monitoring journalists and writers in the city.

Yusupov had long been on his watch list. The middle-aged writer had never participated in political activism or published any social criticism, not even once. Considering his thirty-year-long career, it was surprising. His record was too clean, and the real ones always kept a low profile. Yusupov, however, could not outsmart César. He had once quoted a line from Neruda in a story of his. Just a line, but it was enough for César to notice it. He had also mentioned Solzhenitsyn once at a dinner hosted by the Anticommunist Alliance. The news of Solzhenitsyn he mentioned had been exclusively reported by The Times, a British newspaper whose import into the country was banned.

César sat down. “So, you think we are the Turks. Well played, Cardinal Alejandro, well played… There, I can still see your red robes… I knew we could never trust you Russians. You are all commies in the end… Aha, that was a smart move too, but Capitán De Hoz never misses a thing…” Murmuring under his breath, he reread Yusupov’s new story and took notes furiously. He could see every line in a new light. Dolores was the people, suffering between the regime and the rebels. Why else would there be two men in the story?

The clock struck eight. César noticed that the whole office had turned dark but for his desk, where a lamp was kept on. He limped towards the window and drew the curtains. It was raining. He was going to be late.

There were dilemmas, the first of them being that he had already approved Yusupov’s story on Cardinal Isidore to be published. He did not want to leave a stain on his career. Another was that Yusupov was good at hiding things—hiding his ideas and hiding himself. The ignoramuses of the army and the police would not be interested in what César had written in the notes, besides that Yusupov had written some pornographic scenes. He needed clear evidence that Yusupov was a commie, and no real commie writer was stupid enough to directly show in his work that he was a commie.

César put on a coat. Evidence could either be discovered or created. All he needed was some time.

“Capitán De Hoz, we were waiting for you!” Yusupov rose to greet César. Having learned Spanish in his teenage after immigrating with his father, he still carried a slight Russian accent. He had an unkempt, salt-and-pepper beard now. In a few more months, he was going to turn into either Tagore or Tolstoy. César remembered that the American CIA had advised Solzhenitsyn to grow his beard long, so that he would appear as a proper Russian sage. He wondered what lines Yusupov could have. For the plot César had in mind, KGB or MI6 would be nice. Anything Cuban could work, too. Those Cubans loved beards.

“Gentlemen, my apologies,” César said, taking his hat off and shaking hands with Yusupov, “but I was so lost in the story of the wonderful writer here, Señor Yusupov.”

César looked around. He knew all the journalists and writers gathered in this small hall that the local branch of the Anticommunist Alliance kept. He knew them better than their wives and mistresses. He was the one reading their unpublished works, reading deeply into their minds, and bugging them in their studies and bedrooms.

When one of them went missing, they rushed to César to ask about his whereabouts. They considered César to be their friend, and César was a friend of people who made journalists and writers disappear into thin air. He was their only hope in that he was the only man with some influence who genuinely cared about literature. What they did not know was that no writing man disappeared without César’s suggestion.

Sometimes, César visited abducted writers at the invitation of the authorities. The visit happened only when a writer would not give desirable testimony, even after one of his testicles had been crushed. A friendly face made anyone surrender with ease—when the inevitable death was nigh, writers stuck with their beliefs and silence, but when the prospect of survival glimmered, they instantly got better at constructing perfect narratives.

“How regrettable it is that I missed your speeches,” said César. Before he could hand his cane to a waiter, Tomás Barrera pulled out a chair for him. His seat was at the head of the table.

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure, Capitán. We are always pleased just to have you here, you see.” Barrera hurried to take away César’s cigarette and offered him a cigar. He was quick to act and dumb in his thoughts, as usual. All César wanted was a quick smoke before dinner. Still, César accepted the cigar with a smile on his face. There was no need to make things more complicated than needed. Idiots got scared when they did not have to and did not get scared when they should.

“Señor Iturri gave us a very poignant speech on the importance of literature for our nation and Christian civilization in general. Then I stepped onto the podium to read my recent investigative article on the disastrous effect The Little Prince caused among our children.” Barrera paused briefly in a dramatic manner to emphasize his importance, while Iturri politely nodded to César and César nodded back to him. Iturri was a man who ran huge oilseed plants on the outskirts of the city.

“You see, Capitán De Hoz, this degenerate book is contaminating the souls of our younger generation, our future. Recently, a young boy was seen catching birds in the General San Martín Park. He thought he would be able to fly away from our fatherland with the help of the birds, like the Little Prince did. He even skipped school. So, my point is that The Little Prince is a disquieting work of dangerous propaganda, spreading unpatriotic ideas, glamorizing antisocial vagabondage, agitating for blatant disrespect and affront to social hierarchy and authority, and the authorities should immediately consider a ban—”

“—I remember your article, Señor Barrera. It was an exemplary work of serious journalism,” César cut in, putting out the cigar. He just wanted to have his empanada in peace. A waiter brought provoleta, bread, and chimichurri sauce. César could smell the beef sizzling in the kitchen.

“Thank you, Capitán. It is an honor when a man of letters and a patriot like you remembers what I wrote.”

“And I believe Señor Yusupov was the last speaker, right?”

“Oh, yes-yes. He read an excerpt from a novel he is working on.”

César turned his face to Yusupov. He was having a glass of rich Malbec. César knew he loved Malbec. In an essay, he had made a light joke that he would never go back to Russia even if it became a Christian nation again, since he loved the local Malbec too much. Yusupov looked back at César and slightly raised his glass.

“You are working on a novel, Señor Yusupov?”

“Yes. Actually, I was thinking, it would be nice if it could be serialized in the newspaper. One chapter every Saturday evening, or two times a month, maybe,” Yusupov answered, wiping his mouth with a napkin. He still had chimichurri on his beard.

“Señor Yusupov, you should have consulted me. You know I am your biggest admirer in town, and we could definitely work out the serialization… What is it about?”

“It is about a capitán.” Yusupov gave a mischievous grin. “A Russian capitán. Did you know that the word, kapitan, sounds the same in Russian? The Russian capitán is an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, and the communist insurrection happens. He fights the communists by Baron Wrangel’s side, but fate brings him to Harbin. It is a city in Manchuria where many Russians live. Again, Chinese communists come, he fights them again together with the Chinese people, and he is forced to flee again, this time to South America, where he continues his fight against communists in the jungles, again and again…”

“A tale of indomitable anticommunist heroism!” Barrera interfered. He shook his fist in the air, and everyone gave thunderous applause. César desperately wanted to make every single one of them a Cuban sympathizer for a moment of silence. Steaks were served, and more wine was poured. After flan con dulce de leche accompanied by strong coffee, the band began to play Se dice de mí. It was time for the girls to enter. Tomorrow, César was going to interview them on whatever gibberish the writers and journalists said during the drunk tango. The Presidente was looking down on them in his portrait, hung high up in the hall.

César could not tango with one of the girls. It was not his professionalism, but his left leg. Then, he saw Yusupov sitting by himself. Come to think of it, Yusupov had never come to him when his colleagues had gone missing. Waiters were nowhere to be seen for the moment. Without his cane, César approached Yusupov. Yusupov noticed César limping towards him and helped him to a chair.

“Does your capitán have a son?” César asked Yusupov.

“Capitán De Hoz, I do not fancy inserting myself into my writing.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t. Absolutely.”

They briefly listened to the tango without words.

“About your new story… I’m sorry for the bad news, Señor Yusupov, but I don’t think we can publish it. Too much obscenity.”

“Do you have suggestions for edits?”

“Technically, yes. I wrote all the notes already, but I decided not to bring them. The thing is, there are too many. I think it will be easier for you to just rewrite the whole thing, if you want that story to be published.”

“The reason is obscenity, am I correct?” Yusupov looked into César’s eyes.

“Yes, obscenity.”

“Obscenity only?”

César nodded. Now, it was Yusupov interrogating him. He made a firm decision that he would make Yusupov pay for his provocation. He took out a cigarette. To his surprise, Yusupov lit it for him.

“Just wanted to make sure what I should keep in mind when I work on it again, Capitán De Hoz.”

“The story caught me by surprise, to be honest. It did not sound like you.” César took a counter-offensive, puffing out cigarette fumes.

“Oh,” Yusupov exclaimed with a laugh. “You have truly keen eyes. It’s what happened to my wife’s hometown friend’s niece, and my wife’s idea of vengeance was disclosing everything in a nationally distributed newspaper, disguised as a work of fiction. The locals will know who they are, especially the local women, despite the pseudonyms.”

César pondered whether Yusupov was lying. Theoretically, a writer could come up with a story in an instant. Yusupov continued.

“To be honest, I felt a bit relieved to hear that you can’t publish the story. It’s not really my thing. I might work on it again, or not… but sometimes, you need to do things just to satisfy your wife. Thank you, Capitán, for providing me with, let’s say, the alibi.”

Yusupov’s mistress had told César that Yusupov seemed to be a good husband, no matter how ironic that sounded. What if he was telling the truth? He was stuttering more than usual, but it could have been because of the wine. César shook his head. He knew a commie when he saw one.

“What would I be without you, Capitán?” Yusupov muttered, placing his hand on César’s shoulder. “Really, Capitán, what would I be without you as my censor.”

His pronunciation of the Spanish word, censurador, was perfect.

Yusupov said there was no need to call for a taxi for him. He was going to walk. César knew his house was not within walking distance. It meant he was going to the apartment of his mistress.

César urged his chauffeur to drive faster. He needed to get there before Yusupov did. Before leaving the hall, César considered whether he should call Paula in advance to instruct her on what to say and ask. He decided not to. Sometimes, unscripted conversations yielded more precious evidence.

It was easy to find a mistress for Yusupov. All it took was to find an arrested college kid who had a charming enough girlfriend, dress her up, and make her appear in front of the writer at the right moment. Paula was not only charming but also smart. She understood very well what her job was, what a writer would want to hear from a young girl, and that her boyfriend was still under surveillance.

César could have waited for the report on what Yusupov said in the apartment as he usually did, but tonight, he wanted to hear it all with his own ears. He still felt enraged when the chauffeur stopped the car behind the apartment building. A black van was parked about ten meters away. The rain had gotten heavier, and the short walk was enough to get César soaked. The soldier in the van, though surprised when César knocked on its door, handed him headphones without saying anything. César heard Paula’s footsteps.

Soon, Yusupov entered Paula’s apartment. He called her Sonia, the name César had given her. It was a name too befitting to a Russian writer’s mistress. Yusupov did not know everything that had happened between him and the girl was too smooth to be true. His ignorance gave César a sense of superiority. Hearing Yusupov’s voice, he sneered.

It seemed Yusupov was drinking more wine. He mentioned Gogol, Bulgakov, Rubén Darío, and Kafka. Everything he talked about them did not make much sense. Nonetheless, Paula was doing an impressive job, as always. The writer wanted his mistress to be intelligent enough to recognize the other writers he spoke of, but not too intelligent. A writer’s mistress should be able to agree with whatever he said with witty comments, but should not actually have her own opinions. It was a delicate art to flatter Yusupov without letting him know he was being flattered.

“And who’s the worst of them all? Borges, darling, it’s Borges. He still lived with his mom when he was almost eighty. Maybe he was fucking their housekeeper all those years, believing his mommy didn’t know, but I guess you shouldn’t hurt your blind son’s feelings, right?”

César tried to focus again on Yusupov’s words. At last, the slick commie was talking about someone alive.

“Did you know the name of Borges’ housekeeper was Fanny? Fanny, and he talks about his love for the English language. Sure, he loved some fanny,” Yusupov continued.

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind. The thing is, Borges says he’s writing fiction, not fables... Does he even understand what he’s talking about? Not at all. No one can, because there’s nothing he’s really talking about, but who cares? Just go blind, be like Homer, and write something that sounds profound, express your Anglophilia… Then all damn Yankees rush in to explain why your writing is so important. Even you could get big like Borges with some tricks, Sonia. Since you are a girl and studying at college, let’s say, if Isabel Allende weren’t on Pinochet’s wanted list—”

“—Are you saying that Borges is ignoring our social realities?”

César stopped breathing, excitedly anticipating Yusupov’s answer. Paula was seriously talented. She asked a perfect question at a perfect moment and even managed to loosen the slick commie enough to let the name Allende out of his mouth.

“Who cares about that son of puta, darling,” Yusupov said. César lit another cigarette and cursed.

“Yes, I think you are much more talented, obviously. I think you must be the best writer on this continent, in fact.”

“You think so?”

Yusupov and Paula clinked their glasses. César heard Yusupov’s hearty laughter and cursed again. All writers were whores.

“What does De Hoz say about your new story?”

Paula’s question was unexpected. She could be merely asking about Yusupov’s day, but César felt that Paula was daring both him and the writer. A moment passed in silence. The sound of the rain squeezed in through the vacuum.

“How can I say this… I can see that De Hoz always tries his best to read everything closely, to interpret everything. It might be a good thing. Good for me as a writer, I guess. He takes literature very seriously. Perhaps too seriously.”

Cigarette ash fell on César’s left knee.

“Darling, I’m not here to talk about work with you. I do that with De Hoz. Now, show me your plums.”

From then on, César listened to Yusupov making out with Paula and roughly pushing her all the way to bed. The soldier next to César grinned at him, but he just felt numb.

“Say my name, you puta, say my name!”

“Don Alejandro! Don Alejandro!”

Paula’s moans suddenly got muffled. César could picture Yusupov choking her. He closed his eyes in agony. He could not imagine what he would be without his writer.

Behind the Scenes

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Every criticism I’ve read of Worst Boyfriend Ever (WBE) disparages his moral character and paints him as a sociopath. They demand that he be beaten by the good men of our society, that he be punished for his violations of common sense morality, or that his work wholly fails as art. Sometimes, they engage in armchair psychoanalysis to piece together his vile behavior and misogyny, arguing that he’s watched too much Neon Genesis Evangelion for his own good and that he’s trapped in a pick-me phase he won’t grow out of. They say that if he wants to write anything of literary value, he needs to read real literature about people who hate themselves like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

Pervading these criticisms are disbelief about how this person’s writing has garnered a cult-like following, and perhaps a disappointment at how far literary culture has fallen if this is what attracts readers. We don’t want him to exist for a myriad of reasons: he violates our idea of what kind of literature deserves attention, of our progressive sense of morality and justice, of how we want men to behave in our society. He incites a kind of madness in his critics who all, apparently, want him dead in a ditch.

I don’t disagree with these criticisms, but I also think they miss the point. The issue is that he does exist. He is alive and well, thriving in fact, in the 25 Top Fiction Substacks at time of writing, rubbing shoulders with established writers like Etgar Keret and Chuck Palahniuk. But if we move past his shock factor, it becomes much, much more interesting to examine what his popularity is a symptom of. It makes perfect sense that, against our literary and moral instincts, WBE has found success: he’s the only notable person writing honestly about being an average young man in 21st century America. He is the Jungian shadow of American masculinity.

Readers of Jung know that to deal with their shadow, or the repressed parts of themselves, they must integrate it into their self-conception in a healthy manner. To ignore the shadow leads to conflict with oneself and to inevitably project that conflict onto others. WBE crawled out of this shadow. It was the cultural suppression of masculinity in the well-meaning era of Obama-style progressivism and the MeToo movement that created the conditions for him to exist. He is the mildest misogynistic thought mutated a thousand times over. He is infection turned sepsis, the cancer we wanted to cure by shouting feminist slogans until it disappeared.

But there is something good about him—he makes the ugliest parts of the ordinary man, of American masculinity at large, visible. And we cannot hope to change something we refuse to admit exists.

In the 2010s, our culture attempted to hold men accountable for their vast abuses of power in every corner of society. With good intention and reason, the liberal left attempted to dismantle patriarchal power, vengefully demanding not just that powerful, abusive men answer to justice, but that all men had better adjust their behavior or else face the consequences. Thus began the campaign to publicly shame masculinity into non-existence. Men were told to abandon their values and to stop taking up space without really understanding why, only knowing that it was no longer appropriate to express certain perspectives or worldviews. Misogyny, racism, and masculinity, it was loudly declared, no longer have a place in our culture.

But shaming something is not the same as addressing it. To shame something is to stuff the monster into the basement, and anyone who’s ever been ashamed knows that monsters thrive in the dark. Shame is a useful tool of social control insofar as it forces someone to adjust their behavior in public, but it does nothing to address the underlying emotions and beliefs at the root of such behavior. Intellectually, it’s easy enough to understand why misogyny and racism shouldn’t exist, but the work of changing one’s beliefs is much trickier, much more laborious. It’s difficult to imagine that men are reading bell hooks or Simone de Beauvoir or having genuine conversations about the misogynistic beliefs they were invariably raised with. (With whom would that happen? Their parents? Their girlfriend? A male friend? I highly doubt it.)

We can see a parallel in our attempts to make our society less racist. The sudden uptick in media representation of POC, DEI policies, and affirmative action did not make our society more accepting of others. It just led to people hiding what they actually think while doing what was expected of them. The demand for public accountability put us into a panopticon under which, yes, people could no longer express racist and misogynistic thoughts, a good thing surely, but that also shut down genuine attempts to engage with problematic beliefs. With the gun of social exclusion held to your head, it’s much easier to simply nod along, loudly proclaim you are an ally, and bolt shut the basement door.

WBE, then, lets the monster out to play. He embodies the average man we so badly wanted to have slain in the zeal of 2010s progressivism. His exploits resurrect the American mythology of masculinity that men were taught to suppress a decade ago: what man hasn’t dreamt of quitting his 9-to-5 to wander across America in a van in a quest to become his own master? What man wasn’t socialized to believe that fucking prodigious amounts of (foreign) women would increase his value as a male? Most recently, what man hasn’t fantasized about acquiring wealth through a mix of cunning and sheer luck, perhaps through a crypto rug pull?

It doesn’t actually matter if the Substack is fictional or not. The writing feeds the juvenile male fantasy for a Hero’s Journey full of risk, irresponsibility, adventure, drugs, sex, and other social transgression. Because he’s quit his job and because the liberal left don’t have a stomach for violence, WBE has effectively made himself untouchable. He cannot be canceled because the consequences of cancellation have no effect on him. And so, in a time of moral fingerwagging, performative men read him with secret glee. WBE reminds his readers that it feels good to be bad.

Of course, if these misogynistic, hypermasculine exploits were all he wrote about, WBE would not nearly have gained this amount of traction. One can only be so entertained by male braggadocio and barely perverse erotica. His greatest narrative trick is interspersing his work with genuine moments of his humanity. In his writing are honest, if undeveloped, glimpses of the indomitable human spirit, of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith or Nietzsche’s Übermensch, that speak to the self-fulfillment that all Americans have been trained to want. There is something seductive to watching someone completely self-destruct in the pursuit of absolute freedom and actually getting it. He is Jack Kerouac for the porn-brained, social media-crippled generation, Hunter S. Thompson filled with microplastics and Adderall. Even in the dehumanizing prison of late capitalism, he renews the average young man’s faith that he can find himself on his own terms.

More importantly, his writing is framed outside of any political ideology and rejects any kind of moralization. It’s obviously not feminist or leftist, and he doesn’t show support for any type of red pill or incel movement (although that’s what his actions essentially amount to). He’s not a white Christian nationalist or a groyper and most likely doesn’t wish for a boogaloo. He seems only to say: This is what I do. It makes me feel free and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Men in America are easily seduced by the idea of radical transformation into someone freer, stronger, and in some vague but very profound way, better, and in an era where men have drawn contempt for simply existing, WBE is music to their ears. For rebellion against social norms, he was rewarded with self-actualization. Nothing is more tantalizing.

All of this is complemented by his confessional, typo-ridden prose style. In terms of literary merit, his writing will fail when judged on the aesthetic grounds of traditional prose. As many critics have stated, it’s just not very good stuff. But the unedited, poorly punctuated writing lends him plausibility, makes him emotionally and literally legible to everyone, including men who don’t read. He feels real because his posts are what we would write down in our Notes app after a bad hook-up or after ruminating in the dark for too long. He is the person we’ve all been at some point in our lives, standing in the corner at some party where we don’t know anyone and, feeling insecure, types something disdainful about the people around us into our phone.

Frankly, the average man won’t want to read his literary equivalents like Ben Lerner’s Leaving for Atocha Station or John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. But people do want to read quick, snappy texts and half-finished blog posts about a guy who exits the rat race and fucks Asian women in his van in every city across America, and then wonder why on earth he feels sorry for himself after. Although those novels and the Substack cover the same exact subject matter, at face value, WBE is much more interesting. He’s been savvy, too, by playing to the Substack platform’s strengths and making the readers who interact with him part of his project. Women can reach out to him and fuck him and men can buy him plane tickets to the Phillippines and take him to strip clubs. In doing so, he’s made it a choose-your-own-adventure text, where readers can literally write themselves into the work and get a taste of his freedom and internet fame. What we end up reading are the confessions of a free yet broken person, a timeless subject, but rendered legible to the chronically online.

Social transgression, informal existentialism, resistance to moralization, casual writing style, reader interactivity: together, these elements have made him popular beyond belief. And underpinning his success is the cry of a male who no longer understands his place in society but wishes for recognition as a fully-fledged person. This is, on some level, what every young American man has felt deprived of over the last decade. It’s almost enough to forgive him.

One only needs a modicum of critical thought to see that the man is deeply unwell. Readers of WBE know his gimmick: immediately after (and sometimes during) a despicably selfish act, the circus of self-awareness begins. By engaging in the requisite histrionics of being a fuck-up, by complaining about his loneliness, by performing any number of existential theatrics to explain his terrible behavior, he attempts to evade accountability. He wallows in his identity as a “sensitive young man,” wants you to feel that same cloying pity you felt for Shinji on your first Evangelion watch as a seventeen-year-old. And like that abstract final episode, he wants to be applauded by all the people he’s hurt on his journey to finding himself. In reality, he hasn’t even gotten in the robot—he hasn’t taken responsibility for the harm he’s caused. But that’s all fine. At the end of the day, he’s just a rascal with a heart of gold. Really!

I imagine there’s something about this claimed innocence that resonates with his male readers. Underneath all their awful behaviors and masculine posturing, they are “just” a person trying to figure themselves out. It was this innocence that the 2010s hunted down and attempted to stamp out. And generally, men complied, quickly understanding that to question this jarring shift in behavioral standards meant to admit wrongdoing, to admit misogyny. It would be social suicide. But it’s exactly this suppression of the male psyche that brought WBE to life. His writing gives men permission to be men again, in all their grotesque and juvenile glory.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

WBE’s presence undoes the shaming of masculinity, which in turn frees our culture to appropriately address its more toxic aspects. As stated previously, we cannot change something we refuse to admit exists. You cannot kill the monster in the basement without opening the door. For better or worse, his blog holds a bright and shiny mirror up to American masculinity, reminding us that these types of thoughts can exist in the ordinary men around us not because they think it’s right, but because it was the culture they were raised in. We must recognize the difficulty of changing one’s beliefs and the impossibility of shaming someone into doing so.

In the words of bell hooks, “To create loving men, we must love males.” It’s unfortunate how bell hooks has become a faux pas of performative maleness, because it would do our culture well to look at masculinity carefully and clearly and figure out how to make it work. We’ve seen what happens when we cast men out of mainstream culture, even if for good reason.

So let the goblins out of their dungeon. They need to breathe air, feel sunlight, remember what it’s like to speak with words, not with grunts and gnashing teeth. Let them find genuine, healthy community with other men. Let them question things in good faith even when it makes you wince. Let them befriend women so that they may soften. Exercise both caution and compassion and hold them accountable, not out of vengeance, but because you believe in a better world.

Ultimately, there is a reckoning coming for WBE. Whether it’s someone getting sick of his antics and committing a real act of violence against him or whether he undergoes a spiritual awakening that compels him to end his blog, he cannot sustain this life forever. The mythologized freedom that he sought by self-destructing has no actual end game. He knows this. But I do believe he should keep writing. We get to read and watch him live out our adolescent dreams so we don’t have to. And when his story ends, one way or another, we can finally grow up and move on.

Behind the Scenes

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I’m used to getting places early, being part robot. The robot-transportation Mexicans work on an unpredictable schedule and often get delayed. Some people bite the drivers’ heads off about it. I just leave more time.

So, I show up early as usual on the Eastside for this latest February ‘scene’ party. Yes, the LA lit scene. A few people in LA do, by mistake, actually read, unlike Hollywood coordinators.

Midday Echo Park is calm, sunny, grimy. The robot-deployment dropship people drop me at Taix, an LA institution, a hundred-year-old French restaurant built like a huge, labyrinthine tudor lodge. It’s closing in a month to turn into condos. C’est la vie.

I’m five hours early, a record even for me, and the restaurant isn’t even open for the night yet. That’s fine. I planned on wandering, maybe doing a little work in a café. I poke around the thrift shops, the side streets, a time-travel-themed novelty shop that doesn’t seem to have a point per se. “So it’s a Meow Wolf type thing?” I ask the hopelessly nerdy Chinese girl behind the counter.

She’s deeply offended. “They actually copied us.” Her face says I might be intruding on her TikTok time.

I retreat to a semi-lesbian (many such cases) hipster bar where I once watched the Dodgers win the World Series in a screaming delirium. At this hour it’s quiet and posh. I get a happy hour drink and I make sure it’s well liquor because I currently have no money because my producers have been delaying and delaying my gainful writing employment on their sci-fi mishmash properties. The signs say laptops allowed until six at night. Good rule for life.

The establishments in Echo Park are swanky, but the infrastructure is decrepit. Streets are so worn they’re as bumpy as cobblestone. Lynchian trash piles cover moving forms of addicts at back kitchen steps. It’s like the government has given up. On the Taipei-to-Tijuana scale I’ve developed for cities in my travels, it’s 90% TJ, way worse than Los Angeles’ usual 70%. This is not my corner of LA. Never lived here, never worked here. I’m a local tourist.

Despite the apparent collapse of society, the young hot people are violently resisting the squalor simply by existing. There are grunge twinks with white tees and tattoos. There are a lot of women with their asses fully out, many making out with the twinks, and there are a lot of other women with tight buns or bobs stepping over bums to get to the liquor store. Everyone seems to either be on drugs or have done so many that they’re permanently partially vacant.

I roll into the party on the dot at six. I’m the first one there, other than a bowtied old reliable Mexican maître d’. The space we’ve been given is a small ballroom with a dance floor and a dozen wedding dinner style tables, white-clothed, with maybe sixty chairs in all. It’s a far cry from the house party mayhem of our hosts’ previous events.

It’s dead silent. Kind of weird. The bowtie man shuffles around. It’s impossible to imagine this place full of people under fifty. Ergo, it’s impossible to imagine this party being a success.

Evan from shows up a second later. It’s their party. They’re putting out another angsty, horny, depressive book about the 2020s young male experience. Even though it’s not my night to shine, I still feel like I’m on the crew. My book is one of their four past releases on the merch table. I feel a kinship with the author of the moment, who’s currently nowhere to be seen. It’s like we’re on the same record label. We’re a gang.

Evan works with a diligent pace assembling a pyramid of copies of the new book. He’s fast and meticulous, and you can tell he’s a hardworking grip when he’s on set. G&E are like the NCOs of film. They’re not in it for pomp and they don’t fuck around.

A dad and his five blond tykes stumble in, maybe looking for the bathroom, maybe just perusing. I realize they don’t know what we are. “We, uh, we put out cool shit,” Evan explains. He’s tall and fit with short, puffy black hair, Greek-Mexican from Texas. He has a perpetual cherubic smile and a love of what’s good. “I really feel like we’re saving America,” he tells me, reflecting on the publishing company while the strangers linger. “Talking about people’s actual experience.”

He, Matt Pegas, and at New Ritual are the only three people in publishing who have immediately championed my work without hesitation. I owe them a lot.

“Are you the author?” the dad asks me.

“No I’m not,” I tell him.

He ignores me thereafter.

I watch the kids check out the books. I’m not sure if I should intervene, since the new release has a naked woman’s back and tramp stamp on display, with her breast and nipple somehow also visible from the side in the corner of the image. It’s been heavily implied to me that this is a photo taken by the author, a narrative which presumably reinforces his bona fides as a pervert flâneur. No one will tell me the details. I think about how I’ve perpetually warned New Ritual to cover the nipples on their book jackets so they don’t get banned from Kindle. With their prior release, I successfully convinced them. This one, though, I did not see until it was done. They have not been banned thus far.

Evan has lit a candle and dialed the chandeliers down to the perfect moodiness. It’s a huge improvement. He has an eye for mise en scène. He wants to know if I think it would be dorky for him to wear a wizard hat he brought.

“It depends on how you carry yourself while you’re wearing it,” I tell him honestly.

He grins. “Oh, then I’m wearing it.” He knows he can carry himself well.

Evan connects to the room’s Bluetooth speakers. He’s trying not to be antsy that there’s no one here. “In an hour it will be packed, so enjoy the quiet,” I tell him, both to make him and myself believe it.

He starts playing oldies. “Don’t know much about geometry...” I softly sing along. I’ve been trying to sing more. Wait. Is it “geography”?

The venue has given us two extremely bored dedicated bartenders, and out of sympathy I say hello and order a glass of white wine. The guy tells me he’s in constant pain from two car accidents and he’s self-conscious about it because it’s not visible. Okay. The gal is a cute black girl from Michigan with a pixie cut drifting through life. She thinks she wants to be a doula ultimately, since she doesn’t want kids herself. She asks if I know what that is. I say yes. Come to think of it, I realize, no one in Echo Park seems like the type to ever want kids. There are stickers all over the light poles for mail order abortion pills. I wonder how many of the people I’ve seen today will have a living descendant in a hundred years.

I buy Evan a vodka soda, his drink of choice, to thank him for his hard work and also possibly console him over no one showing up. I forget to specify well vodka and Mr. Car Accident fucks me with a $17 Ketel One premium pour. I see emptiness in his eyes as he does it. I hate him. I still tip well.

Matt Pegas finally arrives just then with his Clark Kent glasses and blazer and runner’s build. This is the guy who inspired me to write “Hunters” after a long, lazy afternoon in the Valley. He’s one of the press’ founders. I trust him more than almost anyone I’ve met online.

The actual author of tonight’s book is with him, too. Michael Mages. He seems a little older than me. He has a weary, solid, young man’s face and a focused, watchful affect. He meets me very deliberately. “Cairo. I really liked your book,” he tells me. I tell him I’m looking forward to reading his.

Pegas is in a flurry of activity. He pulls rank on Evan and switches the speaker to his own phone, playing what we used to call New York alt and now call indie sleaze. He keeps walking to other rooms in the restaurant with his phone in his pocket and making Arctic Monkeys cut out in jarring bursts.

All-capser shows up shortly after. He’s the bestseller author on the New Ritual roster. I’m not envious of his sales or the attention, but I am a little insecure that Matt wants to take him across the street to sell a bunch of his books to Stories, Echo Park’s mainstay bookstore. Should I be asking Matt to do stuff like that for me?

I had gone into Stories when I first pulled up that afternoon, to inquire about getting my book stocked there. I was inspired to see a Substacker I know, , on prominent display. “Put it on Ingram so we can order it,” the staff told me of my own book. Another thing on my to-do list.

I felt rude inquiring without purchasing anything, so while I was there I decided to buy a book as a token of support. My first pick was East of Eden, which I’ve been meaning to read together with , but on closer inspection the cover had a big red Netflix N on the front and I hate Netflix hate Netflix hate hate hate Netflix. So I bought The Bell Jar instead, since I sincerely love it and I did not own a physical copy.

Sitting at the party, I realize it would be a funny joke to keep a brand new, untouched The Bell Jar prominently on my lap, face up. It’s the performative male bit ad absurdum, something from a starter pack. I commit.

The waiters start bringing a huge spread of food to the banquet tables. There’s bruschetta both with and without goat cheese. There’s a comical amount of cold rolled ham, maybe a whole pig’s worth. There’s a giant golden bowl of champagne punch, which makes me feel even more swindled for patronizing the bar. There are still maybe only five people here, even though a hundred RSVPed on Partiful. This is starting to get sad.

Then The DJ walks in. No, not the DJ of the event. This man is an honest-to-God college radio DJ with a weekly show up and down the West Coast where he plays a wacky character and spins deep cuts for a cult following of thousands. Like all of us in the scene, he has found his own tiny way to live like it’s still the 20th century. He is also insanely, mind bogglingly well-read and loves alt lit. We appreciate a loyal fan.

I realize in that moment I’ve given up on any other terms besides alt lit and ‘the scene’ for what this is. New Wave didn’t stick, possibly to ’s pleasure. You have to go with the flow. Maybe in twenty years they’ll call us indie lit sleaze.

“Nice performative Sylvia Plath,” The DJ cracks. Nice. He gets it immediately. He hugs my upper half above my robot carapace as best he can. It’s nice to see him again.

I ask about his other half I’ve never met, whom he’s about to marry. “She’s at home,” he tells me. “She thinks this is a Klan rally,” he adds as a partial joke, and explains that’s because of John McDermott’s hoe-scaring Rolling Stone article on New Ritual’s “anti-woke” tendencies from last year.

We end up on the topic of gay rape fairly quickly, like one does. The DJ explains he believes gay rape is a key feature of scene books in our moment. Dragon Day, Nutcrankr. He’s not wrong. I don’t push him too hard to figure out why that may be, although it seems obvious to me.

Then something magic happens. I had predicted it, but I didn’t believe it. I look around and the place is full of people. Young people. Pretty, glamorous, hot people. Two-thirds women. This is the set that scene parties always attract, somehow, as unlikely as it sounds. I first encountered it at the debate in 2023 where and debated and over whether the sexual revolution had failed. Call it the Red Scare adjacency effect. Everyone is elegant.

“Everyone finally showed up,” I tell The DJ with relief. “No one wanted to be first so they all tried to wait each other out.”

“It’s the defect-defect equilibrium,” the DJ smiles.

Matt Pegas grabs the mic and thanks everyone for coming and promises a quick reading, since everyone’s sick of long ones. A tall, blonde-bobbed woman in a green dress who’s friends with the author reads the book’s first two pages aloud into the microphone. The audio equipment is working well, for once. No e-girls are nearly exploded by propane tanks.

It’s weird hearing a misanthropic male character’s voice come out of this woman who has probably never lived the experience of bitter, testosterone-driven sexual frustration. I have a hard time telling if I would like the book, but I can tell it’s well done. Evan makes sure to stress to me, proudly, that it was he and not Matt who first pulled this novel from the submission stack cold. Matt explains how Michael’s cover letter comparing his work to and Bret Easton Ellis was what first piqued the press’ attention.

The strangest part of the post-reading mingle is when I end up talking to the author’s mom. She’s cute. Straight white bob and a leather jacket. Fifties or so. She says she’s read the book three times and loves it, although she wishes the end was less dark.

I make my way back to The DJ to relay my anecdote. “Is that a little strange, for your mom to be so involved in your debauched manuscript?” I ask him. I keep my own mother away from my more bawdy work with regularity.

“No,” says The DJ. “I mean, my mom wrote romance novels. I never wanted to read them, though, because of all the...violent non-consensual sex.”

“I feel like that’s to my point,” I say back.

As the party gets crazier I’m trying not to run people over with my robot lower half. Around then, to my delight, I hear my name warmly called out. I immediately recognize the source as , a fellow Angeleno I have thus far only seen on Substack and video.

I wax poetic to The DJ about Henry being an astonishing essayist. I repeat a bit that I believe originated about Henry’s literary essays being so good they destroy your interest in reading the reviewed book because he makes you feel like you already read them.

Henry came alone from work. He’s not a scene guy, and he only came because of my invitation. There’s a little pleasure in making him get his toes wet, in corrupting him. He tells me about a big-time traditional publisher that recently started cold-DM lovebomb glazing him, begging to collab, only to then jerk him around and ghost him. I try to reassure him he’s well-suited and beloved on Substack. He’s a sensitive young man. It’s hard for any of us to admit the institutions we worship from days gone by are now staffed by bozos, but it’s the truth.

I meander. Someone touches my arm. “Oh my God, I love Sylvia Plath.” I think she’s doing a bit but she is not doing a bit. The DJ has poured me a lot of punch by now. I’ve been trying to drink enough of the free stuff to bring my dollar cost average down from the bar tab. I’m faded-ish.

I laugh. “Me too.”

She’s a Southern European sort of blonde. That mix of West Coast slinky and yet not haughty that only comes from Arizona. Indeed, she’s Arizonan, and apparently my age. She explains she’s another friend of the author. She explains that he involved her because she has a lower back tattoo, and he was trying to get a collection of photos of women’s bare naked back tattoos to promote the book. I wonder if perhaps the book was secondary to that project. There are worse reasons to write a novel.

I learn and immediately forget her name. She brings me over to her friend, who looks like an early twenties Sophia Loren with jet black hair, so she can monologue to both of us about how she read The Bell Jar in high school and it was the perfect age for emotional impact, although it also probably made her a worse person.

Sophia Loren is quieter and sweeter than Arizona and seems less likely to cut me, although they’re both nice. She wants to know how fast I can go on my robot chassis. I tell her. She’s impressed that I’m 650 pounds in total, counting my borged out hardware, because I’m pretty slim. She asks me if there are safety features to prevent me from running someone over. I say absolutely not. She seems to like this. She tells me she’s glad I could run someone over for her if she needed me to.

“I wanna smoke,” Arizona pouts at Sophia, reclaiming her friend’s attention. I ask Arizona what she smokes and she says white Marlboros. Then she makes fun of me for liking American Spirits. She tells me they’re not actually healthier. I tell her I couldn’t give a fuck about that. I like the flavor and how long they take. It’s leisurely. It’s aristocratic. They invite me outside.

We go out through the side door to the street, the only door that can accommodate my Swedish-built high-powered combat frame. They smoke their Marlboros. I enjoy the smell secondhand. I’m not smoking these days. It started disagreeing with me. I was an old soul as a child and now at twenty-eight I’m just old.

At some point, we realize the door has latched behind us. Arizona offers to go around to the valet entrance and let us in from the other side. Sophia and I wait, and we wait, and we wait. She eventually knocks as hard as her knuckles will allow, then she kicks the door a few times with her heel. Then she gives up and turns back to me. She’s wearing some black Audrey Hepburn sort of dress and a huge white vintage fur. She tells me all about how she buys her clothes vintage. I say that’s pretty cool.

I don’t knock the door down. We just wait and entertain ourselves. After a long while, we realize Arizona has truly abandoned us. I escort Sophia around to the valet entrance, and then I go back to the combat-chassis accommodating door. In seconds, Sophia lets me back in to the party.

It’s well after nine o’clock, which is when our reservation for the room ended, but nobody is even attempting to kick us out. It seems like nobody cares. The place is closing in a month anyway. It’s kind of a last hurrah. I’m relieved to see the spread has been mostly eaten and replaced with dessert courses.

Pretty soon, Sophia and I realize that Arizona has been going around the whole restaurant, opening almost every door to try and find us. I guess she mixed up her sense of north, south, east, and west, and almost got kicked out for barging through the place. I look around for my actual friends, but they’re all busy. I settle back in at an empty table with my new acquaintances.

We talk a long time. Well, really, they talk and I listen. Arizona has a text from a guy named Philip saying they met on Raya. She doesn’t remember him. Probably not , but there’s a chance. She doesn’t want to reinstall Raya to figure out who he is. She hates the apps. She says she wants to meet a guy in real life, and Sophia agrees.

Sophia tells a story about going on a date with a man from the apps who talked about how he drinks his own fermented piss. It’s the kind of story you would play for laughs, but she relays it with a sort of glumness, like this is just an accurate picture of the state of the world these days. You have these beautiful women going to literary events, getting ignored except by half-robots, and then having to go on terrible app dates with literal piss drinkers. The indignity of it all.

I decide it’s time to make my way back to my publishers and check in on how the night’s going. I navigate through a group of wealthy Chinese girls in cute dresses and jewelry who seem to have appeared from nowhere. No one is talking to them either. What a world.

A few feet later, someone else comes up to me, looking down at my upper leg and the object on it. “Oh my God, I love The Bell Jar,” she says.

“Me too,” I say back, and I smile at her before continuing on.

Another foot later, there’s another one. “Are you an author?” she asks.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“Is that your book?” she says, tapping The Bell Jar on my leg.

“No,” I say, “that’s Sylvia Plath.”

At this point, I realize my Bell Jar bit’s irony has been lost on everyone except The DJ. It’s too effective. I’m never going to be able to get across the room with it face up, so I flip it over.

I get back to Evan at the book table and he looks pleased. His girlfriend has shown up in good spirits. At least, I think she’s his girlfriend. I can’t exactly remember. She’s sweet. She’s got sort of a Mikey Madison energy. She and I go on a successful expedition to get crème brûlée from the dessert table.

We get back to Evan and he starts making plans for us to go see a movie soon. He’s just worried there’s nothing good out. I try to convince him to go with me to some dusty old revival house to see something on film instead of just hitting an AMC. He sounds open to it. I think I could convert him into true cinephile snobbery.

The event seems to at last be winding down. They’ve sold a good amount of copies. Everyone looks over the moon. There’s a noticeable hole in the aura in the shape of Dan Baltic, who was not able to make it out from that literary gravity well called New York. I run into the DJ again and I tell him how I had to flip The Bell Jar over to get some peace, to amuse him. He laughs, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me. It’s fine. Some people will never know what they’ll never know.

The DJ and I go out to the curb and we connect with Sam Austen, the tall and mysterious man with a beard like a folk singer, whose claim to fame is writing the hit book Meow, which is just the word meow over and over again. He tells me with his usual haunted tone that he’s getting out of Los Angeles soon, going back to Miami. He came to Los Angeles to get away from unspecified things, but he realizes now that they’re worse here than anywhere. Between Sam and leaving, it feels like the end of an era.

I introduce Sam and The DJ outside. Sam explains that he’s doing a Pride and Prejudice version of Meow, which is the chapter and punctuation structure of Pride and Prejudice, but with all the words changed to one word that you can probably guess. He explains that he’s having issues repeatedly getting banned from Kindle, probably for getting reported for having books that are just meow, despite them selling well and getting good reviews. He asks me if I have any experience dealing with Kindle bans. I tell him I do not.

I’ve got fifteen minutes before the robot-transport people are supposed to pick me up. Ever hungry for life, I ask the boys if they would pop over to El Prado, which is a block away. I’ve never been, but it’s on my list.

Someone on rs_x asked a few months ago where the cool spots to drink in LA are for former Red Scare types. Someone replied, “Since you sound like a douchebag, you’ll probably just end up at El Prado like everyone else.”

This immediately put it near the top of my list to check out. I’m not afraid of what a Redditor would call a douchebag.

We sneak over to El Prado and I can tell I’m slightly annoying people by making them move for my combat chassis. Fuck them, though. I don’t care. The DJ and Sam get drinks. Then The DJ proceeds to tell us all about Tom Clancy’s obsessive attention to military detail and how he describes his protagonists as pure self-inserts. As always, I’m lightly comparing this to my own work. I’m always wondering how come these other guys are bestsellers and I’m not. It’s not that I want to sell out. It’s just my radar is always on. I want to be aware of the landscape.

The DJ tells one more good story about getting lashed to the wheel of his father’s unlicensed party boat rental operation in a storm when he was seven. I could talk for hours, but the robot-collection people are merciless. They wait for no one. I make my way back out to the street and hope no bum decides to take my phone off my lap as I wait for my ride.

It’s weird to be alone after being surrounded by so many people. Soon enough, the transport guy’s dropship comes and I get home to my other half. She tells me about how she spent a few hours uprooting a very large unwanted plant in our backyard, and how she successfully got it into the green bin despite it being very spiky. She’s proud. I’m proud of her.

I tell her everything about the night. She laughs and says she thinks she’d get along with The DJ’s fiancée. We talk excitedly about our next-day plans to dress up in outrageous space costumes and go to our lovely friend’s thirty-first birthday in North Hollywood and party well into the night. Sometimes life is good.

The next morning, I wake up and briefly go stop by the neverending party-international called the internet. and Lillian are slinging shit at each other over a joke article she wrote slightly at his expense, which he did not take in good fun. I can’t help but grin at it all. Everyone is getting exactly what they want. Ross is in his element threatening to fight people. Lillian is in her element teasing. The audience loves the drama. We all win.

As I drink my coffee and reflect at my non-working-class French café (apologies to ), I realize we’ve done something amazing. We’re actually getting what we want. We all grew up dreaming of little literary circles of old where people write novels and poems to one-up and impress another. Now it’s happening. These are the good times.

It doesn’t matter that we all have day jobs. It doesn’t matter that the publishing industry has collapsed. The scene is alive. A hundred people came out for the launch of a book by a young man who wrote from the heart and sent a cold email. At best, Evan is right, and we’re literally saving America. At worst, we’re just indulging ourselves, but I still call that a win.

It’s like MGM’s motto, the one they chose back when people understood Latin and cared about creative values. Ars gratia artis, art for its own sake. Even if Henry Begler never publishes in that splashy legacy magazine, I think he’s right where he belongs. We are the successors to everything we love in those dusty old books. The Muse lives on.

Behind the Scenes

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Mommy can be a real bitch sometimes.

Every time Bobby comes to Imperial Flower Nails & Beauty for an Imperial Deluxe Pedicure he brings Noah a Three Musketeers. Not just a tiny fun size bar, either. Mommy always takes it away if she can catch Noah first. He has to eat the whole thing right away, otherwise she takes it from him and throws it in the dumpster out back, the big one he’s too short to reach inside.

Sometimes Bobby brings Noah Hot Wheels, too. Mommy lets Noah keep those. Noah has a whole collection of little cars, now. He lines them up on the bookshelf next to his bed where he keeps his books and the Captain America action figures that he pretends to be too grown-up for.

Bobby slides out of his black Ford F-150 with a UVA baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. The salon is empty—it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday, Imperial Flower’s slowest day—and the parking spaces right out front are all empty, but Bobby takes a spot at the other end of the lot. Noah can see him through the front windows if he cranes his neck. Bobby’s shoulders are hunched and he keeps looking over his shoulder like a spy in a movie trying to shake a tail. He pretends to read the menu taped to the front door of Pho 777. He always does.

“Mommy, Bobby’s here!” Noah shouts to the back of the store. Mommy and the new lady, Lily, are in the back office, sanitizing tools. Lily has been sleeping on a cot in the back since she started working here a few weeks ago. Her English is worse than Mommy’s, so it’s Noah’s job to welcome customers and translate when needed. Lily is younger than Mommy and all the other ladies who work here; she’s an agashi, not an ahjumma. Mommy says Noah can’t pull any pranks on Lily like he does with the ahjummas. She’s skinny and pale and gets dizzy a lot so Noah has to help her finish cleaning sometimes. It’s not fair, but when he helps sweep up the nail cuttings or wipe the perfumed soap scum and dead skin sloughings from the foot basins, she smiles at him from inside her sad face and somehow he doesn’t mind it too much.

Mommy sighs and sets a metal file down on the table. Noah listens to the tip-tap pitter-patter of her knock-off Uggs against the linoleum. He likes that sound. It’s the sound a bear paw would make, the rough skin of its paw-pads against the cool dusty floor. She stands next to him at the front desk and they both watch as Bobby pushes open the door and is transformed as he crosses the threshold: rounded shoulders roll back, soft chin lifts, scared eyes brighten.

“Hey kid! Think fast,” he says and tosses something shiny at Noah. He doesn’t react in time and something substantial hits him in the forehead. It’s a Three Musketeers! Noah grabs it and scrambles away before Mommy can confiscate the candy.

“Hi Mr. Bobby,” Mommy says. “We not see you in a while.”

She smiles sweetly at him and leads him to the oldest pedicure station, the one where the massage rollers poke out way too hard. See? What a bitch.

Mommy doesn’t like Bobby even though he’s nice to Noah and he’s a Good Tipper. Noah doesn’t like the way he ruffles his hair, but he brings him stuff and drives a big truck, so he figures Bobby’s alright. Mommy acts nice to him, but Noah can tell that it’s the fake kind of sweetness that means trouble. Bobby doesn’t seem to notice. He thinks she likes him.

Just as Bobby is pulling off his boots and Mommy is turning on the hot water for his soak, Lily comes out with a tray of sanitized tools. He stops, boot midair, and stares at her. He trembles like a dog smelling a steak.

“Who’s she? She new? She busy?” Bobby asks. Lily looks over at him, quickly breaks eye contact. She is straightening each bottle of nail polish in the front display with great care.

“No! No—she not train yet,” Mommy says.

Lily has been working for weeks. She hasn’t mastered nail art yet, but she can scrub a callous, trim a cuticle, and file a corn down with the best of them.

Bobby peels off his socks and settles back into the massage chair, flexing his hairy toes.

“Well, I guess that’s okay,” he says. “You are the master of foot massages. I mean, mistress.”

He rolls his baggy khakis up past his knees and dips his toes into the steaming water, frothy with soap and fragrant with lemongrass essential oil.

“It’s hot,” he says, and giggles, a strangely high-pitched sound issuing forth from his barrel-chested, lumbering body. His face is turning bright pink. Mommy fake laughs back at him.

“Yes, very very hot water,” she says, giggling like he’s just said something funny.

He submerges his feet. As he soaks, Mommy sneaks up on Noah, who is reading a book at the front desk and licking chocolate off of his fingers. She snatches the silver wrapper off of the desk but finds that the candy bar is all gone.

“Aiiiish—” she hisses. “Read your book closely! I want a book report at dinner, so pay close attention.”

She tosses the wrapper in the trash and returns to her stool, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. She hefts one of Bobby’s legs out of the water and starts scrubbing, rubbing, squeezing all the way from his toes to the arches of his feet and up his meaty calves. Noah’s feet tickle whenever someone touches them, so he doesn’t get it, but all the customers love this part of the procedure—and none more than Bobby. Noah turns back to his book, an adventure story about parallel universes, some that have magic and portals to other worlds.

As Mommy grinds her knuckle into Bobby’s instep, he puts his hands into the pockets of his pants and starts moving them, like he’s scratching an itch down there. But he doesn’t stop. He keeps scratching his itch. She kneads her thumbs into his calf and he starts breathing heavily. His face turns from pink to red. He’s enjoying the massage so much that he starts groaning a little under his breath.

Noah is startled to hear Lily gasp—everyone turns to look at her. She drops the nail file she was holding and says something real fast to Mommy that he can’t quite make out. Mommy snaps back at her: “Go-in-back-and-stay-there.” Lily scurries away, eyes big. Bobby watches her leave with a blank look on his face. His hands stop moving. Mommy takes a scoop of sugar scrub and works it into Bobby’s heel. His eyes move from the empty doorway back to the top of Mommy’s head. His hands start scratching himself again.

Noah gets bored and goes back to his book. Last year, his third grade teacher said he was reading at a fifth grade level, which is really good. Now that he’s going to be a fourth grader after this summer, he’s probably reading at a sixth grade level, which is middle school. He likes reading. It’s like he gets sucked in and can see it all in his head, even better than a movie. Lily thinks it’s cool that he reads so much, but he really doesn’t do it to impress anyone. Maybe just a little bit. He likes picking books with the thickest spines. This summer he even read a book that had over 500 pages in it. He likes it when grown-ups are surprised at the books he’s able to read. But he really does get absorbed in stories, so much so that he doesn’t notice how much time is passing until he hears Bobby clunking around in his boots and realizes that the pedicure is over. Mommy brushes past Noah to reach the cash register.

Bobby pulls out a wad of bills from one of his many pockets and counts out forty-five dollars onto the counter without looking at Noah or Mommy. That’s the price of the Imperial Deluxe Pedicure, the second-most expensive one. It comes with a sugar scrub, paraffin wax, and hot stone massage. He takes two twenty dollar bills and sets them down on top of the forty-five bucks. Then he looks at Mommy. She smiles at him with her big fake smile, the one that reminds Noah of a tiger shark. He smiles back and sets another twenty on the counter.

“That’s for the new girl,” he says. “I’ll come back for her when she’s trained up.” He winks at Noah.

Mommy stuffs the bills into the register and ushers him out the door.

“Okay, thank you, see you, thank you mister Bobby, see you next time!” she says, smiling so big her eyes disappear and Noah can see her gold fillings.

Mommy turns back to Noah. Her smile is gone.

“You have chocolate on your face,” she says, wiping it away with her rough thumb. “Clean out the tub and wipe down that chair, okay?” Then she tip-tap bear paw-pads her way back to the office and yells at Lily. Lily yells back. Noah has never heard her voice this loud before.

“He’s just a kid! You should have just kicked him out!” Lily says. “Or call the police. Don’t they have laws in this country?”

“A kid? A ‘kid’ his age was big enough to cause all of your problems,” Mommy says. “His uncle is a policeman. What do you want me to do?”

“Tell him… tell him your husband will beat him up.”

Mommy snorts. “He comes by enough to know there’s no men here.”

“Well, maybe you should find a man.”

“My problem is men. Your problem is men. Another man isn’t gonna solve that problem. You better learn that quick.”

Lily makes a disgusted noise.

“He’s not hurting anyone,” Mommy says. “And he’s a Good Tipper. He left a tip for you, too. You don’t want?”

They keep arguing for a while, but Noah is scrubbing the layer of grime and dead skin cells that Bobby left behind in the foot basin and he can’t make out their words over the shush-shush of the brush against the porcelain. He sprays the red faux leather massage chair with disinfectant and sneezes at the sharp rotten-lemon scent as he wipes it down with a rag.

Now that he knows Lily doesn’t like Bobby, either, he begins to reconsider the man he thought of as a friend. Most customers either ignore Noah or coo about how cute he is, which he loathes. Bobby is nice and doesn’t talk to him like he’s a baby. And he brings presents. But he keeps thinking about the way Bobby looked at Lily. It makes him angry, for some reason.

Noah finishes up and pushes the cleaning cart back into the office. Mommy is watching a k-drama on the computer and Lily is looking at her phone. Lily looks up when he walks in. She’s still flushed pink from the argument and her face looks pinched. When she sees Noah, she smiles. It’s like someone put earmuffs on him, because suddenly he doesn’t hear Mommy’s show or the cycling of the air conditioner or the Zen Spa Music Mix playlist and his ears feel all hot.

“Such a good son!” she says. “Noah’s mommy is so lucky. I hope you work as hard in school as you do in the salon.”

Noah grins. Mommy never says nice things like that.

“I don’t have to work that hard,” he says. “School is easy. I’m basically two grades ahead of everyone. But it’s summer break now, so I don’t have class until I start fourth grade next month.”

“You’re a smart boy,” Lily says. “Smart is good, but it’s no replacement for hard work. Don’t forget that.”

Noah spots Bobby’s truck driving by Imperial Flower a few times later that week while it’s busy with customers, but he doesn’t stop in. He drives by on the main road going ten under and Noah can see his face, like he’s looking across the parking lot and into the storefront. Like he’s looking for someone.

Bobby comes back on another slow afternoon. Noah is reading a comic book so he doesn’t notice him until he hears the door chime and Bobby is already inside the threshold, un-slumping his shoulders and squaring his jaw. He watches him unfold like some kind of flower blooming in time-lapse. He wears camo cargo shorts this time. His shins are all scabbed over.

“Mommy, Bobby’s here!” Noah calls. She’s somewhere in the back, probably watching another k-drama from the DVD store next to the Oriental Market. Lily is sweeping up in the corner.

“Hi, Bobby!” Noah says. “You wanna see my comic book? It’s Batman.”

Bobby doesn’t look at him. His eyes are locked on Lily. He takes a squished Three Musketeers from his pocket and tosses it in his general direction.

“Enjoy it, kiddo,” he says as the candy bar lands with smack on the floor three feet away from Noah. He looks at it, sees the oily fingerprints on the shiny wrapper. It doesn’t seem too appealing, right now.

Mommy comes out of the office and grabs Lily by the elbow. She flinches and drops the Swiffer. Mommy whispers something urgently in her ear, then shoves her car keys in her hand and rushes her past the pedicure stations, past the manicure tables, and past Bobby, who watches them pass him with his mouth agape. Lily steals a glance at Bobby and laughs—a hard, tinkling sound. Mommy pinches her arm even tighter, cutting her laughter short. Bobby’s mouth snaps shut and his brow furrows. Lily continues out the door and Mommy turns around to greet Bobby with a big smile on her face.

“Welcome, mister Bobby!” she says. “Come, come, please sit.”

“Hey, where’s the new girl going?” Bobby says. “I thought you said I could have her this time.”

“Oh, so sorry, very important errand,” she says. “Very important.” She guides him to the worst pedicure chair.

“Will she be back soon?” Bobby asks.

“Very important errand, far away,” Mommy says, smiling.

Bobby frowns and pulls off his boots as Mommy runs the water and draws up a stool. She checks to see if Noah is absorbed in his comics. After a while, Bobby puts his hands into his pockets and starts rubbing.

Noah looks at his comic book for a while, but the pictures and words don’t make any sense to him. After a while, he picks up the candy bar from the floor and puts it in the trash bin for receipts behind the register.

Bobby doesn’t leave a tip today.

The next time Noah sees Bobby, the salon is busy, a Saturday afternoon, and he’s translating a customer’s acrylic gel-fill request to Lily. This lady hasn’t been there before and she seems annoyed to be talking to a nine year old boy. Noah tries to talk her out of the coffin-shaped ombre with French tip because it’s not cool anymore and it’ll look tacky, but she insists, so he explains her demands to Lily in rudimentary Korean.

It’s a full staff roster today. Noah, Lily, and the customer are up at the manicure stations next to Vicky and Tina. Mommy, Rose, and Mimi are all giving pedicures. Sophie is doing a lash tint on the recliner in the corner, behind a folding plastic and polyester screen printed with cherry blossoms. Noah catches a glimpse of Bobby in his truck in front of the pho joint. He’s sitting there with his head in his hands, not moving, but Noah is kept busy running around the salon, bringing tissues and top coats and refilling cuticle serum dispensers, so he forgets that Bobby is there after a while.

Noah looks up when he hears the door chime, but for a moment he doesn’t recognize Bobby. His posture isn’t slouching and shy or puffed up and confident like he usually is in the salon. Instead, he’s in a sort of purposeful crouch. There’s a shiny black semi-automatic rifle in his hands. Its oiled body gleams under the buzzing fluorescents. On his hip is a six-shooter revolver with an inlaid mother-of-pearl handle in a leather holster. A cowboy’s gun. He’s here in a costume. Halloween in July.

The lady getting an ombre French manicure screams first. Lily’s head whips around to see what she’s screaming at, but before she can look, Bobby shoots her in the temple. She collapses forward into the dish of acetone solution that the lady’s fingertips are soaking in. The lady screams again. Her voice is as loud as a fire alarm. Bobby shoots her in the chest three times and she stops. All Noah hears is the Zen Spa Music Mix piping through the Bluetooth speakers and the mechanical whir of an abandoned massage chair.

Noah discovers that he’s on the floor, underneath the manicure table. He can’t tell if he’s been shot. Doesn’t think so. The drills in school worked. He sees the boots, the same stinky boots Bobby always wore, pacing next to him. He is swiveling, looking for his next target. He shoots into the corner a rapid burst of several rounds towards Sophie and the lady getting her lashes done.

“Please, please no,” Sophie whimpers. Must’ve shot the lady first. He fires again and Sophie stops whimpering.

Bobby’s boots plod back towards the pedicure stations. One of the massage chairs is still noisily running through its cycle. No legs are visible, so they must’ve all run into the back office. Mommy too. There’s another exit back there, a fire door that Vicky and Mimi prop open to smoke cigarettes. If they’ve all escaped, Bobby will come back to the front. Bobby will find Noah. Noah prays to God for Bobby to follow Mommy and the others out the back.

Noah realizes that he’s clinging to Lily’s slender shin under the table. She isn’t moving. A sharp, burning smell cuts through the usual acetone fumes. He thinks of Lily’s pretty, pale face half submerged in the nail polish remover bowl inches above his head. He thinks he’s going to be sick, he wants to bolt, but he forces himself to be as still as Lily.

Bobby’s footfalls pause. He’s most of the way to the back office, but he hesitates and doesn’t push back the polyester bamboo print curtains in the doorway. Mommy could be right behind that curtain. Or she could be in the ABC store next door, calling the police. Or she could even be a mile away by now, in the car, driving fast away from Noah. He wishes it were her here instead of him. Instead of Lily.

Bobby takes another step towards the rear doorway, and then Noah hears the thin wail of a police siren in the distance. Bobby freezes. He pivots on his heel and speed-walks past Noah to the front windows. He stands there a moment, listening to the sirens grow louder, and then stalks back to the middle of the salon, next to the manicure stations. Noah could reach out and grab his ankle if he wanted to. He lets the rifle hang loose from the shoulder strap. The tip of the barrel grazes the laminate tabletop. He puts a heavy hand on Lily’s shoulder, and Noah feels her body shift. He makes a strangled sound, something between a grunt and a sob.

With his other hand, Bobby pulls the revolver out of its holster. He fires it. He collapses down to where Noah can see him. The top of his skull is gone. A tiny curl of smoke escapes from the dime-sized hole in his chin.

Noah glues his eyes shut, clinging to Lily’s leg. If he stays still enough, everything bad will disappear. The sirens get louder and he wishes they would go away so he could stay frozen here forever.

Mommy hasn’t gone into the salon for weeks. The ahjummas from the church they infrequently attend raised some money to clean it up. Because it was on the news and on the internet, there’s a lot more money than they thought. So Mommy said screw the customers and screw the church; Imperial Flower is closed until further notice.

Mostly, she drinks pink wine from Costco and watches k-dramas all day. That, or she yells at Noah for not cleaning up the mess in his room. Sometimes Noah sits and watches the shows with her, but he can’t keep up with the storylines. They talk so fast and the subtitles don’t help much. The words go by so fast.

Tonight, Mommy passes out on the couch again. Noah sits in front of the TV for a while, letting the colors and sounds wash over him. After a while, he leaves her on the couch and gets ready for bed. At first, he used to try to get her into bed, but she’s too heavy and tugging at her dead weight just made him think of Lily. Instead, he takes the empty glass from her hand and covers her up with a blanket. He sets his clothes out on the foot of his bed and packs his backpack with notebooks, pencils, pens, and highlighters the church ahjummas brought for him. It’s the first day of fourth grade tomorrow.

The Hot Wheels Bobby gave him are still sitting on the bookshelf in Noah’s room. Sometimes he feels like they’re watching him. Like there’s a tiny little driver in a UVA hat behind the black windows in each little car. He doesn’t play with them anymore, but he’s afraid to throw them away. Something bad will happen if he does, he knows it to his core. He can’t explain. Doesn’t try to explain to Mommy.

Noah told the police about the Three Musketeers but he never told them about the Hot Wheels. Instinctively, he knew the Hot Wheels had to stay a secret. He couldn’t tell the cops. If he did, then they would know that he was a bad guy and they would take him away. They would know that he had prayed for Bobby to go after Mommy.

Some nights, Noah still prays that God will take Mommy and bring back Lily.

Mommy can be a real bitch sometimes.

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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This piece is free to read without a subscription.

On the dim outskirts of the carnival lot stood the peculiar machine: a glass cage for the animatronic head of some stereotype of a mystic, turbaned and enigmatic. At the top, “Zoltar Speaks” was printed in exotic font.

Leaving the crowds, the boy approached the machine slowly, dubious of its nature, followed by Zoltar’s dead eyes. From one of the signs the boy read aloud, “Drop twenty-five cents here.” He pulled a quarter from his pocket and pushed it into the slot but nothing happened. Growing frustrated, his fists pounded the glass again and again until suddenly, to his relief, Zoltar’s eyes ignited in electric red and its head nodded up and down in a repeated, stiff motion.

A sign lit up: “ZOLTAR SAYS…MAKE YOUR WISH.” The boy mulled it over, searching deep within his heart for the one desire he held above all others.

“I wish I had a computer that can make realistic pictures of anything I tell it to.”

The bobbing of Zoltar’s head ceased. From its mouth came a low voice—accented thickly with vague Eastern European origins. “Wait, what?” it spoke. “So, you would explain an idea to a computer and it would then place that image onscreen?”

The boy nodded, eager to witness the materialization of his wildest dreams and wield its futuristic power.

The electronic fortune teller made a sound not unlike a sigh. “It is a rare occasion when someone’s wish gives me pause.” Zoltar was not moving, not even its mouth, but its eyes still glowed like fire. “Hear Zoltar plainly, young man. Your request can be granted, and not by spell but by great assemblies of thinking machines, built from specialized algorithms, consuming pictures by the billions to learn their shades and contours so to thereby piece together new ones when summoned through language. In fact, decades hence, this technology will be quite commonplace.”

Zoltar’s tone turned cautious. “But mark this, for your request casts a heavy shadow. Such an image generator necessitates massive structures of computation—acres upon acres of server farms devouring energy from the grid, rivaling the hungers of entire industries, resources that could otherwise lift works offering more social benefit. Know this as well: the training data that feeds this beast is so immense that only with unethical measures can its demand be met.

“Yet, there remain a limitless number of other wishes waiting to be claimed. Perhaps, for example, you desire to be taller?”

However, the boy was adamant about this remarkable idea of his. With such functionality, he asserted, anything that he conjured could be fashioned into being, or at least, the image thereof; he could even manipulate existing photos, making the untrue appear doubtless in new, unique forms. Imagine the possibilities!

“Your absence of specifics,” rebutted Zoltar, “stresses the inessential nature of your request. Its cost is vast, its utility meager and its conveniences—the truly necessary ones – exist already in other modes, typically as a professional service accountable to a set of standards. Worse still is the inevitable harm that will spread: false images, false information, false charges and then ultimately doubt will fall on every photograph ever taken. All of this, for a novelty that contrives fake images.

“Young man, your wish stands at the edge of fulfillment. Still, the weight of its consequences demands honesty. Speak the true intent of your wish and Zoltar shall grant it.”

The boy contemplated the wise mystic’s instruction but couldn’t lift his gaze from the ground. Finally, he muttered, “For making nudes of celebrities.”

“And…?”

The boy shuffled his feet. “And of girls that I know.”

Instantly, the mechanical head of Zoltar resumed its steady nod as if in creepy agreement. A grinding noise started somewhere within the box’s lower half, then all fell silent and still when something black dropped into the chute in front. The boy reached with hesitance, then scooped it up, brushing against its shiny surface. Suddenly, the glass lit up, revealing the touchscreen display of a handheld device, the likes of which he had never before seen. At the realization of his wish and the thoughts of his time occupied by its application, he grinned.

The red light in Zoltar’s eyes faded to dark nothingness.

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…

Read more

This is the first chapter of the novella Burn Zone by Cairo Smith, available now in digital and paperback editions.

Burn Zone follows a White House staffer detained by an international coalition for his actions during a failed American war.

It is a closed-court ensemble tribunal thriller rendered in modernist fragmentary style.

Read the announcement letter here.

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

ONE

NOW

They’re playing that cartoon again.

Carter Clemens is on the floor, staring up at the old flatscreen on the wall of the cell. The concrete is his seat and the sticky white-painted brick is his backrest. He is soiled, disheveled. They haven’t let him bathe in three days. He stinks in the same blend tee and jeans he was wearing when they picked him up at home, when he went quiet so Sara and the boys wouldn’t cry.

At least they gave him a bucket to shit in. Even if they don’t take off the handcuffs.

He looks familiar. He has one of those faces, born after the towers fell, now a man in full. Plain brown brows on an Iliadic head. A man cut for television, for an easy life, if there were any easy lives left to lead. Three days of dark beard shade cheeks and jaw without a smile.

There are words on the wall below the TV. Minutemen Class of 2031. Paul Revere High School. We love you, Mr. Jefferson. Best custodian ever.

These are words for a janitorial closet, not a cell. A cell would have a toilet and a sink.

At least you don’t shit much when you don’t eat.

Carter shifts. His wrists are red, abraded. Pinned behind his back. His shoulders are giving out from three days contorted. Years of reconstruction rations do not leave a body strong.

Minutemen. Paul Revere. This must be near Boston, all the way back East, a five-hour headbagged flight from John Wayne with a Coalition muzzle jabbing his cheek through the cloth the whole time.

Boston. How pointed.

He wonders if the dust on the sticky walls is shortening his life, the microparticulates of his hand circling around in a cosmic turn, people and donut shops and the Mayflower eternitized, now unraveling his ribosomes. What better physicalization of a haunting could man make than radioactive corpse dust?

He wonders if he’s imagining it all.

He wonders if he has enough life ahead for the microdeath on a closet wall to matter.

A headsman would be clean, but you can still see after, still feel, teeth grinding, face a grimace, no air to scream. Von Leveling proved that in The Terror, poking heads in baskets.

Lethal injection’s too slow.

Nitrogen inhalation’s the best, Carter reasons, eyes ahead, blinking, trying to become unaware of the body, the indignity.

Coalition tribunals don’t go for gas, though.

They go for firing squads.

Carter puts firing squads somewhere in the middle for pain.

They’re playing that cartoon again.

The video starts again on its loop. The color is bleeding in the bottom row of the pixels. The whole thing looks like a show for children, choppy and stiff, speaker warbling with corporate stock sound, palette ten years out of date and expressions uncanny by domestic sensibilities.

Domestic sensibilities are what dragged us to hell in the first place. So thinks the prisoner.

He doesn’t see himself a prisoner. He sees himself purgatorian. Dead already, on the advice of the Meditations. The thought was supposed to bring comfort, bring calm. But dead men don’t need to piss or drink water or stop skin from sloughing off on dew-damped cuffs.

The narrator speaks. They got an American for this. A Don LaFontaine of a Tokyo Rose.

“The national emergency has come to an end.”

A globe. Spinning. Bad animation.

The screen settles on the US of A.

“The War of American Aggression is over, and peace-loving leadership is back in control of the White House.”

More cartoon. Carter stares like he hasn’t watched it a thousand times over. They show Avett in the Oval, bearded like he was in the final six months. He growls as Coalition troopers in manta-blac bag him and toss him in ADX Adirondacks. Blond bulldog. Rabid. No mention of the bullets and two knee-shatters he took beneath the portrait of Washington, flare-blinded for good.

A brown-haired woman with veneers and an Old Glory pin swaps in for Avett at the Resolute Desk. Seamless, like changing to a new cassette. It’s supposed to be Saunlin, but they didn’t get her eyes and cheeks right.

It’s shoddy work, Carter tells himself. Slapdash, visionless. Even in cuffs he finds respite in appraising, in dismissing the slop of his Coalition comms monkey counterparts.

At least Avett propaganda had some shred of aesthetic commitment.

Four pulsing arrows arrive on the American coasts, hot cerulean, merging into the Coalition rounder as they fill the body and guts of the fat cow belly of the heart of the nation. All Columbia goes blue. War over. Old Glory becomes the veneer like Saunlin’s veneers. CHICOMs, Euros, Norks, and Ivan fill in underneath.

What do you have beneath fake teeth when the glue rots?

Stumps.

Carter’s stomach writhes with the pain of emptiness. The narrator goes on.

“Coalition forces are here to help rebuild the country and restore our values.”

Chibi COFOR troops fix up storefronts, plant flowers, teach little kids. You can’t tell in mute cartoon who’s domestic American COFOR, recruited post-surrender, and who’s part of the international occupation. That’s the point of the navy COFOR jumpsuit. Sexless. Nationless. A higher order.

That’s what Brunn said.

He called it great evil.

Carter believed him.

Thus the cuffs.

“Every day, radiation is being swept away, and fresh food is coming by the ton from your friends overseas.”

Apples. Plums. Christmas.

A man in a rattlesnake ballcap lurks, vicious, armed. The shadow of Avettism. The insurgent.

Watch out, American children! Watch out!

KAPOW!

The COFORs nab him and his Armalite in a puff of action. Schoolmistress wags a finger, stern. No blood is sprayed across cartoon pastoralia.

“Remember, anti-Coalitionism is anti-Americanism, so make sure to report any weird talk and or dangerous stuff to your local rehabilitation office.”

Carter shuts his eyes. The wrist pain sharpens. The cartoon is not meant for him, not as warning, not as guide. The cartoon is for the hungry American children of a hundred thousand classrooms returning to school for the first time since Temporary Measures.

It’s a taunt, he tells himself, to play schoolroom propaganda for adults in tribunal detention.

“We have your children.”

He wonders what they’ve told his boys and he sobs and the dust burns his eyes.

He cannot reach his face to dry the tears.

The guards are here. They look well fed. Two deadbolts roll over and the closet-cell door swings open with a suck of cool air.

There are only two guards that Carter ever sees. Both domestic. Always together. The corporal is always first to come in, thin wheatgold hair and a slawed white Texas face. Even through her shapeless COFOR fatigues he can tell she’s a woman. There was a time when that might have meant something to him. He can’t remember it now.

The second, the lowly, is an overtall squirrel of a young man. His voice is drab, base Western American, that underenunciated talking-head drivel that pours from every suburbanite past the mid-Rockies.

It’s Carter’s voice, too. The voice of his loved ones. Proud of nothing. Tethered despite its best tries to a back-East government of madness, and now of ruin.

A voice resigned.

At least Texas still has some grit.

“Get up.” The Texan speaks. “You smell like shit.”

“I know.”

Forgive me. Even though you did this. Forgive my state.

“Keep still. Face the wall.”

Carter stands and does as asked. The COFOR Texan takes the cuffs and all the wrist skin that’s scraped across their edges.

She’s not acting scared, not in her movements, even though she has to pretend he’s dangerous. Tribunal protocol.

She must know he has too much to lose.

“Strip, Clemens. Laskey, keep your weapon on him.”

Laskey. The squirrel. He has a name now.

Carter strips and they take him naked to the locker room off the gymnasium. The whole grotesquerie is coated fuzzy gray. Squirrel Laskey checks a Geiger. “It’s fine enough.” Small comfort.

They say the mold eats the fallout.

The Texan corporal turns a knob. Rust like vomit spurts from the central shower spigots. She lets Carter wait till it’s running half-clear before forcing him into the coldshock.

He bathes in the stream of lead and rotted copper. Parched, he laps up gulps of it. At the very least it’s something to fill his stomach. The hard water carries the worst of the grime from his ass and loins. He scrubs with a scrap rag, exposed.

If there’s any thrill in the staring guards’ hearts, he does not want to know.

“What’s your name?” He asks of the woman.

“I’m Corporal Blye.”

“Corporal.”

He wins no kindness with his small talk, but at least there is dignity in making the examination mutual. Her gaze stays fixed on Carter as he shivers and works his bare body clean.

Blye. Sure enough, it’s stitched on her breast. But there’s no Lone Star to be found on the Coalition patch.

She knows full well.

No honor for a turncoat.

Not in his eyes.

But a woman’s got to work.

Laskey speaks to Carter now. Voice cracking, failing to be clinical. Just a boy. “What’s that scar on your back?”

Carter tells him. “Pre-war. Dirt bike accident, ’29.”

“You dirt bike?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.” Laskey hesitates. “I used to all the time back home. I do still sometimes here too. If you go out past Diamond to Franklin Park there’s a great circuit. Great when it’s not mudded out.”

Blye stops this. “Laskey.”

Unsoiled, Carter stands like a man again. He shuts off the water. He holds his jaw tense. “In another life, Laskey. Thank you.”

There is little sleep naked on concrete floor, even without cuffs. Carter wakes from a dream of deathlight to windowless, clockless time without time in his cell. Someone has left him fresh long johns and purified water. He makes use of both, then dry-heaves from mold, then pisses deep orange into an empty CHICOM canteen and caps the lid. It stinks less than to do it like this than to use the Lowe’s bucket as a urinal.

Ninety minutes later someone knocks.

The looping TV goes black.

He searches for meaning.

“Yes?”

Enter Sara.

My God. Sara. Sara in good clothes. Pearls and blazer and turtleneck, dressed for court. My God, did she fly here thinking she was coming to court, to a fair trial, to anything civilized?

These thoughts torment Carter as the door creaks and his wife steps inside. What is she feeling? What is this face she’s making, holding everything creased where once was smooth? He used to be able to see her analytically, round nose and little chin and big, blue eyes. Then some time around when Carl was born his brain flipped and he could only really see love.

Love. Hello love. How can love be present in waking nightmare? Surely love and nightmare, great forces that they are, would obliterate each other on sight.

His throat clamps shut from the dissonance.

He still can’t tell what this strange expression means as she looks him over.

Then the sound reveals the heart.

A small squeak.

Involuntary, high, from the back of her mouth.

Horror. Her horror at the sight of him.

“Sara.”

He wants to tell her to look away, to fly back to San Clemente. To forget this and remember him as he was. But it’s too late. In her horror she shrieks, red with sympathy like oxygen swell.

“Where are your clothes?”

“They took them.”

Oxygen sympathy combusts Mercurial to anger. She screams at Blye and Laskey outside before Carter can stop her. “You won’t give him any clothes?!”

The words pile atop each other, his and hers, grasping, her head askance and body full of unspendable action.

“Hey, hey, don’t. Sara.”

“Why, why were they, what—”

“What?”

“Were they doing something to you?”

“Doing what? They searched—”

“I don’t know.”

“They searched, they searched me. What?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard, they’ve been, the Russians—”

He closes the distance and holds her. He has something to give her even now, he sees. Relief from her fears. He clings both to her and the purpose he finds in the act of rendering comfort, the delay of his unmaking.

“These aren’t Russians. Baby. These are American Coalition troops.”

Blonde Sara lets herself be held and sniffles like the undergrad she was when they met. She will trade woman as pillar for woman held for ten seconds, for old times’ sake.

In the secret space between them she mocks the new phrase.

“‘American Coalition.’”

He grips her shoulders. Fear in the shape of the Texan cuts him. “Don’t start with that.”

Someone is moving between the balls of his feet like a near-still metronome in the hall. He is four feet tall. He has Carter’s eyes and Sara’s hair and he’s staring past Blye’s hip into the custodial enclosure.

“You brought the boys?”

Sara’s mouth opens. “I—I—”

Carter presses with his eyes.

“They didn’t give me a choice.”

He believes her. New shame floods his body. “I don’t want them to see me like this.”

Blye is letting young Carl stare.

Sara presses in. She flashes hate toward the guards in her near-whisper. “They wanted you to see the boys seeing you like this.”

“Do you have water in your purse?”

She sees the state of his lips. “My God.” Sara cranes and digs through mom flotsam. Black leather, a Coach bag from Venice, barely worn. She had been saving it five years, he remembers, in the closet. Saving it for the end of the war. Now here it is.

He doubts there will be another.

“Here.” She tries to nurse him the water, from habit, from something. He insists on taking the carton for himself and drinks it dry.

“Carter.”

“Yes?”

“They’re not letting you come home.”

He knew that much from the first ram smash against their living room door.

“They’re putting you before some kind of tri, tri—”

“Tribunal.” He nods.

“But you’re not a prisoner of war. You’re not a soldier.”

“I was regime.”

“You were a civil servant!”

He lets her protestations roll off his shoulders to the floor. “It’s their ball game now.”

She can’t understand his resignation. She searches him. “Did you do something?”

To the concrete, “No.” Lying.

“Did you do something?”

“No!” To her. Meaning it. “I did my duty! That’s it! They can run me through the apparatus and squeeze every drop of history out on the floor, all they’ll see is a man who tried to follow his conscience.”

She swallows. “Then fight.”

“I will.”

“Fight your way back to us.”

Tears now. That mutual collapse. “I will.” He swears it with his eyes. “Just take care of the boys. I can survive this.”

“I know.” Her words paint him gleaming.

“I love my country.”

She’s kissing his coppery forehead. “I know. I know.”

He looks to the silhouetted boy outside the scene like he means to talk, but turns back. “Tell them I’m fighting to get back to them. Make sure they know.”

Silence from Sara reveals more than words. He watches her defiance sputter for life like firecracker doused in rain. Too stricken to meet his waiting lips, she collapses on his chest. “I will,” she seems to want to say, but something thorny stops her.

Instead she says, “They need their father.”

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

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

I have engaged in shameless tourism via Google Maps, and I have the screenshots to prove it. On any given day, I can sit on my bed and wonder what a Fred Meyer supermarket would look like in Nampa, Idaho, and within three minutes I’m virtually in front of the store. I can see the whole layout of the foundation, where the loading docks are, and all the different exits and entrances. When I’m doing this, I realize this is the closest experience that I can have to mimicking what God sees and feels.

It’s hard not to daydream when I’m engaged in my Google Maps globetrotting. Many people have vices to escape the physical world, and Google Maps is mine.

While clicking around the premises of the supermarket in Idaho, I imagine myself driving an old pickup truck around the north driveway to deliver some dry produce to the loading dock. It’s not snowing very hard, but enough for me to have to squint and use the windshield wipers. As I get out of the truck, my boot gets stuck in a pothole that has been hidden by the snow. With one wrong twist of my body I am in mortal pain and writhing around on the ground.

And so I imagine this is how the lawsuit begins. A doctor tells me that my ankle is broken and I will never regain the full range of motion that I once had. I will have a limp for the rest of my life.

I sue Fred Meyer and Kroger for everything they’ve got. It’s not a very high-profile case, but it’s enough for a handful of people to click on the article while mindlessly scrolling at work.

I come into the courtroom on crutches, slowly and silently, not looking anyone in the eye. I take my seat. I have to make my case to the judge and the jury on what grounds I’m suing. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

I’m mostly suing Kroger for my loss of quality of life. I tell the jury that I’ve never had the desire to take swing dance classes, but if the idea ever did appeal to me someday, I would no longer be able to act on this inclination due to my injury. And if I had been able to take this swing dance class, there is a really good chance I could have had a life-changing event in that dance class, but now I will never know.

What I assumed would have happened in that class was that I would catch the eye of my future wife. I thought that she would be charmed by my earnest effort and willingness to make myself vulnerable in an unfamiliar environment. She would take my hand, we would lock eyes, and in one look I knew she would understand that every single thing I had done wrong in life was based out of love and never hatred.

Our marriage was going to last forever. We would have built a life together. Possibly one where I owned and operated a failing laser-tag-themed pizza restaurant that sucked all our money dry, but she still stuck by my side because that’s the type of woman my wife was.

Once I’m done recounting, I open my eyes and see that there is not a dry eye in the room. I won the lawsuit and was rewarded with a large sum of money. On the cab ride home, I thought about what I would do with all my new wealth. I thought about what it would be like to be the proud owner of several all-terrain vehicles. Or what if I created a new frozen food item that took the world by storm? I could print 3D service animals for healing exercises with retired vets. I could do anything I wanted.

I close my laptop and toss it aside on my bed because I am done with my Google Maps tourism. I curl up on my side and stare at my wall. I think about how I can do irreparable damage to my own mind by thinking the wrong thoughts.

Thank God I know my limits.

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…

Read more

The yule tide is here. The first quarter of the century is almost through. Futurist Letters is soon to begin its third year of weekly publication. We have gained an average of twenty-five new subscribers per piece and only continue to grow. Thank you for taking this ride with us.

The Futurist Letters Awards 2025

Please congratulate and on their well-deserved wins of the first-ever Futurist Letters Awards. You can read their winning pieces at the links below.

A statement from Willem:

It is a cliche to say that the experience of writing is largely a solitary one, so I will instead diverge and say that the experience of getting one’s work out there is quite thrilling in what I admit is sort of a lurid and egotistical way. Seeing the likes and comments pile up, obsessively checking the Substack website—this must be what being an influencer feels like!

In all seriousness, I’m so grateful to the Futurist Letters community for their interest in my story and for their kind words and well wishes. I’m even more grateful to be published alongside great writers like Olivia McNeilis, whose fiction piece “Now That the Party’s Over” is well-deserving of its prize. Most of all, I’m grateful to Futurist Letters Editor in Chief Cairo Smith, who continually invests in the sort of writing that he wants to see on Substack. Thank you to Futurist Letters, and onto even bigger and better things in 2026!

A statement from Olivia:

Thank you to Futurist Letters for this award, and to everyone who took the time to read and vote for my story. To be recognised by such a thoughtful readership, and in the company of such strong writers, is particularly meaningful at this stage of my writing life. I’m glad that “Now That the Party’s Over” found a fitting home here, and that it resonated with an audience willing to engage with the challenging questions it raises.

We invite you all to continue submitting. All non-staff, non-excerpt original work published by us in 2026 will be eligible for next year’s awards.

The Futurist Letters Show

TFLS is now approaching thirty episodes and will switch to an ad hoc basis with and continuing on as recurring cohosts.

We may experiment with new show formats in the coming year.

Futurist Print III

The next Futurist print edition will be out early next year. It will be called Futurist Letters: Bad End and feature highlights from the past half-year.

The San Zosimo Slipstream

Starting in 2026, this journal will be host to a new experimental media project called The San Zosimo Slipstream. Like everything else we run, it will be free to read.

TSZS is co-created by Cairo Smith and Emma Bowe-Wagner. We are also very glad to have Emma joining us as a staff editor in the new year.

Best wishes to you and yours. Keep on reading human work, and believe in yourself.

Because of size, this post may be cut off in your email inbox. Visit our website or use the Substack app for the full article, and to vote.

The Futurist Letters editorial team is proud to announce open voting in our first-ever annual awards in fiction and nonfiction. All our readers are welcomed to vote for their choices in the polls at the bottom of this announcement through December 18th, 2025.

Each award is down to a runoff between four finalists nominees. These pieces, all published in Futurist in 2025, were selected by the editorial team with reader engagement taken heavily into account. Reruns, parts of larger whole works, and pieces by the staff were excluded from consideration.

An announcement will be made after voting ends to crown our two Futurist Letters Award winners. Each winner will get a cash prize of $40 USD for a little holiday cheer, plus an accolade to put in his or her literary bio for life.

If you are nominated, or if you’re not, we encourage you to share this post and get your friends to vote. These nominees also serve as a great sampler of the work we’ve been honored to acquire and hone this past year!

The eight finalists are linked below for your convenience. They are:

Fiction

“Larry Grank Saves the Kilogram” by

“A Riot at Red Plan-It! Park” by

“Now That the Party’s Over” by

“Kill Your Son” by

Nonfiction

“American Evil” by

“Rob the Übermensch” by

“The Last Good Man” by

“Criers and Kingmakers” by

Find all eight below, followed by two voting modals.

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

The 2025 Futurist Letters Awards:

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The man arrives late, he’s a little tired. He walks in through the door as usual and takes off his coat, puts it over the chair to the north of the table. The boy watches all this, half-heartedly, quite uninterested. He’d put some fish fingers in the oven earlier, they seem to be taking too long; the oven isn’t at its best it seems, it could be to do with winter, some ebb in the voltage, or they’ve made the fish fingers somehow different this time, more resistant to heat. But why would you want to do that? If anything, it would be more advantageous to make fish fingers less resistant to heat, perhaps better still to do nothing at all, to leave things as they are. There’s something counterintuitive about cooking, according to the boy; you don’t have to cook a computer before you use it, you don’t have to cook your friend before you speak to him… But there’s nothing he can do, more and more people around him have started saying things like we’re cooking! or now we’re cooking! and he’ll soon discover something similar going on in various ‘artistic circles:’ everyone is only able (or only willing) to talk about “processes,” as if, unable to “make things,” they’d been reduced to reciting the ingredients of some infinitely long conceptual recipe, which, simply by virtue of existing, has already demonstrated its profound uselessness. What happened to things, he’ll think, some thirty or forty years later, staring at a local lake, thinking lightly of death.

The death he’ll be thinking of will be not so much his as his father’s, who’s just (see above) entered the room and put his coat over the chair (which has a good slope, like a woman’s shoulders). His father’s death, what an interesting thing. It’s so unwieldy, it came so suddenly… But what an uninteresting thing to talk about, there’s so little to say, and, let’s be honest, thinking is just a kind of talking. Fathers die, why think about it, you only need to think about it after it happens — you only can think about it then — and then, why think about it, it’s already happened. Qua boy, he certainly isn’t thinking about it, the idea of his father’s mortality won’t occur to him until he nearly dies himself, in a strange snowing accident, which won’t happen for another what, twenty, twenty-five years. And during the snowing accident, and even after, he won’t think about his own death at all, only his father’s, which will seem to have been described or promised or perhaps unveiled by the snow, by the strange encircling pain the snow (a mild European avalanche) has visited on him. It will have a fatherly quality as much as a deathly one: nearly dying of it will ‘remind him of his father,’ who always had a sort of snowy quality about him, actually. Some times more than others, and this particular evening (see above) especially so: it’s snowing.

And after placing his shirt on the chair-woman’s shoulders, he brushes himself down a little, to get the snow off, looks over to the boy and says: what are you cooking? You can see for yourself dad, fish. Fish fingers. Advanced shit, the father say. I’m growing up fast, the boy says, I’ll be a man before those fish fingers are ready. Advanced shit, the father says again, modulating his tone to contain the repetition. There’s no need to think about death, neither now nor in the future, neither yours nor anyone else’s, that’s the conclusion the boy will later reach, qua man. All thoughts of death indicate a failure to remember; thoughts of death occur when you either can’t remember or you’ve run out of things to remember, but both of those situations are illusory, he’ll think, at some dumb lake which he came to precisely to think this thought. Advanced shit, he’ll think, remembering it exactly, the tone of voice, the exact scene, which will have effortlessly occurred to him, emerging out of the lake just as the sword does in the story, to be to reached out for and gripped hard around the middle. And then, of course, he’ll go back to his own house which he’ll have sort of cobbled together in the meantime, though he’ll have decided, most likely, against having children. Don’t like them much, don’t really see the point, he’ll think, but even that thought will have somewhere in it this strange reductive refrain, which will have become part of him at this point, a part of him that seems central, or perhaps centring, at least a part which it’s easy to take hold of, this little phrase of his dad’s that already striking him (see above), in its lightness of touch, its ease, its understanding, this little remark his dad always makes on seeing his son do anything slightly different from what he was doing immediately before. Advanced shit… fathers have said, and, of course, done, much worse, perhaps they’ve even done better, but, he’ll almost certainly think, standing in the shallow water of a local lake, why think about that?

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…

Read more