No, Kyle said. You won’t work today. They’re closing everything. In case of attacks or riots or mass suicides or looting. Everything is closed but the In-N-Out Burger. Just come over.
Kyle! Really? Michelle thought of her mother: Is this a gay boy thing, this drama?
Girl, Kyle sighed. Just turn on your TV.
9
In the kitchen Michelle killed cockroaches with her bare hands. She’d become immune to it. Every morning they were there, scuttling across the counter, seeking refuge in the slats of the plastic dish rack. The only weapons handy were the dollar-store glasses prone to shattering, and so Michelle began bringing her hands down on them with a slap so hard it pulverized them, it juiced them. Her hand would go warm and tingle, vibrations rising up her shoulder. She would turn on the faucet and rinse the tiny carcasses from her palm. The big ones, the baby ones they called tweedlebugs — she smacked them all to death.
I Am Killing Roaches! Michelle hollered. With My Bare Hands! Michelle needed a witness. To both her bravery and the mundane horror of her life.
Michelle’s studio was full of bugs. Michelle thought perhaps the government should visit her apartment and investigate, maybe there was something they could learn about sustaining life, because the bugs had learned to work it out. Invaders, but still. Jungle bugs, stowaways on ships, on trucks driven up from the tropics. They would emerge from nowhere, alarming Michelle. One looked like a feather, it had a million wispy legs floating its slinky body across the linoleum. It was almost beautiful, except it made her throat close and her eyes water. When Michelle killed it, its legs shriveled away and it became just another stain on the kitchen floor.
Beetles fat as tanks waddled from cracks in the walls, sturdy, shiny beetles that looked fake, like a gag beetle you’d scare a coworker with. Or a robot bug plodding toward you by remote control. Michelle screamed. If she killed the beetle she would hear its body crunch. Her arms rolled with goose bumps.
Michelle grabbed a glass and captured the formidable beetle. She released it in the alley below, knowing that it would only find its way back inside.
On the first day of the end of the world, Michelle got out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and smacked some roaches. She dumped a half-empty champagne flute swampy with dead fruit flies into the drain. She made coffee. Michelle made her coffee camp-style, tucking a filter into a plastic cone and hovering it over a mug. She knew she needed to buy a coffee machine or a French press or something, but she’d been scared to spend the money. Michelle wondered if things would perhaps become free now that the world was going to end. Would people become very greedy or very generous? Michelle could imagine manufacturers succumbing to an insanity of scarcity, raising their prices and padding their mortality with profit. She could also imagine them shrugging a cosmic oh-fucking-well and releasing their inventory, allowing the world to take whatever it wanted.
If Michelle had only a bit more time left to be in the world, she wanted to stop worrying about money. The relief of that possibility, never before considered, shone over her head like a new sun. Imagine, to stop worrying about money! Michelle was born into such anxiety, it had been her placenta, the water breaking between her mother’s legs, dollars and coins scattered on the ground. They’ll nickel and dime ya to death was a phrase Michelle was acquainted with. No heirlooms, no property or fortune to be passed on to her. Michelle received bitter chips of wisdom from her mothers instead. Money goes to money, like cash was a carousel and Michelle’s people did not have a ticket to ride. Just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor man. The advice seemed to contradict. If money went to money, then a poor girl would find it difficult to find a moneyed man to marry, no? There were no rich men in Chelsea. Indeed, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, it was just as easy to become an unwed teenage mother with a jobless baby daddy as it was to marry anyone, period. Anyway, if rich people sucked so bad, why was Michelle being encouraged to marry one?
Here at the end of the world, Michelle was suddenly over poverty. The shield she had welded around her heart to protect herself from the pain of it was corroding like rust in the rain. It had felt so strong, but there in the apocalypse kitchen Michelle felt it flimsy as a floppy disk — so much philosophy, political analysis, rebellious identity, and liquored intoxication just to stave off the simple scary sadness of being broke. Michelle began to cry. The anxiety of being poor and not understanding how to not be. Learning she would die so soon had cracked Michelle’s bravado. Her hand holding the plastic coffee thing over a mug, she fed slow gulps of boiling water to the grounds. Still hungover, spacey, tired, not caffeinated, in that honest pocket, a tender, beaten place, not yet inflated with the day’s efforts, Michelle felt the broken reality of her life. She was not her mothers, but she was in fact her mothers’ daughter, valorizing a struggle that was breaking her down.
A decade spent in the downtrodden underground had warped Michelle’s ambitions. In a place where powerless people fought over who had the least amount of power, Michelle had applied herself to the acquisition of hardship. People bragged about and competed for who had it the worst. Whose parents were brokest, whose PTSD the most damaging. “Calling people out on their shit” was a worthwhile way to pass the time. Michelle wanted her last days to be of a higher quality. She knew that she would likely leave the world as broke—broker—than she had entered it, but she was through pretending she was somehow the better for it, had chosen a superior mode of existence rather than been assigned a losing lotto ticket of economics and genetics at birth and then written a love story about it. She also thought she would think about trying to stop drinking.
Michelle took a shower. The news of the coming calamity had not impacted water purification, the plumbing that snaked through her building and out beneath the street, tubing off — where? Where did Michelle’s water come from? Where did it go when it spiraled down the drain? The world would end before Michelle had the chance to understand how it had ever worked. Outside the rotted bathroom window the freeway whizzed with cars. Tiny cars, zippy electric things propelled by their batteries, plus some older ones buzzing on compost and then, every so often, a lumbering antique wheezed by, gargling gasoline.
Michelle often read news articles that explored how the poor, in their ignorance, destroyed their own environments, be they Los Angelenos torching their neighborhood grocery stores or South Americans slashing their rain forests. The poor inherited the archaic systems of the rich as the rich moved on to better ways of life the poor could not afford. And so the poor drove their gasoline hand-me-downs, sold away their corner of the earth and ate the last endangered sea turtle. Michelle imagined the poor would be blamed for the earth’s catastrophe, the way gay people and artists got blamed for gentrification when people in suits came to town and the landlords jacked up the rent.
A crash happened on the freeway below, a battery car driven straight into the wall. It looked like a television show. Michelle realized she only ever saw cars crash on television. After the one car crashed, another car, gas powered, crashed beside it. It didn’t need to crash, it’s like it was inspired. It simply followed suit, swirling the wheel and aiming itself into the wall. It took three cars crashed on the bank of the freeway, accordioned and steaming, for Michelle to realize she was witnessing suicides. She turned off her shower and climbed out of the tub. Michelle felt the urge to return to the window, to gawk at the spectacle of the fire, but also to convince herself of what was happening because it felt unreal. The smoke streamed down her nose and clutched at her throat, choking her. She did not return to the window. She would probably begin seeing lots of car crashes, she thought.