Michelle moved through her bathroom gingerly, as if through a haunted house. It felt like she could trip an unseen wire and cause the roof to collapse or a car to burst through her walls. The wail of fire trucks and ambulances pierced the air. She zipped herself into a dress perhaps originally worn by a stewardess for an airline that went bankrupt in 1971. It was Creamsicle orange and woven from polyester so dense it could stop a bullet. It had a weird mock-turtleneck neckline, golden buttons angling down the torso, and box pleats. The second she zipped herself into it Michelle’s armpits began to stink. She pulled her hair into a bun atop her head. She looked like a waitress on Star Trek: Enterprise.
Michelle boiled a pot of pasta and plopped a chunk of margarine into the tangled noodles. She walked the food into the bedroom, something she normally avoided lest the roaches follow and climb through her hair as she slept. She settled onto the floor with her pasta and coffee, her back against the bed. On the television, planes smacked into buildings in an unrecognizable country, perhaps somewhere in Eastern Europe. The planes on the television dropped burning to the ground, the image synced with the smell of smoking automobiles coming in through the rotted bathroom window. All over the world, wherever there were streets, people were running through them. Wherever there were buildings, people were leaping from them. Or blowing them up. The world was a sandcastle doomed to the tide. Why not experience the release of demolition? Buildings vaporized, became a rolling cloud of debris, curling through the streets like a sideways mushroom cloud. It looked like a monster approaching, the shockwave footsteps of a giant lizard. The people who survived it stood stunned and dusted in the street, shit in their hair, speaking to news cameras with the glaze of shock upon them.
Michelle thought it was irresponsible of the journalists to speak to these victims. They needed medical attention, ambulances, all of them. Michelle did not want to watch these people. They looked like they’d had strokes, how they could hardly speak, their twitching faces and their stammer. Michelle chewed her pasta. The TV was so staticky she could barely see the footage of people suiciding from bridges and towers. They were pixels merging into pixels. Michelle began to cry. At the idea of their fear, the moment when they understood they were about to die, even though they had chosen it, that moment when they were both alive and dead, there had to be a split second of instinctive regret, it made Michelle weep with spooky grief. The mock turtleneck of her polyester dress absorbed her tears like a parched landscape. Her hangover was powerful, she was all jangled nerves. She lay down on the floor and cried, the bowl of pasta on her stomach. The phone rang, and it was one of her mothers.
Have you seen the planes? Kym wanted to know. No one ever wanted to talk to Kym about television but today all anyone could do was watch and comment. It was her time to shine. The one in Ukraine? The one in Ohio?
Not The One In Ohio.
Oh my god. And the people, did you see them jumping in New York and in London?
I Saw New York, Not London.
Kym had been tuned in for hours. The carnage filled her with fear, yes, and sadness, of course, but also with an odd satisfaction. She knew something like this would happen. She knew it would get too bad, was getting too bad, had gotten too bad. People could not become incapacitated from their food and water, from the rays conjured to enliven cell phones and tiny gadgets, from computers. Think of all the computers, the dead computers piled upon each other, leaching poison into the earth and the water table. Think of all the new computers, millions and millions being birthed each day by third world women wearing gloves and masks to keep the deathiness of the machines off them, good luck, fat chance. People could not be gasping for air in the very air of their time and not have a solution dealt out to them eventually. A terrible solution for a terrible problem. It was a cancer. People were a cancer on their very own body and like a cancer they would band together and kill, cell after cell. Kym expressed this into her telephone, a true landline, a thick wire curling from a heavy receiver. The phone had been manufactured in the 1980s, it was safe.
Michelle thought Kym’s metaphors were a little off, but her mom was stoned and Michelle got the general gist.
It’s True, Michelle said simply. You Were Right. Michelle was prone on the floor, the phone jammed into her ear, the television rolling its loop of destruction. There’s A Lot I Don’t Understand, Michelle began, I Don’t Know If It’s Because I Actually Have A Bit Of A Hangover, I’m Not Going To Lie—
You out late last night?
No, I Don’t Go Out. I Stay In And Watch Friends. I Rent Movies. I Sleep A Lot. I’m Working On A Scrapbook Project That Is Taking Up A Lot Of My Time.
You writing another book?
Yeah, Michelle lied. It’s Just In My Head Right Now. I Have To Write It There First And Then Put It On The Computer.
You should write a screenplay, Kym suggested. Being in Los Angeles and everything.
Yeah, Michelle said. Well, Being In Los Angeles And Everything There Are Already A Lot Of People Writing Screenplays.
What’s the book about?
Um, It’s About A Crack-Smoking, Aging Psych Nurse In New England.
Whoa, Kym said. I’m not going to tell your mother that. What happens to her?
I’m Still Sorting It Out, Michelle said, distracted by a woman on the television. Her face was smeared with probably blood. On the black-and-white television it looked like chocolate, like fake blood, Karo Syrup and food coloring. But Michelle presumed it was, in fact, real blood. The woman’s mouth was open in a scream.
You might not get to finish it now, Kym said practically. I mean, how long does it take to write a book?
I Don’t Know, A Year? It Depends?
Kym was quiet, considering. You could do it. There’s that National Book Writing Month, right? Where everyone writes a book in thirty days? You might do it. I’d forget about publishing, though. It might not be worth it to go through the trouble of putting out a book if we’re all going to die the day after it comes out, you know? Kym’s voice had a certain crushed quality to it. She kept the phone jammed between her head and a throw pillow, her throat bent around the receiver.
Will You Explain What Is Happening? Michelle asked. Because I’m Confused.
The planet’s dead, Kym said, cheerfully. You know, the ocean keeps rising and it’s so awful, it’s full of computers. And the weather patterns have changed and the hurricanes are getting so much worse, there’s a chain of tsunamis somewhere out in the middle of the ocean and they’re just going to take out most of Southeast Asia sometime this year, and the drinkable water is all but gone, there are all those water riots, we had some this year, not New England we but America we, I think maybe you had some down in Los Angeles—
Michelle bristled at being lumped into Los Angeles we, but bit her tongue. On the television screen the news guy cried so hard his face was wet.
— and basically, you know, there’s no food, everyone has cancer, right, there’s no clean power so every time you turn on your lights you’re killing something that hasn’t already been killed while most things have already been killed, right, there’s the food shortage because there’s a land shortage because the land, the soil, is so dirty, dirty dirt, right, you know what I mean, and the nukes that got exploded last year I mean that whole region is just gone now and then there are all the nukes underneath everything and in the actual ocean, there are nukes getting exploded in the sea, can you imagine, that would make a big wave, right, and the chemical compounds being created in the ocean, these totally new, really bad chemicals are being manufactured sort of organically, well not organically because it’s not organic, what’s in the ocean, but the chemicals we dumped there are coming together and creating these totally new chemical compounds no one understands—