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My body was cemented by silence.

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

“Ruslan died.”

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

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

I could not find supportive words and muttered:

“That was to be expected.”

Died?

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

Killed.

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

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

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

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

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

“I understand,” I said then.

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

Hatred. It had a name. Putin.

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

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

The war split Russia. Society. Families.

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

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

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

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

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

“You should be proud! He is a hero.”

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

They answered her with cold silence. Then with shame.

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

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

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

They met briefly. He smiled like nothing happened.

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

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

“Mother, we will soon start living!”

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

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

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

My mother listened in silence.

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

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

But …

“Ruslan died.”

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

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

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

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

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

He no longer existed.

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

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

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

“No need to rush.”

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

“Quarrels are okay, if not every day.”

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

“That’s how we live, in silence.”

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

But he did not. And now he never will.

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

“They will give you a parachute.”

“Really? That’s much better!”

“Of course!”

He sent me rap music. Photos.

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

Our last conversation:

“Hey, what’s new?”

“Everything is okay.”

“Did you get married?”

“No.”

“How’s the weather?”

“Still cloudy…”

“Hello to your mother. Hugs and kisses.”

“And you say hello to yours!”

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

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

I typed: I love you

And deleted it.

One lonely tear ran down.

I went to the bar and said to my friend,

“My cousin died in the war.”

“It was his choice!” she said.

“Was it?”

As if that settled everything.

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

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

At night, I was looking at the ceiling.

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

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

The feeling did not come. Only emptiness.

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

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

Our lives go on.

Ruslan does not exist anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But—”

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

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

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

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

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

“Um,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eduardo, what about you?” Brandon asked.

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

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

“What did you think about the book?”

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

“What made it good?”

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

Keith sat up straight in his seat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tonsil stones.”

“What?”

“You’ve got tonsil stones.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry,” Brandon mumbled.

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

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

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

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

Brandon’s phone rang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i’m moving out

when?

end of month. my dad needs the apartment back

where are you going?

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

does that mean we’re done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were some quiet mm-hmms and yeahs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh-huh.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well?” Brandon added, impatient.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Brandon,” Grant said.

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

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

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

“What?” Brandon asked.

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

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

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

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

“Guys, listen to this,” Keith said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The group turned to him. Keith sat down.

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

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

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

“Come out, Brandon.”

Brandon froze, his heart thudding from the adrenaline.

“Come on. Show’s over.”

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

“How did you know I was there?”

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

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

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

“You ruined the book club,” said Brandon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get back. Now.”

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

“Last warning.”

“Fuck you, Keith.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It hurts,” Brandon said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You interrupted me.”

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

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

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

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

“I knew someone was up there.”

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

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

“He does that sometimes, yeah.”

“Does he have a face?”

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

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

“The man on the mesa?”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind the Scenes

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

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

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

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

See the book page here.

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do we do this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I see something shift in her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the book page here.

This piece is free to read without a subscription.

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Amanda, we’re ready,” said Jason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

▶

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

▶

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

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

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

▶

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

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

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

“Amanda, it didn’t take.”

“What do you mean it didn’t take?”

“The card was full. We lost the end.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You and Amanda and her fiancé—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

▶

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

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

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

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

“Marry me.”

“Say when.”

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

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

▶

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

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

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

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

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

▶

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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